The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like to address the question of the mortal and the immortal in man in two reflections, of which this evening, the first, is to be devoted mainly to man's mortality, and next week's second lecture will deal with man's immortal essence. We live in a time in which materialism, even though it is now more or less in decline, has nevertheless taken hold in wide circles. And even if one wants to deceive oneself about this fact by the fact that the word materialism is often frowned upon, the way of thinking and attitude, the nuance of world view, is nevertheless in a state of continuous increase, which must be correctly designated by the word materialism.

Now materialism has a very, very simple answer to the question “What is mortal about the human being?” It has the answer: everything about the human being is mortal. One need only refer to the bible of the newer materialistic times, to David Friedrich Strauß' “Old and New Belief”, to substantiate this. It is true that David Friedrich Strauß's “The Old and the New Faith” is no longer read to the same extent as it was a few decades ago. But this is not so much because people have withdrawn from the innermost impulses that dominate David Friedrich Strauß's materialism, but rather because in our fast-moving times a book is hardly able to survive for a few decades.

We can and must ask ourselves the question in view of everything that has come to light and been discussed within today's materialistic world view: Can materialism provide any answers to man's legitimate spiritual questions, or can materialism provide proof that the questions that a spiritual scientific world view must raise are unjustified, that they, so to speak, refer to nothing? If one, esteemed attendees, is aware of how deeply rooted the materialistic world view is in what many people today consider to be the only truly scientific view, then one must raise these questions with particular intensity. For within today's science, or rather within the view that results from today's science for many, there are strong impulses that take a stand against the science of the spirit. In today's science there are many instruments of power that can be brought into play against many of the objections that one or the other side may have to the materialistic world view. Anyone who can really see what has emerged from the so-called scientific world view, which claims to be based solely on true and real facts, must say to themselves: Only then can a spiritual-scientific world can be developed that is able to meet the demands of modern natural science, if it is able to deal with this natural science in such a way that this natural science comes into its own.

It must be fully admitted that natural science can easily deal with the objections that are still being raised from many sides today; at least insofar as it can easily penetrate with its arguments against the immortality of the human soul in those who, from the outset, have an inclination to deny the free activity of the spirit, independently of the material.

It has often been emphasized that spiritual science seeks to engage with the spiritual cultural process of our time, and it seeks to do so on the basis of – it may well be said – a complete transformation, a complete renewal of people's habitual ways of thinking and imagining. Precisely for this reason, because spiritual science must appeal to something that is unknown in the broadest circles today, really unknown, even in those circles that usually oppose it, that is why it is so difficult to make this spiritual science of the time formation really somewhat understandable.

Spiritual science differs fundamentally from what is usually called a philosophical way of thinking today. Philosophical thinking, which seeks above all to arrive at its results through considerations of reason, through mere combinations of concepts, through conclusions and the like, — philosophical thinking, as it is often understood today, is not capable of grasping that in human nature which really passes through the gate of death, which is truly capable of living independently of corporeality, of physicality.

For spiritual science, however, this purely philosophical approach, based on concepts and ideas of the external world, is from the outset something — forgive the somewhat trivial comparison — it is this philosophy, based purely on rational arguments, as one often says, is something that can just as little arrive at real results about the spiritual life, just as little get the spirit into human knowledge, as man can nourish himself by eating himself. Just as the process of nutrition must take hold of something that is outside its structure if it is to serve the human or animal organism, so human cognition must take hold of something that lies outside the mere connection and concatenation of concepts and ideas if the true cognitive needs of the human being are to be satisfied. In the second half of the nineteenth century, we have an example of how materialism, in its strict logic, is able to proceed from conclusion to conclusion, but because it is unable to really engage with a spiritual reality, it nevertheless becomes entangled in contradictions, which are not noticed by this materialistic world. conclusion to conclusion, but because it is impossible for it to really engage with a spiritual reality, it nevertheless becomes entangled in contradictions, which are not noticed by this materialistic world view itself, but which are noticed by those who have trained themselves to a certain universality of thought. In his book 'Old and New Faith', David Friedrich Strauß also presents Goethe's idea of immortality among the various proofs of human immortality that he wants to refute. He takes up this idea and behaves very strangely in doing so. David Friedrich Strauß does admit that there is something heroic about Goethe's idea of immortality, but then he belittles this heroism – one would like to use the word that Nietzsche coined for David Friedrich Strauß – like a real philistine. Goethe made not one but many statements about human immortality. For Strauß, only the one that I will mention now comes into consideration.

The thought occurs to Goethe that when the human soul tries to grasp itself, it becomes aware within itself of having abilities and talents that it cannot fully develop and unfold in one human life; and now, from the depths of his being and at the same time from what I yesterday called “the sustaining power of the German spirit,” the word comes forth: If nature has given me such aptitudes that cannot be satisfied in this life, then it is obliged to assign me another life after death, where these various aptitudes can really come to fruition.

Now, first of all, Strauss makes a kind of joke, as it were, by saying: Perhaps nature is indeed obliged to do so; but who can tell us that nature will keep this obligation? But he objects to something else as well. He says: Does not the whole of natural science contradict the view that all the tendencies that appear within the series of nature's beings are actually developed? Could it not be that tendencies develop in human nature that do not reach ultimate perfection, that do not come to fruition? And now it certainly looks very logical when David Friedrich Strauß says: that not all tendencies come to development, that can be seen very clearly in the germs of fish, how thousands of fish-germs arise and how few of them develop. But it can be clear to anyone who has once walked across fields or through gardens and has seen how many apples have fallen and decayed without coming to their development.

Now one can say: that is all certainly correct and it looks as if it could be convincing. But then, if one forms one's thinking somewhat more universally, the objection arises: yes, do all apples perish? Do they all fall from the tree before they are developed? Or do no fish germs come to fruition at all? Does not nature itself show that it is fundamentally concerned with the actual final development of all germs? If man then notices in himself that there are certain tendencies in him that do not come to fruition within his lifetime, then, according to Strauß's logic, the development of such tendencies in every human being should not be achieved. But life does not show us that at all. But David Friedrich Strauß shows us that he cannot think things through to the end. However, that is not enough for him, so he finds something else. You don't even have to read between the lines, it's pretty bluntly stated, and I will just translate it into slightly different words. David Friedrich Strauß says something like this: Basically, Goethe's saying is not even correct. Because if you look at old Goethe, you can clearly see that Goethe was actually able to develop all his abilities. Then he points out to us that, if you look at it properly, every person will actually find that their abilities are being developed. If Strauss had been just a little more modest, he might have realized that perhaps Goethe was more justified in speaking of the unfinished potential in human nature, which is only seeking to develop, than Strauss was.

Thus we can see from this example – and hundreds and thousands of such examples could be cited – how, as it were, a general course of mere philosophical speculation, even if it has a materialistic coloring, does not come to anything other than that it runs into an easily refutable contradiction that destroys itself before the universally observing soul.

If one asks oneself how it is that people have such a difficult time talking about the immortal part of their soul, the answer must be: between birth and death, people do live entirely in what is mortal in them, what is transitory in their nature, as we shall see in a moment. And one would like to say: only quietly and intimately does that which is immortal in the human being come to light, does the immortal part come to light. Indeed, one can say that this immortal element appears so quietly and intimately that in ordinary life the human soul does not have enough strength, enough endurance, but above all, does not have enough attention developed in a higher sense to observe what is quietly and intimately announcing itself in it as the immortal.

When we observe the human soul in its life and how it expresses itself, we encounter it, so to speak, in three ways of expression: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. Now, as has often been discussed in these lectures, the path of spiritual science into the spiritual worlds consists in bringing forth the powers lying in the depths of the soul in order to develop thinking, feeling and willing to a high level, to a sharper and more intense than those in which they usually are, so that through this training, through this activity, they can become organs that not only enable the human being to grasp the physical, but also enable him to grasp the spiritual that is all around us. Now, however, the usual consideration, which seeks to become clear about the mortal and the immortal in the human being, usually assumes that it is considering this mortal and immortal part of the soul and now asks itself: Is there anything to be found in this thinking, feeling and willing that betrays that the human being is able to carry something over from the mortal into the immortal?

Here I must take up what I said in one of my lectures this winter about the development of the human faculties for spiritual scientific research, in order to show how it is possible to find, and not find, in thinking, feeling and willing that which distinguishes the mortal in man from the immortal. One of the paths into the spiritual world that has often been mentioned here is that which is called the concentration of thought life, of thinking. I will only briefly point out what this concentration consists of and what it leads to. If we place some thought, preferably one that we have formed ourselves, not one that the external world stimulates in us, if we place such a thought formed by ourselves into the horizon of our consciousness, if we forget everything that lives around us and otherwise in us, and become only one with this one thought, when we can live completely in this one thought for a certain time, then we can throw all the soul forces that we would otherwise apply to the entire activity of the human being onto this one thought, then it is made stronger and stronger; then our whole being flows together with this thought, we concentrate on this thought. This experience occurs as a result of spiritual-scientific experience, but it is brought about by not growing tired of repeatedly and repeatedly placing a thought at the center of one's consciousness and identifying completely with it. For one must often apply this inner energy and perseverance, this concentrated attention to a thought for years. Even if one says, as a precaution, that one must not overdo this, a short time must still be devoted daily to such practice. But once one has devoted oneself to such practice, depending on one's abilities, depending on the structure of the soul after the experience of the human being, one gains a certain experience, one enters into a certain experience. Up to a certain point this inwardly concentrated thought intensifies; it becomes ever brighter and brighter; the one thought takes hold of us more and more, absorbs us more and more, and we feel, as we are concentrating, that we can forget the world, we feel more and more and more within this thought. But just when we feel strong in this thought, we feel at the same time how this thought, as it were, disappears from us, and how with this thought the power to apply our thinking in this way, as it were, dies away. We feel with this thought as if the thought and with it we ourselves were taken up by powers that live around us; as if our thinking darkened from a certain moment on. All this must, of course, remain a purely spiritual process, only then is it a healthy process. Today is not the time to mention that all the objections raised by pathology and psychopathology are quite wrong when they say that in this way the human being would work himself into illusions and self-suggestions, that he must arrive at ideas that are pathological in nature. One has only to read the relevant chapters of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” to see that the path described here is precisely the healthiest path for the soul, provided it is followed correctly. When the moment has come, one feels how a spiritual power that surrounds us, as it were, snatches the thought from us and allows it to die away in us; one then feels what the soul must go through in order to find the way into the spiritual. One feels as if one were losing one's spiritual footing, and this too has already been hinted at here. One feels as if one had in a certain way become acquainted with the Nothing. And a state can easily overtake a person that can be compared to a boundless fear. But it is precisely such a state that is suitable for bringing certain powers out of the soul that would otherwise remain undeveloped in man. For in overcoming such conditions, which I have now compared to fear, and many others that are part of the experiences of the spiritual researcher, deep powers of the soul that would otherwise remain undeveloped are unfolded, and therein lies that strengthening of the inner life of the soul, through which alone man can find his way into the spiritual worlds.

When one has gone through an experience such as that indicated here, one has yet another feeling. And all these experiences, which lead to one's actual entry into the spiritual world, are of an intimate nature, are fine, quiet processes of the human soul. When one has come to the point indicated, one feels as if that which one has hitherto addressed as the human faculty of thought, that which thinks in us, that which has the power to think, — as if that were to go out of us and go to the world, as if one were to lose it for the time being and as if one were to be transported with it into the objective world. One must have such experiences; one must have them in such a way that one really comes to know them in their reality, in their reality for the human being, otherwise one cannot speak about them in a true sense. But so that the human being does not remain stuck with this experience, as if only what had previously lived in him as thought had been snatched from him and he had been carried out into the world with this thought, so that he does not remain stuck with this experience - because this process of knowledge would simply leave him falling into a nothing - another must come to it. I have often described it here under the name meditation.

Meditation has also been hinted at here – meditation on something that we usually speak of as being outside of man, but which, if we look at the individual human life, we can see how intimately it is connected with man. When we look at what we have gone through in this life between birth and our present point in life and what we summarize as our destiny, then we are accustomed to saying: this or that stroke of fate has hit us here or there. But on closer reflection, it can show up even for ordinary life how one-sided such a saying is. If you ask yourself: What are you today? What can you do today? What abilities does your soul possess? — then we have to look at what we have gone through. We usually do not look for the context; but if we do, it enlightens us about what we actually are at the present moment. It enlightens us about how we would not have these or those abilities if we had not been struck by this or that stroke of fate, this or that twist of fate, twenty or thirty years ago or more, and guided us to acquire these abilities. But if we did not have them, our self would be something quite different in the concrete. We do, after all, consist of our abilities, our powers. But these are brought to us through our destiny. If you think this thought through to the end, you say to yourself: We are much more intimately connected with our destiny than is usually believed. We grow into our destiny with our innermost being, with our I. And we finally come to the thought: Basically, your self has become you through the fact that these or those strokes of fate, good or bad, have happened to you; but you have become you out of them. That which you are now lay in your destiny. Our self goes out of us, goes into our destiny. When we really learn to feel through what we usually call destiny in this way, when we really connect with it completely, we come to extend not our thinking but our will to our entire destiny and say to ourselves: If you want to know yourself as you are now, you have to develop your will. In relation to your entire destiny, you must say to yourself: You are what you are now because your ego has become what it is now. We are fully immersed in destiny. That is to say, we understand that if we want ourselves now, we must want ourselves in our destiny; in other words, that it is I myself who, in destiny, rules, lives and exists.

We learn to say about what has happened to us in our destiny: we have done it to ourselves; we were in it in every single blow of our destiny. Man's will — and here again only experience can show us — becomes, by grasping his fate as being fully identical with his own nature, by will-ing his fate, is thereby greatly strengthened. Man's will, by becoming so strengthened, becomes that which, in a different way from what has been characterized in thinking, is now, as it were, detached from man as he stands before others. While we have driven thinking out of us through concentration, we succeed in such a strengthening of the will, as it has been described in the grasping of the fate thought, that we enter into something that lies outside of us, which, as we say, falls to us. We enter into something with our will that we otherwise ascribe to the outside world. When we steel our will in this way, strengthening and intensifying it, we then have a second spiritual experience. The intensifying of the will now in its turn becomes independent of our being and follows the thinking that has gone out of us. And so we are able to strengthen this thinking, which threatens to die due to the first experience, from the will.

What happens to the thinking that has become shadowy at a certain point and has almost ceased? It is filled with content, it acquires substance, in that we send the will after the thinking, in a sense send ourselves after the thinking with the second part of our being. When thinking and willing are thus removed from our being, then we come to achieve what today, however, can hardly be admitted for the contemporary world view — we come to be outside of that in which we otherwise live in the waking state. We have gone out ourselves with our thinking and willing; we stand really outside ourselves. And that in which we are otherwise always becomes for us an object, something that is outside of us, like the table or any object outside of the sensory body. We look back at the sensory body, at the life circumstances that this body has gone through. We look back at the spatial and temporal aspects of our human nature. We become acquainted with that in us which has separated itself from that which is mortal.

Thus the spiritual researcher answers the question: What is mortal in the human being? — so that he must say: That which remains when he unites the will, strengthened by this grasp of the facts of fate, with the thinking that has been dispersed in the universe through concentration of thought, and marries and feels outside of himself in his being thus grasped in spirit, beholds then that which is otherwise too quiet in us, the eternal, the immortal, is so greatly intensified that we experience it, we know ourselves in it, we know ourselves in it, but outside of our body. And only then do we begin to notice it. But we also begin to notice what ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, in short, the ordinary life of the soul actually is.

When we consider ordinary thinking, how it is stimulated by the external-sensual nature, how it proceeds bound to the process of our brain, then for someone who is able to look at the world spiritually in the sense just indicated, it is something that does not belong to our immortality at all, as it presents itself to us in the mortal body. You realize this when you stand outside of the mortal body in your true essence. Because then you realize: everything that this mortal, this physical body actually is – I would like to use a comparison that is not just a comparison, but that points to the truth – you recognize: this physical body is a mirror that is able to reflect that that a person in ordinary life knows nothing about, that he can only know when he, as it were, peels it out of the physical, that he only knows something when he stands in his immortal self opposite the body. He knows that the body is only a mirror and that thoughts have the same relationship to the body as the mirror images have to the observer. Just as if one had a number of mirrors on the wall and passed by the mirrors and saw one's own figure as long as one was there, but no longer saw oneself when one was not there and saw oneself again when one was there again, so man sees that of which he lives, but of which he knows nothing, when he is in the body and the body reflects its own nature back to him. And thoughts are present in the form in which we have them in ordinary life only as long as the mortal body reflects them. But something else is that which thinks; something else is that which exercises the immediate activity that reflects itself as a thought in the mortal body.

When examining human thinking, one cannot say that one can find anything in this thinking that could provide any insight into immortality, because these thoughts are reflections that are evoked by the mortal body. And that which is immortal is not standing in front of the mirror now, but is reflected in the thought forms. What is it that lives in front of the mirror, in our case in the mirror? Is there any way to express this at all in human words? Yes, there is a way. But what is to be expressed here at this point is not observed by man; for he is satisfied when he can take hold of his thoughts for orientation in the outer world, when he can live in his thoughts. That something lives in this thought, which one has to describe as the will within the thoughts, as the will that is active there, - man is usually not aware of this at all, or when he becomes aware of it, he draws a conclusion, as Schopenhauer did. Then he has no direct vision, then he does not grasp himself in this volitional thinking, in the thinking volition, in what he is, but in what this thinking volition gives him, namely in the thoughts, which are only mirror images. Only when man has brought about the marriage between thinking and willing as I have described it, only then are the soul powers so strong that all thinking appears permeated by a supersensible human entity, which is of a will-like nature, but in such a way that it shows its true, will-like nature, mirrored as thoughts. As truly as it is really our countenance when we see ourselves in the mirror, so truly do we mirror ourselves in our thoughts; but it is not what we are in this mirror image. That which we are is mirrored in such a way that we can never grasp in life, in strength, in thinking, what stands behind thinking and of which thinking is only a reflection. Just as the reflection lasts no longer than the time we stand before the mirror, so too this thinking in the material body lasts no longer than it is stimulated by the actual immortal in us, which is reflected in the thought.

Another thing becomes apparent to us in the ordinary process of willing, in the process by which we commit our actions, move our limbs. While we do not notice in thinking that what is essentially mirrored in it stands behind thinking, we do not notice in acting, in the actions we perform, that behind the human will there is something everywhere that is quite unlike our world of thoughts, quite unlike that which is mirrored in thoughts. The reason there has been so much controversy in philosophy about the freedom of the will is because man does not get to know the will as it really is. He only gets to know the power of the will, but not the living entity that is really inherent in the power. And in the will, the living entity is of a mental nature. You see, that which is the actual immortal in man is so quiet, so intimate, so hidden in the external sensual world that in the thought process the thought is hidden, that in the will process it is not even noticed that every smallest will process depends on what is reflected in the thought, but which cannot be noticed at all. One only notices this when one observes the course of fate in the manner described; when one strengthens the will so that it is united, standing outside us, outside mortal man, as I have described, with the thought. Then one notices how the will is united with the thought, then one notices the two sides, which always confront us separately in life as thought and will, united; for one has only brought them to marriage. One then lives in a thought-will process. But then one has only grasped that which goes beyond death, which goes through the gate of death. And then one realizes what mistake, what tremendous mistake those have made who have often thought about the immortality of the human soul in a purely philosophical way. Those who have thought about this immortality of the human soul have always wanted to hold on to something that is, after all, in a certain way similar to that which lives in sensuality or in sensual thinking. People have spoken of a substance of the soul, have searched for something that, like a fine materiality, passes through the gate of death. That one must grasp the eternal in man outside of the body and that one needs completely new concepts and ideas for this, which no external perception, no thinking bound to the brain, can give, will become clear to mankind through spiritual science. That, as it were, the immortal consists precisely in that which has nothing in common with the sensual, that is what will gradually have to be grasped.

Such things have always been sensed; scientifically substantiated from the present into the future, they will be. Schiller says:

Do not talk so much to me about nebulae and suns.
Is nature only great because it gives you things to count?
Your subject is the most exalted in space,
But, friends, the exalted does not dwell in space.

So he pointed out that one must go beyond the spatial in order to arrive at what is actually spiritual. Now, however, for the one who thinks in materialistic terms, reality ends precisely where the immortal begins; and since for him reality ends where the immortal begins, he cannot arrive at any concept of this immortality. We see again in David Friedrich Strauß, the representative of materialism in modern times, how strangely these things are thought of. David Friedrich Strauß has a very low opinion of the church fathers. For him, they are dismissed people; but he does remember one of these dismissed people, one of these church fathers, who he liked. He expresses himself somewhat strangely about him, somewhat coarsely, but in a certain sense, cleverly. David Friedrich Strauß gives this characterization mainly because the church father said, “Only that which is not is incorporeal.” — That is also David Friedrich Strauß's conviction: Only that which is not is incorporeal. One might just as well say: what is non-spatial; but “the spiritual — the sublime — does not dwell in space”.

This is what still causes particular difficulties for the world view of our time. This world view of our time assumes that in order to understand something that can be grasped at all, it is absolutely necessary that it be linked to familiar concepts. The thinking habits of our time demand that when we speak of spiritual realities we use concepts with which they are already familiar. They do not want to be led to unfamiliar concepts, but want to have something they already know. One should point to something that they already know. This is what all philosophers have done who have spoken of a soul 'substance'. They say: the soul must simply have a substance; this then passes through the gate of death. But one can say: natural science in particular could prepare people for what spiritual science will actually have to address these things bit by bit. You all know the very simple way in which one elastic billiard ball can be steered towards another; then the other takes on any direction. And the direction that the second ball gets depends on the direction and movement of the first ball. Physics is clear about the fact that the state of motion of the second ball has emerged from the state of motion of the first and that everything that can be found in the state of motion of the second ball can be found in the motion of the first. There is a transition of the motion of the first ball to the motion of the second. But anyone who would think something completely absurd would say: I cannot imagine that the movement of the second ball depends on the movement of the first ball. But just as absurd is the thought of the soul for someone who cannot imagine that the soul-spiritual is something different than what reminds of the physical in its essence. Just as it would be if one were to demand that the first sphere send some of its substance into the second so that something would be present in the second, — so it would be if one were to demand that in the life which the soul enters into after death there should be that which can already be found in the experiences which the soul undergoes while it is in the body, only through this body.

But it is also necessary to recognize the difficulty that stands in the way of spiritual science, namely that this spiritual science must not only speak of things that go beyond the sense world, but must also expect people to accept new, different concepts than those they have in order to grasp this spiritual; that the concepts must be enriched, that one must not merely talk around with the same concepts and ideas. Therefore, what spiritual science has is often incomprehensible to those who stand on the standpoint of today's habits of thought, because they actually only hear words that sound fantastic, that appear to be coined together, and because they do not engage with what the spiritual researcher takes from his experiences. For when the spiritual scientist has brought these things alive from the spiritual world, they are comprehensible to the power of judgment. One can understand with sound judgment what the spiritual researcher has brought from the spiritual world. To do so, not everyone needs to be a spiritual researcher; one need only examine without prejudice what the spiritual researcher is able to give, and one will be able to understand it. He who says that no one can possibly admit that what the spiritual researcher says is true without becoming a spiritual researcher himself, should also claim that no one can prove by any kind of reasoning that someone is a thief if he has not carried out the theft himself. Such things seem absurd when they are expressed, but they are all the more correct in the light of a universal logic. Above all, however, one thing will become completely clear to humanity when the spiritual-scientific results of this humanity become comprehensible, when people begin to think about things without prejudice. One thing will become clear: that there is something in human nature that is a weaving and living only in the spiritual, even in everyday life. There it is, but it can only be interpreted in the right way with the help of spiritual science. Something in our daily life from waking up to falling asleep is spiritual in nature; but the materialistically thinking person will not accept it: it is the process we go through in our memory. When we remember something, when we look back on an experience we had in the past, then this remembering, this directing of our soul forces to something that no longer takes place, is an entirely spiritual process; the soul performs it only in the soul-spiritual.

One will only admit this if one has already grasped the nature of the spiritual. For, of course, from the present state of natural science, one can easily say: Yes, movement transforms into warmth, as physical research shows us; why shouldn't external processes transform into sensation and thought within us? Of course they do. They do it by evoking processes that are the mirror in which our being is reflected. One can say: natural science is quite right. Only by fully embracing natural science and not fighting it, but then also asserting spiritual experiences, can one make progress. So someone might say: So the spiritual processes are a transformation of the external processes. Just as movement is transformed into warmth, so that which is outside in the world is transformed into that which is within us. But this was only valid as long as it could not be proven that when we transform movement into warmth, something always remains that is there, always there. That has remained warmth, is never anything but warmth. This is apparent to someone who really follows the bodily process from outside his body, who follows what the body can actually do. It is apparent to him that although, when we perceive in the external world, the process that is built up by the senses and continues in the brain is a continuation of the external process, this is not correct in relation to what we remember. And it is precisely at this point that the ever-advancing science will show that, by focusing attention on the physical processes, the process of memory, which is a purely spiritual process, could never somehow arise from the physical processes. It will be possible to show, in a strictly scientific way, that what happens physically in us when we remember is not the mental process, or has more to do with it than the strokes of a pen on paper have to do with what I read. When I have a word consisting of certain lines in front of me, I do not read by looking at the word and tracing my thoughts, but by connecting a meaning with this sign through something in me that has nothing to do with what is on the paper. Thus one will come to realize that the memory process that takes place in the body has as little to do with physical processes as my reading process has to do with the forms on the paper. Memory will present itself as a spiritual process that intervenes in physical life. But then one will also recognize that already in our ordinary physical life between birth and death we are surrounded by the essence that we must grasp in a higher, more intense sense if we want to look towards the immortal. When materialism asks: What is mortal in man? and answers: Everything that man experiences here in the sense world! — then spiritual science can also say to him: Yes, you are right; everything that a person experiences here in the world of the senses is mortal in the human being. But just as an event passes by in our physical life and we remember it at a later point in time purely through the spiritual essence of our soul, so too is it with our soul. As long as we are searching for a “soul substance,” we are incapable of even approaching that which is immortal in the human being. As soon as we know that what is not even noticed in our ordinary mortal existence because it is as if a person stands before a mirror and sees only his reflection, only knows himself in the image, — as soon as we know that what what is ignored in ordinary life, what we know nothing about in ordinary life, what we only know as in an image, - that precisely this is what is retained after our death and lives in the memory of earthly life, we can also understand: What we are here, it goes as a fact, as that, as what it lives here, perishable in the human being. That which remains for the soul, the soul that does not know itself in life, that is the memory that will be incorporated into the experiences that the human being then undergoes in the purely spiritual world after death.

Only when one begins to understand what a purely soul-spiritual process memory is, only then does one point to that which continues beyond death. Here, the power of memory already lives in the formation of thought and will and reveals itself here as spiritual. In the memory that lives in us, we do not carry across the threshold of death as soul substance, but as power, that which we are in the time between birth and death. For anyone who does not aspire to spiritual science, the possibility of imagining anything in what has been said disappears immediately, for the reason that he has nothing left to remember according to his ideas. For in everything he can think of, he has in mind that he must have something substantial that he already knows. He does not want to come to the realization that he has something only as a gift of memory that he does not know.

Thus, in our memory, we are actually given something that leads us to the otherwise unknown concepts of the spiritual process by which an immortal separates from the mortal, so that we have to recognize it. And so it appears to us in something else in the spiritual research process that we must, as it were, take hold of ourselves more strongly, so that the powers of comprehension expand beyond that which would otherwise receive no attention, in order to enter the spiritual world. For example, we can hold up an ideal to ourselves that is yet to be achieved, that is just as absent in the present as a past experience. Then we also stand in a purely spiritual process to this ideal. The materialist will indeed lose himself with a kind of voluptuousness in a certain impasse; he will want the soul to have a physical relationship to an ideal. But the real relationship to an ideal is a purely spiritual one. Only those who know that memory is also a purely spiritual process can understand this.

Now, however, a person usually does not experience the ideal in such a way that he can become fully warm, let alone fiery, towards the ideal. It remains somewhat cold, even if he admires it. At most, he becomes warm when he is directly involved in a process in which the ideal lives in some way in the outside world, where he can go along with the ideal. But when the ideal is raised in his soul purely as a thought and he can then connect feelings and volitional impulses only with the ideal, so that he also directs his will towards it, and when he does this more often, when he adds these volitional exercises to the concentration, — then gradually a feeling develops in the soul that we not only have a power of intuition and memory, but that we also have something that, although it is of a volitional nature, can be described as a foreknowledge of future events. There is something prophetic in the human soul. This is not just some kind of superstition. Spiritual science shows that this prophetic gift is extremely difficult to manifest in man only because man in the physical body must use the powers that would otherwise allow him to perceive what is approaching him; he must use this power to build up the physical body; it flows into it and is transformed. Because we have already gone through the past life process, we are able to apply the growth forces that we have retained from it, in terms of soul and spirit, as a power of remembrance. As we live in the physical body towards the future, we have to apply the strength we need to maintain the body in the physical body. So it is very difficult to get to know certain forces, though not in the way people imagine, but in a much more intimate and quiet way. They are present in the human being. Spiritual research can get to know them in such a way that it learns to understand that in what is immortal in the human soul, there is something that really carries this soul's rich content through death and into the future. Through this spiritual science, man really becomes aware of the power itself that carries him through the gateway of death.

Thus spiritual science cannot answer the question, “What is mortal about the human being?” as easily as one might think. But it shows the way to find out what is mortal in the human being, by showing what lives in man as the immortal, unnoticed by ordinary attention, and how this immortal can, as it were, objectively survey one's own ordinary life between birth and death. But this can only be the case when a person comes to recognize that his being is a self-contained entity, outside of the physical, and that this self-contained entity actually has an effect on the body from outside of the body. Just as a person standing in front of a mirror affects his reflection, so the true essence of the soul affects the physical, reflecting back what it is for this earthly life. Because in earthly life we have only a reflection of our true nature, and this can only be present as long as what is reflected stands before the mirror, what we actually experience as present in earthly life is fundamentally the mortal part. Man gets to know that which underlies it as mortal, as that in which his immortal part dwells, as in his tool – I do not say in his shell, but in his tool.

In this way, the question, “What is mortal in the human being?” can be answered in full accordance with current natural science. And this will be of tremendous importance for the future of spiritual development. It will be of tremendous importance because the natural scientist can always point out when one speaks of an independent soul, of soul substance, and can always say: Yes, just look at this soul; it grows with the growth of the body, of the brain, it grows with aging. When the body falls ill and dies, the soul is no longer there. Merely inferring the soul from external appearances does not make it possible to object to facts. The soul must be recognized in a field that lies outside of facts. One must be able to say yes to all legitimate objections, not no. And spiritual science can do that. Therefore, when those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of natural science come and say, “We know that! We know that! We know that!” You must not come to us with spiritual science! then the spiritual scientist stands before them and says: Nothing, absolutely nothing, to the very last thing you say, is denied by spiritual science; for what you know, what natural science knows, that is mortal in the human being. Nothing is denied to you by spiritual science, it only shows that there is a path of human knowledge to something other than what you know. Then the natural scientist is no longer able to argue with logical reasons, but he must forbid that one knows something other than he knows. Then he has only this single objection. And that is really the only objection that can come from natural science. One cannot refute the spiritual scientific world view, because the objections that one makes, the spiritual researcher admits them all. It must be asserted: I alone have the right to decide where research may be carried out; and if you assert anything other than what may be asserted according to my will, then you are a fantasist. — From that side, spiritual science cannot be refuted with reasons, but only and solely by fiat. Spiritual science can only be eliminated if people agree to suppress spiritual scientific research by majority vote. Spiritual science cannot be refuted by logic, but only by brutality; but it will only be able to stand up to natural science if it is on a par with natural science, if it does not come up with amateurish things and wants to refute natural science with them. It must be able to show that it is capable of conquering a field in which even the old philosophical concepts of the soul's substance can no longer be applied, but for which new concepts must be created. That is why so much of what appears in the literature of spiritual science still seems absurd. But the absurdity only exists because we have never been accustomed to such concepts; that is why we reject them. Spiritual science is producing something completely new. It is not by fighting natural science, but by opposing something, that we can pave the way for spiritual science. Even in terms of its way of thinking, spiritual science can fully meet the justified demands of natural science. For if someone were to say: I stand on the firm ground of natural science; anyone who has their five senses and relies on them and on what the mind can grasp on the basis of these five senses cannot agree with the fantasies of spiritual science, — then the spiritual researcher replies: Just take a little look at yourself! You admit that for a long time people lived as those who relied on the healthy five senses. Then came Copernicus. He established a world view in relation to the outer world that flies in the face of the five senses. Indeed, it took many people a long time, right up to the present day, to recognize or acknowledge the truth of Copernicus' world view. But just as human truth found a way to go beyond the five senses in relation to the external science of the world in those days, so spiritual science will lead beyond that which is to be established by the fiat of the five senses with regard to the supersensible. For this supersensible allows even less that one should rely only on one's “healthy five senses”.

Now we see that the path of development that a person must take if he wants to become a spiritual researcher is not something that everyone needs to take. If there were only a few spiritual researchers and they established truths that the intellect could grasp, then everyone would be able to understand them. We see that the path that the spiritual researcher is led along consists of taking hold of one's own soul in order to guide it further. Just as the child must develop by being led from the time when it cannot yet say 'I' to itself, to a time when it can say it, so the soul, when the spiritual researcher has a hold on it, can develop to become a companion of the spiritual world. But here the soul must take hold of itself. This is a purely spiritual-soul process. Humanity has been on the path to this process for a long time. One of the spirits of Central European spiritual development, of whom I spoke here recently, coined a beautiful phrase that could be said to point the way for human feeling, human thinking, human will — the path that ultimately leads to the human becoming a spiritual researcher themselves. The German mystic Meister Eckhart, who died in 1327, coined a beautiful phrase. A word, so to speak, that, when meditated upon, has the power to point the soul to the path that leads into the spiritual world. You cannot just let such a word sink in once or a few times, but you have to let it sink in day after day. For behind such a saying lies a deep spiritual experience, which the one who brought it forth out of the innermost structure of his soul has already gone through. Master Eckhart says:

"He who wishes to attain the highest perfection of his being and to see God, the highest good, must have a knowledge of himself and of that which is above him, to the very bottom. Only in this way will he attain the highest sincerity.

Therefore, dear man, know yourself; this is better for you than if you knew the powers of all creatures.

Know Thyself! — the saying that already stood on the Apollonian sanctuary. But self-knowledge, which is most intimately connected with the path into the spiritual worlds, is, so to speak, the most, most difficult! Even the most external self-knowledge is something difficult for man. The philosopher Ernst Mach gives a curious example of this. In his “Analysis of Sensations” he reveals how he fared with regard to self-knowledge even in the most superficial area. He recounts how he was once crossing the street and saw his own image in a tilted mirror. He was shocked by the ugly, repulsive face that looked back at him, and lo and behold: it was his own. And when he was already a professor, something similar happened to him. He came tired from a trip and boarded a bus. On the other side, he saw a man get on, and he thought: What kind of dried-up schoolmaster gets on there! And again, the person who got on the bus opposite him turned out to be himself; he had seen himself in a mirror. And he says: So I knew the profession of Habirus better than my own. We see from this case that one can even be a famous professor and have all the qualities and powers of a famous professor and yet not have come very far in terms of the most external self-knowledge.

But much more difficult is that which can be attained of self-knowledge of the soul. And it must be said that what is often defined as self-knowledge is nothing more than an egoistic feeling about an inner experience. Truly, real self-knowledge can only be acquired through spiritual science.

But – and perhaps it does not seem far-fetched; for not far-fetched is also everything to which not only logic, but also feelings, which are caused by much of what occurs in the present is caused — this path, which must lead to spiritual science, is indicated particularly by such impulses as those just mentioned by Meister Eckhart, but which can be enumerated in many other ways. For humanity is on this path. And if we want to point to someone in more recent times who, in terms of working out the spiritual from the material, was also on the path to spiritual science, we can point to Goethe. Goethe, to mention just one example, wanted to show in his Metamorphosis of Plants how, in the leaf, in the individual leaf, there is that which can transform itself and, in transforming itself, presents itself as a different organ. But he also endeavored to implement the idea of transformation in other fields. This proved fruitful for him and led him to remarkable scientific results, some of which are still rejected out of hand by science today. And yet, many seeds for the future spiritual-scientific world view lie in Goethe's way of thinking. When one builds up one's own structure of ideas and transforms it into a living spiritual experience, one realizes how fruitful Goethe's world view is, which is so vividly contained, for example, in the small work 'Metamorphosis of Plants'. One then realizes that the highest spiritual powers, for which one must first seek words, concepts and ideas, those processes that the soul undergoes when it leaves the mortal body, already have a metamorphosis in the ordinary memory process. One needs only to have enough universality of mind to follow this process in metamorphoses, to recognize it as a life process of the soul freed from the mortal body. Then one notices that what is mortal in the human being passes away just as the flower that remains, which withers, is understood to be separate from the germ, which continues into a new plant. But it was only logical that Goethe should apply this way of thinking to the physical world as well. It is only that he is not yet understood. It must appear comprehensible that the physicist, who believes himself to be on the ground of truth when he is on the ground of physical hypotheses, rejects Goethe's theory of colors. The deeper reason for this rejection is none other than that Goethe's Theory of Colors is grasped and set forth by a human being who has allowed the inner driving force to take effect in him, which lives in the human being's spirit, and that today one seeks a theory of colors in physics that is based only on those cognitive abilities of the human being that are mediated by the body.

As spiritual science develops as a fruit of human spiritual striving, something like the Goethean theory of colours will also be recognized along with spiritual science itself. Then people will understand why another spirit, who also felt the impulse of the eternal spiritual in his soul, who, motivated by the same impulse, also wanted to comprehend the outer world, why this spirit stood up for the theory of colours, and indeed for something else — Hegel, Hegel was also one of those who were deeply connected with the sustaining power of the German spirit, which has already been described here yesterday. With all the power of eloquence that was his, he opposed the belittling of his fellow countryman Kepler, the great Kepler, who is known to anyone who has even slightly looked into a physics book as the one who found the so-called Kepler's laws. Hegel showed that these laws already contain what Newton had merely formulated in mathematical formulas. The world has otherwise noticed this only a little. Hegel has shown: Newton puts mathematical letters where Kepler has expressed his laws; he only changes a little the formulas. Newton has done nothing but expressed in mathematical terms and formulas the Kepler laws. But Hegel was concerned with the reality and not with the form of expression.

I already said that I would like to mention something that only belongs here in a subjective way. I would like to draw attention to the fact that this has happened to us several times recently, as it did there, that the person who only found the form of expression is presented as the great physicist, instead of the person who actually found the essence of the matter – Goethe. In accordance with a spiritual world view, Goethe discovered everything that is connected with the developmental theory of organisms. However, one must be borne by the spiritual, as he himself was, if one wants to see this spiritual world view as the natural developmental theory. For the spirit behind all sensuality, Goethe was strengthened, not weakened, by his natural developmental theory. But in many cases it was too difficult for humanity to understand the transformation of organisms in the Goethean way. People grasped it more easily when it was presented to them in a way that did not place such great demands on the intellect as in Darwin's account. And these things could still be applied to many, many more things.

The second half of the 19th century is the time when people fell victim to shallower thinking in many fields. In German intellectual life, the deeper impulses and germs of thought lie everywhere for that which a shallower way of thinking has stood for. It will certainly be a matter of reflecting on what the “supporting forces of German intellectual life” are; of reflecting on how the true theory of evolution must be presented not in the Darwinian sense, but in the Goethean sense. But this leads to the thoughts that, as I explained yesterday, can bring about a change of heart in many areas in our difficult times, that we have to achieve victories in other respects as well, perhaps more than we think: the victory of German intellectual life, the victory of the deeper principles of a world view, as they are prepared in German intellectual life, – in contrast to what has come over from England so often as the shallower things. This is not said in a nationalistically chauvinistic spirit but simply and historically. The German mind must realize that much that is English must be sent back to its source. And one can say: in this respect, German intellectual life can hope that the germs within it will come more and more to fruition in the future. But then that which is the German soul, the German spirit, must be defended in the same way as it is defended by our self-sacrificing contemporaries. For what is being defended here is the most sacred possession of mankind. Not only are German territory and German people surrounded on all sides by enemies as if in a fortress, but the noblest German spiritual heritage is also surrounded and besieged as if in a fortress and must be defended. Truth is the same everywhere; but it is also true that the capacity for truth is not developed in the same way everywhere. As regards German intellectual life, it may be said that the clarity and religious nature with which German idealism approached the spiritual is a beginning from which there is a gradual ascent to a truly spiritual Weltanschauung. Hence we may cherish the hope, based on truthful knowledge and not on mere feelings, that the German spirit will be given the opportunity to develop that which those who are familiar with the German spirit are familiar with in this German spirit, those who are familiar with the connection between the German spirit and the path to the spiritual worlds. And there is a word of Goethe's that the Alsatian poet Lienhard refers to in his remarkable brochure “Germany's European Mission” — a word of Goethe's that he uttered in 1813 in a conversation with Luden. He says:

“The destiny of the Germans is... not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task to fulfill than to break up the Roman Empire and create and order a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe they must still have a great future, a destiny...”

In many other areas, too, there are still many German determinations to be found. But there is no doubt that the determination to lead German idealism to spiritualism, to a completely spiritual world view, also still lies within the German development. For, whatever may happen, only one thing can happen: that what has emerged from such a deeply inner experience as a word of Goethe's, which he has just placed at the end of the poem where he presents the deepest human struggle with the world spirit, will be a fruitful part of this process. It is not without reason that the German world-view has given rise to Faust, this portrayal of the struggle with the world spirit for a way into the spiritual world. Just at the time when Germany allowed itself to be overcome spiritually, to a certain extent, by a foreign world-view, the strange dictum was repeatedly expressed that Germany was Hamlet. Germany is not Hamlet. It is only a misunderstanding to believe that. In the innermost forces of German development lies something that can never be uttered by Hamlet – “To be or not to be, that is the question” is a saying of Hamlet – but the German spirit says: the spirit is the source of all being, and the soul finds its true destiny, its true essence; and “only on spiritual ground, only by looking beyond the material, can the soul unfold its full power.” That is the German development, considered in the right style, connected with the spiritual essence of humanity in general, that one must say: May the present painful events bring much more, - but that lies in the German development itself as a deepest justification, that one will have to say:

Such a victory of the German spirit must emerge from these painful times, in the face of the onslaught of all enemies of the German spirit, that, by virtue of the other purposes of the German people, it can also fulfill what springs from the words with which the most German, but at the same time the most profound poetry of mankind concludes – which sounds like a victory cry against all materialism, like the herald's call before every spiritual world view: “The transitory is not the permanent”. At the end of “Faust” we are met with what sounds like a true motto of a truly spiritual world view: “All that is transitory is only a parable”.

And the German spirit still has much to contribute to making this the goal of human endeavor. And we hope that the present difficult times will help it to fully fulfill its destiny in this direction.

Among the many prejudices against spiritual science, as it is meant here, are those that associate the methods of spiritual research, that which can be described as the paths of spiritual research, with an abnormal, pathological mental life. Although anyone who follows more closely what can be said about the course of such soul development, which is to lead to spiritual research, can only come to such a prejudice either out of ignorance, out of lack of knowledge, or out of ill will, this prejudice must be discussed at some point. For there is plenty of ignorance in the sense mentioned, as well as ill will, in the world. I do not wish to go into individual attacks that have been made against spiritual science from this particular quarter, but I would just like to discuss in general terms the possible attacks, the possible objections and prejudices, and show how unjustified they actually are in the face of the nature of true spiritual research. To do this, however, I must briefly present some material from a certain point of view that was already the subject of the lectures I gave here at the beginning of the winter. I must sketch out the way of spiritual research in a very sketchy way.

The way of spiritual research - as has been emphasized here again and again - is a purely inward path of the soul, a path that is only traversed within the life of the soul itself, and it consists of certain activities of the life of the soul, of certain exercises of the soul life, which lead this soul life from the point at which it stands in ordinary life to another point, from which it is precisely in a position to approach what can be called the spiritual world. Now, in summarizing a great deal, I have just dealt with the exercises that the spiritual researcher has to go through in two main groups in one of the lectures I gave this winter. The first exercises consist of forming one's thinking differently, in a certain way, from the way it is in ordinary life: exercises of thinking. They belong to the first group of spiritual research exercises. Exercises of the will, undertaken in a certain way, belong to the second group of spiritual research exercises.

Today, I will have to say a lot, of course in a brief summary, for a full understanding of which it is necessary either to know what has been said in earlier lectures or to read, for example, my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or the second volume of my “Occult Science”. For I shall endeavor to show how thinking is changed by certain exercises, technically called meditation and concentration of thought, in comparison with ordinary thinking. I do not propose to go into the way these exercises are done, but I may mention at once that in the actual thinking exercises it is a matter of raising into consciousness what is always present in human thinking, and especially in the healthiest human thinking , but which remains more or less unconscious within this healthy human thinking of everyday life, for the reason that we carry out this thinking of everyday life in the sense of what could be called adaptation to the laws, to the processes of the outer world. We do not perceive the external world only through our senses; we think about the external world, we form ideas that become thoughts, we connect these ideas in our thought life. We connect them, when it comes to healthy thinking that belongs to reality, in a very specific, lawful way. Even that which is called logic can only describe how judgments are made, how thinking moves inwardly, so to speak, in order to arrive at what is called truth. The actual process of thinking, the inward activity of thinking, essentially remains unconscious in ordinary thinking. The aim of the first group of exercises is to bring to consciousness what happens in ordinary thinking but remains unconscious, so that we do not merely let our thoughts be woven and live under the compulsion of the currents of the world, but so that our full, conscious will comes to expression in our thinking.

We must realize, when we truly observe the process of thinking and imagining, that we are doing so in the sense that it is imposed on us as a compulsion of the flow of reality. The exercises, which are now particularly thinking exercises, aim to take such ideas and such kinds of ideas into consciousness in the processes that are called meditation and concentration of thought, so that one always has conscious will in the whole process of meditating, of concentrating, that there is no moment when the conscious will does not prevail. And if you have the necessary patience and the necessary stamina and energy to do such exercises, it turns out that you come to detach the activity of thinking, the act of thinking, so to speak, from what ordinary life is the state of being in thought, that one learns to concentrate not only on what is being thought, but on the process of thinking, on that inner weaving and life of the soul that takes place when one thinks. And I have also dealt with the accompanying phenomena associated with this inner discovery, which consists in becoming aware of the thinking activity in thinking. The accompanying phenomenon is this: that one can, to a certain extent, regard one's thoughts themselves, which one is otherwise accustomed to having in one's thinking activity, as something secondary, and indeed, that one can ultimately have them entirely outside one's thinking activity. One begins with certain thoughts, but one passes over to a mere conscious, volitional, fully volitional thinking activity. One is able to switch thoughts on and off and consciously control one's thinking activity. As a side effect of this, one certainly becomes firm and strong in this voluntary use of thinking activity. But at the same time one enters into a certain emptiness of consciousness, into an empty weaving and living of consciousness. Therefore, as I said, these exercises, which relate to mere thinking, must never be undertaken alone. Indeed, the exercises of meditation and concentration are already undertaken in such a way that, by going through them in consciousness, the ordinary element of the will undergoes training at the same time; so that one comes to raise into consciousness what is hidden in the will in ordinary life. And then one comes to find something quite real in ordinary volition, in ordinary will activity, something that is always there, but which otherwise remains stuck down in the unconscious. One cannot will just anything, nor can one pour just any volition into an action without the element I am speaking of being present in the activity. But it remains unconscious. Through those exercises which are based on a kind of concentration, meditation, on an inner, now more, I would say, soul-related activity, one comes to discover what otherwise, by willing, by letting a will flow into the action, unconsciously pours into the willing or into the action, but which one does not look at. Now one discovers it. Strangely enough, one discovers in the will something that resembles consciousness. One discovers a consciousness that is different from the usual consciousness. One discovers – and one must take this, what is now being looked at, not as an image, but as a reality, as a truth – that another consciousness than our ordinary daytime consciousness accompanies us continually, that we are just not aware of this other consciousness, if the paradoxical expression may be used. One discovers another person in the person. One discovers that which can be named: a consciousness that is constantly watching us. And one learns to handle this consciousness, which one thus discovers in the operations of one's will, like the ordinary consciousness. One also learns to connect this consciousness with the results that one has achieved through the thinking exercises, so that the two connect with each other to a certain extent and one is now able to perform soul tasks, which one now knows are completely free from any physical involvement. The latter must be an inner experience, and it becomes an inner experience.

Thus one develops one's soul life into a consciousness that is different from the ordinary one, and one gives this soul life a content by discovering the will in thinking, by discovering thinking as this “activity in itself.” Not in such an abstract way as it is done by ordinary philosophies or other sciences, but in a living way one discovers the thinking activity as a volitional activity. One can now also say that one discovers the will in thinking, and one can say that in the will one discovers a consciousness that can be addressed as a thinking consciousness, just as the ordinary everyday consciousness that we have in life is a thinking consciousness. In thinking, one discovers the will; in the will, one discovers objective thinking that is not otherwise handled by us – if I may use the expression – a thinker in us that is within us, that is objectively present. This essentially characterizes what is to be achieved.

Other accompanying phenomena of this process must also be characterized in order to have a complete picture when one has arrived at discovering thinking as an activity, to find in one's thinking that which can otherwise remain unconscious; I have described this in more detail in earlier lectures. Then one finds oneself confronted with something as one is otherwise confronted with the objects and processes of the external world. But an important, essential peculiarity arises. What one now experiences with the help of the developed thinking and that consciousness of which I have just spoken, that other consciousness than the ordinary one, what one discovers in this way, differs quite essentially from the soul experiences one otherwise has in ordinary life. One may interpret the process more materialistically or more spiritually, but that does not matter, just as it does not matter in the case of today's reflections, which are based on experience rather than interpretation. That which has entered into us through our ordinary experiences, through our perceptions, and which has become thoughts, ideas, is transformed in such a way that it can remain in our memory, in our recollection, as one says, even if, of course, quite different processes are behind this retention. Just as experiences of ordinary perception and ordinary thinking gain the possibility, through a certain process of the soul, of being stored directly in memory, and become, as it were, our memory treasure without our intervention, so it is not the case with those experiences that we make in the way I have just described, with the developed consciousness and the developed will-filled thinking activity. These experiences are made, but they pass by being made, so that one can actually only hold on to them for a moment. They do not become embedded in our organic life. One can compare their fleetingness with the fleetingness of dream experiences. But one is not saying more than a comparison. After all, the dream still has the peculiarity that it can at least be remembered in a certain way directly through itself. What is experienced in the spiritual world in the way described takes place, but does not pass through itself into the ordinary store of memory. And that is the peculiar thing about it: if one wants to face reality in the spirit, one can never proceed in such a way that one can simply extract from one's memory what one has once experienced and then have it again. You would not have it again; instead, you have to experience it anew. Of course, what I have described is slowly preparing itself; it prepares itself through all possible stages. But if you consider all the things described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” for example, what you come to last is what I have just described.

Now you will say: So spiritual experiences can only be had and then have to be forgotten. They would have to, if nothing else were added. And the other thing that is added now is at the same time the special fact of spiritual loss, which must be taken into account if one wants to understand the relationship between the healthiest soul life and spiritual research, and how unfounded the prejudices are that somehow spiritual research could have something to do with pathological soul development. The peculiar thing at issue here is that the state of consciousness that is attained through the true, through the right spiritual-scientific path develops. It comes about, it is then there for our soul life. But the ordinary state of consciousness with which we otherwise live in everyday life remains as it was before we entered this other state of consciousness. That is to say, we remain capable of judgment or, for that matter, deficient in judgment in exactly the same way as we were before; we initially remain full of affect or less full of affect in exactly the same way as we were before. At first, it is possible to observe the other person, who one was before and who one has now remained, with the same objectivity with which one can observe today the processes that one went through emotionally yesterday, for example. Just as little is changed in the ordinary consciousness by the fact that one has attained this other consciousness, as the soul life that one went through yesterday is somehow changed by the fact that one looks at it today. And if it is changed, if you fantasize something into it, then the observation is not the one that can lead to any objectivity; then something must have taken place that is not in order. So you face your ordinary mental life in the same way that you face, I would say, a previous mental experience. The ordinary mental life remains completely intact. And if one wants to store up spiritual-scientific experiences, one must first take over into the ordinary consciousness, which has been preserved, that which one has experienced in the spirit, and then one can store it in one's memory in the same way as one can store experiences of the ordinary consciousness. But it is always necessary that the ordinary consciousness stands beside the newly attained consciousness and that what is undertaken for ordinary life is not undertaken with the newly attained consciousness, but with the ordinary consciousness. If, then, one wants to incorporate spiritual-scientific experiences into the ordinary life of thought, which can be preserved in memory, then one must first take them over from the other consciousness. If one wants to recognize that these spiritual experiences are true, then one cannot experience this in the other consciousness – this must be expressly emphasized – but one must judge them with the ordinary consciousness. They must be subjected to the judgment of the ordinary consciousness. Insight into the spiritual facts is gained through the developed consciousness; insight into the truth of these spiritual facts is initially gained through one's completely ordinary, healthy judgment, which remains completely intact if all exercises are completed in the proper manner.

But this is how the consciousness I have just spoken of differs from all pathological mental states. It differs from pathological states of consciousness in that the pathological states of consciousness develop out of the healthy ones – for my sake – that those that can still be considered healthy pass over into the pathological states of consciousness. The altered consciousness replaces the first. But even if you can think in succession: healthy consciousness, sick consciousness, healthy consciousness again, you cannot think in the actual conscious sense that you are normal, reasonable and crazy at the same time. Because then you would not be crazy. In the moment when you can judge your craziness with your normal mind, you are truly not crazy. This is the special fact that must be considered, that all altered consciousness, all morbid consciousness, arises out of the healthy one like a metamorphosis, and that one should never actually speak of a double ego – which has already been criticized by the excellent criminal anthropologist Benedikt – but should speak of an altered consciousness for the usual pathological phenomena.

This simultaneously characterizes the aim of spiritual-scientific exercises, the goal to which what is called spiritual research actually leads the human being. Now it is quite understandable – I say expressly: quite understandable – that anyone who does not immediately grasp the full essence of the matter at hand can easily fall prey to the prejudice: Well, yes, someone has done mischief with their soul life and has arrived at an abnormal soul life. Perhaps one could also, as one otherwise does, quite nicely, for example, in addition to the usual abnormal, morbid soul phenomena, which all basically have to be characterized by the fact that in reality not one consciousness can exist alongside the other but that one must develop out of the other, that one must replace the other. One could, in addition to these abnormal mental phenomena, simply register new ones – that is how it is done – in which one consciousness could exist alongside the other. For anyone who is not familiar with these things can, after all, basically come to no other conclusion than that the person who has come to such a different consciousness is basically subject to abnormal thinking, or also to abnormal volition or feeling in some way.

These things are quite understandable at first, although after all they do not stand in any other field than that in which someone who has reached a certain level of education in agriculture – and this is by no means meant to be disparaging! — can, from his point of view, also regard as a madman the person who, for example, spends the whole day dealing with quite clever mathematical operations, because it is human nature to regard as abnormal everything that one does not think and believe in oneself. Basically, the prejudices that are often brought against spiritual science from this side are nothing more than the instinct of human nature, just as characterized, to accept only that which one can experience inwardly.

Now, however, the fact is that there are indeed many opportunities to confuse true spiritual research with all kinds of nonsense. Spiritual research – that is, in a sense, given by the necessities of life – will initially speak to a smaller, closed circle of people, just as it ultimately happens in other fields. Of course, today those who have the task of speaking to people about spiritual research are often criticized for speaking to all kinds of small circles and the like, for speaking to people who have only just agreed to listen to the things. Yes, but I can see no objective difference between this process and the other, that at the beginning of a semester a number of students are enrolled with some lecturer, and he then also speaks to this closed circle. And unless other nonsense is going on, I cannot see why the closed circle of a lecture hall should be less called a sect, if one wants to use the term, than a number of people who hear something spiritual. But in spiritual science one is initially dealing with things that cannot be easily controlled by the processes and events of the external physical plane. If someone says that a composite body consists of these or those elements, then one can verify something like that immediately by external means. All spiritual-scientific results can also be verified, but it is necessary to first go the way of the spiritual researcher that has been described. So although these things can be verified, they cannot be verified in the ordinary state of mind in which other things that are purely taking place in the external physical world can be verified. Therefore, and I need not make a detailed transition to cite the experience I want to characterize, it happens that in this area, where verification can only be achieved by applying the appropriate means, there is in fact an enormous amount of what can be called a belief in the authority of what is said, what can be called mere empty talk. Yes, societies are easily formed for the purpose of spiritual life, from motives that need not be characterized here, which make tolerance, mutual love and mutual trust their first principle with a certain right. That is a fine principle. But experience has shown many times over that nowhere is there more arguing and disagreement than in such societies. And although such societies have often taken up the cause of venerating truth as the highest, experience shows that in no other field is truth less respected than within societies that claim to have such corresponding goals. And so it happens that within circles where supposedly spiritual science is practiced, much nonsense prevails. And then it is difficult for those who do not get involved in the matter itself, but judge things according to external symptoms and external events, to distinguish truth from nonsense. And now, in the further course of today's reflections, I would like to provide some information that can help to distinguish truth from nonsense in this field. Above all, I would like to emphasize that one should not be too critical of the prejudices that spiritual research has brought to the side just characterized today, that one can even find these prejudices understandable to a very large extent. I will now mention something very specific.

When one has entered the spiritual world in a certain way, when one has had spiritual experiences, that is, when one has come to know spiritual reality, then one arrives at what I have already characterized here several times, but which you can find precisely characterized in the books mentioned – one comes to what is called imaginative knowledge, not because it is just a matter of exercises in the imagination, of mere imagination in the ordinary sense, but because one comes into the position of having to express pictorially what one experiences. Of course, what a person initially has in terms of imagination, and also in terms of how he can put the ideas into words, how he can characterize the ideas, that refers to the physical world. If one is now transported into a completely different world and then does not characterize it differently, namely characterizes this other world as pictorial for oneself, then one forms false ideas about it. What is stated in detail about the spiritual world must always be absorbed with the awareness that everything the spiritual researcher describes flows out of fully conscious will activity, that he is not describing from some vague, indefinite , but that, in contrast to every half-remembered or visionary consciousness, he consciously, with full will, develops that which he presents as imagination, as images for the spiritual experiences. Just as he presents that which he presents in this sense, that everything is permeated by him willfully, so it must also be received in this sense.

To depict spiritual experiences, which are nevertheless really present in the life of the soul, even if they have to be depicted pictorially, it is of course necessary to take pictorial images from ordinary life, so that what is spiritually experienced is characterized by designating one thing with this color, another with that color, and so on. But there is a certain necessity — but now purely in a soul-spiritual sense, not in a physiological-organic sense — for the description of one, let us say, this color, this sound and this tactile experience, for the description of the other to use something else. And just as when speaking in a particular language one does not first explain that this word has this meaning and that word has that meaning, so too, when one describes one's spiritual experiences in concrete terms, the world of images in which one expresses oneself must be there like an inner language, like something through which one visualizes and represents the actual spiritual experience behind it. Now, if such a description of a spiritual experience occurs, and if this or that spiritual being is described in terms of red, blue and so on, which is quite correct and by which it is really represented, not just characterized, then of course the person who receives this description and is completely unfamiliar with the way it is actually meant can say: We know this! We know that from the field of psychology! We are well acquainted with those mental states in which soul experiences arise purely from the inner being as a secondary sense perception or as a hallucination or even as an illusion. It is therefore entirely justified when it is pointed out, for example, that there are people — after certain experiences have been gathered, even one-eighth of all people have this characteristic — who, for example, when they perceive a certain tone without seeing any color, add a color, but in such a way that it becomes quite objective to them. Such color phenomena, which are not evoked by an external impression but which arise from within and join a sound – I do not want to go into the various hypotheses that have been made about this – are called secondary sensory perceptions. And what people can experience in this way can go so far that, for example, when they pick up a printed matter, the individual letters appear to them in different colors according to their content, depending on whether it is an o or an a. In short, the psychiatrist can of course say: we know these things. And he can say this all the more when mental experiences occur that have the full character of sense perceptions but are formed from within as hallucinations. And if one often takes hallucinations that come to mind in a particularly vivid and plastic way, then one can say: Yes, is not the morbid soul life capable of really producing inner effects? And if one then hears what is presented from this or that side, the claim that they have developed in relation to the soul life, one finds exactly the same. The important thing is that, precisely because of the nonsense mentioned, secondary sensations or hallucinatory states very often occur in people who have a particular disposition to them, and then it is claimed that these are “higher experiences”, that they have really received something from the spiritual world. Yesterday, in connection with Faust, I already pointed out that nothing is given from the spiritual world, but these are mere transformations of the inner life of the instincts, which have merely arisen from within the human being. It does not give us more than the normal life of the soul, but rather less, because there is something that works below the level of the normal life of the soul and that only, when it is raised into consciousness, is transformed into things that look like the ordinary life of the soul. But there is a considerable difference between what is attained by true spiritual research and, if one wants to use the expression, true clairvoyance, and what is often called “clairvoyance” in ordinary life.

And this enormous difference will be noticed if you take what has been said: in all the activities of the spiritual researcher, in all the activities of the true clairvoyant, there is full volitional activity, there is no element in the realization of which you are not present, while the vision has the peculiarity that it comes about without the will being active in it. And one can even answer the question, “How does the spiritual researcher differ from the ordinary visionary, from the hallucinator?” — despite the fact that for many this will seem extremely paradoxical — by saying that they differ in that the spiritual researcher never has visions and hallucinations in the usual sense, precisely because his training in spiritual science goes far beyond the possibility of ever having hallucinations or visions in the usual sense of the word. And this is connected with the fact that what is a spiritual research experience, as I have said, must not be directly fixed in the human organization, but must always be experienced anew.

If spiritual-scientific experience were to become established in the organism in its immediacy, it could indeed lead to an illusory life, because it would then arise from the organism through itself, because it would become attached to the organism and the person would lose control over it. He can only be present at the production of impressions if he approaches each one, I might say, as a virgin, as he approaches, for example, an external impression. And only through this virginal approach to the spiritual experience each time can he know that he has an impression from the spiritual world, just as he knows through ordinary life that when he sees an external object, such as a clock, this clock is not hallucinated, but that there really is an external impression. Through what is happening between him and the clock, he can distinguish what he is now experiencing in direct activity in the external physical world from what arises in him that could, for example, force him into some hallucination or illusion. And again, only by maintaining the same spiritual experiences in the same state of virginity, by not forcing them into the physical body, but by constantly renewing them, does he know that he is not confronted with what arises from his own organization, but that he is always confronted with objective experiences that come from a spiritual world And one certainly still learns, if one is really involved in the way described in the living comprehension of the spiritual world, that inner energy, that inner strength, which one needs, in order to come, let us say, to imaginative knowledge, to recognize, curiously enough, as the same strength that dispels illusions and hallucinations. That is what matters. It is not the power by which hallucinations arise that one invokes, but precisely the power by which one dispels illusions and hallucinations and delusions, and whatever else these things may be called.

And so one could also cite something else, which in turn could be made as an objection in a very easily understandable way. When someone who is still inexperienced in these matters hears that a person who describes his spiritual experiences using terms such as 'world of color' or 'world of sound', as you do in my 'Theosophy', for example, illustrates the soul and spirit worlds in this way, he might say: Yes, if one has to come to the conclusion that one can recognize the spiritual world as a colorful world, as a resounding world, on the one hand all of this is considered a hallucinatory, visionary activity, a pathological state; on the other hand, however, we also know – he may object – that someone born blind cannot be brought to such visions, which play out in colorful images, through any process of spiritual schooling, nor can someone born deaf be brought to such auditory hallucinations. And it is very easy to refute this by saying: So we are dealing purely with the development of the person, which depends on the presence of certain organs.

An objection raised from this point of view is of no more value to the person who sees through things than the question: whether someone who has very good thoughts can express these thoughts in a language that he has not learned at the moment. He cannot, of course, express the thoughts in a language that he has not learned, quite naturally. So someone who is born blind cannot express in colors what he experiences mentally. But that does not mean that he cannot experience exactly the same things as someone who is able to express it in colors, that is, who also illustrates it to himself in colors, deliberately expressing it in this way. It is often necessary, though, to really get to know things intimately if one wants to see through the justification or non-justification of objections.

But if one does not look at things according to their inner character, according to their inner being, but according to how they appear externally, then one will very easily find that there are indeed – if I may use the trivial expression – there are some truly crazy people who belong to some movement that calls itself a spiritual research organization, and who come up with all kinds of stuff that can more or less really be put into the category that the psychiatrist is very familiar with. If, for example, someone approaches a psychiatrist and tells him that he is the reincarnation of John, the psychiatrist is fully justified in saying: We are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac. From a spiritual scientific point of view, we are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac because the truly reincarnated John would not express himself in such a way. But quite apart from that, it must be clear that when one is dealing with such phenomena, which must truly be described as pathological, one cannot characterize the essence of the matter in terms of it; for one must consider the whole way in which spiritual research has presented itself in our present time. It must be clear that a world-view is dominant today that leaves very, very many people unsatisfied for various reasons. I do not need to explain why various religious worldviews leave many, many people unsatisfied today, because that is too well known. But I need only point out that even those worldviews that are very often built on the so-called solid ground of the scientific way of thinking leave many people unsatisfied, and for two reasons. Firstly, partly because those who adopt the scientific way of thinking really do recognize that, as a rule, the answers to the big questions do not lie in the scientific results, as one can get them, but at most the clues to the questions themselves. For those who can see things clearly, scientific books usually do not lead to answers, but rather to more questions. That is one side of it. On the other hand, however, there are other reasons why building a worldview on a scientific or even on a modern basis today leaves some people unsatisfied. It must be said that building a worldview today on a scientific or historical basis requires a great deal. Above all, it requires making an effort to learn many, many facts and chains of facts. It cannot always be said that those who do not want to build a worldview on the basis of the scientific way of thinking really do so because they realize that nothing satisfactory, nothing easily satisfying, can be built on it; rather, very often it is simply out of laziness, out of an inability to familiarize themselves with the necessary facts and chains of facts. People shy away from dealing with the difficulty that today's science offers, for themselves. And so it turns out that very many people find it more convenient not to go the long way of preparation, which claims a certain scientific basis, but find it more convenient to take in what can actually be absorbed – sometimes as a mere phrase, as a nice saying – that which comes out of spiritual science in some way. One also likes it because it initially ties in with what is of direct personal interest to the individual. One likes it more, it satisfies one more than when one starts with nature and then tries to arrive at some understanding of the human being, insofar as this can be gained from natural science. In this way one has a long and arduous path to tread. Many want to avoid this. That is why people who actually have no opportunity to gain anything for their satisfaction through what the current education offers approach spiritual science, and then they do not develop in spiritual science what comes from spiritual science, but they carry into the spiritual scientific world current what they previously have in their whole organism, in their whole soul.

If someone has something in his whole affect, in his whole emotional life, which, if one describes things symptomatically from an external point of view, can be described as a tendency towards megalomania – I know very well that I am only expressing one symptom here – then it can of course very easily happen that this tendency towards megalomania is now brought into the spiritual scientific movement. And then it is quite natural that the person concerned connects what he hears about the human being, not in an objective way with the human being, but with what he himself develops through his tendency to feelings and emotions. And then it just happens that when he learns about the law of repeated earthly lives, he naturally finds it very satisfying when he can dream up some way to be, say, the reincarnation of so-and-so. But there is one who considers things rationally is quite clear about the fact that what the person in question has brought into spiritual science has led him to such an idea and that spiritual science cannot have led him to this idea. And anyone who takes into consideration what is only a very brief mention of the path of spiritual research in the last chapter of my 'Theosophy' — he does not even need to get to know it anymore — and who then still really takes it seriously with what can be gained from today's official psychiatry, from recognized psychiatry, cannot possibly come to the idea that something can be contributed to the illness of the soul life from the spiritual scientific path itself. Conversely, however, spiritual-scientific activities can be distorted and caricatured by what is brought into spiritual science by people who have the necessary aptitudes for it. Someone could enter the spiritual-scientific world-view current enter, let us say, the world of the stock exchange instead of the spiritual-scientific current of thought, and he might have such tendencies that develop into megalomania; then he would naturally live out his megalomaniacal ideas in all kinds of fantasies related to the world of the stock exchange. He might see himself as a special stock market king or something similar. If, instead of entering the world of the stock market, he enters the world of the spiritual-scientific school of thought, he will live out the same tendencies by considering himself, for example, to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist.

And so one can say: in a certain sense spiritual research itself suffers from the fact that many people who have failed in their quest for a worldview because of what is otherwise offered today for the quest for a worldview come into some spiritual research current and then clothe in all kinds of spiritual scientific ideas that which they would otherwise have lived out in a completely different way. It is easy to observe that especially in circles composed of people who, because of a failed world-view aspiration, profess a spiritual-research direction, many of them approach spiritual research precisely at the moment when they become disillusioned with what the external world can offer them. Now just think about what is actually happening here. Before this, the person lived with his predispositions, which naturally had to lead to some abnormality of the soul life at some point. This abnormality of the soul life would certainly have occurred. But at the moment when it is still hidden, when he no longer really knows his way around the outside world, he turns to some kind of spiritual research direction. The consequence of this is that he cannot be saved in the way I will shortly indicate, but that he carries what is stirring within him into the spiritual research direction. And because of all these facts it may just happen that because such a spiritual research direction is otherwise looked upon with envy, it is blamed for having caused mental illness in such people. Of course, on the one hand, every sane psychiatrist and every sane spiritual researcher will be quite clear about the true process. Now, in order to understand more in this field, it will be good to consider once more how the two types of consciousness, of which has been spoken, do not really have to behave in such a way that one develops from the other, that one replaces the other, but that they exist side by side, that full consciousness is present for two soul lives, but that they do not fall apart. These two souls should not be understood as more than what is already characterized in the concrete. This, then, is what must be borne in mind.

Now the question may be raised: Does this spiritual research as such have any positive significance for ordinary life, for the external life in the physical world? One might think that it has no significance, because it has just been said that what is experienced in the spiritual world cannot flow directly into ordinary consciousness. But the following can happen, for example. It can happen that a person in the spiritual world perceives this or that moral impulse, a moral motive that can only be recognized from the spiritual world. Our moral view from the spiritual world can certainly be enriched. Likewise, our natural view from the spiritual world can be enriched. Now, let us consider the case that one receives a moral impulse from the spiritual world through a spiritual experience, that is, an impulse to do this or that in ordinary physical life. Then, according to what has been discussed, this moral impulse, which is first experienced in the spiritual world, must be taken over into the ordinary physical consciousness and justified there, yes, placed in the world in the same way as moral impulses are otherwise placed in the world. In this way all possibility will be removed that a person might appear in the world and say: I must now do this or that, because this is my mission – a phrase that one hears very, very often precisely in the areas that I could only characterize by saying: 'Nonsense is being done with it'. The true spiritual researcher will never receive motivation from the spiritual world in this way. What he receives from the spiritual world enters his ordinary consciousness, and he now develops those ideas that are adapted to the external physical world, and with his will impulse he enters into this physical world, just as if one received an impulse to recognize some scientific connection. One will not present this scientific connection from the outset as an illumination, but will take it over into ordinary consciousness, test it against common sense and against all that one has so far known in the field of natural science, and will now begin, having taken it over, to place it in the system of natural scientific knowledge that one has developed. If one bears this in mind, it will never be possible to come into conflict or disharmony with the outer physical life. But someone who, on the basis of impulses that are compulsively inherent in him, as compulsive drives, ascribes this mission to himself can come into such a conflict, into such a disharmony, which then, of course, because it comes only from within him, is not at all adapted to the outer world, will fit into the outer world as badly as possible. He will tend to be a destructive individual rather than one who could enrich social life through what can be experienced in the spiritual world. The path that leads to spiritual research thoroughly familiarizes one with all these things. And it must be said that everything that is otherwise added to the described training group of thinking and will is essentially there to ensure that, on the one hand, the human being does not bring anything unhealthy into his spiritual life from the ordinary physical life, that he is truly free with his spiritual and soul life from his bodily life, and on the other hand, that he does not caricature what can be experienced in the spiritual realm by taking it, not into healthy reason and normal affect life, but into the pathological realm of affect life. But if what actually underlies experience in the spiritual world is developed in a healthy way of this kind, then one not only has something healthy in the spirit-research way, but one has something that is healthy-inducing, one really has something that also helps people in terms of their health. But it must proceed as I have described or at least outlined it today. Confusions, which then lead to the most unfortunate prejudices, will always occur.

In this way spiritual research comes to a deeper understanding of the human soul, to a vision of more in the human soul than can be seen in this human soul with the ordinary soul mood. And if one does not misuse the word, one can call such a view of what lives in the soul beyond the ordinary soul life a mystical view of one's own soul. One can call such a life a life in mysticism. Again, it is quite understandable when someone who is a layman in these matters says: Yes, we know mysticism quite well; we have come to know it quite well, only we call it mystical madness. For there is indeed a pathological condition that can be strictly defined and is called mystical madness. It leads from a purely pathological basis to a kind of soul-vision that is purely organic and physiological, for example to an inner brooding in which one then comes to find all kinds of religious visions of a visionary kind within oneself. In short, there is what is called mystical madness in psychiatry.

Someone who is grounded in spiritual research will not want to criticize the psychologist, although there are, of course, enough people who believe that they also understand spiritual science. He will not say: When you speak of mystic madness, you are dealing with a person who is sacred to God and to whom more is revealed than to others. No, the healthy spiritual researcher also describes the mystic madman as a mystic madman, just like the psychiatrist himself, in exactly the same sense and also with the same caution, which I do not need to go into today. In regard to everything that has natural, healthy justification, spiritual science stands completely on the ground of natural science, denying nothing that is accepted as justified by natural science, not even in the matters that have just been discussed. And so the spiritual researcher, without lapsing into dilettantism, can, if he is able to judge things, quite properly and positively agree with the psychiatrist on all pathological phenomena that are externally designated as symptoms of madness, be it as mystical madness, religious madness or the like. He will never deny that these things exist and occur here and there in a specific case.

But if true spiritual research is really done with inner energy, then it does indeed happen that certain types of abnormal mental life are healed and balanced out through what the person concerned experiences mentally, in the way it has been described today. If the person who does such exercises, as indicated today and as described in more detail in the books mentioned, comes to true mysticism, to that which can objectively occur in the human soul as spiritual-soul experience, then he may even have had a tendency, a disposition, to mystical madness before: this will disappear, it will be corrected! All false mysticism in the sense indicated is dispelled by true mysticism. And it can go much further. A tendency towards megalomania, or other things, can be overcome by finding one's way into spiritual-scientific life in this way. Not to mention the fact that the more and more this living in the spiritual-soul life is intensified, the energies that are developed there can also assert themselves further, into the life of the body. But I do not want to go into this chapter today, which can only be discussed in detail and in a special way. Thus, in this limited field, which has been discussed today, there is not only something healing in delving into spiritual research – and this could actually be extended in a certain way to all phenomena of the morbid soul life – but there is also something healing about it. And it must be understood in this sense. One must always be clear about the fact that what appears as spiritual research can easily be confused with the abnormal soul life because it deviates from the experiences of ordinary soul life, and that the abnormal soul life can also be confused by its carrier himself, of course, with that which is healthy soul life. And there one experiences the strangest things even with the bearers of abnormal mental life, when they turn to spiritual research. There is now so much available in the literature for the possibility of progressing to a certain degree on the spiritual research path that anyone, and anyone can use it safely, provided they follow the instructions. Now let us suppose that someone wants to make progress. At first he is driven by an inner impulse, a urge to advance. Often it is curiosity, a desire for sensationalism, to look into the spiritual world. In the course of his striving, however, he very often fails to achieve what he initially imagines. The reasons why this or that is not achieved, the reasons why this or that is achieved wrongly, are sufficiently explained in the books mentioned. However, because he does not really want to enter into the spiritual-scientific world-view current, the person concerned is unwilling to say that he is not making progress or that he is coming to a caricature of spiritual-scientific thought, and does not admit that he has neglected this or that, but is often inclined to say: the prescriptions are to blame; I have come to this or that which seems abnormal to me, the prescriptions are to blame or the person who gave the prescriptions. And especially when there is some kind of morbid disposition, a belief is very easily formed that can be characterized by a kind of persecution mania precisely towards the person who has given the instructions in any way, in order to make the soul's journey into the spiritual world through exercises. This is a very, very common phenomenon, one that occurs again and again and can be exploited, because of course it is very easy to refer to the testimony of such people. I do not wish to refer to individual cases, but only to show how, through the introduction of a morbid mental life into the spiritual-scientific world-view, the spiritual-scientific world-view as such can indeed be misunderstood. Therefore, anyone who wishes to become acquainted with this spiritual-scientific world-view would do well to become acquainted with it where it can be recognized in its essential nature.

And there it will be found that what I have said in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is true, all that I have described today and otherwise: that man comes to certain harrowing experiences that can throw him off balance in a certain way, but not as an objective fact, as something that emerges from within. For all these reasons it may happen that in various writings dealing with such things - I have expressed this in the book mentioned - there is much talk of the dangers connected with the ascent into the higher worlds. The descriptions of such dangers are indeed apt to make fearful minds look upon this higher life only with shuddering. Yet it must be said that this danger exists only when the necessary precautions are disregarded. If, on the other hand, every precaution is taken that true schooling of the spirit provides, then the ascent will take place in such a way that the power of the manifestations will surpass in magnitude what the boldest imagination can conceive. And when it is said that man learns to recognize impending dangers at every turn, so to speak, he must face these dangers boldly and courageously. It is possible for him to make use of such forces and paths that are withdrawn from sensory perception. And he is threatened by temptations to take hold of precisely these forces in the service of a selfish, unhealthy interest or to use these forces in the wrong way due to a lack of clear thinking about the conditions of the sensory world. But if all the rules are really observed in the appropriate way, there can be no question of entering into an unhealthy soul life. And if they are not observed in the appropriate way, then one should not be surprised if what is to be achieved is not achieved. After all, this is what spiritual science has in common with other things in life. If someone is supposed to learn something at school and instead of going to school always goes behind the school, he will not achieve what is to be achieved at school either. Although this is a very trivial comparison, it is still an apt comparison.

There could be much more said about the various errors and prejudices that can be held against spiritual science. But anyone who is deeply immersed in this spiritual science itself knows that much of it is different from what one is accustomed to in ordinary education and worldviews today. Much is different. For example, a critic of my book 'Theosophy' recently said: Well, various things are claimed there, but they should first be examined objectively. If it is claimed that one can see this or that in the spiritual world, then, according to this critic, the objective test would be to sit five or six spiritual researchers down together on both sides and have them give their spiritual research experiences about one and the same thing. If they agree, then from this critic's point of view it is said to be self-evidently correct. The man criticized the book “Theosophy”. But if he had really read it – and one is almost tempted to believe that he is not at all able to understand a book written in this way – then he would have had to recognize that this path is out of the question; but that the only correct examination is possible if he tries to set out on the path of spiritual research himself. Everyone can investigate and will find that everything is confirmed by his own research. Why all this is possible is something I have recently discussed in a note on the sixth edition of my 'Theosophy'. But one must simply engage with the subject itself. Today one must already be able, I would say, to rise to the point of view that spiritual science is something that is, in a true, genuine sense, a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that the dawn of modern times has brought; but precisely because it, like natural science, wants to penetrate into the processes of the senses, into the spiritual world, and explore its secrets, it must also proceed differently than the natural scientific way of thinking, which is directed only at the external. And when one has understood the matter in this way, one will find that, basically, the way in which spiritual science is received does not differ so much, after all, in terms of understanding and also in terms of ill will, from the way in which other spiritual movements were received that were unusual for conventional views. Certainly, anyone who wants to attain higher spiritual experiences has a long, long way to go before they can get there. But today we live in a time of human development when everyone can develop to a certain extent within themselves, which can at least lead them to the conviction, to the own-achieved conviction, of what the spiritual path is. To understand that the results of spiritual science are true, one need only have common sense; this has been emphasized many times here. For the one who can research them can only recognize and confirm their truth through the common sense that he must have in addition. And when it comes to natural science, it is easier to say that a spiritual science initially leads one to questions that nature poses, that it enriches one's entire knowledge of nature, than that it simply deals with the so-called “meaning of life” in a philistine, pedantic way. It does find the meaning of life, but in a different way than one often imagines.

So, what is necessary for understanding spiritual research does not necessarily mean that one has to go a long way oneself, and also what one needs in the present, so to speak, for the security of one's soul – for that security that one can gain when one knows that this soul goes through births and deaths, that does not belong to temporality but to eternity - one does not even need to approach spiritual research itself; rather, when the spiritual researcher describes what he has researched and presents this description appropriately, then one already has in it what is needed. I have often mentioned this here, but it cannot be repeated often enough: just as little as one needs to feel the need to have the fact itself in front of one, but finds satisfaction in the picture, so it is the case that for certain soul needs one really has enough in the description that the one who is a spiritual researcher gives. Indeed, he can have what he wants for his soul's needs not only through his spiritual research, but also by drawing it from the spiritual worlds and carrying it down into the world in which he himself lives, by describing it for himself. That it is also necessary today to indicate those exercises by means of which one can take certain steps in spiritual research does not depend on the fact that only he can have the fruits of spiritual research who enters into the spiritual world itself, but on something quite different. It is connected with the fact that present-day humanity has indeed reached a point in its development where it no longer wants to accept things merely on authority, where it really wants to develop to at least that degree, that it can say: I can also judge to a certain extent what the spiritual researcher says. Therefore the development of spiritual research will take the course that a larger number of people will be found who take the first steps, which already lead very far, in the field of spiritual research, in order to be able to accept - without relying on authority and not only on the mere sense of truth, which is also sufficient for the needs of the soul - that which is brought from the spiritual worlds through spiritual research. For the needs of the soul, self-research would not be necessary. But for the needs of the time, self-research will develop more and more. For the needs of the soul, it is just as sufficient to hear what the spiritual researcher says as it is for the ordinary person not to carry out chemical experiments in a laboratory, but to accept the results of chemistry for ordinary life. Let each one now beat his breast and say to himself how much of his scientific knowledge he has accepted on authority. Undoubtedly, if we look at the matter in terms of truth, belief in authority has never been as great as it is today, although to many people this seems a completely paradoxical statement.

When all these things are taken into consideration, it must be said that spiritual science must indeed be something that wants to place itself in the spiritual development of humanity, from the present into the future, not because it ascribes this mission to itself only from spiritual worlds, but because one can recognize, according to what lives in humanity today as a need, as a possibility for development, that spiritual science is just as necessary for further development as Copernicanism was in the dawn of modern times, as Galilean science was, as Keplerian science was. He who sees through these things will not be able to despair, nor will he be able to become fainthearted in the face of all the misunderstandings that are brought against spiritual research. He will not become fainthearted, but rather, when he considers the great examples of history, he will see how, again and again, everything that has to be integrated as something new into the spiritual development of humanity is met with prejudice. Just as Copernicanism had to face prejudices, and as in the ecclesiastical field it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that it was allowed to be believed, so too must spiritual science, in principle, face prejudices.

But anyone who has followed the course of truth through human historical development for a little while knows that truth is something that is intimately related to the human soul. One can misunderstand the truth, but even if it were so misunderstood in a time, in an age, that it would have to disappear for the time being, it would rise again! For it has forces by which it forces its way through the narrowest crevices of the rocks of prejudice in the course of human development. One can hate the truth. But anyone who hates the truth will ultimately only be able to disadvantage himself. You can push the truth back in any age, but the truth cannot be completely suppressed, for the reason that it is, figuratively speaking, the sister of the human soul. The human soul and the truth are sisters. And just as discord can sometimes break out between siblings, but agreement will always come again when they remember their common origin in the right way, so too, when discord and hatred and misunderstanding breaks out between the human soul and the truth, there will always come times when it will be recognized from both sides, when it will be confirmed from both sides, that truth and the human soul belong together and have one origin in the eternal spirit of the world. Therefore, anyone who sees through such things, as I have tried to express figuratively, will be able to say with justification, as expressed in a proverb with which I will conclude today's reflections, in one of those proverbs that are said in certain regions of Germany: “A proverb - a truth”. Yes, it is a proverb and a truth: you can squeeze the truth, but you cannot crush it!

In my last lecture I tried to show how it is due to misunderstandings if there is so little understanding between those who direct their research and attention to the soul and its processes and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism, which proceed — well, as one will call it — as accompanying phenomena or also, as materialism maintains, as necessary causes for the psychic events. And I tried to show what the reasons for such misunderstandings are. Today I would like to draw attention to the fact that wherever real, true knowledge is sought, such misunderstandings, and also misunderstandings in a different direction, must necessarily arise if one does not take into account in the process of knowledge itself, which, in the course of more intimate, especially longer research, imposes itself more and more on the spiritual researcher as a direct experience, as an inner experience. It is something that at first seems very strange when it is expressed: In the field of world-views, that is to say in the field of knowledge of the spiritual-real or in general the knowledge of the sources of existence, if one, I might say, is too entangled in certain conceptions, in certain concepts, then one must of necessity enter upon such a view of the human soul that can absolutely be refuted, and just as well be proved.

Therefore, the spiritual researcher will increasingly deviate from what is otherwise customary in matters of world view, namely, to present this or that in support of one or the other view, which would be similar to what is called proof or even refutation in ordinary life. For in this field, as I said, everything can be proved with certain reasons, everything can be refuted with certain reasons. Materialism can be rigorously proven in its entirety, and it can be rigorously proven when it engages in individual questions of life or existence. And one will not be able to simply knock out of the field that which a materialist can cite in support of his views, if one simply wants to refute his view from opposite points of view. It is the same for someone who represents a spiritual existence. Therefore, anyone who really wants to research spiritual matters must not only know the arguments in favor of a particular worldview, but must also know all the arguments against it. For the remarkable result emerges that the actual truth only emerges when one allows what speaks for a matter and what speaks against a matter to take effect on the soul. And anyone who allows his mind to be fixed, I might say, on any web of concepts or images of a one-sided world view will always close his mind to the fact that the opposite can also assert itself in the soul, that the opposite must even appear right to a certain degree. And so he will be in a situation, like someone who wanted to claim that human life could only be sustained by inhalation. Inhalation presupposes exhalation; the two belong together. But this is always the case with our concepts and ideas that relate to questions of world view. We can put forward a concept that affirms something, we can put forward a concept that denies it; the one demands the other, like inhalation demands exhalation, and vice versa. And just as real life can only appear, can only reveal itself through exhalation and inhalation, when both are present, so can the spiritual only come to life in the soul when one is able to respond in an equally positive way to both the pros and cons of a matter. The affirmative concept, the affirmative idea, is within the living whole of the soul, so to speak, like an exhalation; the negative concept, like an inhalation; and it is only in their living interaction that that which relates to spiritual reality is revealed. Therefore, it is not at all appropriate for spiritual science to apply the usual methods that one is so accustomed to in everyday literature, where this or that is proved or refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that what is presented in a positive way can always have a certain justification when it relates to questions of world view, but so can the opposite phenomenon. But when one advances in matters of world-conception to that direct life which lives in positive and negative concepts, just as physical life lives in inhalation and exhalation, then one comes to concepts which really take in the spirit directly, to concepts which are equal to reality. One must then, however, often express oneself differently than one expresses oneself according to the habits of thinking in ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises out of the living, active inner experiencing of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not outwardly perceived in the way of material existence.

Now you know that one of the most important questions of our world view, and one that was also treated in the first lectures I gave here this winter, is the question of substance, of matter. And I would like to touch on this question today from the point of view I have just hinted at, as an introduction.

We cannot come to terms with the question of substance or matter if we keep trying to form ideas or concepts of what matter actually is; if we want to understand, in other words, what matter is. Anyone who has really wrestled with such questions, which are remote for many people, knows what such questions are all about. For if he has wrestled with it for a time, without yielding to any prejudice, then he comes to a completely different point of view regarding such a question. He comes to a point of view that makes him consider more important the way one behaves in one's soul when forming such a concept as that of matter. This wrestling of the soul itself is raised into consciousness. And then one arrives at a view precisely on these riddle-questions, which I could express in the following way.

He who wants to understand matter, substance, in the way it is usually understood, is like a person who says: I now want to get an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He lights a light and regards this as the right method to get the impression of the dark room. It is, in fact, the most absurd thing one could do. And it is equally absurd — but one must become aware of this through a marked struggle — to believe that one will ever be able to cognize matter by setting the spirit in motion to illuminate matter with the spirit, as it were. Only where the spirit can be silent in our body itself, in the sensation of the senses, where the life of representation ends, only there does an external process penetrate into our inner being. There we can - by letting the spirit be silent and experiencing this silence of the spirit - have matter, substance, truly represented in our soul, so to speak.

One does not arrive at such concepts through ordinary logic; or if one does arrive at them through ordinary logic, then they turn out, I might say, to be much too thin to evoke real conviction. Only when one wrestles in the indicated way in one's soul with certain concepts, then they lead one to such a result as I have indicated.

Now the opposite is also the case. Let us assume that someone wants to grasp the spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely external material form of the human body, he is like someone who, in order to grasp the light, extinguishes it. For the secret of the matter is that the external sensual nature itself is the refutation of the spirit, the extinguishing of the spirit. It reproduces the spirit just as illuminated objects reflect light. But nowhere can we, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity, ever find it from any material processes. For that is precisely the essence of material processes: that the spirit has transformed itself into them, that the spirit has been transformed into them. And if we then try to recognize the spirit from them, then we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to say this by way of introduction so that more and more clarity can come about what the cognitive attitude of the spiritual researcher actually is, and how the spiritual researcher needs a certain breadth and mobility of the life of ideas in order to penetrate the things that are to be penetrated. With such concepts it is then possible to illuminate the important questions, which I also touched on last time here, and which I will only briefly mention in order to move on to our considerations today.

I said: As things have developed in the newer formation of the spirit, a one-sided view of the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical has increasingly come about, which is expressed by the fact that today the soul-spiritual is actually only sought within that part of the human body that lies in the nervous system or in the brain. In a sense, the soul-spiritual is assigned to the brain and nervous system alone, and one regards the rest of the organism more or less as an adjunct to the brain and nervous system when speaking of the soul-spiritual. Now I have tried to explain the results of spiritual research in this field by pointing out that one can only arrive at a true understanding of the relationship between the human soul and the human body if one places the whole human soul in relation to the whole physical body. But then it becomes clear that there is a deeper background to the structure of the human soul as a whole, into the actual life of perception, into the life of feeling and into the life of will. For only the actual life of perception of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way that modern physiological psychology assumes. On the other hand, the life of feeling — and here I must make it clear that I do not speak of it as it is presented to us, but as it arises — is related to the breathing organism of the human being, to everything that is breathing and is connected with breathing, in the same way as the life of presentation is related to the nervous system. So we must allot to the breathing organism the life of feeling of the soul. Then further: that which we call the life of will is in an equal relationship to that which we must call metabolism in the body; naturally right down into its finest ramifications. And by taking into account the fact that the individual systems in the organism are intertwined — metabolism naturally also takes place in the nerves —, I would like to say that at these outermost ends things interpenetrate. But a true understanding is only possible if we look at things in this way, if we know that the impulses of will can be attributed to metabolic processes in the same way as imaginative experiences can be attributed to processes in the human nervous system or in the brain.

Of course, such things can only be hinted at at first. And for the very reason that they can only be hinted at, objections are possible over and over again. But I do know one thing for certain: if we approach the subject with the whole range of anatomical and physiological research, that is, if we consider everything that anatomical and physiological research is, then there will be complete harmony between the spiritual scientific assertions I have made and the natural scientific assertions. On a superficial examination — let me just put forward the objection as a particularly characteristic one — objections can, of course, be raised against such a comprehensive truth. Someone might say: Let us first agree that certain feelings are connected with the respiratory organism; for the fact that this can be shown very plausibly for certain feelings cannot actually be doubted by anyone. But someone might say: Yes, but what about the fact that we perceive melodies, for example, that melodies arise in our consciousness? The feeling of aesthetic pleasure is connected with melodies. Can we speak here of some kind of relationship between the respiratory organism and that which quite obviously arises in the head and which, according to physiological findings, is so clearly connected with the nervous organism? As soon as we look at the matter properly, the correctness of my assertion immediately becomes completely clear. Namely, one must then take into consideration that with every exhalation an important process in the brain occurs in parallel: that the brain would rise during exhalation if it were not held down by the skullcap – breathing propagates into the brain – and vice versa; during inhalation the brain sinks. And since it cannot rise and fall because the skullcap is there, what is known to physiology occurs: the change in the blood flow occurs, what is known to physiology as brain breathing takes place, that is, certain processes that occur in parallel with the breathing process in the nerve environment. And in this encounter of the breathing process with what lives in us as sounds through our ear, what happens is that feeling is also connected to the respiratory organism in this area in the same way as the mere life of thinking is connected to the nervous organism.

I will only hint at this because it is something particularly remote and therefore provides a close objection. If one could agree with someone on all the details of the physiological results, no such details would contradict what was presented here last time and what has been presented again today.

Now it is my task to continue our discussion in a similar way to the last lecture. And for that I must go into a little more detail about the way in which the human being develops sensory perception in order to show what the actual relationship is between the sensory perception that leads to representations and the life of feeling and will, and indeed the life of the human being as soul, as body and as spirit.

Through our sensory life, we come into contact with our sensory environment. Within this sensory environment, natural science distinguishes certain substances, or, to be more precise, forms of substance, for it is these that are important here. If I wanted to speak in terms of physics, I would have to say aggregate states: solid, liquid, gaseous. But now, as you all know, physical and scientific research adds something else to these material forms. When science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied with just accepting the material forms that I have just mentioned. Instead, it reaches for what appears to it to be more subtle than these types of matter; it reaches for what is usually called ether. The concept of ether is, of course, an extraordinarily difficult one, and it can be said that the various thoughts that have been formed about what should be said about ether are conceivably diverse and manifold. Naturally, all these details cannot be discussed here. It should only be noted that natural science feels compelled to establish the concept of ether, that is, to think of the world not only as filled with the denser substances that can be perceived directly by the senses, but as filled with ether. The characteristic feature is that natural science cannot use its methods to determine what ether actually is. This is because natural science always needs material foundations for its actual work. But the ether itself always eludes material foundations, so to speak. It appears in connection with material processes, it causes material processes; but it cannot be grasped, so to speak, by the means that are tied to the material foundations. Therefore, a peculiar concept of ether has emerged, especially in recent times, which is actually extraordinarily interesting. The concept of ether that can be found among physicists today tends to say: ether must be that which, whatever else it may be, in any case has none of the properties that ordinary matter has. Thus, natural science points beyond its own material foundations by saying of the ether that it has what it cannot find with its methods. Natural science comes precisely to the assumption of an ether, but not to filling this ether concept with any content with its methods.

Now, spiritual research yields the following. Natural science starts from the material basis, spiritual research starts from the basis of soul and spirit. The spiritual researcher, if he does not arbitrarily stop at a certain boundary, is driven to the concept of ether in the same way as the natural scientist, only from the other side. The spiritual researcher attempts to include in his knowledge that which is active and effective within the soul. If he were to stop at what he can experience inwardly in ordinary soul life, then in this field he would not even go as far as the natural scientist who accepts the concept of ether. For the natural scientist at least formulates the concept of ether and accepts it. The student of the soul who does not arrive at a concept of ether on his own initiative is like a natural scientist who says: What do I care about what else is alive there! I assume the three basic forms: solid, liquid, gaseous bodies; I do not concern myself with what is supposed to be even thinner. This is indeed how the science of the soul usually proceeds.

But not everyone who has worked in the field of soul research does it this way; and particularly within that extraordinarily significant scientific development, which is based on German idealism that became established in the first third of the nineteenth century, — not in this idealism itself, but in what then developed out of it —, we find attempts to approach the ether concept from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as natural science ascends from the material side to the ether. And if you really want to have the ether concept, you have to approach it from two sides. Otherwise you will not be able to come to terms with it. Now, the interesting thing is that the great German philosophical idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, despite their insistent thinking and conceptualizing, which I have often characterized here, still did not have the ether concept. They could not, so to speak, strengthen their inner soul life, could not so energize it that the ether concept would have presented itself to them. On the other hand, in those who allowed themselves to be fertilized by this idealism, who, so to speak, allowed the thoughts that were generated at that time to continue to work in their souls, although they were not as great geniuses as their idealist predecessors, this ether concept arose out of this soul research. We find this concept of ether first in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also a disciple of his father, in that he allowed what Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had done in their souls to continue to work within him. But by condensing it, as it were, to greater inner effectiveness, he came to say to himself: When one looks at the soul-spiritual life, when one, I might say, measures it on all sides, then one comes to say to oneself: This soul-spiritual life must run down into the ether, just as solid, liquid, and gaseous matter runs up into the ether. The lowest part of the soul must, as it were, open into the ether in the same way that the highest part of the material opens into the ether at the top. And Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed certain characteristic ideas about this, through which he really did come from the spiritual-soul to the boundary of the ether. We read in his “Anthropology” 1860 - you will find the passage quoted in my last book “Vom Menschenrätsel” -:

“In the material elements....the truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body cannot be found, which proves effective throughout our entire life.” “So we are pointed to a second, essentially different cause in the body.” “In that it contains that which is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible body, but one that is present in all visible materiality. The other, the outer appearance of the same, formed from incessant metabolism, may henceforth be called 'body', which is truly not enduring and not one, but the mere effect or afterimage of that inner corporeality, which throws it into the changing material world, just as, for example, the magnetic force prepares a seemingly dense body from the parts of iron filings, but which atomizes in all directions when the binding force is withdrawn.

Now, for I. H. Fichte, an invisible body lived in the ordinary body, which consists of external matter, and we could also call this invisible body the etheric body; an etheric body that brings the individual particles of matter of this visible body into their forms, shapes them, and develops them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear that this etheric body, to which he descends from the soul, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that for him it is enough to have insight into the existence of such an etheric body to get beyond the riddle of death. For I. H. Fichte says in his “Anthropology”:

I have shown with I. H. Fichte how he advances to such an invisible body of the soul. It is interesting that in many places in the heyday of German idealistic intellectual life, the same thing emerged. Some time ago I pointed out a solitary thinker who was a school director in Bromberg and who dealt with the question of immortality: Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the 1860s. He initially approached the question of immortality like the others, by trying to get behind this question of immortality through ideas and concepts. But for him, more emerged than for those who merely live in concepts. And so the editor of that treatise on immortality written by J. H. Deinhardt was able to cite a passage from a letter that the author wrote to him in which Deinhardt says that although he had not yet communicate the matter in a book, but that his inner research had clearly shown him that during his life between birth and death, man works on the development of an invisible body, which is released into the spiritual world at death.

And so many other phenomena of German intellectual life could be cited in favor of such a direction of research and contemplation. They would all prove that in this direction of research there was a desire not to stop at what mere philosophizing speculation, mere living in concepts can yield, but to strengthen the inner soul life in such a way that it reaches the density that reaches the ether.

Of course, the real mystery of the ether will not yet be solved from within by following the paths these researchers have taken, but it can be said, so to speak, that these researchers are on the path to spiritual science. For this mystery of the ether will be solved as the human soul undergoes those inner processes through practice, which I have often characterized here and which are described in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Man does, however, gradually attain to really reaching the ether from within by going through these inner soul processes. Then the ether will be directly there for him. But only then is he capable of grasping what a sense perception actually is, what is actually present in sensory perception.

In order to present this today, I must, so to speak, approach the question from a different angle. Let us approach what actually takes place in metabolic processes for humans. Roughly speaking, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as taking place in such a way that they essentially have to do with the liquid element of substance. This will be easy to see if one is even slightly familiar with the most viable scientific ideas in this field. What is a metabolic process lives, so to speak, in the liquid element. What breathing is, lives in the airy element; in breathing we have an interaction between inner and outer air processes, just as in metabolism we have an interaction between material processes that have taken place outside our body and those that take place inside our body. What happens when we perceive with our senses and follow it with our imagination? What does that actually correspond to? In the same way that fluid processes correspond to metabolism and airy processes to breathing, what corresponds to perception? Perceptual processes correspond to etheric processes. Just as we live, as it were, with metabolism in the liquid, we live with breathing in the air, we live with perception in the ether. And inner etheric processes, inner etheric processes that take place in the invisible body, of which has just been spoken, touch with external etheric processes in sensory perception. If one objects: Yes, but certain sensory perceptions are obvious metabolic processes! — it is particularly striking for those sensory perceptions that correspond to the so-called lower senses, smell, taste — a closer look would show that what is material belongs to the metabolism itself, and that in every such process, even in tasting for example, an etheric process takes place through which we enter into relationship with the outer ether, just as we enter into relationship with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without an understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of the sensations is not possible. |

And what actually happens? Well, what happens there can basically only be understood when one has brought the inner soul process so far that the inner etheric-physical has become a reality. This will be the case when what I have recently called imaginative visualization in my lectures here has been achieved. When the images have been strengthened by the exercises that you can find in the book mentioned above, so that they are no longer abstract images, which we otherwise have, but are images full of life, then they can be called imaginations. When these images have become so full of life that they are imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas when they are abstract images, they only live in the soul. They spread into the etheric. And then, when one has so far brought it in one's inner experimentation that one experiences the ether as a living reality within oneself, then one can experience what happens in the sense perception. The sensation consists in this – I can only present this today as a result – that, as the external environment sends the etheric from the material into our sense organs, it creates those gulfs of which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that what is outside also becomes internal within our sense realm; for example, we have a sound, so to speak, between the sense life and the external world. Then, as a result of the outer ether penetrating our sense organs, this outer ether is killed. And as the outer ether enters our sense organs in a deadened state, it is revived by the inner ether of the etheric body counteracting it. This is the essence of sensory perception. Just as in the breathing process, death and life come into being when we inhale oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, so there is an interaction between the quasi-dead ether and the living ether in the sense of feeling.

This is an extraordinarily important fact for spiritual science. For that which cannot be found through philosophical speculation, on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has so often failed, can only be found through spiritual science. Sensory perception can thus be recognized as a fine interaction between external and internal ether; as the animation of the ether killed in the sensory organ from the inner etheric body. So that what the senses kill in us from the environment is inwardly revived by the etheric body, and we thereby come to what is precisely perception of the external world.

This is extraordinarily important, for it shows how, even when he is giving himself up to sense perception, man lives not only in the physical organism but also in the ethereal supersensible, and how the whole life of the senses is a

life and weaving in the invisible etheric. This is what the deeper researchers have always suspected in the characterized time, but it will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I will mention the almost completely forgotten J.P.V. Troxler. I have already mentioned him in earlier lectures here in earlier years. In his Lectures on Philosophy, he said:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that has an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner human being... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, of an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way... ."

These researchers were also aware that the moment one ascends from mere material observation to the observation of this supersensible organism within us, one has to pass from ordinary anthropology to a kind of knowledge that comes to its results by way of inner observation. It is therefore interesting that both I. H. Fichte and Troxler are clear about the fact that anthropology must be elevated to something else if it is to grasp the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his 'Anthropology':

"Sensual consciousness... with the entire, also human, life of the senses, has no other significance than to be the site in which the supersensible life of the spirit is realized, in that through free conscious deed it introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

We see from this current of German intellectual life, which, I would say, drives idealism from its abstractness to reality, the inkling of an anthroposophy. And Troxler says that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in conjunction with a super-sensible spirit, and that one can thus grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to deal with an ordinary anthropology, but with something higher:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... . in every anthroposophy.. . must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes to it as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

With Anthroposophy, something is not presented that emerges, as it were, out of arbitrariness, but something that inevitably leads to that spiritual life, which once it is engaged in, experiences concepts and ideas not only as concepts and ideas, but condenses them to such an extent - and I would like to use the expression again - that they lead into reality, that they become saturated with reality.

But, and this is the defect of this research, if one merely rises from the physical to the etheric body, one still does not get along; but one only comes to a certain limit, which must be exceeded, however, because beyond the etheric only the soul-spiritual lies. And the essential thing is that this soul-spiritual can only enter into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. Thus, we have to look for the actual soul of the human being in that which now works completely super-etherically in the etheric, so that the etheric in turn shapes the physical as it is itself shaped, permeated, and lived through by the soul.

Let us now try to grasp the human being at the other pole, the will pole: We have said that the life of the will is connected with the metabolism. Inasmuch as the impulse of the will expresses itself in the metabolism, it lives, not merely in the external physical metabolism, but, since the whole human being is within the boundaries of his being, the etheric also lives in what develops as metabolism when a will impulse proceeds. Spiritual science shows that the opposite of sensory perception is present in the will impulse. While in sensory perception the outer ether is, as it were, animated by the inner ether, so that the inner ether pours into the dead ether, in the case of the will impulse, when it arises from the soul spiritual, then through metabolism and everything connected with it, the etheric body is loosened and driven out of the physical body in those areas where the metabolism takes place. So here we have the opposite: the etheric body, as it were, withdraws from physical processes. And therein lies the essence of acts of will, in that the etheric body withdraws from the physical body.

Now those revered listeners who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative knowledge, I have distinguished between inspired knowledge and the actual intuitive knowledge. And just as imaginative knowledge is the result of such a strengthening of the soul life that one comes to the etheric life in the way indicated earlier, so intuitive knowledge is given by the fact that one learns, so to speak, in one's soul life to participate through powerful impulses of will, even to evoke what one can call withdrawal of the etheric body from physical processes. Thus in this area the soul-spiritual extends into the physical-bodily. When a volitional impulse originally emanates from the soul-spiritual, it finds the etheric, and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn from some metabolic area of the physical body. And from this working of the soul-spiritual through the etheric upon the bodily, there arises what may be called the transmission of a volitional impulse to some bodily movement, to some bodily activity. But it is only when we consider the human being as a whole in this way that we arrive at his actual immortal part. For as soon as we learn to recognize how the spiritual-soul element weaves in the ether, it also becomes clear to us that this weaving of the spiritual-soul element in the ether is independent of those processes of the physical body that are included in birth, conception and death. And in this way it is possible to truly rise to the immortal in the human being, to that which connects with the body that one receives through the hereditary current and which is maintained when the human being passes through the gate of death again. For the eternal spiritual is connected with that which is born and dies here, indirectly through the etheric.

It has become clear that the concepts presented by spiritual science are very much at odds with today's thinking habits and that it is difficult for people to find their way into these concepts. It may be said that one of the obstacles to this finding one's way in, besides others, is that so little effort is made to seek the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily in the way suggested today. Most people long for something quite different from what spiritual research can actually provide. What is it actually that takes place in man when he imagines? An etheric process that only interacts with an external etheric process. But in order for a person to be in this direction in a healthy mental and physical way, it is necessary for that person to become aware of where the boundary is where the inner and outer ether touch. This mostly happens unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being rises to imaginative knowledge, when he experiences inwardly the rain and movement of the ether, and his coming together with the outer ether, which dies in the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer ether, we have, so to speak, the outermost limit of the effectiveness of the ether in general on the human organism. For that which is in our etheric body, for example, primarily affects the organism in terms of growth. There it is still active within the organism, forming it. It gradually organizes our organism so that it adapts to the outside world, as we see when a child grows up. But this inwardly formative grasp of the physical body by the ether must reach a certain limit. If it goes beyond this limit through some morbid process, then what lives and moves in the ether, but which should maintain itself in the etheric, encroaches upon the physical organism, so that what should remain as ether movement is, as it were, interwoven into the physical organism. What then happens? That which should actually only be experienced inwardly as an image, occurs as a process in the physical body. Then it is what is called a hallucination. When the ether process crosses its boundary into the physical, because the body, through its disease, does not offer the right resistance, then what is called a hallucination arises. Now, many people who want to enter the spiritual world actually desire hallucinations above all. Of course, the spiritual researcher cannot offer them that, because hallucination is nothing more than the reproduction of a purely material process, a process that takes place in relation to the soul beyond the boundaries of the body, that is, in the body. On the other hand, what leads to the spiritual world is that one goes from this boundary back into the soul and instead of hallucinations, one comes to imagination, and imagination is a purely mental experience. And because it is a purely mental experience, the soul lives in the spiritual world in the imagination. But in this way the soul also lives in fully conscious penetration of the imagination. And it is important to realize that imagination, that is, the right way to gain spiritual knowledge, and hallucination, are opposites and also destroy each other. He who hallucinates through a diseased organism blocks the path to true imagination; and he who has true imagination is most safely guarded from all hallucination. Hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive and mutually destructive.

But the same is true at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can encroach upon the physical body, can sink its formative power into the physical body, and thereby cause hallucinations, that is, purely physical processes, so on the other side, through certain morbid formations of the organism or through induced fatigue or other conditions of the organism, the etheric, as it was characterized in the act of will, can emerge in an irregular manner. Then it may happen that instead of the etheric really being withdrawn from the physical metabolic region in a correct act of will, it remains within, and the purely physical activity of the physical metabolic region encroaches upon the etheric , so that the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in normal will-manifestation the physical is dependent on the etheric, which in turn is determined by the soul-spiritual. When this happens through such processes as I have indicated, then, I might say, the compulsive act, which consists in the physical body with its metabolic processes forcing its way into the etheric, so to speak pushing itself into the etheric body, gives rise to the morbid counter-image of hallucination. And if the compulsive act is evoked as a pathological phenomenon, then one can again say: it excludes what is called intuition in spiritual scientific knowledge. Intuition and compulsive behavior are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive. This is why there is nothing more soulless than, on the one hand, hallucinators, because hallucinations are just hints at bodily conditions that should not be; and, on the other hand, for example, the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish comes about through the physical body pushing into the etheric, so that it is not the etheric that brings about the effect from the spiritual-soul, but basically only regular compulsive actions occur. And anyone who believes that they can find revelations of the soul in the dancing dervish should first of all study spiritual science in order to realize that the dancing dervish is proof that the spirit, the spiritual-soul, has left its body; that is why he dances in this way.

And, I would like to say, only a little more extensive is that which is not dancing, but which, for example, is automatic writing, mediumistic writing. This also consists in nothing more than first driving the spiritual-soul out of the human being completely, and allowing the physical body, which has been pushed into the etheric body, to unfold as it does when it has become empty, as it were, of the inner ether and now comes under the control of the surrounding outer ether. All these subjects lead away from spiritual science, not toward it, although nothing should be objected to them from the standpoint of those from whom they usually meet with so much opposition. In the dancing dervish one can study what a danced art, a truly artistic dance, should be. The artistic dance should consist precisely in the fact that each individual movement corresponds to a volitional impulse, which can also become conscious to the person concerned, so that one is never dealing with a mere intrusion of physical processes into ethereal processes. Only spiritualized dance is artistic dance. The dancing of the dervish is only the denial of spirituality. Some will object: But it does show the spirit! It does, but how? You can study a shell if you take in and look at the living shell; but you can also study it when the living shell is gone, by looking at the shell: the shape of the shell is reproduced in the shell, the shape born out of life. But in a similar way, we also have a reproduction of the spiritual, a dead reproduction of the spiritual, when we are dealing with automatic writing or with a whirling dervish. That is why it resembles the spiritual as much as the shell resembles the mussel, and why it can be so easily confused. But only when we truly penetrate into the spiritual can we have the right understanding of these things.

If we start from the bodily, through the sensation of the senses, and ascend to the realm of the imagination, which then transfers itself into the soul-spiritual, we come to recognize in this way, in a spiritual-scientific way, that what is aroused by the sensations of the senses is, as it were, deposited at a certain point and becomes memory. Memory arises from the fact that the sensory impression continues in the body, so that not only can the etheric work from within in the sensory impressions themselves, but the etheric can now also be active in what the sensory impression has left behind in the body. Then what has gone into memory is brought up again from remembrance.

Of course, it is not possible to go into these things in more detail in the short time of a one-hour lecture. But one will never come to a real understanding of what imagination and memory are, and how they relate to the soul and spirit, if one does not advance in the spiritual-scientific sense on the path that has been indicated.

At the other pole, there is the whole current that flows from the spiritual-soul of the will impulses down into the physical body, through which the actions are effected. In the ordinary life of man, the sense life comes to remembrance and remains, as it were, in the act of remembering. Remembrance is placed before the soul-spiritual, so that the latter is not aware of itself, of how it creates and is active through the sensations of the senses. Only a vague, confused notion arises that the soul lives and weaves in the etheric, when this soul, living and weaving in the etheric, is not yet so strengthened in this etheric weaving that all etheric weaving breaks at the boundary of the physical. When the soul-spiritual interweaves the etheric body in such a way that what it expresses in the etheric body does not immediately break at the physical body, but is so sustained in the etheric that it reaches the boundaries of the physical body, but is still noticed in the etheric, then the dream arises. And the life of dreams, when it is really studied, will become proof of the lowest form of supersensible experience of man. For in dreams man experiences that he cannot unfold his soul-spiritual, because it seems too powerless, in will impulses within that which is present in the dream images. And because the will impulses are lacking, because the spirit and soul intervene so little in the etheric in the dream that the soul itself becomes aware of these will impulses, the chaotic fabric that the dream represents arises.

What dreams are on the one hand, on the other hand there are those phenomena in which the will, coming from the soul-spiritual, intervenes in the outer world through the etheric-physical , but is just as little aware of what is actually happening there as he is able to become aware in the dream, due to the weak activity of the spiritual-soul, that the human being is living and breathing in the spiritual. Just as the dream so to speak represents the attenuated sense perception, so something else represents the intensified effect of the spiritual-soul, the intensified effect of the will impulses; and that is what we call fate.

We do not see the connections in fate, just as we do not see in the dream what is actually weaving and living there as the real thing. Just as material processes always underlie the dream, surging into the ether, so the soul and spiritual anchored in the will surge towards the outer world. But in ordinary life the soul and spiritual are not organized in such a way that the spirit itself can be seen in its activity in what happens to us as the succession of so-called fateful experiences. At the moment we grasp this succession, we learn to recognize the fabric of fate, we learn to recognize that just as in ordinary life the soul obscures the spiritual through ideas, in fate it obscures the spiritual through affect, through sympathy and antipathy, with which it takes in the events that come to it as life events. In the moment when one sees through sympathy and antipathy in a spiritual-scientific way, when one really grasps the course of life's events objectively and calmly, one notices how everything that happens in our lives between birth and death is either the after-effect of previous lives on earth or the preparation for later lives on earth. Just as, on the one hand, natural science does not penetrate to the spiritual and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks the relationships between the material world and the imagination, so at the other pole, natural science cannot cope with its efforts today. Just as it clings to material processes in the nervous organism in the life of the imagination, so at the other pole it clings to something unclear, which, I might say, hovers nebulously between the physical and the soul.

These are precisely the areas where one must become fully aware of how world-view concepts can be both proven and refuted. And for those who insist on proof, the positive has much to recommend it; but one must also be able to experience the negative inwardly, in keeping with one's insights, as with exhalation one inhales. Recently, what is called analytical psychology has emerged. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intuitions. For what does it want? This analytical psychology, or as it is usually called today, psychoanalysis, wants to descend from the ordinary soul life to that which is no longer contained in the ordinary present soul life, but is a remnant of earlier soul experience. The psychoanalyst assumes that mental life is not exhausted in the present mental experience, in the conscious mental experience, but that consciousness dips down into the subconscious. And in much of what appears in the mental life as a disturbance, as confusion, as this or that defect, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of what surges down in the subconscious. But what the psychoanalyst sees in this subconscious is interesting. When you hear what he lists in this subconscious, it is first of all deceived hopes in life. The psychoanalyst finds some person who suffers from this or that depression. This depression does not have to originate in the present conscious mental life, but in the past. Something occurred in mental experience in this life. The person has since emerged from it, but not completely; a residue remains in the subconscious. He has experienced disappointments, for example. Through education and other processes, he has come to terms with these disappointments in his conscious mental life, but in the subconscious they live on. There they surge, as it were, to the very edge of consciousness. There it then produces the unclear mental depression. The psychoanalyst thus searches in all kinds of disappointments, in deceived hopes of life that have been drawn down into the subconscious, for that which determines the conscious life in a dark way. He also searches for this in what colors the soul life as temperament. In what the soul life colors out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconscious that, as it were, only strikes against consciousness. But then he comes to a broad area — I am only reporting here — which the psychoanalyst grasps by saying: 'The animalistic mud of the soul is playing up into conscious life'. Now, it is not at all denied that this basic sludge is present. In these lectures I myself have already pointed out how certain mystics have experiences in that something, be it for example the erotic, is subtly brought up and plays into consciousness, so that one believes to have particularly exalted experiences, while only the erotic, “the animalistic basic mud of the soul,” is brought up and sometimes interpreted in a deeply mystical sense. One can still see in such a poetically delicate mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg how erotic feeling goes into the details of the images. These things must be clearly grasped so that no errors are made in the spiritual-scientific field. For anyone who wants to penetrate the spirit must be particularly aware of all the paths of error, not to avoid them, but to avoid them. But anyone who speaks of this animalistic basic mud of the soul, who only speaks of disappointed hopes in life and the like, does not go deep enough into the life of the soul: he is like a person walking across a field in which nothing can yet be seen and who believes that it contains only the soil or even the manure, whereas in fact this field already contains all the fruits that will soon come up as grain or other things. When speaking of the basic mud of the soul, one should also speak of what is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes contained in this basic mud; but at the same time, what is embedded in it contains a germinating power that represents what – when the human being has passed through the gate of death into the life that between death and a new birth, and then enters into a new earth-life, makes something quite different out of the deceived hopes than a depression, that makes out of them that which then in a next life leads to disillusionment, to hardening. What the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed hopes of life in the depths of the soul, if he delves deeply enough, is what is being prepared in the present life in order to intervene fatefully in the next life.

Thus, if we dig around and search through the animalistic mud of the ground without dirtying our hands, as is unfortunately so often the case with psychoanalysts, we find the spiritual and mental weaving of fate that extends beyond birth and death with the spiritual and mental life of the soul. Analytical psychology is precisely the kind of psychology that can be used to learn how everything is right and everything is wrong when it comes to questions of world view, namely from one side or the other. Nevertheless, there is an enormous amount that can be said in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts; therefore a refutation will not greatly impress those who are sworn to these concepts. But if one learns to recognize what speaks for and against with the attitude of knowledge that was characterized at the beginning of this lecture, then it is precisely from the pros and cons of the soul that one will experience what really works. For, I might say, between what can be observed in the soul, as psychologists do, who only go to the level of consciousness, and what the psychoanalyst finds down in the animalistic mud of the soul, lies the realm that belongs to the spiritual-soul-eternal, which goes through births and deaths.

The exploration of the human soul also leads to a correct relationship with the external world. Modern science has not only spoken about the ether in an indeterminate way, but it is also spoken about in such a way that the greatest mysteries of the world are actually attributed to it: what then took on solid forms, became planets, suns and moons, and so on. In this view, the soul and spiritual processes at work in man are regarded as no more than a mere episode. There is only dead ether, back and front. If one gets to know the ether only from one side, then one can come to such a construction of the becoming of the world, to which the subtle Herman Grimm — I have quoted his saying before, but it is so significant that it can always be brought before the soul again — says the following words. By familiarizing himself with how one thinks that the dead etheric mist of the cosmos has given rise to that out of which life and spirit are now developing, and by measuring it against Goethe's world view, he comes to the following saying:

What appears here again within German intellectual life as a feeling born out of a healthy soul life is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, as one learns to recognize, how the animation of the dead ether through the soul, through the living ether, comes about, then through inner experience one comes away from the possibility that our world building could ever have arisen from a dead etheric. And this riddle of the world takes on a quite different form when we become acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. We now recognize the ether itself in its living form, we recognize how the dead ether must first arise out of the living. So that by going back to the beginning of the world, we must come back to the soul and see in the spiritual-soul the origin of that which is developing today. But while this spiritual-soul substance remains a mere hypothesis, a mere figment of the imagination, in relation to the outer riddles of the world, so long as one does not learn about the whole life and weaving of the etheric through spiritual science in the encounter of the living ether from within with the dead ether from without, it is precisely through spiritual science that the cosmic fog itself becomes a living, spiritual-soul substance.

As you can see, the riddles of the soul also open up a significant perspective for the riddles of the world. I must pause on this perspective today. You can see that a true contemplation of outer and inner life from the point of view of spiritual science leads across the ether into the spiritual-soul realm, both in the soul itself and in the outer world.

On the other hand, there is the attitude of knowledge such as I have described in the case of a man whom I mentioned last time. Today we can at least surmise that from the corporeal as conceived by spiritual science, the bridge leads directly up to the spiritual-soul, in which ethics, morality, and morals are rooted, which originate in the spirit, just as the sensual leads into the spiritual. But in its study of purely external material things, science has arrived at a point of view that denies that ethics is rooted in the spiritual at all. Today, people are still too embarrassed to deny ethics itself, but they say the following about ethics, which is at the end of Jacques Loeb's lecture, which I presented last time with reference to the beginning. There he says, who comes to a brutal denial of ethics through scientific research:

“If our existence is based on the play of blind forces and is only a work of chance, if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms, how can there be an ethic for us?” The answer to this is that our instincts form the root of our ethics, and that instincts are just as hereditary as the formative components of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce, not because metaphysicians have come to the conclusion that this is desirable, but because we are mechanically induced to do so. We are active because we are mechanically compelled to do so by the processes in our nervous system, and, if people are not economic slaves, the instinct of “successful triggering or successful work determines the direction of their activity. The mother loves her children and takes care of them, not because metaphysicians had the idea that this was beautiful, but because the instinct of brood care, presumably through the two sex chromosomes, is just as firmly determined as the morphological characters of the female body. We enjoy the company of other people because we are forced to do so by hereditary conditions. We fight for justice and truth and are willing to make sacrifices for them because we instinctively want to see our fellow human beings happy. That we have an ethic is due solely to our instincts, which are chemically and hereditarily laid down in us in the same way as the shape of our body."

Moral action leads back to instincts! Instincts lead back to physical-chemical action! The logic is, however, very threadbare. Of course, one can say that one should not wait for the metaphysicians to work out some metaphysical principles before acting ethically, but that is the same as saying: should one wait for the metaphysicians or the physiologists to discover the laws of digestion before digesting? I would therefore recommend to Professor Loeb not to investigate the physiological laws of digestion in the same brutal way as he attacks the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: one can be an important natural scientist today – but the habits of thought are such that they cut you off, as it were, from all spiritual life, that you no longer have an eye for this spiritual life at all. But this always goes hand in hand with the fact that you can, as it were, prove a defect in thinking, so that you never really have everything that goes into a thought.

One can indeed have strange experiences in this regard. I have already presented such an experience here some time ago; but I would like to present it again because it ties in with the ideas of a very important contemporary natural scientist, who is also one of those whom I attack precisely because I hold him in high esteem in one field. This naturalist has made great contributions in the field of astrophysics and also in certain other fields of natural science. But when he wrote a book summarizing the world view of the present and the development of this world view, he makes a remarkable statement in the preface. He is, so to speak, enchanted by how wonderfully far we have come in being able to interpret everything scientifically, and with a certain arrogance, as is common in such circles, he points to earlier times when this was not the case. Goethe, saying: “Whether one can really say that we live in the best of times is not clear; but that, in terms of scientific knowledge, we live in the best of times for knowledge compared to earlier times, we can refer to Goethe, who says:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so gloriously far.

With this, a great naturalist of the present day concludes, that is, with a confession that he takes from Goethe. He has only forgotten that it is Wagner who makes this confession and that Faust says to this confession when Wagner has left:

How can the mind not lose all hope,
When it is always stuck with stale evidence,
Digging for treasure with a greedy hand
And happy when it finds earthworms!

This great researcher forgot to reflect on what Goethe actually says the moment he refers to Wagner to express how wonderfully far we have come. One can, I would say, see where thinking leaves off in the pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many more examples if we were to delve a little deeper into contemporary scientific literature. Since I hold the aforementioned natural scientist in high regard, as I have said, it will certainly not be taken amiss if I were to assert the true Goethean attitude in the face of such natural science, which puffs itself up by also claiming to be able to provide information about the spirit. For although we can forgive many a monist for being unable to grasp the spirit due to the weakness of his thinking, it is dangerous when the attitude that appears in Jacques Loeb and in the characterized natural scientist, who characterizes himself as Wagner but believes he is characterizing himself as Goethe, spreads more and more into the widest circles through the belief in authority. And it does. Those who penetrate into what spiritual science can give in terms of attitude may, if they follow the example of the natural scientist, even if it may not seem reverent enough to some, come to the genuine Goethean attitude by taking up Goethe's words, with which I would like to conclude this lecture:

It is a great horror
to put oneself in the shoes of souls like that,
how greedily they touch the material
and rush past the spirit!

Anyone who wishes to attach any value to the form of spiritual-scientific world view that I will be speaking about today and tomorrow will need to familiarize themselves with the peculiar contradiction inherent in the development of humanity, namely that a spiritual current, a spiritual impulse, can be eminently timely from a certain higher point of view, and that this timeliness is nevertheless at first sharply rejected by contemporaries, rejected in a way that one might say is thoroughly understandable.

The impulse for a new view of the universe of space, which Copernicus gave at the dawn of the new era, was timely from the point of view that the development of humanity at the time of Copernicus made it necessary for this impulse to come. This impulse proved to be quite untimely for a long time to come, in that it was opposed by all those who wanted to hold on to old habits of thought, to prejudices that were centuries and millennia old. To the followers of spiritual science, this spiritual scientific world view appears to be in keeping with the times, and it is out of date from the point of view of those who still judge it from that perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that in the course of today's and tomorrow's lecture I will be able to show that in the subconscious depths of the soul of contemporary humanity there exists something like a yearning for this spiritual-scientific world view and something like a hope lives for it:

As it presents itself at first, this spiritual science wants to be a genuine continuation of the scientific work of the spirit, as it has been done in the last centuries. And it would be quite wrong to believe that this spiritual science somehow developed opposition to the great triumphs, to the immense achievements and the far-sighted truths that natural scientific thinking of the last centuries has brought. On the contrary, what natural science was and is for the knowledge of the external world, that this spiritual science wants to be for the knowledge of the spiritual world. In this way, it could almost be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, although this will still be doubted in the broadest circles today.

In order to give an idea, not a proof, but initially an idea that should lead to understanding, the following is said about the relationship between the spiritual science meant here and the scientific world view: If we look at the great, powerful of the development of natural science knowledge in the last three to four centuries, we say that on the one hand it has brought immeasurable truths across the broad horizon of human knowledge, and on the other hand that this thinking has been incorporated into practical life. Everywhere we see the benefits of this in the fields of technology and commerce, which have been brought to us by the laws and insights of natural science that have been incorporated into practical life. If we now wish to form an idea of the attitude of spiritual science to these advances, we can begin by making a comparison. We can look at the farmer who cultivates his field and reaps the fruits of the field. The greater part of these fruits of the field are taken into human life and used for human sustenance; only a small part remains. This is used for the new sowing of the fruits. Only the latter part can be said to be allowed to follow the driving forces, the inner life and formative forces that lie in the sprouting grain, in the sprouting fruit itself. What is brought into the barns is mostly diverted from its own developmental progress, is, as it were, led into a side stream, used for human food, and does not directly continue what lies in the germs, what the own driving forces are.

Thus, the spiritual science referred to here appears to be more or less what natural science has brought in the way of knowledge in recent centuries. By far the greatest part of this has rightly been used to gain insight into external, sensual-spatial facts, and has been used for human benefit. But there is something left over in the human soul from the ideas that the study of nature has provided in recent centuries that is not used to understand this or that in the sensual world, that is not used to build machines or maintain industries, but that is brought to life so that it is preserved in its own right, like grain that is used for sowing again and allowed to follow its own laws of formation. man imbues himself with the wonderful fruits of knowledge that natural science has brought forth, when he allows this to live in his soul, when he has a feeling for asking: How can the life of the soul be illuminated and recognized through the concepts and ideas that natural science has provided? How can one live with these ideas? How can one use them to understand the main driving forces of human soul life? If the human soul has a feeling for raising these questions with the spiritual treasure acquired, not in theory but with the full wealth of soul life, then what can only now, in our time, when science has been cultivated on its own ground, so to speak, for a while, merge into human culture.

And in another respect too, this spiritual science can be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, only the spirit must be investigated in a different way from nature. Precisely if one wants to approach the spirit with the same certainty, method and scientific basis as natural science approaches nature, then one must transform scientific thinking and shape it in such a way that it becomes a suitable tool for the knowledge of the spirit. These lectures will share some insights into how this can be achieved. Especially when one is firmly grounded in natural science, one realizes that the means by which it works cannot be used to gain spiritual knowledge. Time and again, enlightened minds have spoken of the fact that, starting from the firm ground of natural science, man must recognize that his power of knowledge is limited. Natural science and Kantianism — to mention only these — have contributed to the belief that the cognitive powers of the human mind are limited, that man cannot penetrate through his knowledge into the regions where the source lies, to which the soul must feel connected; where man realizes that not only the forces that can be grasped by natural science are at work, but other forces as well. In this respect spiritual science completely agrees with natural science. Precisely for the cognitive abilities that natural science has magnified, and on which natural science must also stop as such, there is no possibility of penetrating into the spiritual realm.

But in the human soul lie dormant other cognitive faculties, cognitive faculties that cannot be used in everyday life and in the hustle and bustle of ordinary science, but that can be brought forth from this human soul and that, when they are brought forth, when they are, as it were, from the hidden depths of the human soul, then they make something different out of the person: they permeate him with a new kind of knowledge, with a kind of knowledge that can penetrate into areas that are closed to mere natural science. It is (I attach no special value to the expression, but it clarifies the matter) a kind of spiritual chemistry through which one can penetrate into the spiritual regions of existence, but a chemistry that only bears a similarity to external chemistry in terms of secure logic and methodical thinking: it is the chemistry of the human soul itself. And from this point of view, in order to make ourselves understood, I will say the following by way of comparison: when we have water before us, this water has certain properties. The chemist comes and shows that this water contains hydrogen and oxygen. Take hydrogen: it burns, it is gaseous, it is quite different from water. Would someone who knew nothing about chemistry ever be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Water is liquid, does not burn, and even extinguishes fire. Hydrogen burns, is a gas. In short, would someone be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Nevertheless, the chemist comes and separates the hydrogen from the water. Man can be compared to water as he appears in everyday life, as he appears to ordinary science. In him are united the physical and the bodily and the spiritual-soul. External science and the world view that is based on it are quite right when they say: Yes, this person standing before us cannot be seen to have a spiritual-soul within him; and it is understandable when a world view completely denies this soul-spiritual. But that is just as if one were to deny the nature of hydrogen.

However, there is a need for proof that the spiritual-soul can really be represented separately from the human being, separate from the physical body, in spiritual-soul chemistry. This can be. That there is such a spiritual-mental chemistry is what spiritual science has to say to mankind today, just as Copernicanism had to say to a surprised mankind that the earth does not stand still, but moves around the sun at a furious pace, but the sun stands still. And just as Copernican writings were on the Index until well into the 19th century, so too will the insights of spiritual science be on the Index of other worldviews for a long time to come. These are worldviews that cannot free themselves from centuries-old prejudices and habits of thought. And the fact that this spiritual science can already, to a certain extent, touch hearts and souls, that it is not exactly outside the search of our time, we have a small proof of this, which I do not want to boast about, but which may be mentioned as a testimony to, I would say, the hidden timeliness of spiritual science in souls. Are we indeed in a position, already in our time, to build a free school of spiritual science on free Swiss soil; and can we not see, through the understanding of the friends of this spiritual current, the emblem of the same in the new architectural style of the double-domed rotunda, which is to rise from Dornach's heights, near Basel, as a first external monument to what this spiritual science has to offer to modern culture? That this building is already being erected, that the forms of its domes are already rising above the rotunda, allows us today to speak of spiritual science with much more hope and inner satisfaction, despite all the opposition, despite all the lack of understanding that it encounters and must still encounter in wide circles.

What I have called spiritual chemistry is certainly not something that can be achieved through external methods that can be seen with the eyes and that are brought about by external actions. What can be called spiritual chemistry takes place only in the human soul itself, and the procedures are of an intimate soul-spiritual nature, procedures that do not leave the soul as it is in everyday life, but which affect this soul in such a way that it changes, that it becomes a completely different tool of knowledge than it usually is. And they are not some kind of, one might say, miraculous exercises, some exercises taken from superstition, which are thus applied in spiritual chemistry, but they are thoroughly inner, spiritual-soul exercises, which build on what is also present in everyday life: powers of the soul , which are always there, which we need in everyday life, but which, in this everyday life, I would say, are only used incidentally, but which must be increased immeasurably, must strengthen themselves into the unlimited if man is to become truly a spiritual knower.

The one power that is active in our whole soul life, more incidentally, but must be increased immeasurably, we can call it: attention. What is attention? Well, we do not let the life that flows past the soul shape itself; we gather ourselves up inwardly to turn our spiritual gaze to this or that. We pick out individual things, place them in the field of vision of our consciousness, and concentrate the soul forces on these details. And we may say: Only in this way is our soul life, which needs activity, also possible in everyday life, that we can develop such an interest that highlights individual events and facts and entities from the passing stream of existence. This attention is absolutely necessary in ordinary life. One will understand more and more, especially when spiritual science also penetrates a little into the soul, that what people call the memory question is basically only an attentiveness question, and that will throw important light on all educational questions. One can almost say that the more one endeavors to put the soul into the activity of attentiveness again and again, already in the growing and also in the later human being, the more the memory is strengthened. Not only does it work better for the things we have paid attention to, but the more often we can exercise this attention, the more our memory grows, the more intensively it develops. And another thing: Who has not heard today of that sad manifestation of the soul that could be called the discontinuity of consciousness? There are people today who cannot look back on their past life and remember it in its entirety, who do not know afterwards: You were with your ego in this or that experience; who do not know what they have been through. It may happen that such people leave their home because they have lost the consistency in their mental experience; that they leave their home without rhyme or reason, that they go through the world as if with the loss of their own self, so that it takes them years to find their self again and to be able to pick up where their self left off. Such phenomena would never lead to the tragedy that they often do if it were known that this integrity, this consciousness of being fully aware of oneself, also depends on the correct development of the activity of attention.

Thus, the exercise of attention is something we absolutely need in our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must take it up, develop it into a special inner soul strengthening, deepen it into what could be called meditation, concentration. These are the technical terms for the matter. Just as in our ordinary life, prompted by life itself, we turn our attention to this or that object, so the spiritual researcher, out of inner soul methodology, turns all soul powers to a presentation, an image, a sensation, a will impulse, an emotional mood that he can survey, that is quite clear before his soul, and on which he concentrates all the soul's powers; but he concentrates in such a way that he has suppressed, as only otherwise in deep sleep, all sensory activity directed towards the outside world, so that he has brought all thinking and striving, all worries and affects of life to a standstill, as otherwise only in deep sleep. In relation to ordinary life, man does indeed become as he otherwise does in deep sleep; only that he does not lose consciousness, that he keeps it fully awake. But all the powers of the soul, which are otherwise scattered on external experience, on the worries and concerns of existence, are concentrated on the one idea, feeling or other that has been placed by will into the center of the human soul life. As a result, the powers of the soul are concentrated and that which otherwise only slumbers, only works for this life as it were between the lines of life, that power is brought to the fore, is shaped out of the human soul; and it actually comes about that through this inner strengthening of the human soul in the concentrated activity, in the attention increased to the immeasurable, this soul learns to experience itself in such a way that it becomes capable of consciously tearing itself out of the physical-sensual body, as hydrogen is dissolved out of water by the chemical method.

However, it is an inner soul development that takes years if the spiritual researcher wants to enable his soul to tear itself away from the physical body through such attention and concentration exercises. But then the time comes when the spiritual researcher knows how to connect a meaning to the word, oh, to the word that sounds so paradoxical to today's world, to the word that seems so fantastic to this world: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body and I know that this body is outside of my soul – well, like the table is outside of my body. I know that the soul, inwardly strengthened, can experience itself in this way, even if it has the body before it like a foreign object, this body with all the destinies that it undergoes in the ordinary outer life. In what he otherwise is, the human being will completely express himself as a spiritual-soul entity separate from his body. And this spiritual-soul entity then displays very different qualities than it does when it is connected to the physical-sensual body and makes use of the intellect bound to the brain.

First of all, the power of thought detaches itself from physical experience. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather report on real facts, please do not be put off by the fact that I want to describe, unembellished and without prejudice, what may still sound paradoxical today. When the spiritual researcher begins to associate a meaning with the word: You now live in your soul, you know that your soul is a truly spiritual being in which you experience yourself when you are outside of your senses and your brain, then he initially feels with his thinking as if outside of his brain, surrounding and living in his head. Yes, he knows that as long as one is in the physical body between birth and death, one must return again and again to the body. The spiritual researcher knows exactly how to observe the moment when he, after having lived with the pure spiritual-soul, returns with his thinking to his brain. He experiences how this brain offers resistance, feels how he, as it were, submerges with the waves of his earlier, purely spiritual life and then slips into his physical brain, which now, in its own activity, follows what the spiritual-soul accomplishes. This experience outside of the body and this re-immersion into the body is one of the most harrowing experiences for the spiritual researcher.

But this thinking, which is purely experiencing itself and takes place outside the brain, presents itself differently from ordinary thinking. Ordinary thoughts are shadowy compared to the thoughts that now stand before the spiritual researcher like a new world when he is outside his body. Thoughts permeate each other with inner pictorialness. That is why we call what presents itself to the spiritual eye: imaginations - but not because we believe that these only contain something fantastic or imagined, but because what is perceived there is actually experienced is experienced, imagined; but this imagination is an immersion in the things themselves, one experiences the things and processes of the spiritual world, and the things and processes of the spiritual world present themselves in imaginations before the soul. —- Thus thinking can be separated from the physical-bodily life, and the spiritual researcher can know himself in a world of spiritual processes and entities.

But other human faculties can also be detached from the purely physical and bodily. When the thinking is detached, the spiritual researcher experiences himself first in his purely spiritual and soul-like essence, after all that has been described so far. But what he experiences there with the things and processes in the spiritual world is a completely different way of perceiving than the ordinary perception. When we usually perceive things, they are there and we are here; they confront us. This is not the case from the moment we enter a spiritual world in our spiritual and soul experience, which arises around us with the same necessity as colors and light arise around the blind man when he has undergone an operation. No, we do not experience the spiritual world in the same way as the external world. This experience is such that one does not merely have the things and beings of the spiritual world before one, but one submerges oneself in them with one's entire being. Then one knows: one perceives the things and beings by having flowed into them with one's being and perceiving that which is in them in such a way that they reproduce themselves in the images that one sees. One feels that all perception is a reproduction. One feels that one is in a state of constant activity. Therefore, one could call this revival of the imaginative world of thought a spiritual mimic, a spiritual play of expressions. One tears oneself out of the bodily with its soul-spiritual; but this soul-spiritual is in perpetual activity and submerges into the processes of the spiritual world and imitates what lives in them as their own powers; and one feels so connected with the beings that one can compare this submerging with standing before a person and intuiting what is going on in his life, and having such an inner experience of it that one would show the expression of sorrow in one's own countenance if the other were sad, and show the expression of joy in one's own countenance if the other were joyful. Thus one experiences spiritually and soulfully what others are experiencing; one becomes the expression of it oneself. In the spiritual countenance, one expresses the essence of things. One is driven to active perception. One may say: spiritual research makes quite different demands on the human soul than external research, which passively accepts things. The soul is required to be inwardly active and to be able to immerse itself in things and beings and to express itself in the way that things present themselves to it.

Just as the power of thought, as a spiritual-soul power, can be separated out of the physical-bodily in spiritual chemistry, so can another power, which man otherwise only uses in the body, which, so to speak, pours itself into the body, be separated out of this body. However strange it may sound, this other power is the power of speech, the power that we otherwise use in ordinary life when speaking.

What happens when we speak? Our thoughts live within us, our thoughts vibrate with our brain; this is connected to the speech apparatus, muscles are set in motion; what we experience inwardly flows out into the words and lives in the words. From the point of view of spiritual science, we must say that in speaking we pour out what is in our soul into physical organs. The detachment of the speech power from the physical-sensory body arises from the fact that the human being increases attention, as described, and adds something else – again, an activity that is usually already present and must also be increased to an unlimited degree. This power is devotion.

We know it in those moments when we feel religious, when we are devoted to this or that being in love, when we can follow things and their laws in strict research, when we can forget ourselves with all our feelings and thoughts. We know this devotion. It actually only flows between the lines of ordinary life. The spiritual researcher must increase this power to infinity; he must strengthen it without limit. He must indeed be able to give himself up to the stream of existence in such a way as he is otherwise only given up to this stream of existence – without doing anything himself to what he experiences – in deep sleep, when all the activity of his limbs rests, when all the senses are silent, when man is only completely given up and does nothing; but then he has lapsed into unconsciousness in his sleep. But if a person can bring himself by inner volition to do it again and again as an exercise for his soul, to suppress all sensory activity, to suppress all movement of the limbs, to transfer his physical-sensual life into a state that is otherwise only in deep sleep, but to remain awake, to keep his inner and develops the feeling of being poured into the stream of existence, wanting nothing but what the world wants with one: if he evokes this feeling again and again, but evokes it apart from attention, then the soul strengthens itself more and more.

But the two exercises - the one with attention and the one with devotion - must be done separately from each other; because they contradict each other. If attention requires the highest level of concentration on one object - deep meditation - then devotion, passive devotion to the flow of existence, requires an immense increase in the feeling that we find in religious experience or in other devotion to a loved one. The fruits that man draws from such an immeasurable increase of devotion and attention are precisely that he separates his spiritual-soul life from the physical-bodily. And so the power that otherwise pours into the word, that is activated by it not remaining within itself but setting the nerves in motion, this power can be separated from the outer speech activity and remain within itself in the soul-spiritual. In this way, the power of speech – we can call it that – is torn out of its sensual-physical context, and the person experiences what, in Goethe's words, can be called spiritual hearing, spiritual listening.

Once again, the human being experiences himself outside of his body, but now in such a way that he submerges himself in things and perceives the inner essence of things; but also perceives it in such a way that he recreates it within himself, as with an inner gesture, not just with a facial expression, but with an inner gesture, as with an inner gesture. The soul-spiritual, torn out of the body, is thus activated, as when we are tempted, through a special disposition in relation to our talent for imitation, to express through our gesture what occupies us. What is done only by special talents, the soul, which is torn out of the body, does in order to perceive. It plunges into things, and it actively recreates the forces that are at play within them. All this perception in the spiritual world is an activity in which one engages, and by perceiving the activity in which one has to place oneself, because one recreates the inner weaving and essence of things, one perceives these things. In the outer, sensory world, hearing is passive; we listen. Speaking and hearing flow together in spiritual hearing. We immerse ourselves in the essence of things; we hear their inner weaving. What Pythagoras called the music of the spheres is something that the spiritual researcher can truly achieve. He immerses himself in the things and beings of the spiritual world and hears, but also speaks by uttering. What one experiences is a speaking hearing, a hearing speaking in immersing oneself in the essence of things. It is true inspiration that arises.

And a third inner activity, a third kind of inner experience, can come over the spiritual researcher if he continues to develop increased attention and devotion. What occurs to and in the spiritual researcher as he experiences himself outside his body, I would like to discuss it in the following way.

Let us consider the child. I cannot speak about this in detail, I only want to hint at what is important for the purpose of today's lecture: it is a peculiarity of the growing human being that he must give himself his direction in space, that he must give himself the way in which he is placed in space, in the course of childhood. The human being is born unable to walk or stand, initially, as we say here in Austria, having to use all fours. Then he develops those inner powers that I would call powers of uprightness, and through this something comes to the fore in man that so many deeper minds have sensed in its significance by saying: because man can rise in the vertical direction, he knows how to direct his gaze out into the vastness of the celestial space, his gaze does not merely cling to earthly things. But the essential thing is that through inner forces, through inner strength and experience, man develops out of his helpless horizontal life, so to speak, into an upright vertical life. The scientist will readily understand that the inner activity of man is something quite different from the hereditary forces that give the animal its powers of orientation in the world. The forces at work in the animal that bring the animal in this or that direction to the vertical act quite differently in man, in whom a sum of forces is at work that pulls him out of his helpless situation and that works inwardly to instruct him in the direction of space through which he is actually an earthly man in the true sense of the word, through which he first becomes what he is as a human being on earth. These forces work very much in secret. One can only cope with them when one has already delved a little into spiritual science; but it is a whole system, a great sum of forces. They are not all used up in the childlike period of man, when he learns to stand and walk. There are still forces of this kind slumbering within man; but they remain unused in the outer life of the senses and in the outer life of science.

Through the exercises of increased attention and devotion performed by the soul, the human being becomes inwardly aware of how these forces that have raised him as a child are seated within him. He becomes aware of spiritual powers of direction and of spiritual powers of movement, and the consequence of this is that he is able to add to the inner mimic, to the inner play of the features, to the inner ability to make gestures, to the inner gesture, also the inner physiognomy of his spiritual and soul life. When the soul and spirit have emerged from the physical body, when a person begins to understand as a spiritual researcher what is meant by the words: 'You experience yourself in the soul and spirit' — then the time also comes when he becomes aware of the forces that have raised him up, that have placed him vertically on the earth as a physical, sensual being. He now applies these powers in the purely spiritual-soul realm, and this enables him to use these powers differently than he does in his ordinary life; he is able to give these powers other directions, to shape himself differently than he did in physical experience during his childhood. He now knows how to develop inner movements, knows how to adapt to all directions, knows how to give his spiritual self different physiognomies than as an earthly human being; he is able to delve into other spiritual processes and beings; he knows how to connect that he transforms the powers which otherwise change him from a crawling child to an upright human being, that he transforms these in the inner spiritual things and entities, so that he becomes similar to these things and entities and thus expresses them himself and perceives them through this. That is real intuition. For the real perception of spiritual entities and processes is an immersion in them, is an assumption of their own physiognomy. While one experiences the processes in the beings through inner mimicry, while one experiences the mobility of the spiritual beings by being able to recreate their gestures; one is now able to transform oneself into things and processes, one is able to take on the form of the spiritual, and in so doing one perceives it, that one has become it oneself, so to speak.

I did not want to describe to you in general philosophical terms the way in which the spiritual researcher enters into the spiritual worlds. I wanted to describe to you as concretely as possible how this spiritual-soul experience breaks away from the bodily, from physical-sensory perception, and submerges into the spiritual world by becoming active in it. But this has become evident, that every step into the spiritual world must be accompanied by activity, that we must know with every step that things do not reveal their essence to us, but that we can only know that about things and processes of the spiritual world, which we are able to recreate, to search for, by being able to behave actively perceptively. This is the great difference between spiritual knowledge and ordinary external knowledge: that external knowledge is passively surrendered to things, while spiritual knowledge must live in perpetual activity, man must become what he wants to perceive.

Even today, or one could also say, even today, one is forgiven when one speaks of a spiritual world in general. People still put up with that. But it still seems paradoxical in our time that someone can say: A person can detach themselves from all seeing, hearing, all sensory perceptions, all thinking that is tied to the nerves and brain, and then, while everything that is experienced in physical existence disappears completely before them, can feel surrounded, know that they are surrounded by a completely new, concrete world, indeed, by a world in which processes and beings are purely spiritual, just as processes and beings in the physical world are physical. Spiritual science is not a vague pantheism, it is not a general sauce of spiritual life. In the face of spiritual science, if one speaks only of a pantheistic spiritual being, it is as if one said: I lead you to a meadow, something sprouts there, that is nature; then one leads him into a laboratory and says: That is nature, pan-nature! All the flowers and beetles and trees and shrubs, all the chemical and physical processes: Pan-Nature! People would be little satisfied with such Pan-Nature; because they know that you can only get along if you can really follow the individual. Just as little as the external science speaks of Pan-Nature, just as little spiritual science speaks of a general spirit sauce; it speaks of real, perceptible, concrete spiritual processes and entities. It must not be afraid to challenge time by saying: Just as we, when we are in the physical world, first see people around us as physical beings among, one might say, the hierarchies of physical beings, of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, the same fades from our spiritual horizon when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world; but spiritual realms and hierarchies emerge: beings that are initially the same as human beings, beings that are higher than human beings; and just as animals, plants and minerals descend from human beings in the physical world, there are beings and creatures ascending from human beings into higher realms of existence, individual, unique spiritual entities and creatures.

How the human soul places itself in the spiritual world, what its life is like within this spiritual world according to spiritual research, which in principle has been indicated today; how the human soul has to live in this spiritual world when it lays aside the physical body at death, when it traverses the path after passing through the gate of death, in a purely spiritual world, will be the subject of the day after tomorrow. The lecture the day after tomorrow will deal with individual insights of spiritual science about this life after death.

What spiritual science develops as its method – well, you notice it immediately – it differs very significantly from what our contemporaries can admit as such, based on the thought habits that have formed over the centuries and which are just as stuck in relation to this spiritual science as the thought habits of past centuries were stuck in relation to the Copernican world system. But how should spiritual science think about the search of our time if it wants to understand itself correctly and behave correctly towards this search of our time?

The first objection that can so easily be made from our time is that one says: Yes, the spiritual scientist speaks of the fact that the soul should first develop special powers; then it can look into the spiritual world. But for the one who has not yet developed these powers, who has not yet mastered the art of forming mental images, of separating thought, of separating the powers of speech, of separating the powers of spatial orientation, of separating the powers of orientation in the world of beings, the spiritual world would be of no concern to him! Such an objection is just like that of someone who would say: For someone who cannot paint, pictures are of no concern. — That would be a pity. Only someone who has learned to paint can paint pictures. But it would be sad if the only pictures a person who could paint could understand were those that had to do with the world of nature. Of course, only the painter can paint it; but when the picture stands before man, it is the case that the human soul has the very natural powers within itself to understand the picture, even if it is not able to paint it. And the human soul has a language within itself that connects it to the living art. Such is the case with spiritual science. Only he who has become a spiritual researcher himself can discover and describe the facts, processes and entities of the spiritual world; but when the spiritual researcher endeavors — as has been attempted today, for example, with regard to the spiritual scientific method — to clothe what he has researched in the spiritual world in the words of ordinary thoughts and ideas , then what he gives can be grasped by every soul, even if it has not become a spiritual researcher; if it can only do away with all that comes from contemporary education, from education that pretends to stand on the firm ground of natural science, but in truth does not stand on it at all, but only believes it. If only the soul can rid itself of all prejudices, if it can truly devote itself to the contemplation of a picture as impartially as the mind researcher knows how to tell, then the result of spiritual research can be understood by every soul. Human souls are predisposed to truth and to the perception of truth, not to the perception of untruth and falsity, if only they clear away all the debris that accumulates from prejudice. Deep within the human soul is a secret, intimate language, the language by which everyone at every level of education and development can understand the spiritual researcher, if only they want to.

But this is precisely what the spiritual scientist finds in the search of our time. In past centuries, people believed that they could only know something about the spiritual world through religious beliefs; in recent times, these souls have been able to believe that certain knowledge can only be built on external facts; in our time, souls do not yet know this in their superconsciousness, as one might say – what they can realize in concepts and ideas and feelings, it is not yet settled -, but for the spiritual researcher it is clear: we live in a time in which, in the depths of human souls, in those depths of which these souls themselves do not yet know much, longing for spiritual science, hope for this spiritual science, is being prepared. More and more it will be recognized that old prejudices must vanish. Especially in regard to thinking many things will be recognized. Thus there will still be many people today, especially those who believe themselves to be standing on firm philosophical ground, who will say: Has not Kant proved it, has not physiology proved it, that man cannot penetrate below the sense world with his knowledge? And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to. Let us see how the real practice of life – the practice of life that is the fruitful one – relates to these things.

Someone could prove by strict arguments that man with his eyes is incapable of seeing cells, for example. Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things. Let us assume that microscopic research did not yet exist and it was proved that man cannot see the smallest particles. This may be correct. The proof can be absolutely conclusive in every respect and nothing could be said against the strict proof that man with his eyes cannot see the smallest partial organisms of the large organisms. But that was not the point in the real progress of research; there it was important to show, despite the correctness of this proof, that physical tools can be found, microscope, telescope and others, to achieve what cannot be achieved at all demonstrably if the abilities remain unarmed, which man has. Those are right who say: Human abilities are limited; but spiritual science does not contradict them, it only shows that there is a spiritual strengthening and reinforcement of the human powers of cognition, just as there is a physical strengthening, and that despite the correctness of the opposite train of thought, fruitful spiritual research must place itself precisely beyond such correctness and incorrectness. People will learn to no longer insist on what can be proved with the limited means of proof available; they will realize that life makes other demands on the development of humanity than what is sometimes called immediately and logically certain.

And another thing must be said if the real, not merely the imagined, search of the time is to be related to what spiritual research really has as its task, as its goal. Once again, reference may be made to the truly tremendous progress of natural science. It is not surprising, in view of these great and powerful advances in natural science, that there are minds today that believe they can build a world structure on the firm ground of natural science, which, however, does not reflect on such forces as have been discussed today. Today there is a widespread, I might say materialistically colored school of thought; but it calls itself somewhat nobler because the term 'materialistic' has fallen out of favor: the monistic school of thought. This monistic school of thought, whose head is certainly the important in his scientific field Ernst Haeckel and whose field marshal is Wilhelm Ostwald. This school of thought attempts to construct a world view by building on the insights that can be gained purely from the knowledge of nature. The search of the time will come to the following conclusion in relation to such an attempt: as long as natural science stops at investigating the laws of the outer sense existence, at visualizing the connections in this outer sense existence of the soul, as long as natural science stands on firm ground. And it has truly achieved a great thing; it has achieved the great thing of thoroughly extinguishing the light of life of old prejudices. Just as Faust himself stood before nature and resorted to an external, material magic, so today, anyone who understands science can no longer resort to such material magic. But it is something else that spiritual life itself, in the ways that have been characterized, imposes an inner magic on the soul. But against all these superstitious currents of thought, against everything that seeks to explain external nature in the same way that we might explain a clock, by saying that there are little spirits inside it, and against every explanation of nature that finds this or that being behind natural phenomena, natural science has achieved great things in negation, and as a worldview. And let us take a look at how the so-called scientific view of nature works, as long as the minds can deal with eliminating the old, unhealthy concepts of all kinds of spiritual beings that are invented behind nature. As long as a front can be made against such spiritual endeavors, a scientific worldview thrives on fighting what had to be fought.

But this fight has in a sense already passed its peak, has already done its good; and today the search of the time goes to ask: By what means can we build a world view in which the human soul has space in it? Since this scientific worldview, this Haeckel-Ostwald materialism fails completely when the person understands himself correctly. It will become more and more evident that the champions of the purely materialistic world-view, in their capacity as soldiers, are great in combating ancient superstition, but that they are like warriors who have done their duty and now have no talent for developing the arts of peace, for developing industry, for tilling the soil. Natural science should not be belittled when it becomes a world view in order to combat superstitious beliefs. As long as such world view thinkers can stop at the fight, they still have something in the fight in the soul that sustains them, but when the person then wants to build a real world view in which the soul has a place, then they are like the warrior who has no talent for the arts of peace. He stands before the question of his soul, let us say, in the peacetime of worldly life, and an image of the world does not build itself up.

Such a mood will assert itself more and more in the souls; the spiritual researcher can already see these moods in the depths of the souls. Where these souls know nothing about it, the longings for what spiritual research wants to bring to the world prevail. That is the secret of our time. But if, from a higher point of view, one might say, it is thoroughly in keeping with the times, this spiritual research world view is out of touch with many contemporaries who do not yet look deeply into what they themselves actually want. Therefore, this spiritual science initially brings a world view that is seen as if it does not stand on firm scientific ground. The other world view, that of so-called monism, wants to be built solely on the foundation of external science. This world view, one can see today from its reverse side, where it must lead if the soul really wants to see its hopes and longings fulfilled. In the activity of spiritual research, of which has been spoken, what really elevates the soul to the spiritual community arises for the soul, the spiritual world arises in perceptible activity, in active perception. Through spiritual science, man can again know of the true spiritual world, of spiritual reality. The so-called monistic world view has nothing to say about this. The spiritual search of our time.

But this seeking of our time, this seeking of human souls, cannot be suppressed, and so some of our contemporaries have already become accustomed to placing their thoughts about spiritual things within themselves in such a way that these thoughts run like scientific thoughts: that the external is observed in passive devotion. What has happened? The result is that a part of our contemporaries — those who occupy themselves with it, they know it — have fallen into the habit of wanting to look at the spiritual as one looks at the sensual. I am not saying that some things that are absolutely true cannot come about in this way; but the method of such an approach is different from that of spiritual science. What is called spiritualism wants to look at spiritual beings and processes externally, without active inner perception, without rising into the spiritual worlds, externally passively, as one looks at physical-sensory processes. Whose child is purely external, we may say materialistic spiritualism? It is the child of that school of thought that takes the so-called monistic point of view and succumbs to the superstition of materialism, the mere workings of external natural laws. What — some contemporary will say — spiritism, a child of Haeckel's genuine monism? — The search of the time will be convinced that it is just with this child as with other children. Many a father and mother has the most beautiful ideas about all the things that should develop in a child, and yet sometimes a real rascal can arise. What monism dreams of as a true cultural child is not important; what is important is what really arises. Mere belief in the material will produce the belief that spirits too can only operate and reveal themselves materially. And the more pure monistic materialism would grow, the more spiritualist societies and spiritualist views would flourish everywhere as the necessary counter-image. The more the blind adherents of the Haeckel and Ostwald direction will succeed in pushing back true spiritual science in matters of world view, the more they will see that they will cultivate spiritualism, the other side of true spiritual research. As firmly as the spiritual researcher stands on the ground of the researchable, the knowable, the knowable spiritual life, he can no more follow the method that wants to materialize the spirit and passively surrender to what is spirit, while one can only experience it in the active.

But I would also like to characterize the quest of our time, which cannot yet be understood in terms of another. A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion. But the philosopher gives advice on how this could be done differently, in line with the search of our time. He says: Today we have a device, a technical advance, through which what is presented to the soul in the merely abstract thoughts of Kant and Spinoza can be brought to the soul quite vividly, so that one can passively surrender to it in perception. The philosopher wants to show in a kind of cinematograph how Spinoza sits down, first grinds glass, how then the idea of expansion comes over him - this is shown in changing pictures. The picture of expansion changes into the picture of thinking and so on. And so the whole ethics and world view of Spinoza could be vividly constructed in a cinematographic way. The outer search of the time would thus be taken into account. It is remarkable that the editor of the journal in question even made the following comment: “In this way, the age-old metaphysical need of man could be met by an invention that some people consider to be a gimmick, but which is very much in keeping with the times.

Now, from a certain point of view, it might be entirely appropriate to the search of our time, but only on the surface, if one could read Spinoza's “Ethics” or Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in front of the cinematograph. Why not? It would take into account the passive devotion that is so popular today. It is so loved that one cannot believe that the spiritual must have a reality into which one can only find one's way by taking every step with it. That one expresses in oneself, in one's spiritual soul, what the essence of things is, that our time does not yet love. Let us take a look at a billboard! Let us try to guess the thoughts of the people standing in front of it. Not many people will go to a lecture where there are no slides, but only reflections that the souls also create the thoughts that are put forward, as opposed to a lecture where spiritual and psychological matters are supposedly demonstrated in slides, where one only has to passively surrender.

Anyone who looks into the search of our time, where it asserts its deepest, still unconscious hopes and longings, knows that in the depths of the soul, the urge for activity still rests; the urge to find itself again as a soul in full activity. The human soul can only be free, with a secure inner hold, if it can develop inner activity. The human soul can only find its way and find its bearings in life by becoming conscious of itself, by realizing that it is not only that which is passively given to it by the world, but by knowing that it is present when it is able to experience in activity; and of the spiritual world it can only perceive that of which it is able to take possession in activity. In reflecting on what spiritual science offers, the process of comprehension must develop into active participation; but in this way spiritual science becomes a satisfaction of the deepest, subconscious impulses in the souls of the present, and in this way it meets the most intimate search of our time. For with regard to the things touched on here, our time is a time of transition. It is easy to say, even trivial, that we live in a time of transition, because every time is a time of transition. Therefore, it is always correct to say that we live in a time of transition. But if one emphasizes that one lives in a time of transition, it depends much more on what any given time is in transition from. If we now want to describe our time in its transition, we have to say: it was necessary - because only through this could the natural sciences and what has been achieved through them come about - that for centuries humanity went through an education towards passivity; because only in this way, through devotion to materialistic truths, could it be achieved what had to be achieved, especially in the field of natural science. But the fact is that life unfolds in rhythms. Just as a pendulum swings up and then swings down again, swinging to the opposite side, so too must the human soul, when it has been educated in a justifiable way for a period of time to be faithfully and passively devoted, pull itself together again in order to find itself again; in order to take hold of itself, it must pull itself together to become active. For what has it become through passivity? Well, what it has become through passivity, I will say it unashamedly with a radical-sounding sentence that will certainly sound much too paradoxical to many. But on the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of spiritual science that shows, as it actually is only the fact, that one does not pull oneself together to face the consequences of the scientific world view if one does not emphasize this radical result. They lack the courage to draw the real consequences, even those who claim to stand solely and exclusively on the ground of what true science yields. If they had this consistency, then one would hear strange words murmured through the seeking of the time.

The Old Testament documents begin with words – I do not want to talk about their inner meaning today; everyone may take the words as they can take them; some may consider them to be an image, others an expression of a fact: everyone can agree on what I have to say about these words – the words are: “You shall be as God, knowing – or discerning – good and evil!” The words resound in our ears, from the beginning of the Old Testament. However you look at it, you have to admit that it expresses something momentous for human nature and the human soul. It is attributed to the tempter, who approaches man and whispers in his ear: “If you follow me, you will be like a god and distinguish good from evil.” It will be possible to surmise that the inclination not only towards good would not express itself in man without this temptation; that without this temptation the inclination would have arisen only towards good, so that all human freedom is in some way connected with what these words express. But they do express that man was, as it were, invited by the tempter to look beyond himself as a different being from what he is: to behave like a god towards good and evil. As I said, however you may think about these words and the tempter, I am certainly not demanding today that you immediately accept him as a real being – although it is quite true for those who see through things, the word: “The devil is never felt by the people, even when he has them by the collar.” But he who is able to eavesdrop a little on the search of the time, hears today in this search of the time his whispering again. It is drawing near. Call it a voice of the soul or whatever you will: there it is — it can be said without any superstition. And for those who have the courage to draw the final consequences of a purely scientific worldview, it brings forth words of great peculiarity, of a strange wisdom. It is just that the people who claim to be on the basis of pure science do not have the courage to draw the final conclusion. They do include in their feelings and thoughts the belief in a distinction between good and evil, which they would actually have to deny if they wanted to be purely on the basis of science. It is a fact that as soon as one places oneself on the ground of mere natural science, not only does the sun shine equally on good and evil, but according to the laws of nature, evil is performed from human nature just as much as good. And so he, the tempter, drawing the conclusion, whispers to man: Don't you see, you are just like highly developed animals. You are like animals and cannot distinguish between good and evil. — This is what makes our time a time of transition, that the tempter speaks to us again in our time with the opposite voice to that with which he spoke according to the Old Testament: You are only developed animals and so, if you understand yourselves, you cannot make any distinction between good and evil.

If one had the courage to be consistent, it would be the expression of a pure, passively surrendered worldview. That time be spared from this voice – let it be said merely figuratively – that knowledge of spiritual life be brought into the seeking of the time: that is the task, that is the goal of spiritual science. Those who still fight against this spiritual science today from the standpoint of some other science will have to realize that this fight is like the fight against Copernicanism. Now that we are also being noticed more in the world through the building of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which used to ignore us, the voices of our opponents are growing louder. And when I recently objected in the writing: “What is spiritual science and how is it treated by its opponents” that the opponents of spiritual science today stand on the same point of view as the opponents of Copernicus, one who felt affected rightly said: Yes, the only difference would be that what Copernicus said are facts, while spiritual science only puts forward assertions. He does not realize, the poor man, that for people of his mind the facts of Copernicanism at that time were also nothing more than assertions, empty assertions, and he does not realize that today he calls empty assertions what, before real research, are facts, albeit facts of spiritual life. And so one can find objections raised by both the scientific and religious communities regarding this spiritual science. Just as people said at the time of Copernicus, “We cannot believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because it is not in the Bible,” so people today say, “We do not believe what spiritual science has to say, because it is not in the Bible.” But people will come to terms with what spiritual science has to say, as they came to terms with what Copernicus had to say.

And again and again we must remember a man who was both a deeply learned man and a priest, who worked at the local university and who, when he gave his rector's speech about Galileo, spoke the beautiful words: At that time, the people who believed that religious ideas were being shaken stood against Galileo; but today – as this scholar said at the beginning of his rectorate – today the truly religious person knows that every new truth that is researched adds a piece to the original revelation of the divine governance of the world and to the glory of the divine world order. Thus one would like to make the opponents of spiritual science aware of something that could well have been, even if it was not really so. Let us assume that someone had stepped forward before Columbus and said: We must not discover this new land, we live well in the old land, the sun shines so beautifully there. Do we know whether the sun also shines in the newly discovered land? So it is that those who believe their religious feelings disturbed by the discoveries of spiritual science appear to the spiritual scientist in the face of his religious ideas. He must have a shaky religious concept, a weak faith, who can believe that the sun of his religious feeling will not shine on every newly discovered country, even in the spiritual realm, just as the sun that shines on the old world also shines on the new world. And anyone who faces the facts impartially can be sure that this is so. But in its quest, when time becomes more and more imbued with spiritual science, it will be touched by it in a way that many today still cannot even dream of.

Spiritual science still has many opponents, understandably so. But in this spiritual science one does feel in harmony with all those spirits of humanity who, even if they have not yet had spiritual science, have sensed those connections of the human soul with the spiritual worlds that are revealed through spiritual science. In particular, with regard to what has been said about the new word of the tempter, one feels in harmony with Schöller and his foreboding of the spiritual world. Through his own scientific studies, Schiller has gained the impression that he has to lift man out of mere animality and that the human soul has a share in a spiritual world. On the soil of spiritual science, one feels in deep harmony with a leading spirit of the newer development of world-views when one can summarize, as in a feeling, what today wants to be expressed with broader sentences, with the words of Schiller:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought,
Leaped out of the amazed brain!

In confirmation that animality receded and that the human being belongs to a spiritual world, in confirmation of such sentences, spiritual science today stands before the quest of our time.

The expansion, the strengthening, the securing of this innermost essence, this spiritual inner essence of the soul, is to be offered to the search of the time through spiritual science.

Have you found something you want to ask, gentlemen?

Question: How are the sun's rays created? Are they a substance? And how is it that they fall on the earth in an arc?

Dr. Steiner: You don't mean that the sun's rays are a reality, do you? And why you think that they fall in an arc, you can perhaps explain something else.

The questioner says that he has heard that they do not fall straight down onto the earth, but in an arc.

Dr. Steiner: The thing is this: the sun's rays, as we see them, are not actually reality; rather, when we look at the sun as such, it is not actually a physical substance, it is actually spiritual and consists of a hollow space in space.

Now, you just have to imagine what such a hollow in space means. If you have a bottle of Selters water, as I have used the comparison before, then the bottle is filled with water, and you can hardly see the water; you know that there is water in it, but you can see very clearly the bubbles that are in there. But you know that if you pour out the water, the bubbles will disappear; they are actually air. As air, they are thinner than water. You don't see something that is denser than water, but you see the thinner part of the air in it. It is the same with the sun above. Everything around the sun is actually denser than the sun, and the sun is thinner than what is around the sun; that's why you see the sun. So it is an illusion to believe that the sun is something in space, so to speak. There is actually nothing there; there is a big hole, just as there is a hole in the seltzer water wherever there is a pearl, wherever there is air.

From this you can already see: It cannot be that rays emanate from the hole. The rays arise in a completely different way. You can visualize this in the following way. Suppose you have a street lamp; there is light inside this street lamp. If you are walking on the street and looking at this lantern, and it is a fairly bright evening, you will see the lantern with a firm, beautiful shine. But consider this: if it is a foggy evening, with fog all around, it will seem as if rays are emanating from the lantern, from the light! So you see the rays inside. You just don't see the rays from the light, otherwise you would also have to see the rays on a really good evening. But they come from what is all around; and the more fog there is, the more you see the rays. That is why you do not see the sun's rays as reality, but as something where you look through a fog at something less dense, into an emptiness. Do you understand?

But now further: When one looks through a mist into the distance, then the object that one sees always appears at a different location than where it actually is. If you are standing here on earth and you look through the air at the sun, which is actually empty, then, as you look, the sun will appear to be lower than where it actually is – then it will appear to be lower in the emptiness of space. As a result, something that has no reality anyway appears as if it were bent out of shape. So it is actually only because you are looking through the fog. That is the reality in this case. One must always marvel anew that today's physicists depict things as if there were a sun and rays emanating from it, while neither the sun nor the rays have any external physical reality. And in the space that is empty, there is indeed spiritual substance. And that is what must always be taken into account. That is what I can say in relation to this question.

Perhaps someone can think of something else.

Question: Could we hear something about Freemasonry and its purpose?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, gentlemen, today's Freemasonry is actually, one could say, only a shadow of what it once was. I have also spoken here on various occasions about the fact that in the very early days of human development there were no schools like those of today, nor churches like those of today, nor art institutions like those of today, but all of this was one. In the ancient mysteries, as they were called, there was the school, the art institution and the religion at the same time. This only diverged later. So that it actually became so for our Central European regions, one could even say, only in the 11th, 12th century; in former times the monasteries were, I would say, a memory of the old times. But in very ancient times, school, church and art institutions were one and the same thing. It was the case, however, that in the mysteries everything that was done there was taken much more seriously than it is taken today, for example, in our schools and also in our churches.

The situation in those days was that one had to prepare for a long time before one was allowed to learn. Today, basically, whether one can learn something or not is decided by a principle that has nothing to do with learning. Isn't it true that today the only thing that really matters is whether the person in question can afford to learn or not! Of course, this is something that has nothing to do with the abilities of the person concerned. And the situation was quite different in ancient times. Among all of humanity, those who were the most capable were selected – and people had a better eye for this than they do today. Of course, the system fell into decline almost everywhere because people are selfish by nature, but originally the principle was to select those who had abilities. And only then were they entitled to learn spiritually – not simply through drilling and training and elements, as taught today, but they were able to learn spiritually.

But this spiritual learning is linked to the fact that in preparation, one learns to develop very specific abilities. You just have to bear in mind that in ordinary life, when you touch something, you actually have a rough sensation of it; and the most that people achieve today is that they can sometimes distinguish substances from one another in their sensation, that they feel things in this way and distinguish something in their sensation. But people today are actually quite rough in their perception - I mean, in their purely physical perception; they distinguish between warmth and cold. At most, people who depend on it can develop a more refined sense of perception. The blind, for example. There are blind people who learn to feel the letterforms when they run their fingers over the paper. Each letter is, after all, engraved a little into the paper. If the feeling in the fingers is developed finely, one can already feel the letters a little. These are the only people who today learn to feel and sense more subtly. As a rule, the feeling is not developed at all, but one learns an enormous amount if one develops the feeling, and especially the feeling in the fingertips and in the fingers, very finely. Today, people do not just distinguish between warmth and cold through feeling. Yes, he can, because he can read the thermometer; the subtle differences in heat and cold become visible to him. But the thermometer was only invented over time. Before that, people only had their feelings. In the Mystery preparations, feelings were particularly developed at the beginning, especially in the fingers and fingertips. And it was the case that one learned to feel in the finest way.

So who was it in the mysteries who was the first to be prepared to feel very finely? Well, the other people could not feel so finely. Now suppose there was a mystery somewhere else. People traveled a lot in ancient times; they traveled almost as much as we do, and sometimes we are amazed at how fast they traveled. They didn't have a railroad; but they traveled because they were nimble, could walk faster, got less tired, walked a little better, and so on. And now they met on the way, such people. Yes, when two such people, who could feel subtly, shook hands, they recognized each other by that, and it was said: They recognize each other by their subtler feeling. That is what is called the grip - the grip when one gripped the other in ancient times and one recognized that he had a subtler feeling.

Now, gentlemen, consider the second point: once it was recognized that someone had a fine perception, then one went further, because one learned even more. In ancient times, people did not write as much as they do today; they actually only rarely wrote down the most important things. However, there was already a kind of correspondence in ancient times; but this correspondence was also more in all sorts of signs. And so many signs came into being for all sorts of things. It was also the case that people who did not belong to the mysteries, who were not the wise men, as they were called, only traveled in a smaller area when they traveled; they did not get very far. But the scholars, the wise men, traveled a great deal. They should have known not only all languages, but also all dialects. Of course, it is difficult even for a North German to speak Swiss German. But for these people, in addition to the language they spoke, there were certain signs for all the things that interested them in the mysteries. They made signs. For example, let's say that the usual gesture that one already has in one's mind was further developed: I understand –; or: That's not what you're telling me –; or: We understand each other well. – You drew the cross inside. So that there was a fully developed sign language precisely among the ancient sages, and everything that was known was contained in such signs. So you can see: All the people who were in the high schools of the time, in the mysteries, had certain signs for everything. Let's say, for example, that they wanted to record these signs. Then they painted them on. This is how the painted signs came about.

It is interesting that there are still certain writings today that clearly show that they originated from signs. This is, for example, the old script of the Indians, the Sanskrit script. In this script, you can see everywhere that everything has emerged from the curved and the straight line. Curved lines: dissatisfaction with something, antipathy; straight lines: sympathy. Just think about it: someone knows that straight lines mean sympathy and crooked lines mean antipathy. Now I want to tell him something. I also have my sign for that. He wants to tell me something; that can go well at the beginning, but later it can go badly. You see, it's still going well; later he draws a wavy line: then it can go badly. And so they had certain signs for everything. Those who were initiated into the mysteries would use these signs to communicate with each other. So the sign was used to access the handle.

Now, something very special was seen in the words in the past. You see, when a person speaks words today, he actually has no idea what the words are. But you can still feel something that is already contained in the sounds. You will easily be able to feel when someone is in a certain situation and he starts: A - that has something to do with amazement. A - the letter A is wonder. Now take the letter R: in it lies rolling, radiance: R = radiance. A = wonder, R = rolling, radiance.

Now, however, we know what we just said about the sun's rays. But even if the sun's rays are apparent, if they are not reality, it looks as if they are flowing. Now imagine someone wants to say: There is something up there that throws something at me here on earth, which, when it appears to me in the morning, causes amazement. He expresses the amazement with A, but that it comes from above, with R; he expresses that with: RA. Yes, that is what the ancient Egyptians called the sun god: Ra! Each of these letters contains a feeling, and we have put the letters together to form words. So there was a very broad sense to it. This has long been forgotten today. You can feel something like that in different things. Take, for example, I. This is something like a quiet joy; you come to terms with what you experience and perceive: I. That is why laughter is also expressed with hihi. That is a quiet joy. So each letter has something specific in it. And there is a knowledge through which you can almost form the words if you have an understanding of the sounds that are within the words.

Now you will say one thing, gentlemen: Yes, then, if that were the case, there could actually only be one language! Originally there was also one language among humanity; when one still had a feeling for these sounds, these letters, there was only one language. The languages then became different when people dispersed. But originally people sensed this, and in the mysteries it was taught correctly how to sense sounds, letters, and how to make words out of them. Therefore there was a language of its own in the mysteries. This language, everyone spoke among themselves. They did not speak the dialects among themselves, but this language everyone understood. If one said Ra, the other knew that this is the sun. If someone says, for example, E - just feel it: I recoil from something, it doesn't suit me; E = I have a slight fear, something like dread! Now take L: that is how something disappears, how something flows, and EL, yes, that is something that flows towards you and makes you recoil, makes you afraid. Thus in Babylon El = God was called. Thus everything was designated according to this principle. Or take the Bible: when you say: O - that is a sudden amazement, a sudden amazement that you cannot overcome. With the A - there you have a feeling that you like, an amazement that you like; O - there you want to step back; H, Ch is the breath. So that one can say: O = recoiling amazement; H = breath; I = one points to it, one is pleased about it, it is quiet joy = I. And M, that is: one wants to go into it oneself. You feel when you pronounce M: M - the breath goes out, and one feels that one is literally running after the breath; M is therefore: going away. Now let's put this together: El, we have already seen that, is the spirit coming from the wind; O = that is the recoiling amazement, H = the breath; so that is already the finer spirit that works as breath; I is the quiet joy; M is the going. There you have Elohim, with which the Bible begins; there you have these sounds in it. So that one can say: What are the Elohim? – The Elohim are beings in the wind that one is somewhat afraid of, that one shies away from a little, but that through breathing bring joy to people, and in turning towards people bring joy: Elohim. And so originally one studies in the words according to the sounds, according to the letters, what the words actually mean. Today people no longer sense what it is actually like.

What is the plural of “carriage” here in Switzerland? Do we say “carriage” here too, or do we say “carriages”? (Answer: “Carriages”! This answer is wrong. The Swiss German is “Wäge”, as Dr. Steiner suspected.) - We still say “carriage”. So there it is already confused; the original would be: “the carriage”, “the carriages”! We have a wide variety of plurals, for example, der Bruder, die Brüder. But that's the same in Switzerland! You don't say “the brothers,” do you? So it's: der Bruder, die Brüder. Or we say: das Holz, die Hölzer. You don't say “the woodworkers,” do you? It's: das Holz, die Hölzer. You see, gentlemen, when the plural is formed, the umlaut is formed: ainä, uinü, oinö. Why does that happen? Yes, the umlaut expresses that the thing becomes unclear! When I see one brother, he is clearly there as a person; when I see several brothers, it becomes unclear, and I have to distinguish one from the other, and if I cannot do that, it becomes unclear. You have to look at one after the other. The lack of clarity is indicated everywhere by the umlaut. So wherever there is an umlaut in a word, something is unclear.

There is something in language by which you can actually recognize the whole person; there is the whole person. And so people also expressed how certain meanings already lay within the letters that were written down, within these signs. A was always astonishment. When the old Jew wrote down x like this, he said to himself: Who is astonished in the world? The animals are not really surprised, only man. That is why he called man in general: amazement. When he wrote down his Aleph, the x, the Hebrew A, it also meant man.

And so it was that each letter also meant a specific thing or being. All this was known to the people who were initiated into the mysteries. So if someone travelled and met another, and they had the same knowledge, they recognized each other by the word. So you can say: In the old days, it was so that people who had studied something, who knew a lot, recognized each other by touch, sign and word. Yes, but, gentlemen, there was something in it! All learning was really contained in these signs, gestures and words. Because by learning to feel, one learned to distinguish objects. By having the signs, one had an imitation of all that was a natural secret. And in the word, one came to know the inner human being. So you can say: in the grip you had perception; in the sign you had nature, and in the word you had the human being, his inner wonder or his recoil, his joy and so on. So you had nature and man and you reproduced it in signs, grips and words.

Now, in the course of human development, what emerged on the one hand was divided into the university and later into schools, and on the other hand into the church and into art. None of the three understood what was originally present; and grip, sign and word were completely lost. Only those who had then realized: Gosh, those old sages, they had a certain power because they knew that! It is a justified power that a person has when he knows something, because it benefits his fellow human beings; if no one knew how to make a locomotive, humanity would never have one! So when someone knows something, it benefits people; that is a justified power. But later on people simply appropriated the power by copying the outward signs. Just as these or those signs once meant something in the past and later on the meaning was lost, so all that has lost its meaning. And then, I might say, by imitating the old mysteries, all sorts of things were formed in which you only have the outward form. What did people do? They no longer had the subtle perception, but they agreed on a sign by which they would recognize each other. They shake hands in a certain way, by which one knows: he belongs to this association. They recognized each other by the handshake. Then they make another sign in some way. The sign and the handshake are different, depending on whether one is in the first, second or third degree. That is how people recognize each other. But it is nothing more than just a sign of recognition. And in the same way, they have certain words for each degree, which they can pronounce in certain Masonic lodges; let us say, for the first degree, for example, if you want to know: what is the word? - [the password] Jachin. We know that he learned the word Jachin in the Masonic lodge, otherwise he would not have been initiated into the first degree. It is only a password. And then he also makes the sign and so on.

Now, actually, this kind of Freemasonry has only developed when everything else from the mysteries was forgotten; and some of the old things that were no longer understood were imitated. So that what Freemasonry has adopted of the cult is mostly no longer understood by Freemasons today; they also do not understand the sign, grip and word because they do not know what it is all about. They do not know, for example, that when they speak the word of the second degree from Table 21: Boaz, that the B is as much as a house; O is, as I told you, this restrained wonder; A: that is the pleasant amazement; $ is the sign for the snake. With that you have expressed: We recognize the world as that which is a great house, built by the great architect of the world, at which one must marvel both anxiously and comfortably, and in which there is also evil, the snake. Yes, people knew about such things in ancient times; they looked at nature and saw these things, looked at people and saw these things. Today, in certain Masonic orders, those who have completed the second degree pronounce the word 'Boaz' without realizing its significance. Similarly, if in the third degree people put their fingers on the pulse, it really meant that they had recognized that the person had a fine intuitive perception. You could tell by the way the finger was placed on the pulse. Later, this became the third degree. Today, people just know when someone comes and takes their hand like that: that's a Freemason. So in these things there is actually something old, venerable, great, something in which all earlier learning lay; now this has been completely reduced to formulaic emptiness. So that today the Freemasons have such things; they also have ceremonies, a cult: that is still from the times when everything was also shown in a cult, in ceremonies, so that it was more forceful for people. The Freemasons still do that today. So that in this inward relationship the Masonic order really no longer has any significance.

But for many people, going through with such covenants when they were established was terribly boring, because it actually degenerated into a kind of gimmick. So something was needed that could be poured into Freemasonry. And that's why the Freemasons became more or less political, or again more or less spread religious enlightenment teachings. The unenlightened Roman doctrine was administered by Rome. The doctrine that opposed Rome was then spread by Freemasonry. Therefore, Rome, the Roman cult and Freemasonry are the very greatest opponents. This is no longer connected with what the cult, sign, grip and word were in the Freemasons, but that just came in between. In France, the union was not called a union, but “Orient de France”, because everything was taken from the Orient - “Grand Orient de France”, that is the great French Masonic union. The other things, the signs, the grips and the words, are only there to keep the people together, they are the means by which they recognize each other. The joint worship is where they come together under particularly solemn circumstances; just as others come together in the church, so these Freemasons come together under ceremonies that come from the ancient mysteries. That is what keeps the people together.

It was also common, especially in Italy at certain times, when political secret societies were formed, to recognize and come together through certain ceremonies, signs and grips. Political alliances and political associations have always been linked to this ancient mystery knowledge. And today, once again, it is quite remarkable: if you go to certain Polish and Austrian areas today, you will find posters; on these posters are strange signs and strange letters that then combine into words; at first you not know what the poster means at first – but such a poster, which is everywhere in Polish and Austrian areas today, is the outward sign of an alliance formed by certain nationalist sides among the youth. The same things are being done there. It is actually widespread, and people know very well that the sign also has a certain strong power. There are associations, the German-Volkish, for example, they have an old Indian sign: two snakes entwined, or also, if you will, a wheel, which then transformed into the swastika. They have it today as a badge. And you will often hear that the swastika is adopted as a sign for certain chauvinistic nationalistic circles. This is because of the tradition that the ancients expressed their rule through such signs. And so it has always been on a large scale in the Freemasons' Association. The Freemasons' Association actually exists to keep certain people together, and it does this through ceremonies, signs, grips and words. And then it pursues secret aims by keeping certain secrets among all those who are connected under these ceremonies, signs, grip and word. Of course, secret aims can only be pursued if they do not all know; and so it is with the Masonic federations that they often pursue political or cultural and similar aims.

But now you can say one more thing, gentlemen. You see, the people who are connected in Masonic associations are by no means to be challenged because of that, but sometimes they have the very best and noblest intentions; they are only of the opinion that you cannot win people over to something other than through such alliances, and therefore most Masonic associations also have the purpose of practicing charity on a large scale. That is all well and good, to practice charity and humanity. This is also something that is practiced on a large scale by these associations. Therefore, it is no wonder that the Freemason can always point out that an awful lot of extraordinary humanitarian and charitable work is founded and established precisely by the Masonic associations. You just have to say to yourself: in this day and age, all such things are actually no longer in keeping with the times. Because, right, what do we have to reject most today in such things? We have to reject isolation. This also leads to the emergence of a spiritual aristocracy, which should not exist. And the democratic principle, which must be applied more and more, is actually completely opposed to the Masonic alliance as well as to the closed priesthoods. So that one can say: It is already the case that anyone who is still able to understand today what is contained in some Masonic ceremonies for the first, second and third degrees, can recognize in what the Freemasons themselves often do not understand that they often go back to very ancient wisdom; but this is not the main significance. The great significance is that today many Masonic associations, alliances, are actually home to many political or other social charitable endeavors. But the Catholic Church and the Freemasons fight each other tooth and nail. However, this has only developed over time.

Now, of course, it is very easy to mistake such things. And it has also occurred: the Freemasons have a certain clothing for their ceremonies; for example, they have a lambskin apron. Some have said: Freemasonry is nothing more than a game with the masonry trade because the mason has a lambskin apron. But that is not true. And the apron that is there is there to show – and it has always originally been made of lambskin – that the one who is in such covenants should not be a raging fellow in terms of the passions; so the genitals are to be covered with his apron, and that is the sign of it. So it was something that expressed the human character in signs. And so it is with very many signs that also lie in clothing.

Then there are also higher degrees where a garment similar to a priest's is worn; there every single detail has a meaning. For example, I have told you that man, in addition to the physical body, also has an etheric body. And just as the priest has a white linen garment, a shirt-like robe, to express the etheric body, so too certain high degrees of the Freemasons have such a garment, and for the astral body - it is colored - there is a toga, an outer garment; all this expresses it. And the mantle, which was then associated with the helmet, expressed the power of the ego.

All these things lead back to old, very ingenious, significant customs that have lost their meaning today. If someone likes Freemasonry, they should not take what I have said as a disparaging comment. I just wanted to explain how things are. Of course, there may be an order of Freemasons that brings together exceptionally good people and so on. And in today's world, something like that can be particularly important. Really, what most people learn today when they become doctors or lawyers – yes, that does not capture their hearts. And that is why many lawyers and doctors still become Freemasons, because at least they then have the solemnity of the old ceremonies and something that no longer allows them much to think about, but which is still something: sign, grip and word, but which indicates that man does not live only in the external material.

That is what I wanted to tell you. Do you have anything else you would like to ask?

Question: In America there is something called the Ku Klux Klan. What about it? Can we hear from Dr. Steiner about what it means? You read about it all the time.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, you see, the Ku-Klux-Klan is one of the newest inventions in this area, and it is an invention that should be taken more seriously than it is usually taken. You know, gentlemen, that only a few decades ago there was actually enthusiasm for a certain cosmopolitanism. Today it is still there, of course, among the working class, among social democracy - these are an international element - but in bourgeois circles and in other circles, nationalism is getting terribly out of hand, and the mood for nationalism is certainly strong. And you will also remember that those people who stood behind Woodrow Wilson – he himself was only a kind of front man – actually counted on this nationalism, wanted to have national states everywhere, wanted to incite nationalism everywhere, and so on. Yes, one can have one's own views about that! But now there are people everywhere who are developing the tendency to take nationalism to the extreme. And it was precisely in this endeavor to take nationalism to the extreme that the Ku Klux Klan was formed in America. It now works with methods such as signs, in the sense I have described.

If you are considering such connections, then you have to know that signs also have a certain hypnotic power. You know, if you have a chicken (it is drawn), if you let the chicken poke the ground with its beak, and you draw a chalk line from there, the chicken will follow the chalk line! It is hypnotized, it follows the line! You just have to poke the beak at the beginning, then it will follow the chalk line because it is hypnotized by the line. So every sign has a meaning, not only the straight line for the chicken, a certain soporific meaning, if you look for it. And that is used by certain secret societies to choose just such signs, through which they beguile the other person, put him to sleep, so that he does not assert his own judgment. And such means are used by such secret societies in particular. In America, the Ku-Klux-Klan belongs to this group. Now the Ku Klux Klan is dangerous because such associations do not just target one nation, but they want to have the nationalist principle everywhere. No one can say: the Ku Klux Klan need only remain an American institution because it particularly wants to promote American nationalism. The Ku Klux Klan supporter does not say that; instead, he says: nationalism should be promoted in general, so in Hungary, in Germany, in France. - Very well! He is not concerned with Americanism; he is not a patriot, but he sees in this insistence of people on nationalism something which, when it then interacts with the most diverse nations, then achieves what he wants to achieve: namely, to bring people absolutely into chaos. That is what he wants: he wants to bring everything into chaos! There is pure destructive rage in it. And so the Ku Klux Klan is particularly dangerous because it can spread in all countries. And you cannot say that if it wants to spread here in Switzerland, it is an American institution, but rather it is a national Swiss institution.

And so were basically the Masonic alliances; they were international, but for the individual countries always nationalist. But they did not pay much attention to that, but they did it more to the outside world, that they joined in with what was going on in the outside world. And now one can say: But are not such people actually insane, who want to stir up something like an absolutely nationalist principle, and who want to destroy everything there? You can't really say that either. Of course, when you ask, it is said: Of course you don't do such things. But people say to themselves: It's all so corrupt today – the leaders say this to the others who follow – it's all the same to the others, so it makes no sense to cultivate the things that are there today. You first have to treat humanity like a confused mass. Then people will come to their senses again, and then they will learn something proper. People do have an idea, namely the Ku Klux Klan has an idea in this regard.

You mean: not?

The questioner: Yes! But that's strange!

Dr. Steiner: You see, many things in cultural life are strange, and we have already mentioned things that looked strange. But the strange is sometimes quite dangerous. It seems strange to you, but sometimes it is extraordinarily dangerous.

Well, gentlemen, tomorrow during the day I have to travel again – to Breslau. I will then say when we will have the next lesson.

Vielleicht fällt jemandem noch etwas anderes ein?

Frage: Könnte man etwas hören über die Freimaurerei und ihren Zweck?

Dr. Steiner: Nun, sehen Sie, meine Herren, die heutige Freimaurerei, die ist eigentlich, man könnte sagen, nur der Schatten dessen, was sie einmal war. Ich habe hier auch schon verschiedentlich davon geredet, daß es in sehr alten Zeiten der Menschheitsentwickelung nicht solche Schulen gab wie heute, auch nicht solche Kirchen und auch nicht solche Kunstanstalten, sondern das war alles eins. In den alten Mysterien, wie man es nannte, war zugleich die Schule, die Kunstanstalt und die Religion. Das ist erst später auseinandergegangen. So daß es eigentlich für unsere mitteleuropäischen Gegenden, man könnte sogar sagen, erst im 11., 12. Jahrhundert so geworden ist; früher waren die Klöster, ich möchte sagen, ein Andenken an die alte Zeit. Aber in ganz alten Zeiten war das so, daß Schule, Kirche und Kunstanstalten eines waren. Es war aber so, daß in den Mysterien alles das, was da getrieben wurde, viel ernster genommen worden ist als heute zum Beispiel in unseren Schulen und auch in unseren Kirchen die Sachen genommen werden.

Die Sache ist nämlich damals so gewesen, daß man lange Zeit hat vorbereitet werden müssen, bis man hat lernen dürfen. Heute entscheidet ja im Grunde genommen, ob man etwas lernen kann oder nicht, wirklich ein Prinzip, das gar nichts zu tun hat mit dem Lernen. Nicht wahr, heute entscheidet eigentlich nur das, ob für den Betreffenden, der lernen soll, das Geld aufgebracht werden kann oder nicht aufgebracht werden kann! Das ist natürlich etwas, was gar nichts zu tun hat mit den Fähigkeiten, die der Betreffende hat. Und ganz anders nun war die Sache in alten Zeiten. Da hat man unter der ganzen Menschheit diejenigen ausgesucht - man hat einen besseren Blick auch dafür gehabt als heute -, die etwa die Fähigsten waren. Natürlich ist die Sache dann fast überall, weil die Menschen schon einmal egoistisch sind, in Verfall geraten; aber das Prinzip war ursprünglich dies, daß man diejenigen aussuchte, die Fähigkeiten hatten. Und die wurden dann erst dazu berechtigt, daß sie geistig lernen konnten - nicht einfach durch Drill und durch Dressur und durch Elemente, wie heute gelehrt wird, sondern die konnten geistig lernen.

Dieses geistige Lernen, das ist nun aber damit verknüpft, daß man in der Vorbereitung lernt, ganz bestimmte Fähigkeiten auszubilden. Sie müssen nur bedenken, wenn man im gewöhnlichen Leben irgend etwas angreift, so hat man eigentlich eine grobe Empfindung davon; und das Äußerste, was heute die Menschen erreichen, ist, daß sie in der Empfindung manchmal Stoffe voneinander unterscheiden können, daß sie die Dinge so befühlen und etwas in der Empfindung unterscheiden. Aber die Menschen sind in ihrer Empfindung - ich meine, in der rein physischen Empfindung - heute eigentlich recht grob; sie unterscheiden Wärme und Kälte. Höchstens daß es die Leute, die darauf angewiesen sind, zu einer feineren Empfindung bringen. Das sind zum Beispiel die Blinden. Es gibt ja Blinde, die lernen, wenn sie das Papier überfahren, die Buchstabenformen befühlen. Jeder Buchstabe ist ja ein bißchen eingegraben ins Papier. Wenn das Gefühl in den Fingern fein ausgebildet wird, kann man schon die Buchstaben etwas befühlen. Das sind die einzigen Leute, die heute lernen, feiner etwas fühlen, feiner etwas empfinden. In der Regel wird die Empfindung gar nicht ausgebildet, aber man lernt ungeheuer viel, wenn man das Gefühl, und namentlich das Gefühl in den Fingerspitzen und in den Fingern ganz fein ausbildet. Heute unterscheidet der Mensch Wärme und Kälte nicht bloß durch das Gefühl. Ja, das kann er auch heute, deshalb, weil er das Thermometer lesen kann; da werden ihm die feinen Unterschiede in Wärme und Kälte sichtbar. Aber das Thermometer ist ja auch erst im Laufe der Zeit erfunden worden. Vorher hatten die Leute nur ihr Gefühl. Da wurden in den Mysterienvorbereitungen anfangs nämlich die Gefühle, besonders in den Fingern und Fingerspitzen, ganz besonders ausgebildet. Und es war so, daß man in feinster Weise empfinden lernte.

Wer war also eigentlich in den Mysterien derjenige, der zuerst vorbereitet worden war, ganz fein zu empfinden? Nun, die anderen Menschen konnten nicht so fein empfinden. Nehmen Sie nun an, irgendwo, an einem andern Orte, war ein Mysterium. Die Leute reisten ja viel im Altertum; sie reisten fast ebensoviel wie wir, und manchmal ist man erstaunt, wie schnell sie reisten. Sie hatten keine Eisenbahn; aber sie reisten, weil sie flinker waren, weil sie schneller gehen konnten, weniger müde wurden, auch etwas besser gingen und so weiter. Und nun trafen sie sich auf dem Wege, solche Leute. Ja, wenn sich zwei solche Leute, die fein empfinden konnten, die Hand gaben, so merkten sie das aneinander, und man sagte dann: Die erkennen sich an ihrer feineren Empfindung. Das ist dasjenige, was man den Griff nennt - den Griff, wenn man den anderen angriff in alten Zeiten und man merkte, der hat eine feinere Empfindung.

Nun weiter, meine Herren, bedenken Sie einmal das zweite: Wenn erkannt wurde, daß einer eine feine Empfindung hatte, dann ging man weiter, denn man lernte noch mehr. In alten Zeiten schrieb man ja nicht so viel wie heute; man schrieb eigentlich nur sehr selten und das Allerallerheiligste auf. Allerdings, es gibt im Altertum auch schon eine Art von Korrespondenz; aber auch diese Korrespondenz war mehr in allerlei Zeichen. Und so entstanden viele Zeichen für alles mögliche. Es war ja auch so, daß die Leute, die nicht zu den Mysterien gehörten, die also nicht die Weisen, wie man sie nannte, waren, wenn sie reisten, nur in kleinerem Umkreis reisten; die kamen nicht sehr weit. Aber die Gelehrten, die Weisen, die reisten sehr viel. Da hätten sie eigentlich nicht nur alle Sprachen, sondern alle Dialekte kennen müssen. Es ist ja natürlich schwer, schon wenn man Norddeutscher ist, den Schweizer Dialekt zu können. Nun aber gab es für diese Leute in den Mysterien außer der Sprache, die sie sprachen, für alle Dinge, die sie interessierten, gewisse Zeichen. Sie machten Zeichen. So zum Beispiel, sagen wir, es wurde die gewöhnliche Gebärde, die man schon in der Empfindung hat, weiter ausgebildet: Ich begreife -; oder: Das ist nichts, was du mir sagst -; oder: Wir verstehen uns gut miteinander. - Man zeichnete das Kreuz hinein. So daß es eine voll ausgebildete Zeichensprache gerade unter den alten Weisen gab, und man legte alles, was man wußte, in solche Zeichen hinein. So daß Sie einsehen können: Alle die Leute, die in den damaligen hohen Schulen, in den Mysterien, waren, hatten für alles gewisse Zeichen. Sagen wir zum Beispiel, sie wollten nun diese Zeichen festhalten. Dann erst malten sie sie auf. So entstanden die aufgemalten Zeichen.

Es ist schon interessant, daß es heute noch gewisse Schriften gibt, welche deutlich erkennen lassen, daß sie aus Zeichen hervorgegangen sind. Das ist zum Beispiel die alte Schrift der Inder, die Sanskritschrift. Bei ihr sieht man überall, daß alles aus der krummen und aus der geraden Linie hervorgegangen ist. Krumme Linien: Unzufriedenheit mit etwas, Antipathie; gerade Linien: Sympathie. Bedenken Sie einmal: Es weiß einer, die geraden Linien bedeuten Sympathie, die krummen Linien bedeuten Antipathie. Jetzt will ich ihm etwas mitteilen. Dafür habe ich auch mein Zeichen. Er will mir etwas sagen; das kann ja anfangs gut gehen, später aber kann die Geschichte schlecht werden. Sehen Sie, da geht es noch gut; später zeichnet er eine Schlangenlinie: da kann es schlecht gehen. Und so hatte man für alles bestimmte Zeichen. An diesen Zeichen oder mit diesen Zeichen verständigten sich diejenigen wieder, die in den Mysterien waren. So daß man zum Griff dazu hatte das Zeichen.

Nun, etwas ganz Besonderes sah man früher in den Worten. Sehen Sie, wenn heute der Mensch Worte spricht, so hat er eigentlich gar keine Ahnung mehr, was es mit den Worten ist. Aber man kann doch noch etwas empfinden, was in den Lauten schon drinnen liegt. Sie werden leicht empfinden können, wenn einer irgendwie in einer Lebenslage ist und er fängt an: A - da hat das irgend etwas mit Verwunderung zu tun. A - der Buchstabe A ist Verwunderung. Nun nehmen Sie dazu den Buchstaben R: dadrinnen liegt das Hinrollen, Strahlen: R = Ausstrahlen. A = Verwunderung, R = Rollen, Ausstrahlen.

Nun wissen wir jetzt allerdings das, was wir eben über die Sonnenstrahlen gesagt haben. Aber auch wenn die Sonnenstrahlen scheinbar sind, wenn sie keine Wirklichkeit sind: es sieht so aus, wie wenn sie hinströmen würden. Nun denken Sie sich, es will einer sagen: Da oben ist etwas, das wirft mir hier auf der Erde etwas zu, was, wenn es mir am Morgen erscheint, Verwunderung hervorruft. Die Verwunderung drückt er aus durch A, aber daß es von oben kommt, mit R; das drückt er also aus mit: RA. Ja, so haben die alten Ägypter den Sonnengott genannt: Ra! In jedem von diesen Buchstaben liegt eben ein Empfinden darinnen, und wir haben die Buchstaben zu Worten zusammengesetzt. Es war also eine ganz ausgebreitete Empfindung drinnen. Das ist heute längst vergessen. So etwas kann man an verschiedenen Dingen spüren. Nehmen Sie zum Beispiel: I. Das ist so etwas wie eine leise Freude; man findet sich ab mit dem, was man erfährt, wahrnimmt: I. Daher wird auch das Lachen ausgedrückt mit: hihi. Das ist eine leise Freude. So hat jeder Buchstabe etwas Bestimmtes in sich. Und es gibt eine Kenntnis, durch die man geradezu die Worte bilden kann, wenn man Verständnis hat für die Laute, die in den Worten drinnen sind.

Nun werden Sie eines sagen, meine Herren: Ja, dann könnte es eigentlich, wenn das so wäre, nur eine einzige Sprache geben! - Ursprünglich hat es unter der Menschheit auch eine einzige Sprache gegeben; als man noch ein Empfinden hatte für diese Laute, diese Buchstaben, hat es nur eine einzige Sprache gegeben. Die Sprachen sind dann verschieden geworden, als sich die Menschen zerstreut haben. Aber ursprünglich haben die Menschen das empfunden, und in den Mysterien wurde das richtig gelehrt, wie man Laute, Buchstaben empfindet und zu Worten macht. Daher gab es eine eigene Sprache in den Mysterien. Diese Sprache, die sprachen alle untereinander. Sie sprachen untereinander nicht die Dialekte, aber diese Sprache, die verstanden alle. Wenn einer Ra sagte, wußte der andere, daß das die Sonne ist. Wenn einer zum Beispiel sagt: E - fühlen Sie nur: Ich schrecke etwas zurück, das paßt mir nicht; E = ich habe eine leise Furcht, so etwas wie Furcht! Nun, nehmen Sie L: Das ist so, wiewenn etwas hinschwindend ist, wie wenn etwas fließt, und EL, ja, das ist etwas, das hinfließt und wodurch man zurückschreckt, wodurch man sich fürchtet. So hat in Babylon El = Gott geheißen. So wurde alles nach diesem Prinzip bezeichnet. Oder nehmen Sie die Bibel: Wenn Sie sagen: O - das ist eine Verwunderung, eine plötzliche Verwunderung, gegen die man nicht aufkommt. Beim A - da hat man eine Empfindung, welche man gern hat, eine Verwunderung, die man gern hat; O - da will man zurück weichen; H, Ch ist der Atem. So daß man sagen kann: O = zurückweichende Verwunderung; H = Atem; I = da zeigt man hin darauf, man freut sich darüber, es ist leise Freude = I. Und M, das ist: Man will selber hineingehen. Sie spüren, wenn Sie M aussprechen: M - da geht der Atem hinaus, und man fühlt, man läuft förmlich nach dem Atem; M ist also: hinweggehen. Jetzt setzen wir das zusammen: El, das haben wir schon gesehen, ist der im Winde herkommende Geist, El; O = das ist die zurückweichende Verwunderung, H = der Atem; das ist also schon der feinere Geist, der als Atem wirkt; I ist die leise Freude; M ist das Hingehen. Da haben Sie Elohim, womit die Bibel beginnt; da haben Sie diese Laute drinnen. So daß man sagen kann: Was sind die Elohim? - Die Elohim sind im Winde Wesen, vor denen man etwas Angst hat, vor denen man etwas zurückweicht, die aber durch den Atem zur Freude der Menschen, im Hingehen zu den Menschen Freude haben: Elohim. Und so ist ursprünglich in den Worten nach den Lauten, nach den Buchstaben zu studieren, was die Worte eigentlich bedeuten. Die Menschen spüren heute gar nicht mehr, wie das eigentlich ist.

Wie heißt hier in der Schweiz die Mehrzahl von Wagen? Heißt es auch hier: Wagen, oder heißt es die Wägen ? (Antwort: Die Wagen! Diese Antwort ist falsch. Es heißt im Schweizerdeutsch «Wäge», wie Dr. Steiner vermutet hat.) - Die Wagen heißt es noch. Da ist es also schon verwuschelt; das Ursprüngliche wäre: der Wagen, die Wägen! Bei der Mehrzahl haben wir das in der verschiedensten Weise; zum Beispiel haben wir: der Bruder, die Brüder. Das ist aber doch wohl auch so in der Schweiz! Sie sagen doch nicht: die Bruder? Also: der Bruder, die Brüder. Oder sagen wir: das Holz, die Hölzer. Man sagt ja wohl auch hier nicht: die Holzer. Das Holz, die Hölzer. Sie sehen, meine Herren, wenn die Mehrzahl gebildet wird, da wird der Umlaut gebildet: ainä, uinü, oinö. Warum geschieht das? Ja, der Umlaut, der drückt aus, daß die Sache undeutlich wird! Wenn ich einen Bruder sehe, dann ist er deutlich da als eine Person; wenn ich mehrere Brüder sehe, dann wird es undeutlich, da muß ich schon einen von dem andern unterscheiden, und wenn ich das nicht kann, wird es undeutlich. Man muß einen um den andern anschauen. Das Undeutlichwerden wird überall durch den Umlaut angedeutet. Wo also ein Umlaut irgendwo in einem Worte ist, da ist irgend etwas undeutlich.

In der Sprache liegt also etwas, woran man eigentlich den ganzen Menschen erkennen kann; da ist der ganze Mensch. Und so drückten die Leute auch aus, wie schon in den Buchstaben, die man aufschrieb, in diesen Zeichen gewisse Bedeutungen drinnen liegen. A war immer Verwunderung. Wenn nun der alte Jude so x aufgeschrieben hat, so sagte er sich: Wer verwundert sich in der Erdenwelt? Die Tiere verwundern sich eigentlich nicht, nur der Mensch. Daher nannte er den Menschen überhaupt: die Verwunderung. Wenn er sein Aleph aufschrieb, das x , das hebräische A, dann bedeutete das aber auch den Menschen.

Und so war es, daß jeder Buchstabe zugleich ein bestimmtes Ding oder Wesen bedeutete. Das alles kannten wiederum die Leute, die in den Mysterien waren. Wenn also einer reiste und traf einen anderen, und sie hatten die gemeinsame Kenntnis, so erkannten sie sich am Wort. So daß man sagen kann: In den alten Zeiten war es so, daß die Leute, die etwas gelernt haben, die also viel wußten, einander erkannten an Griff, Zeichen und Wort. Ja, aber, meine Herren, da war etwas darinnen! Da war wirklich zugleich die ganze Gelehrsamkeit drinnen in diesen Zeichen, Griff und Wort. Denn dadurch, daß man fühlen lernte, lernte man die Gegenstände unterscheiden. Dadurch, daß man die Zeichen hatte, hatte man ein Nachahmen alles desjenigen, was Naturgeheimnisse waren. Und im Worte lernte man den inneren Menschen kennen. So daß man also sagen kann: Im Griff hatte man die Wahrnehmung; im Zeichen hatte man die Natur, und im Wort hatte man den Menschen, seine innere Verwunderung oder sein Zurückbeben, seine Freude und so weiter. Man hatte also Natur und Mensch und hat sie wiedergegeben in Zeichen, Griff und Wort.

Nun, im Laufe der Menschheitsentwickelung ist dann dasjenige entstanden, was sich auf der einen Seite trennte in die Universität und später in die Schulen, und auf der anderen Seite in die Kirche und in die Kunst. Alle drei haben nicht mehr verstanden, was ursprünglich vorhanden war; und ganz verloren ging Griff, Zeichen und Wort. Nur diejenigen haben es verstanden, die dann bemerkt hatten: Donnerwetter, diese alten Weisen, die hatten ja dadurch eine gewisse Macht, daß sie das wußten! Das ist eine gerechtfertigte Macht, dieein Mensch hat, wenn er etwas weiß, denn dadurch kommt es seinen Mitmenschen zugute; wenn keiner eine Lokomotive zu machen verstünde, so würde die Menschheit eben niemals eine Lokomotive haben! Also wenn einer etwas weiß, so kommt es den Menschen zugute; das ist eine gerechtfertigte Macht. Später aber haben sich die Leute einfach die Macht angeeignet, indem sie abgeguckt haben die äußeren Zeichen. Gerade wie diese oder jene Zeichen früher einmal etwas bedeutet haben und man später die Bedeutung verloren hat, so hat alles das die Bedeutung verloren. Und es bildete sich dann, ich möchte sagen, durch Nachäffung von den alten Mysterien, allerlei aus, in dem Sie nur äußerlich die Sache haben. Was haben die Leute getan? Die hatten die feine Empfindung nicht mehr, aber sie verabredeten ein Zeichen, an dem sie sich erkennen. Sie geben sich die Hand in einer bestimmten Weise, wodurch einer weiß: der gehört zu diesem Bund. Da haben sie sich erkannt am Griff. Dann machen sie noch in irgendeiner Weise ein Zeichen. Das Zeichen und der Griff sind verschieden, je nachdem der eine im ersten oder zweiten oder dritten Grad ist. Daran erkennen sich dann die Leute. Aber es ist nicht mehr darinnen als nur ein Erkennungszeichen. Und ebenso haben sie für jeden Grad bestimmte Worte, die sie aussprechen können in gewissen freimaurerischen Bünden; sie haben, sagen wir, für den ersten Grad zum Beispiel, wenn man wissen will: Was ist das Wort? - [das Losungswort] Jachin. Man weiß, er hat das Wort Jachin in der Freimaurerloge gelernt, sonst wäre er nicht im ersten Grad drin. Das ist nur noch ein Losungswort. Und ebenso macht er dann das Zeichen und so weiter.

Nun, eigentlich hat diese Art der Freimaurerei sich erst entwickelt, als alles übrige aus den Mysterien vergessen war; und es wurden einzelne von den alten Dingen, die man nicht mehr verstand, nachgeahmt. So daß dasjenige, was die Freimaurerei an Kultus übernommen hat, meistens heute von den Freimaurern nicht mehr verstanden wird; auch Zeichen, Griff und Wort verstehen sie nicht, weil sie all das nicht wissen, um was es sich da handelt. Sie wissen zum Beispiel nicht, daß, wenn sie das Wort des zweiten Grades aus Tafel 21 sprechen: Boas, daß das B so viel ist wie ein Haus; O ist, wie ich Ihnen gesagt habe, diese zurückhaltende Verwunderung; A: das ist die angenehme Verwunderung; $ ist das Zeichen für die Schlange. Damit haben Sie ausgedrückt: Wir erkennen die Welt als dasjenige an, was ein großes Haus ist, das der große Baumeister der Welt gebaut hat, über das man sich sowohl ängstlich als auch behaglich verwundern muß und in dem es auch das Böse gibt, die Schlange. - Ja, so etwas hat man gewußt in alten Zeiten; da hat man die Natur angeschaut nach diesen Dingen, den Menschen angeschaut nach diesen Dingen. Heute sprechen ahnungslos in gewissen Freimaurerbünden diejenigen, die den zweiten Grad haben, das Wort «Boas» aus. Ebenso, nicht wahr, wenn beim dritten Grad die Leute die Finger gelegt haben auf die Pulsader, dann war das wirklich eine Erkenntnis, daß der Betreffende eine feine Empfindung hat. Das merkte man an der Art und Weise, wie der Finger lag an der Pulsader. Das ist später geworden der Griff für den dritten Grad. Die Leute wissen heute nur noch, wenn einer kommt und so die Hand nimmt: das ist ein Freimaurer. Also in diesen Dingen ist eigentlich etwas Altes, Ehrwürdiges, Großes, etwas, worin alle frühere Gelehrsamkeit gelegen ist; das ist jetzt also ganz ins Formelhafte übertragen, ins Nichtige ausgegangen. So daß heute der Freimaurerbund solche Dinge hat; er hat auch Zeremonien, einen Kultus: das ist noch aus den Zeiten, wo man alles auch in einem Kultus, in Zeremonien gezeigt hat, damit es den Leuten mehr eindringlich war. Die Freimaurer machen das auch heute noch. So daß in dieser innerlichen Beziehung wirklich der Freimaurerorden keine Bedeutung mehr hat.

Aber es ist doch so furchtbar langweilig für viele Leute gewesen, wenn solche Bündnisse eingerichtet worden sind, da die Sachen mitzumachen; denn eigentlich artete es aus in eine Art Spielerei. Es brauchte also etwas, was man wiederum hineinschüttete, hineingoß in die Freimaurerei. Und dadurch entstand das, daß dann die Freimaurer mehr oder weniger politisch wurden, oder wiederum mehr oder weniger religiöse Aufklärungslehren verbreiteten. Die unaufgeklärte römische Lehre wurde von Rom verwaltet. Diejenige Lehre, die Rom gegenüberstand, wurde dann von der Freimaurerei verbreitet. Daher sind Rom, der römische Kultus und die Freimaurerei die allergrößten Gegner. Das hängt gar nicht mehr zusammen mit dem, was nun der Kultus, Zeichen, Griff und Wort, bei den Freimaurern war, sondern das ist eben dazwischen gekommen. In Frankreich nannte man den Bund nicht Bund, sondern «Orient de France», weil alles von dem Orient genommen ist - «Grand Orient de France», das ist der große französische Freimaurerbund. Das andere, Zeichen, Griff und Wort, das ist nur noch, damit die Leute zusammenhalten, das ist das, woran sie sich erkennen. Der gemeinschaftliche Kultus ist das, wo sie zusammenkommen unter besonders feierlichen Umständen; so wie die anderen in der Kirche zusammenkommen, so kommen diese Freimaurer unter Zeremonien, die von alten Mysterien herrühren, zusammen. Das hält die Leute zusammen.

Es war ja auch besonders in Italien zu gewissen Zeiten, als politische Geheimbünde sich bildeten, Sitte, unter gewissen Zeremonien, Zeichen und Griff, sich zu erkennen und zusammenzukommen. Politische Bünde, politische Vereinigungen haben immer angeknüpft an dieses alte Mysterienwissen. Und es ist heute ja wiederum ganz merkwürdig: Wenn Sie heute zum Beispiel in gewisse polnische und österreichische Gegenden gehen, finden Sie Plakate; auf diesen Plakaten sind sonderbare Zeichen und sonderbare Buchstaben, die sich dann zu Worten verbinden; man weiß zunächst nicht, was dieses Plakat bedeutet - aber solch ein Plakat, das heute in polnischen und österreichischen Gegenden überall angeschlagen ist, das ist das äußere Zeichen für einen Bund, der von gewissen nationalistischen Seiten unter der Jugend gebildet wird. Da wird mit denselben Dingen vorgegangen. Es ist das eigentlich weit, weit verbreitet, und die Leute wissen ganz gut, daß das Zeichen auch eine gewisse starke Kraft hat. Es gibt Verbände, die Deutschvölkischen zum Beispiel, die haben ein altes indisches Zeichen: zwei ineinandergeschlungene Schlangen, oder auch, wenn Sie wollen, ein Rad, das sich dann so umgebildet hat zum Hakenkreuz. Die haben das heute als Abzeichen. Und Sie werden vielfach hören, daß das Hakenkreuz wiederum als ein Zeichen angenommen wird für gewisse chauvinistische völkische Kreise. Das ist aus dem Grunde, weil man die Überlieferung hat: durch solche Zeichen haben die Alten ihre Herrschaft ausgedrückt. Und so ist es im großen Maßstabe immer gewesen beim Freimaurerbund. Der Freimaurerbund ist eigentlich dazu da, um gewisse Leute zusammenzuhalten, und das tut er durch Zeremonien, durch Zeichen, Griff und Wort. Und dann verfolgt er geheime Ziele, indem er unter all denen, die unter diesen Zeremonien, Zeichen, Griff und Wort, verbunden sind, gewisse Geheimnisse bewahrt. Natürlich, geheime Ziele kann man nur verfolgen, wenn sie nicht alle wissen; und so ist es bei den Freimaurerbünden, daß sie vielfach politische oder kulturelle und dergleichen Ziele verfolgen.

Nun können Sie aber noch eines sagen, meine Herren. Sehen Sie, die Leute, die in Freimaurerbünden verbunden sind, sind keineswegs deshalb anzufechten, weil sie das tun, sondern manchmal haben sie die allerbesten und edelsten Absichten; sie sind nur der Ansicht: Man kann die Menschen nicht auf eine andere Weise als durch solche Bündnisse für so etwas gewinnen, und daher haben die meisten Freimaurerbünde auch wiederum den Zweck, Wohltätigkeit im großen zu üben. Das ist schön, Wohltätigkeit und Humanität zu üben. Das ist nun auch etwas, was von diesen Bünden in großem Maßstabe ausgeübt wird. Daher ist es kein Wunder, wenn der Freimaurer immer darauf hinweisen kann, daß furchtbar vieles außerordentlich Humanes und Wohltätiges gerade von den Freimaurerbünden gestiftet und begründet wird. Man muß nur eben sich sagen: In der heutigen Zeit sind eigentlich alle solche Dinge nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Denn, nicht wahr, was müssen wir denn heute an solchen Dingen hauptsächlich ablehnen? Wir müssen die Absonderung ablehnen. Es entsteht dadurch auch bald eine geistige Aristokratie, die es nicht geben soll. Und das demokratische Prinzip, das immer mehr und mehr zur Geltung kommen muß, das widerstrebt eigentlich durchaus dem Freimaurerbund ebenso wie den geschlossenen Priesterschaften. So daß man also sagen kann: Es ist schon einmal so, daß derjenige, der noch heute verstehen kann, was in manchen freimaurerischen Zeremonien für den ersten, zweiten und dritten Grad enthalten ist, in dem, was die Freimaurer selber oft nicht verstehen, erkennen kann, daß sie oftmals zurückreichen auf ganz alte Weisheit; aber dieses hat nicht die große Bedeutung. Die große Bedeutung hat dieses, daß eigentlich heute bei vielen freimaurerischen Verbänden, Bündnissen, eben viele politische oder sonstige soziale Wohltätigkeitsbestrebungen leben. Aber bis aufs Messer bekämpfen sich die katholische Kirche und die Freimaurer. Das hat sich aber auch im Laufe der Zeit erst herausgebildet.

Nun, solche Dinge kann man natürlich sehr leicht verkennen. Und es ist auch das aufgetreten: Die Freimaurer haben eine bestimmte Bekleidung bei ihren Zeremonien; sie haben zum Beispiel ein Schurzfell aus Lamm, das Lammschurzfell. Da haben manche gesagt: Die Freimaurerei ist überhaupt nichts anderes als eine Spielerei mit dem Maurerhandwerk, weil der Maurer ein Schurzfell hat. Aber das ist nicht wahr. Und das Schurzfell, das da ist, das ist durchaus dazu da - und es ist immer ursprünglich aus Lammleder gewesen -, um zu zeigen, daß derjenige, der in solchen Bündnissen ist, nicht ein wütender Kerl sein soll in bezug auf die Leidenschaften; es sollen also die Geschlechtsteile bedeckt werden mit seinem Schurz, und das ist das Zeichen dafür. Also es handelte sich da doch um etwas, was in Zeichen ausdrückte den menschlichen Charakter. Und so ist es mit sehr vielen Zeichen, die auch in der Bekleidung liegen.

Man hat dann auch höhere Grade, wo ein ganz priesterähnliches Kleid getragen wird; da bedeutet alles einzelne etwas. Zum Beispiel habe ich Ihnen gesagt, daß der Mensch ja außer dem physischen Leib noch einen Ätherleib hat. Und geradeso wie der Priester ein weißes Linnenkleid, ein hemdartiges Gewand hat, um den Ätherleib auszudrücken, so haben auch gewisse hohe Grade der Freimaurer ein solches Gewand, und für den Astralleib - er ist farbig -, da hat man eine Toga, ein Übergewand; das drückt alles das aus. Und der Mantel, der dann verbunden war mit dem Helm, der drückte aus die Macht des Ich.

Alle diese Dinge führen eben zurück auf alte, sehr sinnreiche, bedeutsame Gebräuche, die heute ihre Bedeutung verloren haben. Wenn jemand die Freimaurerei gern hat, so soll er das nicht als etwas Abschätziges behandeln, was ich gesagt habe. Ich wollte nur auseinandersetzen, wie das ist. Es kann natürlich ein Freimaurerorden bestehen, der außerordentlich gute Menschen in sich vereinigt und so weiter. Und in der heutigen Zeit kann so etwas besonders wichtig werden. Wirklich, was heute meistens der Mensch lernt, wenn er Arzt oder Jurist wird - ja, das ergreift sein Herz nicht. Und deshalb werden noch viele Juristen und Ärzte Freimaurer, weil sie dann wenigstens die Feierlichkeit der alten Zeremonien haben und etwas, wobei sie sich nicht mehr viel denken können, was aber immerhin noch etwas ist: Zeichen, Griff und Wort, was aber hinweist darauf, daß der Mensch nicht bloß im äußeren Materiellen lebt.

Das ist das, was ich Ihnen sagen wollte. Haben Sie sonst noch irgend etwas, was Sie gerne fragen wollten?

Frage: In Amerika gibt es etwas, das «Ku-Klux-Klan» genannt wird. Wie ist es damit? Können wir von Herrn Doktor etwas darüber hören, was das bedeutet? Man liest immer wieder darüber.

Dr. Steiner: Ja, sehen Sie, der Ku-Klux-Klan, der ist eine der neuesten Erfindungen auf diesem Gebiet, und zwar eine solche Erfindung, die schon wichtiger genommen werden sollte als man sie gewöhnlich nimmt. Sie wissen ja, meine Herren, daß eigentlich eine Begeisterung für einen gewissen Kosmopolitismus nur war vor einigen Jahrzehnten. Heute ist er zwar noch da, selbstverständlich, unter der Arbeiterschaft, unter dem Sozialdemokratismus - diese sind ein internationales Element -, aber in den bürgerlichen Kreisen und in anderen Kreisen, da nimmt der Nationalismus furchtbar überhand, und die Stimmung für den Nationalismus ist ja stark da. Und Sie werden sich auch erinnern, daß diejenigen Menschen, die hinter Woodrow Wilson standen - er selber war ja nur eine Art Strrohmann -, eigentlich gerechnet haben mit diesem Nationalismus, überall nationale Staaten haben wollten, überall den Nationalismus aufstacheln wollten und so weiter. Ja, darüber kann man so seine Ansichten haben! Aber nun gibt es eben Menschen, die entwickeln heute überall die Tendenz, den Nationalismus bis auf die Spitze zu treiben. Und in diesem Bestreben, den Nationalismus bis auf die Spitze zu treiben, ist eben in Amerika diese Verbindung Ku-Klux-Klan entstanden. Der arbeitet nun eben durchaus mit solchen Mitteln, wie zum Beispiel Zeichen sind, in dem Sinne, wie ich es gesagt habe.

Wenn man nun gerade wiederum solche Verbindungen ins Auge faßt, dann muß man wissen, daß Zeichen schon auch eine gewisse hypnotisierende Kraft haben. Sie wissen ja, wenn Sie ein Huhn haben (es wird gezeichnet), dieses Huhn mit dem Schnabel auf die Erde aufstoßen lassen, und Sie zeichnen von da aus einen Kreidestrich, läuft das Huhn dem Kreidestrich nach! Es ist hypnotisiert, es läuft dem Strich nach! Sie müssen nur erst den Schnabel aufstoßen auf den Anfang, dann läuft es dem Kreidestrich nach, weil es hypnotisiert ist von dem Strich. So hat jedes Zeichen - nicht nur für das Huhn die gerade Linie - eine Bedeutung, eine bestimmte einschläfernde Bedeutung, wenn man es darauf anlegt. Und das benützen nun wiederum gewisse Geheimverbindungen, um gerade solche Zeichen zu wählen, durch die sie den anderen Menschen betören, einschläfern, so daß er seine eigene Urteilskraft nicht geltend macht. Und mit solchen Mitteln arbeiten extrem namentlich solche Geheimverbindungen. Dazu gehört in Amerika wiederum der KuKlux-Klan. Nun ist der Ku-Klux-Klan aus dem Grunde gefährlich, weil solche Verbindungen nicht nur auf das eine Volk ausgehen, sondern sie wollen das nationalistische Prinzip überall haben. Es kann niemand sagen: Der Ku-Klux-Klan braucht bloß eine amerikanische Einrichtung zu bleiben, weil er den amerikanischen Nationalismus besonders befördern will. - So sagt der Anhänger des KuKlux-Klan nicht; sondern er sagt: Man soll überhaupt den Nationalismus befördern, also den in Ungarn, den in Deutschland, den in Frankreich. - Sehr schön! Nicht auf den Amerikanismus kommt es ihm an, er ist nicht ein Patriot, sondern er sieht in diesem Pochen der Menschen auf den Nationalismus etwas, was, wenn es dann zusammenwirkt bei den verschiedensten Nationen, dann bewirkt, was er erreichen will: nämlich die Menschen absolut ins Chaos hineinbringen. Das will er: Er will alles ins Chaos hineinbringen! Es ist die reine Zerstörungswut darinnen. Und so ist der Ku-Klux-Klan besonders aus dem Grund gefährlich, weil er sich in allen Ländern ausbreiten kann. Und Sie können nicht sagen, wenn er sich einmal ausbreiten will hier in der Schweiz, das sei eine amerikanische Einrichtung, sondern es ist dann eine nationale schweizerische Einrichtung.

Und so waren im Grunde auch die freimaurerischen Bündnisse; sie waren international, aber für die einzelnen Länder immer nationalistisch. Aber darauf gaben sie nicht viel, sondern sie haben es mehr der Außenwelt gegenüber getan, daß sie mitmachten, was in der Außenwelt war. Und man kann nun sagen: Aber sind denn solche Menschen nicht eigentlich wahnsinnig, die aufrütteln wollen so etwas wie ein absolut nationalistisches Prinzip, und die da alles zerstören wollen? Das kann man eigentlich auch nicht sagen. Natürlich, wenn man frägt, heißt es: Selbstverständlich macht man solche Sachen nicht mit. - Aber die Leute sagen sich: Es ist alles so verdorben heute - die Führenden sagen sich das bei den anderen, die nachlaufen -, das ist ja den anderen ganz einerlei, so daß es gar keinen Sinn hat, die Dinge zu pflegen, die heute da sind. Man muß erst die Menschheit wie eine wirre Masse behandeln. Dann werden die Menschen wieder zu sich kommen, und dann werden sie wiederum etwas Ordentliches lernen. Also eine Idee haben die Leute schon, und namentlich der Ku-Klux-Klan hat eine Idee in dieser Beziehung.

Sie meinen: nicht?

Der Fragesteller: Doch! Aber das ist komisch!

Dr. Steiner: Sehen Sie, viele Dinge sind im Kulturleben komisch, und wir haben ja auch schon Dinge erwähnt, die komisch aussahen. Aber das Komische ist manchmal recht gefährlich. Es scheint einem komisch, aber es ist manchmal außerordentlich gefährlich.

Nun, meine Herren, muß ich morgen im Laufe des Tages wiederum - nach Breslau - verreisen. Ich werde dann sagen, wann wir die nächste Stunde haben werden.

When speaking about such a subject as this evening's we must earnestly bear in mind that there are countless human souls at the present time whose experience of the various kinds of knowledge and of the tendencies of practical social life to be found today makes them long for a renewal of these things, for a new way of looking at the world. Such souls feel that in certain respects we cannot take for granted that we can continue to exist as beings with spirit-soul life and social life with the ideas, feelings and impulses of the will which we have taken over from the last century and with which we have been brought up.

Living in the civilized world we have experienced the immense progress of the scientific outlook on the one hand, and we have experienced the tremendous results of this scientific outlook in practical life and in technical achievements which meet us from morning till evening at every turn. But we have also received something else with these tremendous achievements of science and with the practical consequences of this scientific knowledge in social life. Whatever a person does today, whether in reading or whether in his ordinary everyday life or in whatever else he does, he constantly takes in from morning to evening scientific knowledge in one form or other. When he then faces the eternal questions of the human soul and of the human spirit, questions about the immortal being of the human soul, about the meaning of the whole world and about the meaning of human activity, he can only link them to what his own soul thinks and feels about these questions, to the impulses of his own actions and to what science has been saying for three or four centuries in a way in which it had not spoken to men of earlier ages. Earlier he would have received the answer through the various religious confessions, but even if he belongs to one of the latter today, the search for his answers will be influenced by his modern outlook. And in living this existence which has become so complicated and the whole style of which is dependent on modern technology, the modern person cannot help seeing how dependent on this technology is his life. And he has to say to himself: Fundamentally, human beings in the whole civilized world have become quite different from what they were when conditions were simpler. And he must then become aware and feel that today there are many questions to be answered about social life, about the way in which people live together.

We can even say the following: Scientific knowledge is such that we are compelled to recognize it, and the practical, technical results which our modern life has brought are such that we are compelled to live with them. But neither really gives us any answers to the great questions of human existence; on the contrary, they only produce new questions. For if we take an unprejudiced look at what science so significantly has to say about the human being, his organization, his form of life on the earth and so on, we do not acquire any answers about the eternal nature of the human being or about the meaning of the world and of existence; on the contrary, we acquire deeper and more meaningful questions. And we have to ask ourselves: where do we now find the answers to these questions which modern life has caused to become deeper and more urgent? For as far as knowledge is concerned, the achievements of natural science have not brought solutions for the great riddles of the world, but new questions, new riddles.

And what has practical life given us? Of course, all the means of our enormous and widespread industrial life and world transport and so on have been placed at the disposal of our practical social life. But it is precisely this practical life which presents us with ethical, moral and spiritual questions as to how human beings live with one another. And it is just this kind of question that concerns the minds of people today as a social problem and which often appears as a quite frightening problem to those who think earnestly and who take life very seriously. So we see that the practical side of life also presents the human being with riddles.

As against these questions which confront the human soul from two sides we can now place what the present speaker calls an anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit. This starts, first of all, from the foundation of knowledge and then seeks in the foundations of social life those sources of man's being which can lead at least to a partial solution of these questions, to a solution which is not only possible, but necessary, because it is quite clear to an unprejudiced observer that humanity will suffer a decline and be unable to rise out of the problems which face it concerning these questions of present-day civilization if life simply goes on as before, if human souls face such urgent questions and simply dry up, and if no new impulses for the renewal of social life are found out of the depths of the human soul.

What the anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit strives for is not directed against the knowledge of natural science. Anything directed against this knowledge, which has brought so much good to humanity, would be amateurish and superficial. But precisely because the anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit takes very seriously the fruits which natural science has given modern humanity, it comes to quite different results from those attained by the kind of scientific research which is practiced in every sphere of ordinary life.

The anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit follows the same path, indeed, in one respect is continued further along it. I would like to make use of a comparison in order to illustrate and explain the relationship of the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit to natural science. In using it I certainly do not wish to link what anthroposophy has been able to achieve so far with an historical event of world importance and to put it on an equal footing with it. It is only intended to be a comparison—there are always people who wish to make fun of such things, and I will leave it to them to decide whether they wish to make fun of this comparison.

When Columbus undertook his journey across the ocean he was not at all sure where he would arrive. At that time there were two possible ways of looking at the problem of world travel (which, in fact, came into the world through Columbus): either one did not bother about the great unknown which exists beyond the sea and stayed in the area of one's home, or one set out across the great ocean as Columbus and his followers did. But at that time nobody hoped to find America or anything like that. The intention was to find another way to India, so that one only really wanted to reach what was already known.

The scientist of the spirit who seriously studies the researches of natural science finds himself in a position similar to that of Columbus who wanted to reach something already known by a new route, but then on the way found something quite different, quite new. In following the work of natural science most of us do not get beyond the observation of sense phenomena and the ordering of them by the intellect. Or if we are equipped with instruments and tools which then help our observation, with the telescope, microscope, spectroscope, x-ray, and if we are armed with the conscientious and excellent method of thinking of modern science and then with all this set out across the sea of research, we shall only find on the other side something that is already known and which is similar to what we already have: atoms, molecules with complicated movements, the world, in fact, which lies behind our sense world. And although we describe it as a world of small movements, small particles and the like, it is fundamentally not very different from what we have here and can see with our eyes and touch with our hands. This then is what lies at the root of the world of the natural scientist. But if with the same seriousness we journey further across the sea of research, only this time using the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit, we arrive at something quite different. We do not meet the well-known atoms and molecules on the way. First of all, we become conscious of questions: What are you then actually doing when you investigate nature as has been done in recent centuries? What happens in you when you investigate? What happens to your soul while you are investigating in the observatory, in the clinic? And anyone who has linked some self observation with what he does will say to himself—your soul is working in an absolutely spiritual way, and when it tries to investigate the evolution of animals up to the human being and to penetrate the course of the stars, it is working in a way which was not followed by men of earlier times. But of course humanity has not always looked at these things in this way. People have not always said to themselves: When I investigate nature it is the spirit, the soul which is really working in me, and I must recognize this spirit, this soul. The results of an anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit are really reached on the path of scientific investigation. They are reached as something unknown in the same way that Columbus reached America. But what happens when we are engaged in true investigation is that we become aware of spirit, of soul, and this can then be developed further. And through this we then acquire a true knowledge of what spirit is in the human soul. And it is precisely the task of an anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit to evolve the methods by which we develop what is active in the soul of the modern scientist. But we have to choose a quite definite starting point for this Science of the Spirit and that is what one might call intellectual modesty. Indeed, we must have this intellectual modesty to such a degree that the comparison which I am now about to make is justified. We have to say to ourselves: supposing, for instance, we give a volume of Shakespeare to a five year old child—what will the child do with it? He will tear it to bits or play with it in some other way. If the child is ten or fifteen years old he will no longer tear the volume of Shakespeare to pieces, but will treat it according to what it is really for. Even as a five year old, a child has certain capacities in his soul which can be brought out and developed so that through the development of these capacities the child becomes different from what he was before. As adult human beings who have achieved our normal development in everyday life and in ordinary science we should be able to produce intellectual modesty and to say to ourselves: as far as the secrets of nature are concerned we are fundamentally in the same position as the five year old child with a volume of Shakespeare. There are certainly capacities in us which are hidden which we can draw out of our souls and which we can then develop and cultivate. And we must evolve our soul life so that we can approach the whole of nature anew in the same way that the child who has reached fifteen or twenty years approaches the volume of Shakespeare anew as compared with his treatment of it when he was five. And I have to speak to you about the methods by which such forces which are to be found in every human soul can be developed. For, in fact, by developing these methods we acquire quite a new insight into nature and into human existence. The modern seeking soul is in a way unconsciously aware of these methods, but this is about as far as it has gone.

There are, as you know, many people already among us who say to themselves: If we look back to ancient times or if, for example, we look across to the East where there are still remains, albeit decadent remains, of an ancient wisdom of humanity, we find that knowledge or what we might call science takes on a religious character, so that the human soul can experience a certain satisfaction in its research for answers about the world and its own existence. And because we see this and because in our civilized life anthropology has produced profound knowledge about such old ways of looking at life, many people long to go back to these earlier soul conditions. They want to bring ancient wisdom to life again and want to further in the West what is left of this ancient wisdom in the East according to the saying, “ex foriente lux.” Those people who long for knowledge which does not belong to our age do not understand the purpose of human evolution. For each age brings particular tasks for humanity in all spheres of life. We cannot fill our souls today with the same treasure of wisdom with which our forefathers filled their souls hundreds or thousands of years ago. But we can orientate ourselves to how our forefathers did it and then in our own way we can seek a path to lead us into the super-sensible. But the human soul has a fairly good idea that in the depths of its being it is not connected with physical nature, with which the body is connected, but with a super-sensible nature which is connected with the eternal character of the soul and the eternal destiny and goal of this soul.

Now our forefathers of hundreds or thousands of years ago had a quite definite idea about the relationship of the human being to the world to which he belongs beyond birth and death. When they entered on the path which leads to super-sensible knowledge, into the super-sensible world, there arose quite definite images, and these filled the soul with deep feelings. And there is one image in particular which made people shudder who knew about it from the past. This is the image of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the threshold which has to be crossed when we progress from our ordinary way of thinking which guides us in daily life and in ordinary science to knowledge of the spirit and of the soul. Men felt in ancient times: there is an abyss between our ordinary knowledge and that which gives us information about the nature of the soul. And these people had a very real feeling that something stood at this threshold, a being that was not human, but spiritual, and that prevented the threshold from being crossed before they were sufficiently prepared. The leaders of the old schools of wisdom, which are also called mysteries, did not allow anyone to approach the threshold who had not first been properly prepared through a certain training of the will. We can show why this was so by means of a simple example.

We are very proud today that for centuries we have had quite a different way of looking at our planetary system and the stars from the outlook of the Middle Ages and from the one we think existed in the Ancient World. We are proud of the Copernican outlook, and from one point of view quite rightly so. We say: we have the heliocentric outlook as compared with the geocentric outlook of the Middle Ages and of the Ancient World, where it was imagined that the earth stands still and that the sun and the stars move round it. We know today that the earth circles around the sun at a tremendous speed, and from the observations which are made in this connection we can work out the framework of our total world picture concerning the sun and the planetary system. And we know that in a way this medieval world picture can be called childish when compared to the heliocentric system. But if we go back even further, for instance, to a few centuries before the birth of Christ, we find the heliocentric system taught by Aristarchus of Samos in ancient Greece. We are told about this by Plutarch. This world picture of Aristarchus of Samos is not basically different from what everyone learns today in the elementary school as the correct view. At that time Aristarchus of Samos had betrayed this in the widest circles, whereas it was normally taught only in the confined circles of the mysteries. It was only conveyed to those people who had first been prepared by the leaders of the schools of wisdom. It was said: In his normal consciousness man is not suited to receive such a world picture; therefore the threshold into the spiritual world had to be placed between him and this world picture. The Guardian of the Threshold had to protect him from learning about the heliocentric system and many other things without preparation. Today every educated person knows these things, but at that time they were withheld if there had not been sufficient preparation.

Why were these things withheld from people at that time? Now, our historical knowledge does not normally suffice to penetrate into the depths of the evolution of the human soul. The kind of history that is presented today offers no explanation of how the constitution of the human soul has changed during the course of hundreds and thousands of years. In the Greek and even in the Roman and early medieval periods human souls had quite a different constitution from today. People then had a consciousness and knowledge of the world which arose out of their instincts and out of quite indefinite, half dreamlike states of the soul. Today we can have no idea of what this knowledge of the world was. We can take up a work which at that time would have been called scientific. We can think what we like about it, we can call it superstitious, and as far as present day education is concerned, we would be right. But the peculiar character of these works was that people never looked at minerals, plants, animals, rivers and clouds or at the rising and setting of the stars in such a dry, matter of fact and spiritless way as is done today, because at the same time they always saw spirit in nature. They perceived spirit-soul nature in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, in the course of the clouds, in the whole of nature. The human being felt this spirit-soul nature in himself, and what he felt in himself he found spread out in the external world. He did not feel himself so cut off from the outer world as people do today. But instead of this, his self-consciousness was weaker. And one quite rightly had to say to oneself in past periods of human evolution: If the ordinary human being were to be told about the nature of the heliocentric system in the same way that it was told to the wise—if it were simply said, “the earth circles through space with tremendous speed,” this ordinary person would suffer a kind of eclipse of his soul.

This is an historical truth. It is just as much an historical truth as what we learn in school about Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian and Persian wars. But a truth we do not normally learn is that the Greek soul was differently constituted from the modern soul. It was less awake in connection with the powers of inner self-consciousness, and the wise leaders of the mysteries were quite rightly afraid that if such souls acquired super-sensible knowledge without preparation, knowledge which today is the common possession of all educated people, they would suffer a kind of spiritual eclipse. Therefore the souls of men had first to be strengthened through a training of the will so that they did not succumb when their self-consciousness was led into a quite different world from the one it was accustomed to. And the souls had to be made fearless in face of the unknown which they had to enter. Fearlessness of the unknown and a courageous realization of what was literally for such souls the losing of the ground under their feet (for if we no longer stand on an earth that stands still, we lose the ground from under our feet), a courageous disposition of the soul and fearlessness and several other qualities were what prepared the student of the schools of wisdom to cross the abyss into the spiritual, super-sensible world.

And what did they learn then? This sounds surprising and paradoxical, for they learnt what we learn today in the elementary school and what is common to all educated people. This was in fact what the ancient peoples were afraid of and for which they had first to acquire the courage to face. The human soul has evolved during the course of the centuries so that today it has quite a different constitution, with the result that what could only be given to the ancient peoples after difficult preparation is now given to us in the elementary school. In fact, we are already on the other side of the threshold which the ancient peoples were only allowed to cross after long preparation. But we have also to deal with the consequences of this crossing of the threshold. We are at the point which they feared, and for which they had to acquire courage—but at the same time we have also lost something. And what this is that we have lost in our modern civilization is clear to us when we read what scientists who take our modern civilization seriously have to say about what we cannot know. Why this is so should really be explained by those who face such facts on the basis of a serious study of the Science of the Spirit. We have arrived at quite a different form of self-consciousness since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. We have progressed to abstract thinking. We are developing our intellectuality to an extent which was unknown to the ancient peoples with their less awake kind of consciousness. And because of this we have a strong self-consciousness which enables us to enter into a world which the ancient peoples could enter only after being prepared. Even the most unbiased scientists who speak about what we are unable to know and about the limits of knowledge show that we enter into this world through a self-consciousness which has been strongly developed through the thinking and through an intellectuality which people in the past did not possess. But at the same time we have lost the connection with the deeper basis of the world. We have become rather proud of ourselves in having achieved a heightened self-consciousness, but we have lost real knowledge of the world. It is no longer possible for us to achieve such connection instinctively, as it was in the tenth or twelfth centuries. We therefore have to talk about a new threshold into the spiritual world. By means of our heightened self-consciousness we have to develop something that will lead us into the super-sensible world, which we can no longer enter instinctively as did the people of earlier times. These people developed a heightening of their self- consciousness through self discipline in order to be able to hold out in a world which we enter without preparation. So now we have to prepare ourselves for something else? In order to do this we have to develop powers which are latent in our soul and of which we become aware through intellectual modesty.

Thus, rather than starting with something obscure in the human soul, we start with two of its well-known powers. In the Science of the Spirit we begin with two powers which are absolutely necessary in human life, and they are then developed further. In normal life they are only at the beginning of their development, and this development is continued through our own work. The first of these is the human faculty of memory. It is through this faculty of memory that we are really an ego. It gives us our ordinary self-consciousness. We look back to a particular year in our childhood, and the experiences which we then had appear in the picture of our memory. It is true that they are somewhat pale and faded, but they do appear. And we know from ordinary medical literature what it means when part of our life is extinguished, when we are not able to remember something in the sequence of our life. We are then ill in our souls, mentally ill. Such an illness belongs to the most serious disorders of our soul-spirit constitution. But this faculty of memory which is so necessary for ordinary life is, bound to the physical body, so far as this ordinary life is concerned. Everyone can feel this. Those who have a more materialistic outlook show how this dependence is manifested, how certain organs or parts of organs only need to be damaged and the memory will likewise be damaged, interrupted, destroyed. But this faculty of memory can also be the starting point from which a new and higher power of the soul can be developed, and this is done in the way I have described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in other writings. I have shown there how the faculty of memory can be developed into something higher through what I have called meditation and, in a technical sense, concentration on certain spheres of thought, of feeling and of the will.

What then is the peculiar characteristic of the images of the memory? Normally our images and our thoughts are formed in connection with the outer world, and they slip by, just as the outer world slips by. Our experience is made permanent by our memory. Out of the depths of our being we can recall what we experienced years before. Images become permanent in us through our memory. And this is what we use in meditation, in concentration, when we want to become scientists of the spirit. We form images which we can easily comprehend—or we allow ourselves to be advised by those who are competent in such matters—and these should be images which are not able to arise out of the unconscious, nor should they be reminiscences of life, but they should be images which we can comprehend as exactly as mathematical or geometrical ideas. The cultivation of these methods is certainly not easier than clinical research or than research in physics or chemistry or astronomy. It is, to be sure, an inner effort of the soul, and a very serious effort of the soul at that. It can take years, although with some people it can also take a shorter time; it simply depends on the inner destiny of the person, but it always takes some time before this continual concentration on particular images can lead to any result. Naturally the rest of life must not be disturbed through these exercises, in fact we remain sensible and able people, for these exercises claim only a little time. But they have to be continued for a long period, and then they will become what one can call a higher form of the power of memory. We then become aware of something in our soul which lives in the same way as the thoughts which we have about our experiences. However we know that what now lives in our soul does not refer to anything that we have experienced in life since birth, but in the same way that we normally have pictures of such experiences, we now have other pictures. In my writings I have called these Imaginations. We have pictures which are as vivid as are the pictures of our memory, but they are not linked to what we have experienced in ordinary life, and we become aware that these Imaginations are related to something which is outside us in the spiritual world. And we come to realize what it means to live outside the human body. With our faculty of memory we are bound to our body. With this developed faculty of memory we are no longer bound to the body, we enter into a state which is on the one hand quite similar to, but on the other hand quite different from the condition which the human being lives through from the time he goes to sleep until he wakes up. He is normally unconscious at this time, because he cannot see with his eyes or hear with his ears. This is the condition we are in when we use our developed faculty of memory. We do not perceive with our eyes and ears; we are not even able to feel the warmth of our surroundings. On the other hand we do not live unconsciously as in sleep, but we live in a world of images and perceptions. We now perceive a spiritual world. It is really as if we begin to go to sleep, but instead of passing over into the dullness of unconsciousness we pass into another world, which we then perceive through our developed faculty of memory. And the first thing that we perceive is what I would like to call a tableau of the memory, that is, a developed tableau of the memory of this life which reaches back to birth. This is the first super-sensible perception.

The memories we normally have are of our life; we allow the pictures of our memory to arise out of the stream of life. This is not the case when we look back on life through this supersensibly developed faculty of memory. In this case in one moment the whole course of our life is drawn together into a single picture which we can comprehend as something spatial before us. When we achieve this independence from our body, the fragments of our memory which normally appear as single events in time now form a coherent whole. When we have become accustomed to forming images independently of the body—in the same way that a sleeping person would if he could—there is then developed what one can call a real view of what going to sleep, waking, and sleep itself are. We get to know how the spirit-soul part of man draws itself out—not spatially, but dynamically, though despite this, the first is the right expression—and how this normally remains unconscious, how the human being can however develop this consciousness outside the body, and how consciousness arises when the spirit-soul part again enters into the body. When this has been developed it is possible to advance gradually to further images.

When we are able to imagine what kind of living spirit- soul beings we are when we sleep, we are able, through working further on the developed faculty of memory which we have described, to recognize how the spirit-soul part lived in a purely spiritual world before it descended into the physical world through birth and conception. We can then distinguish the following: A person who is sleeping has a desire which is both physical and super-sensible, to return to the physical body which is lying in bed and to revive it in a spirit-soul sense. We also meet this as a strong force in the soul that is waiting to be received by a physical body which comes from the father and mother in the line of physical heredity, but we also come to see how this soul descends from this spirit-soul world and penetrates the body. We acquire knowledge of how our soul lives in the spirit-soul world before birth; we come to know the eternal in the human soul. And we no longer merely rely on our faith concerning the eternal in the human soul, but on knowledge which has been acquired through super-sensible perception. And through this we also acquire knowledge of the great going to sleep which the human being experiences when he passes through the gates of death. What happens to the human soul when it passes through the gates of death is similar to what happens in sleep when consciousness is not lost but merely subdued, only here it is the other way round: whereas the human being is strongly attached to the body when he goes to sleep and wishes to return to it, thereby retaining his consciousness in normal sleep in a subdued form, when he goes through the gates of death he acquires full consciousness because he no longer has any desire for the body. Only after he has lived for a long time in the spiritual world does he experience something which may be compared to the age of the physical body which has reached the 35th year of life. After having lived for a long time after death the soul experiences a desire to return to the body, and from this moment it moves toward a new life on earth. I have repeatedly described in detail these experiences of the human being between death and a new birth. When such things as these are described, people today often make fun of them and regard them as fantastic. But those who regard as fantastic what has been won in this way should also regard mathematical ideas as fantastic, for what I have described has been won through true and earnest scientific investigation.

And now we experience a tremendous and significant image. In a memory image we have before our souls something which we have experienced years before. We have what we once experienced as an image before our souls. But if what we have before us does not arise through our normal memory but through the developed faculty of memory, we then have the spiritual world before us in which we are when we sleep and in which we also exist before we descend to a life on earth. What we now experience is not what appears to the senses in the outer world, but what appears to the eye of the spirit, the eye of the soul. We have before us the spiritual roots of existence, the widths of the universe. We rise up and go past a new Guardian of the Threshold, we cross over a new threshold into the super-sensible world, to what lies spiritually behind the natural existence to which we belong. The stones and clouds and everything that belongs to the kingdoms of nature arise like a mighty memory. We know what a stone or a cloud looks like to the eye. But now to the eye of the spirit something appears to which we are related because we lived in it before our birth or conception. This is the great world memory. Since this world memory of our own super-sensible existence before our birth appears and since our eternal nature appears before the eye of the spirit from the world outside us, we acquire at the same time a world tableau of the spirit that is spread out in the world around us. We acquire real spiritual knowledge of the world. The Science of the Spirit must speak about such things, for it is something which must be taken into modern civilization just as the Copernican and Galilean outlook entered the world a few centuries ago. Today the Science of the Spirit is regarded as fantastic in exactly the same way as the new outlook of that time which was rejected as paradoxical and fantastic. But these things will be accepted into human souls, and we shall then also possess something for the external social and the entire existence of the human being, which I am now about to mention. But first I must point out that there is another faculty of knowledge which must be developed in order to acquire full knowledge of the spirit.

People will be prepared to admit that the faculty of memory can be developed into a power for acquiring knowledge. But perhaps the more strict scientists will not be able to accept the second faculty for acquiring knowledge which I have to describe. And yet, despite this, it is a real power for acquiring knowledge, though not as it appears in life, but when it is developed. This is the power of love.

In normal life, love is bound to the human instincts, to the life of desires, but it is possible to extricate love out of normal life in the same way as the faculty of memory. It is possible for love to be independent of the human body. The power of love can be developed, if by means of it we are able to obtain real objectivity. Whereas in normal life the original impetus for love comes from within the human being, it is also possible to develop this love through being immersed in outer objects so that we are able to forget ourselves and become one with the outer objects. If we perform an action in such a way that it does not arise out of our inner impulses which originate in our desires and instincts, but out of love for what is around us, then we have the kind of love which is at the same time the power of human freedom. That is why I already said in the book which I published in 1892 under the title, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, that in a higher sense the saying, “love makes one blind,” is not true, but that on the contrary, “love makes one seeing.” And those who find their way in the world through love, make themselves really free, for they make themselves independent of the inner instincts and desires which enslave them. They know how to live with the world of outer facts and events, and how their actions should be directed by the world. Then they can act as free human beings in the sense that they do what should be done and not what they would be led to do out of their instincts and desires. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wanted to provide a foundation for a new social feeling of freedom which would enable a new form of social life to arise out of the depths of the human being. And now I would like to underline this by saying that we must cultivate this love as a power for acquiring knowledge, for example in developing a sharper faculty of perceiving how we become a new person each day. For each day are we not fundamentally a different person? Life drives us on, and we are driven on by what other people experience in us, and by what we experience in them. When we think back to what we were ten years ago, we have to admit that we were quite different from today.

Fundamentally, we are different every day. We allow ourselves to be driven by ordinary life and what the scientist of the spirit has to do as a training of the will is to take this development of the will into his own hands and to note to himself: What has influenced you today? What has changed in your inner life today? What has changed your inner life during the last ten, twenty years?—On the one hand we have to do this, but on the other hand we also have to do something else: we ourselves have to direct quite definite impulses and motives so that we are not always changed from outside, but that we ourselves are able to be our own witnesses and observe our willing and our action. If we do this we shall be able to develop quite naturally the higher kind of love which is completely taken up into the objects around us.

We therefore develop these two faculties of the soul—on the one hand, the faculty of memory which is independent of the body, and on the other, the power of love which really enables us to unite ourselves with our true spiritual existence for the first time and leads us to a higher form of self-consciousness. With these two we then cross the threshold into a spiritual world. We then supplement our ordinary scientific knowledge, and through this anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit, every branch of science becomes more fruitful.

I can remember how the great medical authorities at a famous school of medicine spoke of a “medical nihilism.” And they spoke of it because it had begun to be said that for many typical illnesses there were really no remedies. In modern scientific life the connection with nature has been lost, for we have no real picture of nature. This or the other substance is tried to see if it has any ability to heal a particular illness, but in fact there is no real knowledge of such things. Through the Science of the Spirit we can come to a real understanding of plant life, of each individual plant and of the great differences which exist between the roots, the leaves and the flowers, and we can come to understand how connections of a spiritual nature lie behind the life of the roots, the leaves, the flowers and in the life of the herbs. We learn how man stands in relation to this world of nature, out of which he has grown. We obtain an over-all view of the relationship of animals, plants and minerals to the human being, and it is through this that we acquire a rational therapy. In this way medicine can be made more fruitful. Last spring I gave a course for physicians and medical students, in which I showed how the art of finding remedies and pathology, the knowledge of various illnesses, can be made more fruitful through this spiritual knowledge.

And in this way all the sciences can be fructified by spiritual knowledge. In acquiring this knowledge, in uniting ourselves with what we are, with the spirit-soul life, which now works on our physical body, we come to a quite different kind of knowledge from the one advanced by ordinary science, for this latter only wants to work with logical, abstract and limited concepts about nature and human existence, and it is said: no science is real and true unless it arrives at such abstract laws.—But supposing nature does not work according to such abstract laws? We can talk about them for as long as we like, but we are limiting our knowledge if we are intent on a logical and abstract method, and if we wish to proceed with abstract experiments only. Then nature might well say: In these circumstances I will reveal no knowledge about the human being.

In approaching nature through the Science of the Spirit we get to know that it does not work out of such laws, but according to principles which can be reached only through an artistic way of perception, in real Imagination. We are not able to fathom the wonderful mystery of the human form, of the whole human organization by means of abstract laws or through the kind of observation which is practiced in ordinary science. Instead, we must allow our elementary knowledge to be developed and to rise to imaginative perception. Then the riddle of true human nature will be solved. And so a view of the human being is given us out of the Science of the Spirit in an artistic way.

With this a bridge is formed, leading from spiritual knowledge to art. Knowledge does not merely assume an outward character for those who devote themselves to it in an anthroposophical sense. If they are artists they do not employ abstract symbols or learned theories, but they see forms in the life of the spirit and then imprint them into matter. In this way art is renewed at the same time. We can certainly experience it if we are unbiased and impartial. The artists of the past created great and impressive works. How did they create? First of all, they looked with their senses at the material of the physical world. Let us take Rembrandt or Raphael—they looked at this material and idealized it according to the age they lived in. They knew how to understand the spiritual in the outer world of physical reality, and how to express it. The essence of their art lay in the idealization of what was real in the world. Whoever takes an unbiased look at art and at how it has developed, knows that the age of this art has come to an end and that nothing new can be created in this way any longer. The Science of the Spirit leads toward spiritual perception. Spiritual forms are first perceived in their spirit-soul reality. And artists will now begin to create artistically through the realization of the spiritual with the same sense of reality which artists worked with earlier where the outward reality was idealized. Earlier the artist drew spirit out of matter; now he takes it into matter, but not in an allegorical or symbolical way.—The latter is believed by those who cannot imagine how absolutely real the new kind of art can be.

So we see how the Science of the Spirit really leads to true art. But it also leads to true religious life. It is remarkable how those who find fault with the Science of the Spirit today say: The Science of the Spirit sets out to bring down into daily life a divine world which should only be felt in exalted heights. Of course, but this is exactly what the Science of the Spirit wants to do. The intention is that the human being is so permeated with spirit-soul existence that the spirit can be borne into every aspect of practical existence and not just be something which is experienced in nebulous mysticism or exercised in an ascetism which has little connection with life. People believe they have already gone a long way if they have given others an education so that when their work is finished, and the factory gate has been closed behind them, they are then able to have all sorts of nice thoughts and ideas. But a person who has to leave the factory gate behind him in order to devote himself to the edification of his soul is in fact not yet able to experience his full human existence. No, if we wish to solve the great problems of civilization we have to advance so far as to take the spirit with us when we go through the factory gate into the factory; we have to be able to permeate with the spirit what we do in daily life. It is this outer, spiritless life which we have created, this purely mechanistic life that has made our life so desolate and that has brought about our catastrophic times. The Science of the Spirit fulfills the complete human being. It will be able to bear the spirit from out of the depths of the human being into the practical, into what appears to be the most prosaic spheres of life. When the Science of the Spirit, which can combine knowledge and religious fervor, enters life, it spiritualizes all aspects of our daily life, where we work for other people, where we work our machines and where we work for the good of the whole through our division of labor. When we work like this it will become a social force which will help men. Economic and ordinary practical life will be taken hold of by a science which does not possess only an abstract spirit in concepts and ideas, but a living spirit which can then fill the whole of life.

It is not possible to solve social problems simply by changing outer conditions. We live in an age in which social demands are made. But we also live in an age in which human beings are extremely unsocial. The kind of knowledge which I have described will also bring new social impulses to man, which will be able to solve the great riddles which life brings in quite a different way from the abstract kind of thinking, which appears in Marxism and similar outlooks, which can only destroy, because they arise out of abstraction, because they kill the spirit, because only the spirit can revitalize life.

This is in a way what the Science of the Spirit can promise of itself: that it can not only give satisfaction to the soul in its connection to the eternal, but that it can also give a new impetus to social life.

Because of this there has been no intention in the Science of the Spirit of getting no further than a mere mystical outlook. We have no abstract mysticism. What we have does not frighten us from crossing the threshold into the spiritual world and to lead other people into the super-sensible world in a new way. But at the same time, we take what we have won in this way down into the physical sense world. This has resulted in the practical view of life which I have described in my book, The Threefold Commonwealth, and in other writings, and which are represented by the movement for the threefold order of the social organism.

There are some people who say: The Science of the Spirit leads away from the religion of the past; they say it is even anti-Christian. Anyone who looks into the Science of the Spirit more closely will find that, on the contrary, it is well suited to bring before people the Mystery of Golgotha and the real meaning of Christianity. For what has become of the Christ under the influence of the modern naturalistic outlook? What has become of Him as a super-sensible Being, who entered into a human body, who gave the earth a new meaning? He has been made into the simple man from Nazareth, nothing more than a man, even if the outstanding man in the history of the world.—We need super-sensible knowledge in order to understand Christianity in a way that will satisfy the needs of modern humanity. And it is precisely through the Science of the Spirit that we can attain an understanding of Christianity which can satisfy the modern person. Those who speak of the Science of the Spirit as being opposed to Christianity—even if these people are often the official advocates of Christianity—seem to me to be lacking in spirit, and not like people who have a right understanding of Christianity. Whenever I hear such faint-hearted advocates of Christianity I am always reminded of a Catholic theologian, a professor, who was a friend of mine who said in a speech about Galileo: Christianity can never be belittled through scientific knowledge; on the contrary, knowledge of the divine can only gain as our knowledge of the world grows and reveals the divine in ever increasing glory. One should therefore always think about Christianity in a large way and say: its foundation is such that non-spiritual and spiritual knowledge will pour into humanity—it will not belittle this Christianity, but will enhance it.

We therefore need a Christianity that takes hold of life, that is not content to say, “Lord, Lord,” but lives out the power of the spiritual in outer activity. And it is just such a practical Christianity that is intended in the threefold division of the social organism.

The gentleman who introduced me at the beginning of the lecture said that I had already spoken in Holland in 1908 and 1913. At that time I had to speak about the anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit in a quite different way from today, for at that time what the Science of the Spirit had to contribute as a solution to the questions of modern civilization was only to be found in the form of thoughts in one or two human souls. But since that time quite a lot has happened, despite the bitter war years which lie in between: Since 1913 when the foundation stone was laid, we have been working in Dornach near Basel on the School for the Science of the Spirit, the Goetheanum. This School for the Science of the Spirit is not supposed to serve an abstract Science of the Spirit alone, but is supposed to make all the sciences more fruitful through the Science of the Spirit. That is why we held the first course in the autumn of last year, although the Goetheanum is not yet finished and still needs a great deal to be done to it, and we shall also hold a second course at Easter, though this will be shorter. Thirty people spoke during the course in the autumn, some of whom were great experts in various sciences, in mathematics, astronomy, physiology, biology, in history, sociology and jurisprudence. But there were also people more connected with practical life, industrialists, people in business, and artists also spoke. As I have said, thirty people spoke, and they showed how the results of spiritual knowledge can be brought into the individual sciences. It was possible to see that this science has nothing superstitious about it, but that on the contrary it is quite rational in its inner, spiritual nature and thereby acquires the character of truth and reality. And it is in this way that we shall try to work in this Goetheanum.

The Goetheanum itself is built in a new artistic form, in a new style. If in the past one wanted to build a place for scientific work one discussed with a particular architect whether it was to be in the Greek, Gothic or Renaissance style. The Science of the Spirit was not able to do this, for it forms out of itself what it knows as reality, not only in ideas, not only in natural and spiritual laws, but in artistic expression. We would have committed a crime against our own spiritual life if we had employed a foreign style for this building, and not a style which arises artistically out of the Science of the Spirit. And so you see an attempt in Dörnach to represent a new style, so that when you go into the building you will be able to say to yourself: each pillar, each arch, each painting expresses the same spirit. Whether I stand on the rostrum and speak about the content of the Science of the Spirit, whether I let the pillars, the capitals or something else speak for me, these are all different languages, but the same spirit which comes to expression in all of them.

This is in fact just the answer which an anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit can give to the great questions which humanity has about civilization. For the first of these questions about civilization is the one concerning a real knowledge of ourselves, suited to modern times. This is gained in crossing the threshold in the new way that I have described, in acquiring powers of knowledge which enable us to have a view of the eternal in human nature through the developed faculty of memory and the developed power of love. And through this we arrive at a new feeling, worthy of the human being, as to what man really is. In meeting our neighbors we notice in them what is born out of the spiritual world, and see in them a part of this spiritual world. The ethical aspect of human life is then ennobled, social life is ennobled by the spirit. That is the answer to the second question, the question about human social life.

And the third great question of present day civilization is this. The human being can know: In what I do in my actions on the earth I am not only the being that stands here and whose action only has a meaning between birth and death, but what I do on the earth has a meaning for the whole world—it becomes a part of the whole world. When I develop social ideas I am developing something that has meaning for the whole world.

Let me sum up: Ordinary science of modern times makes a division between outer nature and the inner aspect of human life. It regards the development of the earth and of the whole planetary system as having originated in a kind of chaos. Man came into being, but then he will also disappear again after a certain time. The earth will sink back into the sun as a clinker, it will gradually become a field of dead bodies. Natural science has to say this when it stands upon its own ground. But moral ideals arise out of the human soul, and they are altogether what is most valuable in it. The outlook which has achieved so much in technology has no room for ideals—ideals will disappear like smoke. That is why what is called “the ideological outlook” has taken root in millions and millions of people. The modern proletariat speaks of customs, law, religion, science and art as an ideology because the feeling for the living spirit has been lost. If we recognize this living spirit again we know that what lives in the human soul as moral ideas, as something spiritual is like the seed in the plant. This year's plant dies, but a new plant arises out of its seed. In the same way we can say out of spiritual scientific knowledge: the clouds, stars, mountains, springs, stones, the plants, the animal and the physical human being will all disappear, decline and pass away like the withered leaves of a plant. But just as the new seed arises out of the plant, moral ideals rest in the human soul as a seed, not only for the following year, but for the eternal future.—And we can repeat the wonderful words of Christ: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words—that is, what we develop as spiritual knowledge in the human soul—will not pass away. We can say that we have a unity again before us: the declining physical world and the rising spiritual world. Through this man acquires a meaning for the whole world. His social life also becomes important. And the empty solutions which worry mankind so much today and which have caused such social upheavals in the east, will disappear when we make the social question a question of our total outlook, when we try to find the impulses for solving this social question in what the human being in his inner nature can fathom as living spirit.

Thus the questions of modern civilization will be activated by the Science of the Spirit.

We have also made some experiments in this direction in education. The Waldorf School has been founded in Stuttgart by Emil Molt and is directed by me. What can result from a living Science of the Spirit is here transformed for the uses of education and given to the children in an artistic, pedagogical form.

The anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit feels itself called upon to reconcile religion, art and science, to introduce real science, real religion, real art into practical life. For this the Goetheanum in Dörnach has been built, to be a first place where such a science can be cultivated in a free scientific atmosphere, in a free life of the spirit. From the beginning until now many people have been ready to make sacrifices to build the Goetheanum, but, as I said before, it is not yet completed. Its completion depends upon whether there will be enough people who have an understanding for such necessary progress in the world—whether the Goetheanum remains a torso and humanity says: We do not want to awaken the spirit again, or whether an understanding for the living spirit will lead to the completion of its first new home. Then others will follow. For it is certain that in the long run the cultivation of a knowledge of the living spirit will be essential. It is certain that even those who hate the spirit and who regard spiritual investigation as something fantastic, need the spirit. Searching souls need the spirit, and souls that are not seeking need it all the more. And this fact will not allow itself to be driven out of the world. We shall seek the spirit, because if we wish to be true men, we need the spirit.

[ 1 ] If the thought of the teleological structure of nature was to be reformed in the sense of a naturalistic world conception, the purpose-adjusted formation of the organic world had to be explained in the same fashion as the physicist or the chemist explains the lifeless processes. When a magnet attracts iron shavings, no physicist will assume that there is a force at work in the magnet that aims toward the purpose of the attraction. When hydrogen and oxygen form water as a compound, the chemist does not interpret this process as if something in both substances had been actively striving toward the purpose of forming water. An explanation of living beings that is guided by a similar naturalistic mode of thinking must conclude that organisms become purpose-adjusted without anything in nature planning this purpose-conformity. This conformity comes to pass without being anywhere intended. Such an explanation was given by Charles Darwin. He took the point of view that there is nothing in nature that plans the design. Nature is never in a position to consider whether its products are adequate to a purpose or not. It produces without choosing between what is adequate to a purpose and what is not.

[ 2 ] What is the meaning of this distinction anyhow? When is a thing in conformity with a purpose? Is it not when it is so arranged that the external circumstances correspond to its needs, to its life conditions? A thing is inadequate to purpose when this is not the case. What will happen if, while a complete absence of plan in nature characterizes the situation, formations of all degrees of purpose-conformity, from the most to the least adequately adapted form, come into existence? Every being will attempt to adapt its existence to the given circumstances. A being well-adjusted to life will do so without much difficulty; one less adequately endowed will succeed only to a lesser degree. The fact must be added to this that nature is not a parsimonious housekeeper in regard to the production of living beings. The number of germs is prodigious. The abundant production of germs is backed up by inadequate means for the support of life. The effect of this will be that those beings that are better adapted to the acquisition of food will more easily succeed in their development. A well-adapted organic being will prevail in the strife for existence over a less adequately adjusted one. The latter must perish in this competition. The fit, that is to say, the one adapted to the purpose of life, survives; the unfit, that is, the one not so adapted, does not. This is the “struggle for life.” Thus, the forms adequate to the purpose of life are preserved even if nature itself produces, without choice, the inadequate side by side with the adequate. Through a law, then, that is as objective and as devoid of any wise purpose as any mathematical or mechanical law of nature can be, the course of nature's evolution receives a tendency toward a purpose-conformity that is not originally inherent in it.

[ 3 ] Darwin was led to this thought through the work of the social economist Malthus entitled Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In this essay the view is advanced that there is a perpetual competition going on in human society because the population grows at a much faster pace than the supply of food. This law that Malthus had stated as valid for the history of mankind, was generalized by Darwin into a comprehensive law of the whole world of life.

[ 4 ] Darwin now set out to show how this struggle for existence becomes the creator of the various forms of living beings and that thereby the old principle of Linnaeus was overthrown, that “we have to count as many species in the animals and vegetable kingdoms as had been principally created.” The doubt against this principle was clearly formed in Darwin's mind when, in the years 1831–36, he was on a journey to South America and Australia. He tells how this doubt took shape in him.

When I visited the Galapagos Archipelago during my journey on H.M.S. Beagle, at a distance of about 500 miles from the shores of South America, I saw myself surrounded by strange species of birds, reptiles and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Almost all of them bore the unmistakable stamp of the American continent. In the song of the mocking-thrush, in the sharp scream of the vultures, in the large candlestick-like opuntias I noticed distinctly the vicinity of America; and yet these islands were separated from the continent by many miles and were very different in their geological constitution and their climate. Even more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each of the individual islands of the small archipelago were specifically different although closely related. I often asked myself how these strange animals and men had come into being. The simplest way seemed to be that the inhabitants of the various islands were descended from one another and had undergone modifications in the course of their descent, and that all inhabitants of the archipelago were descendants of those of the nearest continent, namely, America, where the colonization naturally would have its origin. But it was for a long time an unexplainable problem to me how the necessary modification could have been obtained.

The answer to this question is contained in the naturalistic conception of the evolution of the living organism. As the physicist subjects a substance to different conditions in order to study its properties, so Darwin, after his return, observed the phenomena that resulted in living beings under different circumstances. He made experiments in breeding pigeons, chickens, dogs, rabbits and plants. Through these experiments it was shown that the living forms continuously change in the course of their propagation. Under certain circumstances some living organisms change so much after a few generations that in comparing the newly bred forms with their ancestors, one could speak of two completely different species, each of which follows its own design of organization. Such a variability of forms is used by the breeder in order to develop organisms through cultivation that answer certain demands. A breeder can produce a species of sheep with an especially fine wool if he allows only those specimens of his flock to be propagated that have the finest wool. The quality of the wool is then improved in the course of the generations. After some time, a species of sheep is obtained which, in the formation of its wool, has progressed far beyond its ancestors. The same is true with other qualities of living organisms. Two conclusions can be drawn from this fact. The first is that nature has the tendency to change living beings; the second, that a quality that has begun to change in a certain direction increases in that direction, if in the process of propagation of organic beings those specimens that do not have this quality are excluded. The organic forms then assume other qualities in the course of time, and continue in the direction of their change once this process has begun. They change and transmit the changed qualities to their descendants.

[ 5 ] The natural conclusion from this observation is that change and hereditary transmission are two driving principles in the evolution of organic beings. If it is to be assumed that in the natural course of events in the world, formations that are adapted to life come into being side by side with those not adapted as well as others, it must also be supposed that the struggle for life takes place in the most diversified forms. This struggle effects, without a plan, what the breeder does with the aid of a preconceived plan. As the breeder excludes the specimen from the process of propagation that would introduce undesired qualities into the development, so the struggle for life eliminates the unfit. Only the fit survive in evolution. The tendency for perpetual perfection enters thus into the evolutionary process like a mechanical law. After Darwin had seen this and after he had thereby laid a firm foundation to a naturalistic world conception, he could write the enthusiastic words at the end of his work, The Origin of Species, which introduced a new epoch of thought:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

At the same time one can see from this sentence that Darwin does not derive his conception from any anti-religious sentiment but merely from the conclusions that for him follow from distinctly significant facts. It was not hostility against the needs of religious experience that persuaded him to a rational view of nature, for he tells us distinctly in his book how this newly acquired world of ideas appeals to his heart.

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed in matter by the Creator that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the linear descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. . . . Hence, we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

[ 6 ] Darwin showed in great detail how the organisms grow and spread, how, in the course of their development, they transmit their properties once they are acquired, how new organs are produced and change through use or through lack of use, how in this way the organic beings are adjusted to their conditions of existence and how finally through the struggle for life a natural selection takes place by means of which an ever increasing variety of more and more perfect forms come into being.

[ 7 ] In this way an explanation of teleologically adjusted beings seems to be found that requires no other method for organic nature than that which is used in inorganic nature. As long as it was impossible to offer an explanation of this kind it had to be admitted, if one wanted to be consistent, that everywhere in nature where a purpose-adjusted being came into existence, the intervention of an extraneous power had to be assumed. In every such case one had to admit a miracle.

[ 8 ] Those who for decades before the appearance of Darwin's work had endeavored to find a naturalistic world and life conception now felt most vividly that a new direction of thought had been given. This feeling is expressed by David Friedrich Strauss in his book, The Old and the New Faith (1872).

One sees this is the way it must go; this is where the new banner is waving sprightly in the wind. It is a real joy in the sense of the loftiest joys of intellectual advance. We philosophers and critical theologians talked and talked to discredit the idea of a miracle. Our decree had no effect whatever, because we did not know how to demonstrate this idea as a superfluous one, because we did not know how to avoid it for we did not know of any energy of nature with which we could replace it where it seemed to be most necessary to be assumed. Darwin has demonstrated this energy of nature, this procedure of nature; he has opened the door through which a fortunate posterity will throw out the miracle once and for all times. Everyone who knows how much depends on miracles will praise him for that deed as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race.

[ 9 ] Through Darwin's idea of fitness it is possible to think the concept of evolution really in the form of a natural law. The old doctrine of involution, which assumes that everything that comes into existence has been there in a hidden form before (compare pages in Part 1 Chapter IX), had been deprived of its last hope with this step. In the process of evolution as conceived by Darwin, the more perfect form is in no way contained in the less perfect one, for the perfection of a higher being comes into existence through processes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ancestors of this being. Let us assume that a certain evolutionary series has arrived at the marsupials. The form of the marsupials contains nothing at all of a higher, more perfect form. It contains only the ability to change at random in the course of its propagation. Certain circumstances then come to pass that are independent of any “inner” latent tendency of development of the form of the marsupials but that are such that of all possible variations (mutations) the pro-simians survive. The forms of the marsupials contained that of the pro-simians no more than the direction of a rolling billiard ball contains the path it will take after it has been deflected from its original course by a second billiard ball.

[ 10 ] Those accustomed to an idealistic mode of thinking had no easy time in comprehending this reformed conception of evolution. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a man of extraordinary acumen and subtlety of spirit who had come from Hegel's school, writes as late as 1874 in an essay:

Evolution is an unfolding from a germ that proceeds from attempt to attempt until the picture that the germ contained latently as a possibility has become real. But once this is accomplished it stops and holds on to the form that is found, keeping it as a permanent one. Every concept as such would lose its firm outline if we were to consider the types that have existed on our planet for so many thousands of years as forever variable and above all if we were so to consider our own human type. We should then be unable any longer to trust our thoughts, the laws conceived by our thinking, our feelings, the pictures of our imagination, all of which are nothing but the clarifying imitations of forms of nature as it is known to us. Everything becomes questionable.

[ 11 ] In another passage in the same essay he says:

I still find it a little hard, for instance, to believe that we should owe our eye to the process of seeing, our ear to that of hearing. The extraordinary weight that is given to the process of natural selection is something I am not quite satisfied with.

[ 12 ] If Vischer had been asked whether or not he imagined that hydrogen and oxygen contained within themselves in a latent form a picture of water to make it possible for the latter to develop from the former, he would undoubtedly have answered, “No, neither in oxygen nor in hydrogen is there anything contained of the water that is formed; the conditions for the formation of this substance are given only when hydrogen and oxygen are combined under certain circumstances.” Is the situation then necessarily different when, through the two factors of the marsupials and the external conditions, the pro-simians came into being? Why should the pro-simians be contained as a possibility, as a scheme, in the marsupials in order to be capable of being developed from them? What comes into being through evolution is generated as a new formation without having been in existence in any previous form.

[ 13 ] Thoughtful naturalists felt the weight of the new teleological doctrine no less than Strauss. Hermann Helmholtz belongs, without doubt, among those who, in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, could be considered as representatives of such thoughtful naturalists. He stresses the fact that the wonderful purpose-conformity in the structure of living organisms, which becomes increasingly apparent as science progresses, challenges the comparison of all life processes to human actions. For human actions are the only series of phenomena that have a character that is similar to the organic ones. The fitness of the arrangements in the world of organisms does, according to our judgment, in most cases indeed far surpass what human intelligence is capable of creating. It therefore cannot surprise us that it has occurred to people to seek the origin of the structure and function of the world of living beings in an intelligence far superior to that of man. Helmholtz says:

Before Darwin one could admit two kinds of explanations for the fact of organic purpose adjustment, both of which depended on an interference of a free intelligence in the course of natural phenomena. One either considered, according to the vitalistic theory, the life-processes as perpetually guided by a life-soul; or one saw in each species an act of a supernatural intelligence through which it was supposed to have been generated. . . . Darwin's theory contains an essentially new creative thought. It shows that a purpose-adjustment of the form in the organisms can come to pass also without interference of an intelligence through the random effect of a natural law. This is the law of the transmission of individual peculiarities from the parents to the descendants, a law that was long known and recognized but was merely in need of a definite demarcation.

[ 14 ] Helmholtz now is of the opinion that such a demarcation is given by the principle of natural selection in the struggle for existence. A scientist who, like Helmholtz, belongs to the most cautious naturalists of that time, J. Henle, said in a lecture, “If the experiences of artificial breeding were to be applied to the hypothesis of Oken and Lamarck, it would have to be shown how nature proceeds in order to supply the mechanism through which the experimental breeder obtains his result. This is the task Darwin set for himself and that he pursued with admirable industry and acumen.”

[ 15 ] The materialists were the ones who felt the greatest enthusiasm of all from Darwin's accomplishment. They had long been convinced that sooner or later a man like him would have to come along who would throw a philosophical light on the vast field of accumulated facts that was so much in need of a leading thought. In their opinion, the world conception for which they had fought could not fail after Darwin's discovery. Darwin approached his task as a naturalist. At first he moved within the limits reserved to the natural scientist. That his thoughts were capable of throwing a light on the fundamental problems of world conception, on the question of man's relation to nature, was merely touched upon in his book:

[ 16 ] In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation . . ., of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

For the materialists, this question of the origin of man became, in the words of Buechner, a matter of most intimate concern. In lectures he gave in Offenbach during the winter of 1866–67, he says:

Must the theory of transformation also be applied to our own race? Must it be extended to man, to us? Shall we have to submit to an application of the same principles or rules that have caused the life of all other organisms for the explanation of our own genesis and origin? Or are we—the lords of creation—an exception?

[ 17 ] Natural science clearly taught that man could not be an exception. On the basis of exact anatomical investigations the English physiologist, T. H. Huxley, wrote in his book, Man's Place in Nature (1863):

The critical comparison of all organs and their modification in the series of the monkeys leads us to one and the same result, that the anatomical differences that separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not as great as the differences that separate the anthropoid apes from the lower species of monkeys.

Could there still be a doubt in the face of such facts that natural evolution had also produced man—the same evolution that had caused the series of organic beings as far as the monkey through growth, propagation, inheritance, transmutation of forms and the struggle for life?

[ 18 ] During the course of the century this fundamental view penetrated more and more into the mainstream of natural science. Goethe, to be sure, had in his own way been convinced of this, and because of this conviction he had most energetically set out to correct the opinion of his contemporaries, which held that man lacked an intermaxillary bone in his upper jaw. All animals were supposed to have this bone; only man, so one thought, did not have it. In its absence one saw the proof that man was anatomically different from the animals, that the plan of his structure was to be thought along different lines. The naturalistic mode of Goethe's thinking inspired him to undertake elaborate anatomical studies to abolish this error. When he had achieved this goal he wrote in a letter to Herder, convinced that he had made a most important contribution to the knowledge of nature; “I compared the skulls of men and animals and I found the trail, and behold, there it is. Now I ask you not to tell, for it must be treated as a secret. But I want you to enjoy it with me, for it is like the finishing stone in the structure of man; now it is complete and nothing is lacking. Just see how it is!”

[ 19 ] Under the influence of such conceptions the great question of philosophy of man's relation to himself and to the external world led to the task of showing by the method of natural science what actual process had led to the formation of man in the course of evolution. Thereby the viewpoint from which one attempted to explain the phenomena of nature changed. As long as one saw in every organism including man the realization of a purposeful design of structure, one had to consider this purpose also in the explanation of organic beings. One had to consider that in the embryo the later organism is potentially indicated. When this view was extended to the whole universe, it meant that an explanation of nature fulfilled its task best if it showed how the later stages of evolution with man as the climax are prepared in the earlier stages.

[ 20 ] The modern idea of evolution rejected all attempts of science to recognize the potential later phases in the earlier stages. Accordingly, the later phase was in no way contained in the earlier one. Instead, what was gradually developed was the tendency to search in the later phases for traces of the earlier ones. This principle represented one of the laws of inheritance. One can actually speak of a reversal of the tendency of explanation. This reversal became important for ontogenesis, that is, for the formation of the ideas concerning the evolution of the individual being from the egg to maturity. Instead of showing the predisposition of the later organs in the embryo, one set out to compare the various stages that an organism goes through in the course of its individual evolution from the egg to maturity with those of other forms of organisms. Lorenz Oken was already moving in this direction. In the fourth volume of his General History of Nature for All Classes of Readers he wrote:

Years ago, through my physiological investigations, I arrived at the view that the developmental stages of the chicken in the egg have much similarity with different classes of animals. In the beginning it shows only the organs of infusoria, thereupon gradually assuming those of the polyps, jellyfish, shellfish, snails and so forth. Conversely, then, I also had to consider the classes of animals as evolutionary stages that proceeded parallel to the developmental stages of the chicken. This view of nature challenged me to the most minute observation of those organs that are added as new forms to every higher class of animal, as well as of the ones that are developed one after the other during the developmental process. It is, of course, not easy to establish a complete parallelism with such a difficult object as a chick egg because its development is so incompletely known. But to prove that the parallelism actually exists is indeed not difficult. It is most distinctly shown in the transformation of the insects, which is nothing more than the development of the young going on before our eyes outside the egg, and actually in so slow a tempo that we can observe and investigate every embryonic stage at our leisure.

Oken compares the stages of transformation of the insects with the other animals and finds that the caterpillars have a great similarity with worms, and the cocoons with crustaceous animals. From such similarities this ingenious thinker draws the conclusion that “there is, therefore, no doubt that we are here confronted with a conspicuous similarity that justifies the idea that the evolutionary history in the egg is nothing but a repetition of the history of the creation of the animal classes.” It came as a natural gift to this brilliant man to apprehend a great idea for which he did not even need the evidence of supporting facts. But it also lies in the nature of such subtle ideas that they have no great effect on those who work in the field of science. Oken appears like a comet on the firmament of German philosophy. His thought supplies a flood of light. From a rich treasure of ideas he suggests leading concepts for the most divergent facts. His method of formulating factual connections, however, was somewhat forced. He was too much preoccupied with the point he wanted to make. This attitude also prevailed in his treatment of the law of the repetition of certain animal forms in the ontogeny of others mentioned above.

[ 21 ] In contrast to Oken, Karl Ernst von Baer kept to the facts as firmly as possible when he spoke, in his History of the Evolution of Animals (1828), of the observations that had led Oken to his idea:

The embryos of the mammals, birds, lizards and snakes, and probably also those of the turtles, in their earlier stages are extraordinarily similar to one another in their whole formation as well as in their individual parts. These embryos are so similar in fact that they can often only be distinguished by their sizes. I have in my possession two little embryos in alcohol that I forgot to label, and now I cannot possibly determine to what class they belong. They could be lizards, little birds or young mammals, so similar is the head and trunk formation of these animals. The extremities are still completely absent in these embryos and, even if they were there, at the first stages of their development they would not tell us anything because the feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and feet of birds, as well as the hands and feet of men, all develop from the same original form.

Such facts of embryological development excited the greatest interest of those thinkers who tended toward Darwinism. Darwin had proven the possibility of change in organic forms and, through transformation, the species now in existence might possibly be descended from a few original forms, or perhaps only one. Now it was shown that in their first phases of development the various living organisms are so similar to each other that they can scarcely be distinguished from one another, if at all. These two ideas, the facts of comparative embryology and the idea of descent, were organically combined in 1864 by Fritz Müller (1821–97) in his thoughtful essay, Facts and Arguments for Darwin. Müller is one of those high-minded personalities who needs a naturalistic world conception because they cannot breathe spiritually without it. Also, in regard to his own action, he would feel satisfaction only when he could feel that his motivation was as necessary as a force of nature. In 1852 Müller settled in Brazil. For twelve years he was a teacher at the gymnasium in Desterro on the island of Santa Catharina, not far from the coast of Brazil. In 1867 he had to give up this position. The man of the new world conception had to give way to the reaction that, under the influence of the Jesuits, took hold of his school. Ernst Haeckel has described the life and activity of Fritz Müller in the Jenaische Zeitschrift fur Naturwissenschaft (Vol. XXXI N.F. XXIV 1897).

Darwin called Müller the “prince of observers,” and the small but significant booklet, Facts and Arguments for Darwin, is the result of a wealth of observations. It deals with a particular group of organic forms, the crustaceans, which are radically different from one another in their maturity but are perfectly similar at the time when they leave the egg. If one presupposes, in the sense of Darwin's theory of descent, that all crustacean forms have developed from one original type, and if one accepts the similarity in the early stages as an inherited element of the form of their common ancestor, one has thereby combined the ideas of Darwin with those of Oken pertaining to the repetition of the history of the creation of the animal species in the evolution of the individual animal form. This combination was accomplished by Fritz Müller. He thereby brought the earlier forms of an animal class into a certain law-determined connection with the later ones, which, through transformation, have formed out of them. The fact that at an earlier stage the ancestral form of a being now living has had a particular form caused its descendants at a later time to have another particular form. By studying the stages of the development of an organism one becomes acquainted with its ancestors whose nature has caused the characteristics of the embryonic forms. Phylogenesis and ontogenesis are, in Fritz Müller's book, connected as cause and effect. With this step a new element had entered the Darwinian trend of ideas. This fact retains its significance even though Müller's investigations of the crustaceans were modified by the later research of Arnold Lang.

[ 22 ] Only four years had passed since the appearance of Darwin's Origin of the Species when Müller's book was published as its defense and confirmation. Müller had shown how, with one special class of animals, one should work in the spirit of the new ideas. Then, in 1866, seven years after the Origin of the Species, a book appeared that completely absorbed this new spirit. Using the ideas of Darwinism on a high level of scientific discussion, it threw a great deal of light on the problems of the interconnection of all life phenomena. This book was Ernst Haeckel's General Morphology of Organisms. Every page reflected his attempt to arrive at a comprehensive synopsis of the totality of the phenomena of nature with the help of new thoughts. Inspired by Darwinism, Haeckel was in search of a world conception.

[ 23 ] Haeckel did his best in two ways to attempt a new world conception. First, he continually contributed to the accumulation of facts that throw light on the connection of the entities and energies of nature. Second, with unbending consistency he derived from these facts the ideas that were to satisfy the human need for explanation. He held the unshakable conviction that from these facts and ideas man can arrive at a fully satisfactory world explanation. Like Goethe, Haeckel was convinced in his own way that nature proceeds in its work “according to eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws, so that not even the deity could change it.” Because this was clear to him, he worshipped his deity in these eternal and necessary laws of nature and in the substances in which they worked. As the harmony of the natural laws, which are with necessity interconnected, satisfies reason, according to his view, so it also offers to the feeling heart, or to the soul that is ethically or religiously attuned, whatever it may thirst for. In the stone that falls to the ground attracted by gravity there is a manifestation of the same divine order that is expressed in the blossom of a plant and in the human spirit that created the drama of Wilhelm Tell.

[ 24 ] How erroneous is the belief that the feeling for the wonderful beauty of nature is destroyed by the penetration of reason into laws of nature is vividly demonstrated in the work of Ernst Haeckel. A rational explanation of nature had been declared to be incapable of satisfying the needs of the soul. Wherever man is disturbed in his inner life through knowledge of nature, it is not the fault of knowledge but of man himself. His sentiments are developed in a wrong direction. As we follow a naturalist like Haeckel without prejudice on his path as an observer of nature, we feel our hearts beat faster. The anatomical analysis, the microscopic investigation does not detract from natural beauty but reveals a great deal more of it. There is no doubt that there is an antagonism between reason and imagination, between reflection and intuition, in our time. The brilliant essayist, Ellen Key, is without doubt right in considering this antagonism as one of the most important phenomena of our time (compare Ellen Key, Essays, S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1899). Whoever, like Ernst Haeckel, digs deep into the treasure mine of facts, boldly emerges with the thoughts resulting from these facts and climbs to the heights of human knowledge, can see in the explanation of nature only an act of reconciliation between the two contesting forces of reflection and intuition that “alternate in forcing each other into submission” (Ellen Key). Almost simultaneously with the publication of the book in which Haeckel presented with unflinching intellectual honesty his world conception derived from natural science, that is, with the appearance of his Riddles of the Universe in 1899, he began a serial publication called Artforms of Nature. In it he gives pictures of the inexhaustible wealth of wonderful formations that nature produces and that surpass “by far all artistic forms created by man” in beauty and in variety. The same man who introduces our mind to the law-determined order of nature leads our imagination to the beauty of nature.

[ 25 ] The need to bring the great problems of world conception into direct contact with scientific, specialized research led Haeckel to one of the facts concerning which Goethe said that they represent the significant points at which nature yields the fundamental ideas for its explanation of its own accord, meeting us halfway in our search. This was realized by Haeckel as he investigated how Oken's thesis, which Fritz Müller had applied to the crustaceans, could be fruitfully applied to the whole animal kingdom. In all animals except the Protista, which are one-celled organisms, a cup- or jug-shaped body, the gastrula, develops from the zygote with which the organism begins its ontogenesis. This gastrula is an animal form that is to be found in the first stages of development of all animals from the sponges to man. It consists merely of skin, mouth and stomach. There is a low class of zoophytes that possess only these organs during their lives and therefore resemble gastrulae. This fact is interpreted by Haeckel from the point of view of the theory of descent. The gastrula form is an inherited form that the animal owes to the form of its common ancestor. There had been, probably millions of years before, a species of animals, the gastrae, that was built in a way similar to that of the lower zoophytes still living today—the sponges, polyps, etc. From this animal species all the various forms living today, from the polyps, sponges, etc., to man, repeat this original form in the course of their ontogenies.

[ 26 ] In this way an idea of gigantic scope had been obtained. The path leading from the simple to the complicated, to the perfect form in the world of organisms, was thereby indicated in its tentative outline. A simple animal form develops under certain circumstances. One or several individuals of this form change to another form according to the conditions of life to which they are exposed. What has come into existence through this transmutation is again transmitted to descendants. There are then two different forms, the old one that has retained the form of the first stage, and a new one. Both of these forms can develop in different directions and into different degrees of perfection. After long periods of time an abundant wealth of species comes into existence through the transmission of the earlier form and through new formations by means of the process of adaptation to the conditions of life.

[ 27 ] In this manner Haeckel connects today's processes in the world of organisms with the events of primeval times. If we want to explain some organ of an animal of the present age, we look back to the ancestors that had developed this organ under the circumstances in which they lived. What has come into existence through natural causes in earlier times has been handed down to our time through the process of heredity. Through the history of the species the evolution of the individual receives its explanation. The phylogenesis, therefore, contains the causes for the ontogenesis. Haeckel expresses this fact in his fundamental law of biogenetics: “The short ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and brief repetition, an abbreviated recapitulation of the long process of phylogenesis, the development of the species.”

[ 28 ] Through this law every attempt at explanation through special purposes, all teleology in the old sense, has been eliminated. One no longer looks for the purpose of an organ; one looks for the causes through which it has developed. A given form does not point to a goal toward which it strives, but toward the origin from which it sprang. The method of explanation for the organic phenomena has become the same as that for the inorganic. Water is not considered the aim of oxygen, nor is man considered the purpose of creation. Scientific research is directed toward the origin of, and the actual cause for, living beings. The dualistic mode of conception, which declares that the organic and the inorganic has to be explained according to two different principles, gives way to a monistic mode of conception, to a monism that has only one uniform mode of explanation for the whole of nature.

[ 29 ] Haeckel characteristically points out that through his discovery the method has been found through which every dualism in the above-mentioned sense must be overcome.

Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. With this statement our basically monistic conception of organic evolution is clearly characterized, and on the truth of this principle depends primarily the truth of the gastraea theory. . . . Every naturalist, who in the field of biogenesis is not satisfied with a mere admiration of strange phenomena but strives for an understanding of their significance, will, in the future, either have to side with or against this principle. It marks at the same time the complete break that separates the older teleological and dualistic morphology from the new mechanical and monistic one. If the physiological functions of inheritance and adaptation have been proven to be the only causes of the process of organic formation, then every kind of teleology, of dualistic and metaphysical mode of conception has thereby been eliminated from the field of biogenesis; the sharp contrast between the leading principles is clearly marked. Either a direct and causal connection between ontogeny and phylogeny exists or it does not. There is no third possibility! Either epigenesis and descent, or pre-formation and creation! (Compare alsoin Part 1 Chapter IX of this book.)

After Haeckel had absorbed Darwin's view of the origin of man he defended forcefully the conclusion that must be drawn from it. It was impossible for him just to hint hesitatingly, like Darwin, at this “problem of all problems.” Anatomically and physiologically man is not distinguishable from the higher animals. Therefore, the same origin must be attributed to him as to them. Haeckel boldly defended this opinion and the consequences that followed from it for the conception of the world. There was no doubt for him that in the future the highest manifestations of man's life, the activities of his spirit, were to be considered under the same viewpoint as the function of the simplest living organism. The observation of the lowest animals, the protozoa, infusoria, rhizopods, taught him that these organisms had a soul. In their motions, in the indications of the sensations they show, he recognized manifestations of life that only had to be increased and perfected in order to develop into man's complicated actions of reason and will.

[ 30 ] Beginning with the gastraea, which lived millions of years ago, what steps does nature take to arrive at man? This was the comprehensive question as stated by Haeckel. He supplied the answer in his Anthropogenesis, which appeared in 1874. In its first part, this book deals with the history of the individual (ontogenesis), in the second part, with that of the species (phylogenesis). He showed point by point how the latter contains the causes of the former. Man's position in nature had thereby been determined according to the principles of the theory of descent. To works like Haeckel's Anthropogenesis, the statement that the great anatomist, Karl Gegenbaur, made in his Comparative Anatomy (1870) can be justly applied. He wrote that in exchange for the method of investigation Darwin gave to science with his theory he received in return clarity and firmness of purpose. In Haeckel's view, the method of Darwinism had also supplied science with the theory of the origin of man.

[ 31 ] What actually was accomplished by this step can be appreciated in its full measure only if one looks at the opposition with which Haeckel's comprehensive application of the principles of Darwinism was received by the followers of idealistic world conceptions. It is not even necessary to quote those who, blindly believing in the traditional opinion, turned against the “monkey theory,” or those who believed that all finer, higher morality would be endangered if men were no longer convinced that they had a “purer, higher origin.” Other thinkers, although quite open-minded with regard to new truths, found it difficult to accept this new truth. They asked themselves the question, [ 32 ] “Do we not deny our own rational thinking if we no longer look for its origin in a general world reason over us, but in the animal kingdom below?” Mentalities of this sort eagerly attacked the points where Haeckel's view seemed to be without support of the facts. They had powerful allies in a number of natural scientists who, through a strange bias, used their factual knowledge to emphasize the points where actual experience was still insufficient to prove the conclusions drawn by Haeckel. The typical, and at the same time the most impressive, representative of this viewpoint of the naturalists was Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902). The opposition of Virchow and Haeckel can be characterized as follows. Haeckel puts his trust in the inner consistency of nature, concerning which Goethe is of the opinion that it is sufficient to make up for man's inconsistency. Haeckel, therefore, argues that if a principle of nature has been verified for certain cases, and if we still lack the experience to show its validity in other cases, we have no reason to hold the progress of our knowledge back. What experience denies us today, it may yield tomorrow. Virchow is of the opposite opinion. He wants to yield as little ground as possible to a comprehensive principle. He seems to believe that life for such a principle cannot be made hard enough. The antagonism between these two spirits was brought to a sharp point at the Fiftieth Congress of German naturalists and doctors in 1877. Haeckel read a paper there on the topic, The Theory of Evolution of Today in Its Relation to Science in General.

[ 33 ] In 1894 Virchow felt that he had to state his view in the following way. “Through speculation one has arrived at the monkey theory; one could just as well have ended up with an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” What Virchow demanded was incontestable proof of this theory. As soon as something turned up that fitted as a link in the chain of the argumentation, Virchow attempted to invalidate it with all means at his disposal.

[ 34 ] Such a link in the chain of proof was presented with the bone remnants that Eugen Dubois had found in Java in 1894. They consisted of a skull and thigh bone and several teeth. Concerning this find, an interesting discussion arose at the Congress of Zoologists at Leyden. Of twelve zoologists, three were of the opinion that these bones came from a monkey and three thought they came from a human being; six, however, believed they presented a transitional form between man and monkey. Dubois shows in a convincing manner in what relation the being whose bone remnants were under discussion stood to the present monkey, on the one hand, and to man of today, on the other. The theory of evolution of natural science must claim such intermediary forms. They fill the holes that exist between numerous forms of organisms. Every new intermediary form constitutes a new proof for the kinship of all living organisms. Virchow objected to the view that these bone remnants came from such an intermediary form. At first, he declared that it was the skull of a monkey and the thigh bone of a man. Expert paleontologists, however, firmly pronounced, according to the careful report, on the finding, that the remnants belonged together. Virchow attempted to support his view that the thigh bone could be only that of a human being with the statement that a certain growth in the bone proved that it must have had a disease that could only have been healed through careful human attention. The paleontologist, Marsch, [e.Ed: perhaps American paleontologist, Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899)] however, maintained that similar bone extuberances occurred in wild animals as well. A further statement of Virchow's, that the deep incision between the upper rim of the eye socket and the lower skull cover of the alleged intermediary form proved it to be the skull of a monkey was then contradicted by the naturalist Nehring, who claimed that the same formation was found in a human skull from Santos, Brazil. Virchow's objections came from the same turn of mind that also caused him to consider the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., as pathological formations, while Haeckel's followers regarded them as intermediary forms between monkey and man.

[ 35 ] Haeckel did not allow any objections to deprive him of his confidence in his mode of conception. He continued his scientific work without swerving from the viewpoints at which he had arrived, and through popular presentations of his conception of nature, he influenced the public consciousness. In his book, Systematic Phylogenesis, Outline of a Natural System of Organisms on the Basis of the History of Species (1894–96), he attempted to demonstrate the natural kinship of organisms in a strictly scientific method. In his Natural History of Creation, which, from 1868–1908, appeared in eleven editions, he gave a popular explanation of his views. In 1899, in his popular studies on monistic philosophy entitled, The Riddles of the Universe, he gave a survey of his ideas in natural philosophy by demonstrating without reserve the many applications of his basic thoughts. Between all these works he published studies on the most diverse specialized researches, always paying attention at the same time to the philosophical principles and the scientific knowledge of details.

[ 36 ] The light that shines out from the monistic world conception is, according to Haeckel's conviction, to “disperse the heavy clouds of ignorance and superstition that have heretofore spread an impenetrable darkness over the most important one of all problems of human knowledge, that is, the problem concerning man's origin, his true nature and his position in nature.” This is what he said in a speech given August 26, 1898 at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge, On Our Present Knowledge Concerning the Origin of Man. In what respect his world conception forms a bond between religion and science, Haeckel has shown in an impressive way in his book, Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science, Credo of a Naturalist, which appeared in 1892.

[ 37 ] If one compares Haeckel with Hegel, one can see distinctly the difference in the tendencies of world conception in the two halves of the nineteenth century. Hegel lives completely in the idea and accepts only as much as he needs from the world of facts for the illustration of his idealistic world picture. Haeckel is rooted with every fiber of his being in the world of facts, and he derives from this world only those ideas toward which these facts necessarily tend. Hegel always attempts to show that all beings tend to reach their climax of evolution in the human spirit; Haeckel continuously endeavors to prove that the most complicated human activities point back to the simplest origins of existence. Hegel explains nature from the spirit; Haeckel derives the spirit from nature. We can, therefore, speak of a reversal of the thought direction in the course of the century. Within German intellectual life, Strauss, Feuerbach and others began this process of reversal. In their materialism the new direction found a provisional extreme expression, and in Haeckel's thought world it found a strictly methodical-scientific one. For this is the significant thing in Haeckel, that all his activity as a research worker is permeated by a philosophical spirit. He does not at all work toward results that for some philosophical motivation or other are considered to be the aim of his world conception or of his philosophical thinking. What is philosophical about him is his method. For him, science itself has the character of a world conception. His very way of looking at things predestines him to be a monist. He looks upon spirit and nature with equal love. For this reason he could find spirit in the simplest organism. He goes even further than that. He looks for the traces of spirit in the inorganic particles of matter:

Every atom possesses an inherent quantity of energy and in this sense is animate. Without assuming a soul for the atom, the simplest and most general phenomena of chemistry are unexplainable. Pleasure and displeasure, desire and aversion, attraction and repulsion must be a common property of all material atoms. For the motion of the atoms, which must take place in the formation and dissolution of every chemical compound can only be explained if we assume that they have sensation and will. On this assumption the generally accepted chemical doctrine of affinity is really based.

As he traces spirit down to the atom so he follows the purely material mechanism of events up to the most lofty accomplishments of the spirit:

The spirit and soul of man are also nothing else but energies that are inseparably bound to the material substratum of our bodies. As the motion of our flesh is bound to the form elements of our muscles, so our mind's power of thinking is bound to the form elements of our brains. Our spiritual energies are simply functions of these physical organs just as every energy is a function of a material body.

[ 38 ] One must not confuse this mode of conception with one that dreams souls in a hazy mystical fashion into the entities of nature and then assumes that they are more or less similar to that of man. Haeckel is a strict opponent of a world conception that projects qualities and activities of man into the external world. He has repeatedly expressed his condemnation of the humanization of nature, of anthropomorphism, with a clarity that cannot be misunderstood. If he attributes animation to inorganic matter, or to the simplest organisms, he means by that nothing more than the sum of energy manifestations that we observe in them. He holds strictly to the facts. Sensation and will are for him no mystical soul energies but are nothing more than what we observe as attraction and repulsion. He does not mean to say that attraction and repulsion are really sensation and will. What he means is that attraction and repulsion are on the lowest stage what sensation and will are on a higher one. For evolution is for him not merely an unwrapping of the higher stages of the spiritual out of the lower forms in which they are already contained in a hidden fashion, but a real ascent to new formations, an intensification of attraction and repulsion into sensation and will (compare prior comments in this Chapter).

This fundamental view of Haeckel agrees in a certain way with that of Goethe. He states in this connection that he had arrived at the fulfillment of his view of nature with his insight into the “two great springs of all nature,” namely, polarity and intensification (Polarität und Steigerung), polarity “belonging to matter insofar as we think of it materially, intensification insofar as we think of it spiritually. The former is engaged in the everlasting process of attraction and repulsion, the latter in a continual intensification. As matter can never be and act without spirit, however, nor spirit without matter, so matter can also be intensified and the spirit will never be without attraction and repulsion.”

[ 39 ] A thinker who believes in such a world conception is satisfied to explain by other such things and processes, the things and processes that are actually in the world. The idealistic world conceptions need, for the derivation of a thing or process, entities that cannot be found within the realm of the factual. Haeckel derives the form of the gastrula that occurs in the course of animal evolution from an organism that he assumes really existed at some time. An idealist would look for ideal forces under the influence of which the developing germ becomes the gastrula. Haeckel's monism draws everything he needs for the explanation of the real world from the same real world. He looks around in the world of the real in order to recognize in which way the things and processes explain one another. His theories do not have the purpose for him, as do those of the idealist, to find a higher element in addition to the factual elements, but they merely serve to make the connection of the facts understandable. Fichte, the idealist, asked the question of man's destination. He meant by that something that cannot be completely presented in the form of the real, the factual; something that reason has to produce as an addition to the factually given existence, an element that is to make the real existence of man translucent by showing it in a higher light. Haeckel, the monistic contemplator of the world, asks for the origin of man, and he means by that the factual origin, the lower organism out of which man had developed through actual processes.

[ 40 ] It is characteristic that Haeckel argues for the animation of the lower organisms. An idealist would have resorted to rational conclusions. He would present necessities of thought. Haeckel refers to what he has seen.

Every naturalist, who, like me, has observed for many years the life activities of the one-celled protozoa, is positively convinced that they, too, possess a soul. This cellular soul consists also of a sum of sensations, perceptions and will activities; sensation, thinking and will of our human souls differ from those of the cellular soul only in degree.

The idealist attributes spirit to matter because he cannot accept the thought that spirit can develop from mere matter. He believes that one would have to deny the spirit if one does not assume it to exist before its appearance in forms of existence without organs, without brains. For the monist, such thoughts are not possible. He does not speak of an existence that is not manifested externally as such. He does not attribute two kinds of properties to things: those that are real and manifested in them and those that in a hidden way are latent in them only to be revealed at a higher stage of development. For him, there is what he observes, nothing else, and if the object of observation continues its evolution and reaches a higher stage in the course of its development, then these later forms are there only in the moment when they become visible.

[ 41 ] How easily Haeckel's monism can be misunderstood in this direction is shown by the objections that were made by the brilliant thinker, Bartholomaeus von Carneri (1821–1909), who made lasting contributions for the construction of an ethics of this world conception. In his book, Sensations and Consciousness, Doubts Concerning Monism (1893), he remarks that the principle, “No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit,” would justify our extending this question to the plant and even to the next rock we may stumble against, and to attribute spirit also to them. Without doubt such a conclusion would lead to a confusion of distinctions. It should not be overlooked that consciousness arises only through the cell activity in the cerebrum. “The conviction that there is no spirit without matter, that is to say, that all spiritual activity is bound to a material activity, the former terminating with the latter, is based on experience, while there is no experience for the statement that there is always spirit connected with matter.” Somebody who would want to attribute animation to matter that does not show any trace of spirit would be like one who attributed the function to indicate time not to the mechanism of a watch but to the metal out of which it is made.

[ 42 ] Properly understood, Haeckel's view is not touched by Carneri's criticism. It is safe from this criticism because Haeckel holds himself strictly within the bounds of observation. In his Riddles of the Universe, he says, “I, myself, have never defended the theory of atom-consciousness. I have, on the contrary, expressly emphasized that I think the elementary psychic activities of sensation and will, which are attributed to the atoms, as unconscious.” What Haeckel wants is only that one should not allow a break in the explanation of natural phenomena. He insists that one should trace back the complicated mechanism by which spirit appears in the brain, to the simple process of attraction and repulsion of matter.

Haeckel considers the discovery of the organs of thought by Paul Flechsig to be one of the most important accomplishments of modern times. Flechsig had pointed out that in the gray matter of the brain there are to be found the four seats of the central sense organs, or four “inner spheres of sensation,” the spheres of touch, smell, sight and hearing. “Between the sense centers lie thought centers, the ‘real organs of mental life.’ They are the highest organs of psychic activity that produce thought and consciousness. . . . These four thought centers, distinguished from the intermediate sense centers by a peculiar and highly elaborate nerve structure, are the true organs of thought, the only organs of our consciousness. Recently, Flechsig has proved that man has some especially complicated structures in some of these organs that cannot be found in the other mammals and that explain the superiority of human consciousness.” (Riddles of the Universe, Chapt. X.)

[ 43 ] Passages like these show clearly enough that Haeckel does not intend to assume, like the idealistic philosophers, the spirit as implicitly contained in the lower stages of material existence in order to be able to find it again on the higher stages. What he wanted to do was to follow the simplest phenomena to the most complicated ones in his observation, in order to show how the activity of matter, which in the most primitive form is manifested in attraction and repulsion, is intensified in the higher mental operations.

[ 44 ] Haeckel does not look for a general spiritual principle for lack of adequate general laws explaining the phenomena of nature and mind. So far as his need is concerned, his general law is indeed perfectly sufficient. The law that is manifested in the mental activities seems to him to be of the same kind as the one that is apparent in the attraction and repulsion of material particles. If he calls atoms animated, this has not the same meaning that it would have if a believer in an idealistic world conception did so. The latter would proceed from the spirit. He would take the conceptions derived from the contemplation of the spirit down into the simplest functions of the atoms when he thinks of them as animated. He would explain thereby the natural phenomena from entities that he had first projected into them. Haeckel proceeds from the contemplation of the simplest phenomena of nature and follows them up to the highest spiritual activities. This means that he explains the spiritual phenomena from laws that he has observed in the simplest natural phenomena.

[ 45 ] Haeckel's world picture can take shape in a mind whose observation extends exclusively to natural processes and natural entities. A mind of this kind will want to understand the connection within the realm of these events and beings. His ideal would be to see what the processes and beings themselves reveal with respect to their development and interaction, and to reject rigorously everything that might be added in order to obtain an explanation of these processes and activities. For such an ideal one is to approach all nature as one would, for instance, proceed in explaining the mechanism of a watch. It is quite unnecessary to know anything about the watchmaker, about his skill and about his thoughts, if one gains an insight into the mechanical actions of its parts. In obtaining this insight one has, within certain limits, done everything that is admissible for the explanation of the operation of the watch. One ought to be clear about the fact that the watch itself cannot be explained if another method of explanation is admitted, as, for instance, if somebody thought of some special spiritual forces that move the hour and minute hands according to the course of the sun. Every suggestion of a special life force, or of a power that works toward a “purpose” within the organisms, appears to Haeckel as an invented force that is added to the natural processes. He is unwilling to think about the natural processes in any other way than by what they themselves disclose to observation. His thought structure is to be derived directly from nature.

In observing the evolution of world conception, this thought structure strikes us, as it were, as the counter-gift from the side of natural science to the Hegelian world conception, which accepts in its thought picture nothing from nature but wants everything to originate from the soul. If Hegel's world conception said that the self-conscious ego finds itself in the experience of pure thought, Haeckel's view of nature could reply that the thought experience is a result of the nature processes, is, indeed, their highest product. If the Hegelian world conception would not be satisfied with such a reply, Haeckel's naturalistic view could demand to be shown some inner thought experience that does not appear as if it were a mirror reflection of events outside thought life. In answer to this demand, a philosophy would have to show how thought can come to life in the soul and can really produce a world that is not merely the intellectual shadow of the external world. A thought that is merely thought, merely the product of thinking, cannot be used as an effective objection to Haeckel's view. In the comparison mentioned above, he would maintain that the watch contains nothing in itself that allows a conclusion as to the personality, etc., of the watchmaker. Haeckel's naturalistic view tends to show that, as long as one is merely confronted with nature, one cannot make any statement concerning nature except what it records. In this respect this naturalistic conception is significant as it appears in the course of the development of world conception. It proves that philosophy must create a field for itself that lies in the realm of spontaneous creativity of thought life beyond the thoughts that are gained from nature.

Philosophy must take the step beyond Hegel that was pointed out in a previous chapter. It cannot consist of a method that moves in the same field with natural science. Haeckel himself probably felt not the slightest need to pay any attention to such a step of philosophy. His world conception does bring thoughts to life in the soul, but only insofar as their life has been stimulated by the observation of natural processes. The world picture that thought can create when it comes to life in the soul without this stimulus represents the kind of higher world conception that would adequately complement Haeckel's picture of nature. One has to go beyond the facts that are directly contained in the watch if one wants to know, for instance, something about the form of the watchmaker's face. But, for this reason, one has no right to demand that Haeckel's naturalistic view itself should not speak as Haeckel does when he states what positive facts he has observed concerning natural processes and natural beings.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, as it is to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach, still finds the most diverse opponents today - opponents who stand on the ground of church theology with their views, even from the artistic side many opponents have shown up, especially opponents who do not always start from thoroughly objective points of departure and come from the most diverse party directions and from the most diverse areas of social life. I will not deal with all these adversaries today, my dear audience, but what I would like to do today is to deal with the misunderstandings and antagonism that anthroposophical research has encountered from the scientific community. For it is my conviction that, although it seems absolutely necessary to oppose the various other opponents, these will gradually disappear of their own accord once the debate between anthroposophy and science has been brought into the necessary forms so that present-day official science and anthroposophy can really understand each other. At the moment, the situation is such that it is precisely from the scientific side that anthroposophical research is met with the greatest misunderstandings.

But first of all, I would like to emphasize that the anthroposophical research method that I represent – for that is how I would actually like to call it – definitely wants to stand on scientific ground and that it would like to set up all its arguments in such a way that this scientific ground becomes possible, excluding any kind of dilettantism and so on. The starting point for the anthroposophical research method is such that the scientific requirements and the whole scientific attitude of modern times have been taken into account. Anthroposophy does not place itself in opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it seeks to take up what has emerged over the course of the more recent development of civilization in the way of scientific conscientiousness and exact scientific methods, especially in the field of natural science, over the last three to four hundred years, but particularly in the nineteenth century and up to the present. Although it must go beyond the results and also the field of actual natural science, as it is usually understood today, it would like to include what underlies it as scientific discipline, as scientific methods, in the inner education for the anthroposophical method. Today I will not be able to give a fundamental lecture, but will only touch on certain points, in order to then be able to draw some connecting lines to the scientifically recognized fields of today.

What is initially claimed by anthroposophy are special methods of knowledge - methods of knowledge that differ from what is generally considered to be the usual methods of knowledge today, but which nevertheless grow out of them quite organically. Today, it is generally assumed that one can only conduct scientific research if one is grounded in knowledge as it arises in ordinary life, after having undergone a normal school education and then approaching the various fields of external natural existence, including that of man, by experimenting, observing and thinking in a materialistic sense.

Anthroposophy cannot be based on this, but rather it assumes that it is possible, that just as one first develops one's mental abilities from early childhood to what today is called a normal state of mind or what is regarded as such, further cognitive abilities can be developed by taking one's soul life, if I may use the expression, freely and independently, starting from this so-called normal state of mind. And through these cognitive abilities, one is then able to gain deeper insights into the nature and human existence, into world phenomena, than is possible without such particularly developed abilities. These abilities are not developed by an arbitrary handling of the soul life, but they are developed in a very systematic way, only that one is not dealing with the training of certain external manipulations, with the application of the laws of thought recognized by ordinary logic, but with the development of the intimate soul life itself.

I can only hint at the methods used to develop such supersensible soul faculties. In my various books, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, I have given detailed descriptions of how a person can proceed in order to soul-life to such abilities by means of which one can — if I may express myself trivially — see more than one can explore with ordinary intellectual thinking, with experimentation and observation.

I have already mentioned imaginative cognition as the first step towards such knowledge. This imaginative cognition does not mean that one should develop the ability to cultivate illusions or phantasms in the soul, but rather that it is a pictorial cognition, as opposed to ordinary abstract cognition, which is simply needed to explore the real secrets of existence. This pictorial knowledge is acquired, as I said, by way of long soul-searching. It depends on individual ability: one person needs a long time, another only a short time, to try to apply a meditative life to the point of enhancing one's inner soul abilities. This meditative life consists, for example, as already mentioned, and described in more detail in the books mentioned, of easily comprehensible ideas, that is, ideas that one either forms in the moment, so that one can grasp them in all their details, or that you can have them given to you by someone who is knowledgeable in such matters, that you can have such ideas present with all your strength in your ordinary consciousness, that you can, so to speak, concentrate all of your soul abilities on such easily comprehensible ideas.

What is achieved by this? Well, I would like to express what is achieved by this through a comparison. If someone uses the muscles of his arm continually, especially if he uses them in a very definite, systematic way, then he will grow in strength for these muscles. If someone applies the soul abilities in such a way that he concentrates them on a self-appointed goal, on a self-appointed inner soul content, then the soul powers as such will grow stronger, will gain strength. And by doing so, one can achieve – as I said, it takes a long time to do these exercises – one can achieve, inwardly, without paying attention to external sense impressions, a strength of soul that is otherwise only applied to the external sense impressions themselves.

The outer sense impressions are concrete, pictorial. Everyone who has a certain self-contemplation knows that he develops a greater intensity of his soul life when he lives in the outer sense impressions than when he lives in abstract ideas or in memories, when he lives in that which remains for him when he turns his perceptive abilities away from the outer sensory life and limits himself only to his soul as such, as it arises, I might say, as an echo, as an after-effect, through the lively, saturated outer sensory impressions. What is important, ladies and gentlemen, is that the inner life of the soul is so strengthened that one can have something in this inner strengthening that one can otherwise only have in the present human life between birth and death when one is given over to the strength of the external sense impressions. One arrives at a pictorial imagining, an imagining that actually differs from the usual abstract imagining – let us say, if we want to speak scientifically, from that imagining by which one visualizes natural laws on the basis of observation and experiment. One comes to develop such inner strength that one has not only the kind of thinking, the kind of inner soul life that is present, for example, in grasping the laws of nature, but also the kind of inner soul life that is present in grasping outer pictorialness. One attains an inner pictorialness of thinking. One comes to live, not merely in thoughts of an abstract kind, but in inner pictures.

In the moment when one characterizes such a developed inner vision, it is immediately asserted: Yes, anthroposophy wants to develop something that is actually known as subordinate soul abilities, as soul abilities that play over half or completely - as one now wants to take it - into the pathological. And further one says: Those who strengthen their inner vision to such an extent that they develop the ability to see inner images without taking these images from the external sense world are surrendering themselves to an ability that is the same as the hallucinatory ability, to the ability to imagine all kinds of pathological phantasms and the like. And indeed, representatives of today's science have repeatedly objected that what anthroposophy claims as its inner vision in images must be traced back to suppressed nervous forces, which then, at the appropriate moment, arise from the inner being through the intensified inner life, so that one actually has nothing other than a suppressed nervous life in these images. Those representatives of science who confuse anthroposophical vision with hallucinations, as they are called in the trivial life, have simply not thoroughly studied what anthroposophical vision really is. Firstly, one could counter such objections by pointing out that anthroposophy insists that it proceeds in exactly the same strict way as the external natural sciences with regard to what the natural sciences deal with, and that it takes recognized scientific methods as its most important preparation and that it rises only from these, so that one should not really speak of the fact that someone who stands on the true ground of anthroposophy would show signs of indulging in a vision like some random medium or some random fantasist. We will not see any medium or fantasist placing themselves firmly on the ground of scientific research and taking this as their starting point, and then wanting to let what is to become a vision emerge from these strict scientific methods. But I do not want to talk about that at all. Instead, I would like to point out that anthroposophy demands a more thorough and exact method of thinking than is usually evident or applied in such objections.

The main point here is that, above all, such objections do not yet arise from a truly thorough knowledge of the soul or psychology. Our knowledge of the soul still leaves much to be desired today. It is by no means commensurate with the exact methods of external natural science. In many respects, it is actually a chaos of ideas handed down from ancient times and extracted to the point of mere words, and all kinds of abstractions. It is not based on real observation of the life of the soul, on exact empiricism of the life of the soul. Above all, such exact psychological empiricism must ask itself the question: What is the actual state of our sensory perception? What actually works in our sensory perception?

In our overall soul life, there is imagination, feeling and will. But our soul life is not such that we can separate imagination, feeling and will from one another other than in abstraction; rather, imagination, feeling and will are involved in everything that our soul is capable of in some way. We can only say that when we are in the life of imagination, feeling and willing play a part in it. When we form an affirmative or negative judgment within the life of imagination, our soul life is oriented outwards, but the affirmation or negation is carried out by an impulse of the will. This impulse of the will plays a definite part in our life of imagination. And only he can get an exact idea of the soul life and its various expressions who is clear everywhere about what is the part of feeling in willing, or, conversely, of imagining in willing, and so on.

Now it is relatively easy to see that the will plays a role in our imaginative life. I have just drawn attention to the process of judging, and anyone who really studies judging will see how the will plays a role in imagining. But also – and this is important, dear readers – the will plays a role in our sensory perception. And here I must draw attention to something that is usually not even known in today's psychology, or at least not sufficiently characterized. Will most certainly plays a part in our sensory perception, in all our seeing, hearing and other sensory perceptions. What actually takes place in sensory perception?

In the act of perceiving, we are inwardly active in every act of the soul, even in those in which we appear to be passively confronting the outside world. In what we bring to the outer world through inner activity, that is, expose ourselves to some kind of sensory perception, the will certainly lives – albeit, I would say, diluted and filtered – but the will lives in it. And the essence of sensory perception is that this will – I could go on for hours explaining this in detail, but here I can only hint at it – that this will, which we expose from the inside out, so to speak, is repulsed by the various agents. And we shall only comprehend the nature of the stimulus, the nature of the total sensory perception, when we can visualize this play of the will from the inside out and the counter-strike of the natural agents from the outside in. become aware of how in every act of sensory perception there is a reaction of the will and how everything that remains of sensory perception in memories or other forms of perception is actually a withdrawn will impulse. And so we can distinguish, by exposing ourselves sensually, that which plays in such a way from the will, from that which, starting from the whole act and following on from it, then continues in the life of imagination.

In the life of the imagination, as I have already indicated, the will also lives, but it lives in such a way that the inner man has a much greater share in this unfolding of the will into the life of the imagination than in the unfolding of the will into the life of the senses. First of all, our will remains much more active, much more subjective, much more personal in imagining than in sensing. You see, dear Reader, everything I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the development of supersensible knowledge, aims to raise to full consciousness the will that plays into sensory perception and that must therefore be applied, even in the most exact natural research. And now one must organize one's inner life of imagination in such a way that in this life of imagination not the subjective arbitrary will - if I may express it in this way - lives, as it otherwise lives in imagining, but the same objective will that lives in sensory perception. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I understand it, does not aim to bring up all sorts of things from the depths of the soul in a nebulous, mystical way, in order to force a subjective will into the life of ideas. This subjective will is already present in ordinary life, but it must be released from the life of imagination precisely through the exercises for attaining higher knowledge, and the will that one carefully trains oneself to see through, and that lives precisely in sensory perception - and only in sensory perception - must discipline and permeate the life of imagination.

If I may express it in this way, something tremendous has been achieved. The entire life of the imagination has acquired the character that otherwise only sense perception has. This is something that each individual must make as his personal discovery. Man knows, he can imagine all sorts of things; the will can play a part in this by turning the judgment one way or the other. What a wealth of life there is in the imagination! But when a person uses his senses, the external world imposes the discipline of the will on him – in the way that the will can be applied to sensory perception – and then it is impossible to bring inner subjectivity into play in an arbitrary way. I would remind you that anthropological psychology has already shown how the will comes to life in sensory perception – I need only remind you of Lotze's local signs and so on. But only when one comes to bring this will, which leaps into objectivity, into the life of the imagination, does one shape the life of the imagination in such a way that it becomes imaginative cognition, that it participates in objectivity in the same way that sense perception otherwise participates in objectivity.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of what I have only been able to hint at in a few strokes, in the face of what is meant in the most exact sense, but which is not meant in such a way that one indulges in all kinds of fantastic ideas about the development of the soul – as is also the case with clear-headed mystics – all the objections, even those raised today by official science, are basically extremely amateurish for anyone who is familiar with the subject. For in comparison with everything that can ever flow into hallucinations, dreams, and everything that arises subjectively only from the human being's organization, in comparison with that, that is, where the person lives without objective orientation, where he is completely devoted only to his inner being, in comparison with that, an imaginative life is developed that is modeled on the outer sense life with its objectivity. In a sense, then, the objectivity of sensory perception is extended inwardly through the life of imagination. In all that is present in mediumship, in all that is somehow present in pathological clairvoyance, on the other hand, what leads to pictorialness, to hallucinatory life, is brought up from within the human being.

But that is not at all the case with those methods that are used for anthroposophical research. Here one does not proceed from the inside outwards, as basically every mysticism has done so far, but one proceeds from the outside inwards. Here one does not learn from one's inner mystical feeling, but one learns precisely from external sensory perception how to relate objectively to the world. And then you discover that by learning in this way through sensory perception, you are able to shape the life of imagination in a way that is just as concrete and just as internally saturated as you would otherwise only have with sensory perception. And when one comes to such an inwardly saturated imagination, which now, just as sensory perception, flows into something objective – that is, it is not merely subjectively oriented – only then is one in a position to ascend from a certain stage of knowledge of nature to another stage, which I will characterize in a moment.

But first of all, I would like to say that the anthroposophical spiritual science, as I understand it, has made a sincere effort to create clarity on all sides regarding the position of such imaginative knowledge. And allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to make a brief personal statement, which is not meant to be personal at all, but is entirely objective and related to to how I myself came to not only develop such anthroposophical methods, but also to truly believe in such anthroposophical methods, to see in them a right to knowledge. For do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone who takes these things seriously is uncritical, that he does not want to thoroughly examine the most thorough and exact methods of critical knowledge of the present day. As I said, allow me to make a personal remark.

I was about thirteen years old when I came across a treatise that – as was particularly prevalent in the 1770s – was primarily concerned with the exact mathematical investigation of external natural phenomena and actually only accepted as natural laws what could be calculated. This essay endeavored to expel even the last mystical concepts from the knowledge of nature. This essay viewed the force of gravitation, the force of attraction in the sense of Newton, as one such mystical concept. This essay was called “The Force of Attraction Considered as an Effect of Movement”. And the mystical concept of attraction was not to be used, in which two material bodies somehow attract each other through space, but an attempt was made to explain attraction in an extraordinarily exact mathematical way: Ponderable matter is in a world gas, and thus a certain number of impacts between, say, neighboring material bodies can be calculated. If you now compare the number of impacts coming from the inside with the number of impacts coming from the outside, you arrive at a pure, mysticism-free explanation of gravitation.

I mention this for the reason that, as I said, this treatise fell into my thirteenth year. In order to understand this treatise - you can imagine that this is not exactly easy for a thirteen-year-old boy - I had to make an effort to master differential and integral calculus at the age of thirteen, because only by doing so can one really master these ideas. And in doing so, I had the opportunity to gain a starting point for everything that followed, which is actually needed to come to terms with such ideas, which have always lived in me with an indeterminate certainty, in a critical way. You really have to get an idea of how you actually use mathematical laws or laws of phoronomy in all your sensory observation, how you actually proceed, what you bring of yourself to the outside world, and so on. In short, for me that was the starting point for exploring how far this strange inner realm of the soul, which we call mathematics, can actually govern external reality.

Heinrich Schramm, the author of this essay - I still consider it extremely important today - was thoroughly convinced that you can go anywhere with mathematics, that you simply have to assume matter, space, motion and that you can then go anywhere with mathematics. He was convinced that the most diverse properties of natural phenomena in ordinary mechanics, in thermodynamics, in optics, in the field of magnetism and electricity, that one can grasp all these different phenomena with mathematics, that one can correctly arrive at all these different phenomena if one only applies mathematics correctly. So, if you apply this mathematical research to a hypothetical material process, the magnetic application springs to mind; if you apply it to a different process, the electrical application springs to mind. In short, all natural phenomena are explained as an effect of motion. One becomes quite free of mysticism; one limits oneself to the concrete, which one can grasp in purely mathematical presentation. This struggle, one must have gone through it once, this struggle with a knowledge that proceeds mathematically in relation to the external world and now wants to grasp the sense perceptions mathematically, because the external world must be grasped somehow, no matter how mathematically one proceeds.

But now another one presented itself to me in this way. I immersed myself in what is called the probability problem in mathematics, where you try to calculate the probability that - let's say, for example - you get a certain throw with two dice, where one, two, and so on, is on top, so you calculate probabilities. This mathematical field, this probability calculation, plays a very important role in the insurance business. There, probability calculation has a very real application. From the number of deaths within a larger number of people, one calculates the probability that any given person, let's say a thirty-year-old, will still be alive at the age of sixty, and then one determines their ability to take out insurance and also their insurance premium. So here we are calculating something, and in doing so we are using calculation to place ourselves in reality in a very strange way. You can see from the fact that, in theory, anyone can calculate their lifespan in such a way that it is fully sufficient for the insurance industry that calculation places us in reality. For example, I could have decided to insure my life at the age of thirty. It would have been perfectly possible to calculate how long my probable lifespan would be and therefore how much I would have had to pay. But no one will believe that they really have to die when this probable lifespan has expired.

We have here a field in which mathematics is valid for what it wants, but where the individual life as such does not fit into the mathematical formula, where life as such is not included in the mathematical formula. In this way, in certain areas of natural science, we have an inner satisfaction of knowledge when we start from the assumption that what has been mathematically understood is adequate to what appears externally in the sense world. But precisely in those areas where probability theory plays a role, there is something where we have to say to ourselves: Mathematics is sufficient for the outer life, for what takes place in outer observation, but one can never be convinced that the inner life is mastered by it.

I would have to tell a great deal more about the intermediate links if I were now to show how, starting from such ideas, I came to the chapter in my “Philosophy of Freedom” (the first edition of which appeared in 1893) on the value of life, on the value of human life. There I was dealing, above all, with a fight against pessimism as such. At that time, this pessimism dominated the philosophical outlook of certain circles much more than was the case later. This pessimism originated in principle with Schopenhauer, but it was systematically founded by Eduard von Hartmann. Eduard von Hartmann now started from the point of view of calculation with reference to the sphere of ethical life, of socioethical life. If you look up his calculations today, they are extremely interesting. He tries to calculate how, on the one hand, everything that brings people pleasure and joy, happiness and so on in life can be positively assessed, and how, on the other hand, everything that brings people suffering, pain, misfortune and so on can be negatively assessed. And he subtracts and actually comes up with a plausible conclusion that for most people the unhappy things, the painful things predominate, that the negative positions predominate.

You can think what you like about such philosophical “trifles”; for those who want to get to the very foundations of knowledge, these are not trifles, and they must not remain so if we want to escape from the misery of today's knowledge. This became a very important problem for me, because I said to myself, a person does not feel it the way it is calculated here. That is nonsense — you can see that the moment you ask people: If you were to add up your happiness and unhappiness, you would come out with a larger number on the negative side. Would you therefore consider your life a lost one? Would you therefore consider yourself ripe for suicide, as Eduard von Hartmann suggests, that every person should actually do so if they were reasonable? For Eduard von Hartmann, the calculation says yes, but life never says yes. Why not?

Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have shown that this subtraction, which Eduard von Hartmann carried out, simply cannot be carried out. if one wants to apply an arithmetic operation at all, one must apply a completely different one. you have to use a fraction or a division: the numerator or dividend contains everything that is fortunate, pleasurable, everything that brings satisfaction, and the denominator or divisor contains everything that brings suffering, unhappiness, pain and so on. If you apply the division calculation, then you would have to have an infinite denominator if you want to get a number that means zero as a life conclusion. If you can only divide a finite number of suffering and pain through it, then you will never get a life conclusion that is zero. The human being does not commit suicide as a result of subtraction. And when I showed that here one cannot just subtract, but instead divide, or that a fractional approach must be taken, I was also able to show that for mathematics in a certain case one is obliged to start from life, that one must therefore gain access to life, gain an immediate insight into life, before making a mathematical approach.

Here I have the three points together: on the one hand, in natural science, the mathematical approach, which in probability theory can adequately describe the external facts, but which is nevertheless insufficient when it comes to reality. Then there is reality itself, as it is grasped in its real individual form, and finally there is reality itself, which is directly observed as the master of the mathematical approach. There we have the limit of what is mathematically possible, insofar as we start from mathematics itself. And when one recognizes in this way that it is necessary to go beyond the mathematical when wrestling with this problem, then, on the other hand, when one has gained that conception of which I have spoken today, one finds that one has now made this leap in reality, where one has gone beyond the abstract thinking that we encounter most purely in mathematics and entered into direct reality. And only from there did the possibility arise – one might say in an epistemological way, which Goethe himself could not yet have given – to grasp Goethean morphology in the first place and, secondly, to deepen and expand it. For now, once you have gained that imaginative conception, you begin to grasp what Goethe actually meant when he developed his primal plant, that is, an inwardly and spiritually conceived form that underlies all the various outwardly diverse plant forms. Once you have grasped this archetypal plant, he said, you can theoretically invent plants in the most diverse ways with the possibility of growth, that is, you can inwardly recreate the natural process. We have an inner soul process by which we can, anticipating the natural process, allow the most diverse plant forms to emerge from the one primal plant, to recreate them inwardly, just as nature creates the most diverse plant forms from the one typical primal plant. There Goethe has already made the transition from pure abstract thinking to what I would now like to call 'thinking in forms'. That is why Goethe arrived at a true morphology.

This thinking in forms – perhaps I may still characterize it that way. What do we actually do in geometry? There we are dealing with forms, especially in plane geometry as well as in stereometry. But actually we are trying to master the forms through numbers, because measurement can, after all, be traced back to something numerical. So we try to force the forms into the abstraction of numbers. But the mathematical, as I have just explained, is limited. We have to leave it if we want to get out into reality. And we can also find the transition from merely reducing the geometric forms to numbers to directly grasping the geometric form. Once we have taken this serious approach to an inner grasp of geometry, we can also find the transition to other forms – to those forms that Goethe meant when he spoke of the primal plant, which then develops inwardly in the most diverse ways into the most varied plant forms. Just as a triangle can have one angle greater and the other smaller, thus creating the various special triangles, so too the most diverse plant forms arise from the primal plant once its law has been grasped. I would like to say that Goethe arrived at his morphology in a subjective way and only developed it to a certain degree. But that which one develops in a systematic way, by driving the will, which otherwise only lives in sensory perception, into the life of thinking, what one develops there as imaginative thinking, that is thinking in forms.

And we come to the point where we can now survey the stage of knowledge of nature where we have natural laws that can be grasped in abstract thoughts - we can apply this thinking to the inorganic, to the inanimate world. At the moment we want to ascend into the organic world of plants, we need thinking in forms. Dearly beloved, let no one rail against this thinking in forms; let no one say that real science can only progress in a discursive way, can only advance from one thought to another, that is, according to the method that is recognized today as the logical method; let no one say that only this is true science. Yes, one may decree for a long time that this is true science – if nature does not yield to this science, if nature, for example the plant world, does not allow itself to be molded into this science, then we need a different science. If purely discursive thinking, purely abstract thinking, is not enough, then we need thinking in forms, in inner pictorialness. And this thinking in inner pictorialness makes the plant world understandable to us on the outside, and makes the unity of our entire life between birth and death understandable to us on the inside.

I have often stated in my books and lectures that in those moments when one has truly developed this imaginative thinking, it turns out that life from the time one has learned to say “I” to oneself, when the ability to remember begins, to the present moment shows itself as if unfolding in a single tableau. Just as one normally regards one's external physical body as belonging to oneself and looks at it at any given moment, so one also has one's previous life on earth in the course of time before one, as in a panorama of images. This is the first achievement of truly anthroposophical science: to survey one's inner life as a tableau right up to one's birth, so that one now really has an overview of this time organism. What is called the etheric body of man or the body of formative forces in my various books - what is that other than what is achieved through imaginative visualization? We come to survey our life between birth and the present moment, presenting itself as a unity in the immediate present, at the same time as the impulses that carry us beyond the present moment into our further life on earth. And when we have achieved this, the second step of supersensible knowledge presents itself: it is difficult even today to find a name for this step; inwardly, as a method I have called it inspired knowledge. Do not let the term bother you. It does not refer to anything handed down by tradition, but only to what I have just hinted at in my books and what I will also hint at here in principle.

I have said that imaginative visualization is achieved by placing certain easily comprehensible ideas at the center of our consciousness and that this strengthens that consciousness. Just as we, in a sense, recreate memory when we place such ideas at the center of our consciousness, we must now also develop forgetting as an act of the will in our lives. Just as we can concentrate all the powers of our soul on certain ideas, which we place in our consciousness in the way I have characterized, we must also be able to drive these ideas out of our consciousness whenever we want, through inner arbitrariness. We must therefore also reproduce forgetting just as we artificially reproduce, if I may express it this way, remembering.

If we do these exercises, we will see that such an idea, which we bring into the center of our consciousness in this way, initially attracts all kinds of other ideas – like bees, they come in from all sides, these other ideas. We must learn to exclude them; in fact, we must learn to exclude all imagining. We must learn, so to speak, after we have developed such images, to be able to make the consciousness empty without falling asleep in the process. Just try to imagine what that means! This must be practiced, because as soon as a person, with only the usual strength of consciousness, tries to empty his consciousness - especially after he has first concentrated on a particular idea - he inevitably falls asleep. But that is precisely what must be avoided: empty consciousness after imaginative ideas, that is, initially without subjective content. And at that moment, when this has been achieved, the spiritual world streams into the soul life thus prepared. At this moment one is able to see a world that is not there for external sensory perception, but which is the world that we now see not only as part of our earthly life, as in imaginative knowledge, where we see up to birth, but we see the world that contained us as beings before we descended into earthly life. There we get to know ourselves as spiritual beings in a purely spiritual world. There we get to know that within us that has created this organism that lives here in the earthly world. There we get to know through knowledge the immortal part of the human being.

And from there it is then - I just want to mention this - one step to intuitive knowledge, to also gain the insight that the earthly lives of human beings repeat themselves. But you will have gathered from what I have only been able to hint at that it is a matter of using strict systematic schooling of the inner being to prepare the consciousness, not to create any world out of the inner being, but on the contrary, to free the consciousness after prior imagination for the contemplation of the spiritual world. Just as we encounter the outer world with our outer senses, in that the will lives in these outer senses and enters into a relationship with objectivity, so, after we have completely freed our inner soul life from the physical, we prepare the soul to see the spiritual world as it sees the physical world through the senses. There we get the opportunity to see what being has built us, in that we are built out of individuality, not out of the cosmos, and how this being lived in the spiritual world as a pre-existent being before we accepted the physical body through the hereditary stream through generations. And then we learn to recognize that which, in turn, passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world when we discard this physical body. We learn to recognize what builds up this physical body, what undergoes a certain transformation in this physical body through birth, what is rekindled through the experiences of life and then, through death, enters the spiritual-soul world again. So we are not striving for a fantasy, not for philosophizing, not for speculating about the immortality of man, but we are striving for a real insight into what lives in us as immortal. And when we deepen our spiritual life in this way, then we are standing in a spiritual objectivity, and it cannot be said that this standing in a spiritual objectivity can in any way be compared with hallucinations arising from the mere inner life or with any subjective fantastic creations.

Now I would like to show – albeit more comparatively – how one can arrive at not only an anthropology, but also a cosmology, in this way. Time is pressing, so I can only hint at it.

How does our ordinary life between birth and death unfold? We see, my dear attendees, how we have external experiences through our sensory experiences, how these sensory experiences trigger and develop ideas, and how, after the ideas have been developed, these ideas can in turn be evoked by the powers of memory. So we see, when we survey our soul life, that in what we carry within us we have, so to speak, the images of what we have experienced in the outside world. I am seeking a particular mental image from the very depths of my soul life. This mental image brings something to my mind in the present moment that I may have experienced fifteen years ago: an objective event experienced completely subjectively. But if my entire inner soul life is healthy, if what I am imagining as a memory is in a healthy connection with the rest of my soul life and, in particular, if I am able to orient myself properly through the senses at all times , then I am also able to tell myself what the external objective experience was like fifteen years ago from what I currently have in front of me – by drawing on everything with which it is related.

Between birth and death, we initially carry the world of our experiences within us in our soul. But, esteemed attendees, we also carry other things within us. If we only look at our lives as we usually survey them in our soul life, we are only aware of what I have just mentioned. But we carry other things within us, and through what I have described to you as supersensible knowledge, we look deeper into ourselves - not through nebulous mysticism, but through exact methods related to mathematics. We carry organs within us, the organs of our inner being. They are built out of our pre-existent being; they are built out of the spiritual world.

Those who, with the help of such exact anthroposophy as I have described, not only survey their soul life, which they have gathered together between birth and the present moment, but who learn to recognize the nature of the forces that prevail in the inner organs, he comes to know the world in its development through his organs, which he spiritually understands. And it is not, my dear audience, some reminiscence of some old superstition, of some old star belief or the like, when today anthroposophy speaks of a world development, but it is based on an insight into the human being that recognizes the inner human being in such a way that the mere life of the soul is recognized as an image of the events experienced since birth that are connected with us.

In this way we experience a connection with the whole world. Just as our memories are inner images of our experiences since birth, so our whole inner being - when we learn to understand it - is an image of the whole development of the world. This is what it means to “read the Akasha Chronicle” - not all the confused ideas that are held against anthroposophy. It means that we can gain knowledge of the world from true knowledge of the human being. However, we must not simplify matters, as is often the case today, when we believe that we can grasp something that is contained in a precise process of knowledge with a few concepts that have been pinned up. Nobody today would dare to grasp or even criticize the system of mathematics with a few pinned-up concepts. On the other hand, what is acquired in a much more complicated way, but with true striving, is today casually tried to be characterized with a few concepts. He who takes care to use all inner precautions in order not to fall into subjectivity but to completely immerse himself in objectivity — that is, to first shape the consciousness so that it can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity — is, I might say, slandered in such a way that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinations arise from this. can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity – is, I might say, slandered in that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinatory images are developed.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, without wishing to lapse into a counter-criticism, I will merely characterize how it is currently being done, and at the end I will show you this by means of a small example. A pamphlet appeared recently in which the author seeks to show that what the anthroposophist finds can, to a certain extent, be readily admitted, for the simple reason that today's science also finds that the strangest experiences of the soul can arise from the subconscious. And so, as the author of this work believes, it is quite possible to admit to the anthroposophist that he experiences all kinds of things as they are experienced by mediums, as they are experienced when people are put under hypnosis or taught suggestions, or even when they create suggestions for themselves. In particular, what is most essential about anthroposophy is traced back to self-suggestion.

And now something very worthy is being done. It is shown how the most wonderful effects are possible from the soul, how one can develop remarkably extensive healing processes for tuberculosis, metritis, fibroids and so on from the soul life, how even tuberculous deformations of the spine can be balanced out by the soul life: Why should it not be possible to admit that an anthroposophist also draws all kinds of things from his soul life, especially when he first puts himself into self-suggestion? And now it is shown that such subjective life exists, and such subjective life, especially of autosuggestion, of self-suggestion, the anthroposoph should also be devoted. And there is, for example, the following claim:

By means of his....

- that is, by means of the spiritual and soul development as I have described it

... self-aware action, that is, self-reflection in a trance, is made possible.

Now, dear attendees, I had not spoken of trance. I had only told you that consciousness comes to clearer, brighter levels, not that it is led back into darkness and gloom as in trance!

And self-contemplation, in turn, is the prerequisite for supersensible seeing. In other words, the so-called transcendental experiences are products of methodically generated self-contemplation in a trance state under the simultaneous effect of systematic suggestion. The actual agent here is self-suggestion. Proof of this is, among other things, Rudolf Steiner's explicit assurance that “to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.”

So, here it is claimed that I said in a lecture in Bern on July 8 that to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.

Now, first of all, something that shows how curiously exactly today's scientific papers are written! For example, on the same page it is said how such suggestions can actually be carried out, how something can be suggested to someone so that an idea is taught to him, and how he then becomes completely absorbed in this idea and even creates all sorts of things out of himself as a result of this absorption in this idea. And now the author says:

These successes are mainly based on the fact that Coue once understood suggestion as an independent, will-independent (ideo-dynamic) force.

– “ideo-dynamic” is in brackets, this is very important! –

... and that he has recognized the significance of this subconscious power.

So, we are dealing with an ideodynamic force that is independent of the will. Nevertheless, this ideodynamic force, which is independent of the will, is to be utilized by me, by saying that one must drive one's will into the imagination. Now, let us take the sentence first of all as the author claims I said it in Bern: One must force one's will into the imagination.

Today I also spoke about how one must develop the will, which one first gets to know through sensory perception, into the life of the imagination. In this way one fights precisely those influences that are merely suggestive. In this way one works in precisely the opposite sense. This application of the will is precisely what destroys all suggestive possibilities of influence. What I have described takes place in the opposite direction to suggestive influence. This is actually already evident from the fact that these suggestive influences are called “ideo-dynamic impulses”, i.e. not impulses of the will, but ideo-dynamic impulses. And yet, the author has a presentiment that he is not yet able to express properly: One must indeed summon up one's willpower when one wants to introduce subjective ideas into the ideas, but this happens without the person to whom it happens, who experiences the suggestion, applying his own will.

Everywhere I have described that the person who wants to become an anthroposophical researcher applies his will, thus standing out from the possibilities of suggestion. Therefore, I could not say - I read this in this brochure and said to myself: Did I really let my tongue be paralyzed in Bern on July 8, 1920, did I really say that in order to gain higher knowledge, one must force one's will into one's ideas? For anyone can do that, for suggestion can also happen without any activity on the part of the one to whom something is being suggested.

Now I have taken the trouble to look at the shorthand notes of my Bern lecture on July 8, 1920, which I fortunately found today. And now see what I really said in Bern at the time. Everywhere I tried to show how the opposite approach to suggestion should be taken. And then I said:

We must apply ever greater and greater strength. And it is the application of this strength that matters; it matters that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of the imagination, into the act of imagining, that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of the imagination.

That is something else. You can only drive ideas into the images. When one speaks of driving the will into the life of the images, it means precisely not allowing the images to be influenced by suggestions, but taking control of the free life of the images and the nature of the images, which is ruled by the will. You see, it is quoted in quotation marks, and the opposite of what I really said is said in quotation marks.

But this is only one example, ladies and gentlemen, of the way in which anthroposophy is often discussed today, especially from a scientific point of view, and how it is misunderstood. This is extremely characteristic, and the whole brochure actually has this tendency. My dear audience, as for what mediumistic phenomena are, what hallucinations are, what kind of visions arise from within – I have always strictly excluded them from the field of anthroposophical life and explained that I consider all of this to be pathological, that it goes below the level of the sense life, not above it. And I have done this everywhere, in many places in detail, as what Anthroposophy wants, what Anthroposophy gives as descriptions of spiritual-soul worlds, arises from completely different foundations than what is asserted here. And now there is a strange tendency for precisely that which I reject, that which I regard as morbid, pathological, to be seen as the justified thing about anthroposophy! That is, they reverse the facts. They make people believe that I am describing something that is hallucinations or the like. Well, they do exist, he says, so we will readily admit that to the anthroposophist, he is entitled to that. But he must not talk about higher worlds, for there he enters a philosophical realm that is to be valued only as theosophical doctrine, as imagination conditioned by theosophical doctrine.

But something highly characteristic, my dear audience: the man who crystallizes out here first of all, who wants from anthroposophy - although it is the opposite of what anthroposophy really gives - says: What I concede to anthroposophy, we know today; telepathy, clairvoyance, teleplasty and so on are known. But all that belongs to the pathological field, perhaps also to the therapeutic field – the things are connected, after all. I would have to go into what I have repeatedly said in medical courses: how a pathology and a therapy can certainly be derived from anthroposophy that legitimately go beyond what today's merely materialistic view can give. But by first distorting what anthroposophy can give, and then by acknowledging this distortion, it is said: Yes, you can suggest all kinds of things to people, but you have never experienced people experiencing something like astral or mental fairy-tale lands in a trance.

But that is precisely the point! He calls it fairy-tale land because he passes it off as fantasies. That, he says, cannot be experienced by suggestion. Yet it is experienced. A strange polemic! First, what one believes one can understand is selected from the anthroposophical results, although one does not understand it at all. This is then categorized as hallucination and so on; that is accepted. But the other part is dismissed as fairyland, yet it is said that it cannot be suggested. It cannot be suggested either, but must be conquered by exact inner methods as inner knowledge. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not blame anyone for misunderstanding in such a grotesque way what anthroposophy can give. I do not blame this respected (and rightly so) collection of scientific, medical and other essays, published in Munich and Wiesbaden by J. F. Bergmann, for including such grotesque criticism of anthroposophy, because the whole booklet by Albert Sichler is actually well-intentioned. He wants to do justice to the matter. He cannot do so because, for the time being, there is still an abyss between what is recognized as official science today and what is needed to really make progress, because ultimately there is an inner connection in spiritual life, between our entire civilized life and the scientific life in modern times. And the bridge must be built over to ethics, to social life. This cannot be done by a science that gets stuck only in the material or at most makes hypotheses about the non-material. This can only be done by a science that truly penetrates into the spiritual, because it is in the social that the spiritual is active, and social laws can only be found by someone who also finds laws, forms, transformations of the spiritual in nature.

Now, in the short time available to me today, I have only been able to give a few points of view, my dear audience. I wanted to show you how anthroposophy strives to work in the spirit of true science, how it takes its scientific and epistemological seriousness very seriously indeed in its quest to arrive at a method modelled on mathematics. On the other hand, however, it still faces many prejudices today, even though it is actually needed by our civilization as something tremendously necessary, because it alone is capable of providing man with a real, satisfying elucidation of his own nature in terms of knowledge.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, as I said, I believe that the antagonisms will disappear once an objective basis is gained for creating harmony and mutual understanding between today's science and the anthroposophical research method. We must wait for that. Until this is achieved, opponents will come from all sides, from political parties or from religion, theology or other fields, who will operate on purely subjective ground. But anyone who is familiar with this anthroposophy, anyone who is serious about it, serious about everything that has its source in Dornach, will say to himself, because he knows how seriously research is conducted within this anthroposophical field, ic field, he says to himself: however great the misunderstandings may be, a balance, a harmony must ultimately be found from the seriousness of modern scientific methods and attitudes. And this is a consciousness that one can have when one is on one's own ground, that in everything one seeks in anthroposophy, one first presents the conscientious demands for examination that are otherwise applied in science today. And that is what makes one expect the external balance. If one proceeds seriously, one can be convinced that from today's science and from what anthroposophy has so far endeavored to achieve - at least for those who know both, contemporary science and anthroposophy - the balance, the harmony can certainly be found today. And this awareness gives confidence that the scientific understanding will come about. And then the other antagonisms against Anthroposophy will disappear by themselves.

There are no requests to speak.

Rudolf Steiner: My dearest attendees! It is of course only possible to consider a few guidelines in a lecture, especially one that is intended as an introductory lecture to a whole series of lectures on Anthroposophy. And so I was unable to consider one thing in particular that would have been very close to my heart: to show the bridge that leads from the cognitive side of anthroposophy to the social, practical-ethical and religious side of it. And about that - we only have time until 10 o'clock - allow me to say a few words. If we consider the scientific world view – I am not saying the natural science, but the scientific world view – as it is widely held today, especially among laypeople, but also among people who do not believe they are laypeople, but who, as members of various monist and other associations, today embrace the scientific ideas of thirty years ago as a religious confession, if one considers what has emerged as a kind of worldview that is more or less materialistic. There is no bridge from what many people today consider to be the only possible way of researching to the reality of ethical ideals and social ideals.

Today, seeing all that science gives us, we are faced with the necessity of forming ideas for a worldview, for example, about the beginning and end of the earth. I can only hint at these things as well. We have the Kant-Laplace theory of the earth's beginning from the primeval nebula, which is presented according to the laws of aerodynamics and aeromechanics. One imagines how the planetary solar system formed out of a primeval nebula, how the earth split off. The question of how living beings could have come into being is, however, continuously critically treated – whereby one will reach the limits of knowledge – and then it is treated how organic life now also sprouts from what was initially only present in the primeval nebula, how man then emerged from this and how he experiences himself today in the self-confident ego.

Now I have met people – and basically life is the greatest teacher, if you only know how to take it correctly – I have met people who took this scientific worldview seriously. I remember one person in particular who is typical of many others. The others often do not realize it, but they set up an altar of faith, an altar of knowledge. Those who take the scientific ideas seriously cannot do this; they come to such hypothetical ideas about the beginning and end of the earth, for example from thermodynamics and entropy theory, which leads to imagining how everything finally merges into a heat death. One meets only few people who have the inner courage to admit from a fully human point of view, in which situation man is placed with his inner being today, if he takes these things seriously as the only ones that apply.

Herman Grimm, for example, says – forgive the somewhat drastic saying that I am quoting – from his feeling, by realizing what is to develop on earth between the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula and the state to which the theory of entropy is supposed to lead us: A carrion bone round which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing piece than this world picture, which is already presented to people in schools today. And future ages will struggle to explain how a particularly pathological age once came to form such ideas about the beginning and end of the earth. It will be impossible to understand how something like this could be taken seriously.

Well, my dear audience, the science that stands before us today as natural science – as I said, anthroposophy does not in the least find fault with it – fully recognizes it in its field. Anthroposophy is based on a scientific attitude, because scientifically conscientious methodology and inner discipline, as they have developed, must be recognized as a model, only they must be further developed in the sense that I have characterized today.

But this also leads to a true knowledge of man. This knowledge of man is not as easy to gain as the one we gain today from physiological and biological views. This knowledge of man finally shows us how man is actually a being that is organized quite differently internally according to the head and the metabolic-limb system - these are the two poles of the human being. What I am now briefly hinting at, I have explained in great detail in a series of lectures. But I want to show right away how wrong it is to say, for example, that our thinking arises from processes in our brain. That would be just as if a car were to move along a road that has become soft and were to make its impressions there: you can follow the path of the impressions of the car in the road that has become soft. But consider, someone comes and says: You should explain these impressions by forces that are down there in the earth; you must explain these configurations from these underground forces! — It is the same with the methods used today to explain the brain convolutions, the nerve structure, from the forces of the organs. The nerve structure can be explained by the effects of the spiritual and soul, just as the furrows in a softened road can be explained by the car driving over them.

It is only an image. But in a perfectly exact scientific way, anthroposophy leads us to recognize how thinking and imagining is a spiritual and soul process that only has the brain as a basis. And it has the brain as a substrate because it is not based on the brain's growth processes, on organic processes, but precisely on the brain's slow dying processes. The nervous system does not actually have a life, but rather the opposite of a life, a decline in life. Space must first be made for thought. The nerve centers must die away, and a continuous dying, a constant clearing out of the material processes, must occur so that the spiritual-soul processes can take hold. This must always be compensated for by the limb metabolism system during sleep or other processes. What arises in this way, the consciousness-paralyzing processes, those processes of which physiology speaks today, do indeed abolish imagining, extinguish it. Precisely when these processes are toned down, passing over into a kind of partial dying, then imagining, thinking arises, so that we continually carry life and dying, being born and dying within us. And the moment of dying, it is only, I would like to say, the integral of the differentials that make up life, of the differentials of a continuous dying that make up human existence.

If we continue this train of thought, we come to recognize something that is virtually denied in today's accepted science, but which lies in the real continuation of this science: that the human being has real processes of decomposition and continuous processes of dying within him. The ethical ideals develop in the context of these dying processes, so that these ethical ideals are not dependent on the continuation of organic processes, but on suppressed, regressing organic processes. But this in turn leads to the following: When our Earth reaches a state, whatever its mineral-biological state, when the Earth - for my sake, let's take the hypothesis as valid, it is not quite, but in a certain sense it is - when it reaches heat death - when no other processes are possible because everything has formed according to the second law of the mechanical theory of heat as the remnants that are always there when heat is released into the environment, when heat is converted, when this state has occurred, then what has lived in man as ethical ideals has come to its greatest expression of power. And that carries earthly existence out to new planetary formation.

We discover in our moral ideals the germs for later worlds, for later worlds based on our present-day morals. This gives our ideals a real value. Contemporary philosophy is obliged to speak of mere values. But what is there for a possibility when one speaks of values that arise in man as mere ideas, but which are not the germs of future realities, what is there for another prospect than to say to oneself: We come from the Kant-Laplacean world nebula, and somehow the moral ideals emerge in our self-awareness, but these moral ideals live in us only like haze and fog. That was the personality I was talking about earlier, who accepted the modern scientific development as a law and said to himself: Man is cheated in the world. Natural scientific development has brought him this far, then the moral ideals arise as foam, dissolve again, and everything enters into the heat death, into the great cemetery, because the moral ideals are indeed experienced, but have no possibility of becoming reality.

By following the regressive processes in which moral ideals have been at work, anthroposophy shows us that these moral ideals have only an ideal existence in us, but that, as they develop in the human being, they are seeds for the future. Just as we see in the germ of the plant that will develop in the next year, so anthroposophy allows us to see in moral ideals the germs of future worlds. And we see the idealities of the past as the seeds of the present world, behind the Kant-Laplacean primeval fog. The present world is the realization, the actualization of what was once only thought, just as the present plant is the realization of last year's seed. And what is currently experienced only as moral value is the real seed of future worlds.

We are not only part of the cosmos through our natural organic processes, we are also part of the cosmos through what we experience as moral and social values within us. We are acquiring a cosmology that does not only include natural processes and laws as its agents, we are acquiring a cosmology in which our entire moral world is also a reality. Anthroposophy builds the bridge from the natural to the ethical and religious world.

This is what I wanted to mention in a brief closing word, because it was no longer possible in the lecture.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is misunderstood and often denounced today not only because we have to talk about it differently than about the things that conventional science talks about, but rather because it has to talk not only about different things but also differently, in a different way. That it has to talk about different things than ordinary science, that is basically what anyone who expects anything at all from supersensible research expects. But that it must also be done in a different way, I might say, if the word is taken in a higher sense, in a different form of expression, is something that is not expected. For centuries, a very definite way of thinking and expressing what has been thought and researched has been developed, through natural science, which has achieved such great triumphs. This form of expression appears to people of the present as something so certain, so well-founded, that they cannot tolerate it when a different way of speaking about a field of knowledge that is actually much closer to the human being is required.

Now, however, many of our contemporaries undoubtedly feel that the scientific approach does not even come close to the most important thing for humans, especially when it is applied most faithfully and most conscientiously in its field. And that is why many souls of the present are looking for a way to that which is so close to the human soul in terms of questions and riddles, I would even say, that although they do not impose themselves from the outside through nature, they do impose themselves through the very nature of the human being.

If we want to talk about these latter riddles, characterizing them, then perhaps, my dear audience, we may recall a saying of a spiritual mystic, Meister Eckhart, who once said: What use is it to me – or: What use would it be to me to be a king if I didn't know that I am a king! if I had no idea at all that I am a king?

Now one could even admit that one could perhaps still benefit from being a king even if one did not even know it. But what Meister Eckhart wanted to express applies to something else to a much greater extent than to his comparison. It applies to being truly human.

If we ask ourselves impartially, are we actually human in the full sense of the word if we are not aware of our humanity? If we cannot say to ourselves: What is our actual essence as a human being?

When we thoroughly ask ourselves this question, we are already struck by how little the natural sciences actually tell us about the most important aspect of this question: what we are as human beings.

One could cite many things if one wanted to characterize the full depth and full significance – the depth and significance of the soul – of this question. One could approach this characterization from the most diverse sides. Today, since I have often been able to speak in this city on topics similar to today's, I would like to start from the fact of life, I would like to say which, most intensely from the external world of facts, presents the real soul riddle to man.

Perhaps one can say: This fact presents the real soul riddle to man most selfishly. But this mystery of the soul is presented by this fact – presented in a way that is, I would say, generally self-evident. Let us keep this fact in mind, this fact of death in all its significance. Let us try to present this fact simply and impartially to our souls.

Death, as is sometimes said today by natural scientists, is characterized by the fact that a corpse is present. A trivial fact, certainly, but precisely as a trivial fact, perhaps one of the most harrowing of human physical existence. What can we see when we place the fact of death, the existence of the corpse, before our soul without prejudice? It begins at the moment when the physical body has become a corpse. For this physical human being, a path of development begins for what is within him, outwardly material-physical. This path of development takes a completely different course than it did before the point when the human being had to pass through the gate of death.

We see how that which remains of a person as a corpse – regardless of whether it is consigned to the fire or the earth – unites with the elements of nature, how it is taken over by the elements of nature, and how these elements of nature now assert their being, exercise their dominion over that which is handed over to them by the physical person. The substances and forces in the physical body of man no longer follow the laws that they followed until death, at least initially according to the external visible world; they follow the laws that are imposed on them by external physical nature, which until death the human being has only observed.

So that we can say: It is the outer world into which man dies, not only at the moment of his death, but by the fact that it receives him into its laws as a physical human being, he dies into this outer physical world.

If you look at this fact with an open mind, then, I would say, all kinds of human soul mysteries flow out of this contemplation. And above all, an important question presents itself to a person if he is open-minded enough.

He looks at the various elements that receive his corpse, that is, his outer physical body. He says to himself: These elements into which my physical body is absorbed, basically they have the same effect as they do out there, by absorbing my physical body; after all, they bring the same into me every day during my life. By absorbing food and drink, he absorbs those substances and forces into himself, to which he is handed over at death.

Can we reasonably assume that the laws of the substances and forces to which we are consigned at death as physical beings, that these laws only exist out there in the world? Must we not reasonably assume that what takes us in after death, by entering our physical body as food and drink, unfolds the same laws within us? A lawfulness that is only overcome by the inner being of the human individual?

We see, I would like to say, the way to one side: the surrender of the human physical body to the substances and forces with the same laws that we actually take into our physical body.

Of course, one would have to give many details if one wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery of life, I would say of the soul, which this fact so poignantly presents to our soul, if one wanted to go into it in full detail.

But another question immediately arises: Can external natural science, which is mainly devoted to care, to observation through the senses, to knowledge through experiment – thus again to observation through the senses – and which is devoted to the training of that mind that is bound to this observation and to these experiments, can this external natural science get close to the most essential part of the human being? It can certainly get close to that which, after death, is handed over to the physical elements and their laws. It can certainly also approach that which is incorporated into the physical body every day on the basis of these physical laws; and with its conscientious methods, it can also investigate the laws — which, in the human body, are no different in that they concern the substances and forces of the external world, and are thus life in the external world itself — it can follow the laws of that which is absorbed by the human body every day. But it can also follow the human being with his mental expressions; it can follow what significance that which we take in daily has for the mental life of the human being. And in this respect, natural science has already done an extraordinary amount, and there are very justified ideals in this regard.

What can already be known today about the significance of the brain and nervous system for the imagination, what can be known about certain processes that are connected with correct or incorrect nutrition or correct or incorrect food processing, and which also exert an influence on the soul, all this can be conscientiously pursued by external natural science, and it is doing so today. And anthroposophy would not be able to justify its existence at all in the face of what science has been able to achieve if it did not fully recognize what science has been able to achieve in this direction. Therefore, it is always and repeatedly a misunderstanding of what anthroposophy wants to be when it is brought into any kind of opposition to contemporary science. There is no such opposition. Anthroposophy fully recognizes what science is able to achieve!

But now it will also be readily admitted: Yes, in this physical body, into which the substances and forces of nature, endowed with external laws, are taken up, in this physical body all kinds of things happen; all kinds of things happen, of which the soul initially knows nothing, of which the soul gradually acquires knowledge by pursuing science, physiology, biology and so on. In this physical body, however, regardless of whether the soul knows or does not know what is going on, the causes for the way the soul feels in the individual and how it feels through a certain overall mood nevertheless lie. That which one has no need to know for a long time, what one can call general indispositions, whatever diseases may be present in the organs, that may sound in the soul. It is expressed in the soul as a mood. It does not need to take root in consciousness at all; it expresses itself in the general mood of the soul.

So that one must, I would say, presuppose much that is present in the material processes and effects of the physical organism, and which works in such a way that the soul has a share in it. But inasmuch as the soul has a share in it, it has a share in what already works during life, and in the way those forces work to which the physical body is handed over after death.

We carry within us – honored attendees – the same laws that bring about our destruction as a physical human being. And since these same laws come into us with food and drink, our soul participates not only in what is sprouting and sprouting power within us, but our soul participates in all that ultimately expresses itself by destroying our physical being. As the substances and forces of the external world work in us, the soul participates in our decay even during our lifetime. And when the series of facts that arises when it is presented to the soul without prejudice, then one learns to recognize: Death, which stands before us as a single moment at the end of our physical life, is ultimately only that which, as it were, adds up to what basically rules and reigns in us throughout our entire physical life. I would like to say: parts of death, the smallest parts of death, so to speak the atoms of death, are within us in every moment of our physical life, and our life of soul is partaken of these atoms of death.

This is expressed in the human soul in everything that arises in the mood through which the soul participates in the destructive forces of the world, in the world's forces of destruction. And however complicated the human soul may appear, one thing is true: the most important moods of doubt, of despair, those moods that often arise without any external cause, at least without any noticeable external cause, that often weaken the human being and conjure up the most important riddles of life from the deepest depths of his soul, which trouble him in both health and illness throughout his entire life. These riddles arise from the soul's participation in the world's forces of decline.

When we look deeply into what is working its way up out of the depths of the soul and into consciousness – consciousness does not know what it is, but consciousness has the working within it, has the experience of it in its soul mood – when we are fully aware of this, , then those other riddles of the soul emerge before consciousness, those that point, as it were, in the opposite direction, those riddles that people have always associated with the word that is the opposite of death: the word “immortality”.

The question of immortality is not just a selfish question for humans – arising from our desire not to disappear with death, for example – but the question of immortality is intimately connected with what can be called, in the sense of Meister Eckhart, the example of the king, what can be called: Man is only then fully man when he really knows of his own being.

But, my dear attendees, I would like to say: this knowledge, insofar as we can acquire it through external natural science, this knowledge takes away the fact of death. For everything we can know, even if it is the greatest and most significant thing about a human being, which we can know through experiment and observation, can only relate to the body and must lose its significance for the human being with death, because it relates to something that merges into the non-human, that is, non-natural, being. And man must ask himself the question: Can we look at the dissolution of the physical body in a similar way to which we can look at the inner mysteries that the soul experiences by participating in the destructive forces of the world? Can we look in the same sense at the creative forces of the world, at the sprouting, sprouting forces? And this is the direction in which, out of the same spirit that modern science has adopted and out of the same scientific conscientiousness, anthroposophy wants to point.

But it cannot hint, I would say point, to something that can happen every day, like death, before the eyes of every human being; it can only lead, this anthroposophy, to this – when viewed according to the opposite opposite principle of research into the reality of life — only by pointing to something that does not initially reveal itself as an external fact, nor as an internal fact of the soul's life, something that must first be achieved by the soul.

Death – dear audience – voluntarily places itself before the soul. We must first work for the knowledge of the nature of immortality if we want to recognize it. At least in its innermost essence, no knowledge of it can be bestowed upon us.

Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again that anyone who now wants to knowingly follow the path to the world of the soul, the actual essence of the soul, can only do so through inner activity, through inner work. That is, through what I have often referred to here as soul exercises.

Now, my dear audience, we will be able to form an idea of these soul exercises from the point of view that is necessary for today's topic if we first visualize how human soul life is in fact a unity. We first survey this soul life by looking within ourselves. It surges, I might say, up and down. It expresses itself in images through which we visualize the external world. It expresses itself through feelings, sensations, and will impulses that lead us to our actions and that we, as a member of the social order, allow to appear to us from the soul throughout the world.

That which surges and weaves within man as images, feelings, sensations and impulses of will, that which, with the means of external natural science, is pointed to as that which only can be investigated with the means of external natural science, which is pointed to that which only dies with death. This can be seen today by many people who are only unbiased enough to look at what this soul actually is, how it is quite different from that which is accessible to external sensory observation and experimentation. And then such people turn away from scientific considerations, because they believe that only science can exist for external nature, and they then turn to certain - as it is called - mystical endeavors.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, must not be confused with mysticism, which only wants to penetrate into the soul life, as it is said, through self-absorption; because Anthroposophy is real science and knows how to look back into the ordinary, earthly – if I may put it this way – soul life of man in such a way that one can indulge in great illusions and great deceptions.

Anthroposophy is less prone to delusions than its opponents and well-meaning critics might think! It is very often believed that anthroposophy is devoted to those inner forces that lead to illusions, hallucinations, and all kinds of mediumistic phenomena. They do not notice that the whole way in which Anthroposophy characterizes its research methods goes in the opposite direction to anything that could possibly lead to illusion, hallucination, vision and so on. What Anthroposophy is about is, above all, absolute clarity about what presents itself to the human being at first. There, the one who really looks inside without prejudice, who actually, I would say, follows the instructions of the mystic, will see what an uncertain thing this looking inside is, how, for example, memories that point to earlier childhood, how these memories simply arise in later life and how one does not recognize that what arises as a thought is actually only a memory, a reminiscence of something previously experienced. And if these memories were to emerge unchanged, one would soon recognize that one is dealing with mere memories. But in the human interior, the ideas of external experiences are absorbed into the feelings, into the impulses of the will, even into the temperament, into the whole human organization, I might say into the intimate human health and illness. And after decades, transformed into a completely different form, the ideas can arise, which are nothing other than what was ignited by external observation. The person who often believes he is a mystic

looks into his inner self and has such ideas, they appear to him as if they had never been borrowed from the outside world, as if they came from the eternal depths of the human soul, as if he could directly experience from such ideas how the soul in divine-spiritual worlds, [in] the world's reason, in the eternal is connected and the like.

Those who are aware of the metamorphoses and transformations that memories can undergo also know that they cannot rely on such introspection. And so, on the one hand, the results of natural science appear to the unprejudiced, showing how the soul is bound to the physical in earthly life, to that physical which is handed over to the outer forces of nature at death; and on the other hand, what often appears is the nebulous, foggy mysticism, through which one nevertheless comes to nothing other than to bring up from the soul that which one has again received through this outer world, albeit so transformed that one does not recognize it, that one regards it as belonging to a completely different world.

It is precisely when a person has prepared himself sufficiently to recognize how little external natural science and how little mysticism can give him, that he comes to recognize the value and significance of those soul exercises that simply consist in not merely brooding or looking inwardly at our soul life, but in bringing it into inner activity, so that it becomes something other than it is in everyday existence.

Nature takes our body with us at death; it incorporates the substances and forces of this body into its own laws. What anthroposophy aims for as the path to the opposite goal is the surrender of the soul for incorporation into that which is opposed to outer nature, into the spirit. Just as the physical body is surrendered to external nature at the time of the outer physical death, so now, not in a mere formal act of knowledge but as an inner fact of anthroposophical knowledge, the souls are surrendered to the spirit so that they may unite with the spirit.

And just as the fact of human physical destruction confronts us with death, so the immortality of the human being confronts us with the soul, in that we unite soul life with that which, as spiritual life, as spiritual being and spiritual weaving, underlies the whole world.

What anthroposophical knowledge strives for, as an actual inner experience, is the opposite of what the event of death is for the physical human being. And just as the soul participates in the processes that take place down there in the physical body organization, and how these physical processes play into the soul's mood, even when the soul is unaware of its essence, so it is that our soul is united – it is just becoming apparent in the knowledge that I will speak of in a moment – that our soul is united with the spirit on the other side, that it is only through this side that it comes to know its experiences by striving for knowledge as fact, as actual inner experience. And this actual knowledge can be attained by developing one's thinking on the one hand to a greater extent than in ordinary life, through inner activity, and on the other hand developing the will more than in ordinary life.

Between the will and the thinking lies the mind, with the feeling right in the middle. The most precious treasure of human life is this feeling, this mind. But when we develop thinking on the one hand and will on the other, the mind and feeling go along with it and become something different themselves.

In order for us — my dear audience — to be able to communicate with each other about the way in which thinking is developed on the one hand and will on the other, we must realize that the soul is nevertheless a unity — in its surging, weaving life a unity —, despite the fact that it lives on the one hand according to thinking, on the other hand according to will and in the middle according to feeling.

When we look at the natural world around us, for example, we must first engage our senses. But what we perceive through our senses is then processed by our thoughts. If we were to apply our will in this process, we would not be able to obtain a true knowledge of nature. We would not be able to do so if we let the will that permeates us in everyday life, if we let it flow into our thinking about nature. We would receive fantasies instead of natural laws. The conscientious scientific method cannot be involved in this.

It is precisely in those ideas and thoughts that we have to develop in relation to the external world, in our soul life, where the will recedes for the everyday and also the ordinary scientific life and the thought appears in a certain one-sidedness, as a mere image of what is present externally, and we have the actual will on the other side. Let us be honest about the actual will. Let us take a simple volitional impulse: I raise my arm, my hand. First of all, I have the intention that something should be lifted at some point. And then the intention, which is a thought, goes down into subconscious depths, unites in a certain way with the organism. How this is not seen through in everyday life, because what [happens] is first of all an experience again, that becomes clear again; the beginning and end can be clearly seen. What lies in the middle, how the will shoots into the organism, as it were, and brings the intention about, that has plunged so deeply into the subconscious as the life of a person from falling asleep to waking up.

One is tempted to say: in relation to his will, man is indeed asleep even when he is awake. From the intention to raise the hand, the arm, to the observation of the raised hand, the raised arm, the everyday consciousness basically sleeps, falls asleep, while the will impulse shoots into the organism, and only wakes up again when the result is seen. Then the will comes to meet us, not interspersed with thoughts. But this will is, I would say, something so alien to our consciousness as what takes place around us between falling asleep and waking.

Now, one can develop the human soul further in both directions, both in the direction of thought and in the direction of will, than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. And what do we have to do in these two directions, in the direction of thought and in the direction of will?

I have already said, my dear audience, that the will takes a back seat to the thought. The thoughts that give us clarity about the world make the will recede completely. And the will impulses that are in everyday life make the thought recede, as I have just explained.

But nevertheless, in thought, and in the most abstract and in the most concrete thoughts, there always lives a remnant of will, it is just not conscious. And in every volitional impulse lives a thought. The thought flows in somewhere and then appears again in the result. If we now seek the will in the thought and the thought in the will, then we exercise the soul in both directions. What does it mean to seek the will in the thought? This is achieved by practising what I have already characterised here several times, by practising meditation and concentration, because that means the soul resting on certain ideas that are presented to it in a completely comprehensible and clear way, like mathematical concepts.

In this often years-long devotion — it takes less time for one person and longer for another, depending on their abilities —, in this devotion to comprehensible ideas, a power of thought is developed, as is what is not present in the ordinary consciousness of the will, as is the will element in thinking, how it intervenes in our organism, and now in our complete organism, one discovers —- while otherwise one always only looks at the thought —, one discovers within the life of thought the otherwise hidden life of will; then the first element of supersensible knowledge enters into human consciousness. For what mingles with our thoughts — I would almost say intrudes — is not, as is usually the case, a pale and abstract thought life. It brings something into our thought life that is as alive and intensely inward as we otherwise experience only in our outer sense perceptions. What we otherwise have as a pale, abstract thought life within us becomes so vivid, so alive, by discovering the will in it, that we have an afterimage of the outer sensory perception in our thought life. And so these processes take place in such a way that complete consciousness — as we develop it in a mathematical problem or as we develop it in a geometrical task — is present in all soul exercises that lead to such, I might say will-veiled pictorial thinking.

Anyone who observes what I have described in detail for these concentration and meditation exercises in my books “Occult Science” and “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and in my book “Puzzles of the Soul” and in other writings, will see how unfounded it is to claim that some kind of dreamy soul life should lead to what has been described as imaginative cognition, as pictorial, cognizant inner life, that all processes are such that we, I might say — if I may use the trivial expression — approach them so soberly and with such sound common sense and finally take possession of this imaginative thinking as we approach and take possession of the solution of a geometrical problem. One would like to say: everything that has to be done to achieve such knowledge is practised in such a way that it can be justified before the most transparent, before mathematical knowledge. And actually one has to say that it is most surprising that it is not precisely mathematicians who sympathize with the innermost essence of anthroposophical research method. For the soul activity that is exercised in anthroposophical research is basically the same as that exercised in mathematics, only that the content is different: in mathematics it is formal, while in what is to be considered an anthroposophical research method it is one that leads into reality, into actuality.

And indeed, we are led into a very definite reality if we allow thinking, through meditation and concentration, to grasp the otherwise neglected element of will. For it is here that the first result of supersensible research, of supersensible knowledge, really comes to us. And that is what I have called in my books the formative forces of the human body.

When we have brought thinking to this stage, to imagination, then we learn to live, not in abstract thinking, but in a kind of thinking that is much more real inwardly than abstract thinking. Now we learn to live into a living thinking, into a thinking that flows into reality and takes in our soul. We live ourselves into a thought organism. And the first result appears before us: it is what stands before us in a large tableau of life, what has been working since our birth, inwardly, permeating our physical body as a supersensible one, precisely the body of formative forces.

This body of which I am speaking here is not spread out in space like the physical body; this body is a time body. Just as the individual organs are related to one another and interact in the physical body of space, so the processes of time from our birth to death are a great unity in this formative body. What the formative forces body experiences from, for example, the age of 45 to 50 is connected to what has been experienced between the ages of 10 and 15 in the same way as, let us say, some part of our brain is connected to the part of our heart or stomach in the physical body. We have a temporal body that is attached to us, but which represents a thinking that has become active, a thinking that at the same time has forces of growth within it, forces that are sprouting and sprouting growth. We now not only feel what we have inwardly lived through since our birth here on earth – like the stream of memory from which one or the other memory emerges – but we feel how these memories are only the abstract upper waves of what surface of ordinary consciousness, what lives in our metabolism, what is in the movement of our hearts, what lives in our activity, our nervous system, but what becomes visible as a spiritual body, as a supersensible, etheric body.

The stages of knowledge of earlier epochs, which could not yet recognize these things as clearly as today's anthroposophy strives to, but which had an inkling from dull clairvoyance, knew that such a formative body exists. Then it was called the ether body or life body. I do not want anything other than what I myself have characterized here to be understood by these expressions! And so, as in a large tableau, we discover what we are as a unity, since we have had a physical body on this earth.

The first supersensible element — dearly beloved attendees — is not yet something that leads us beyond our earthly existence. Anthroposophy must continue to advance conscientiously in stages, but it is the content of our earthly existence, the first supersensible element within us, this body of formative forces, which is organized in time, as our physical body is organized in space, characterized.

But we can move forward. We can carry out a next exercise, which, so to speak, is still linked to thinking, to meditation and concentration, but which at the same time leads beyond them. It consists in the fact that, after we have initially concentrated, we first turn our entire soul attention to an idea in meditation, so that we perceive nothing of the rest of the world, but turn the soul only to this one idea; then we strengthen the soul through this concentration, as we otherwise strengthen the muscle that repeatedly and repeatedly performs a task. So, through this ever-recurring concentration and meditation, we grasp some conceptual complex that is easily manageable, and this strengthens the soul; we ascend to what we have just described – to the apprehension of the will element in thinking – so that imaginative knowledge may arise. Although common sense always remains with this anthroposophical method, we must still say that something like a second personality is added to the person as he usually is, which now experiences what I have described, let us say, for example, in imaginative knowledge.

The difference between anthroposophical experience and experience as a medium is that the person experiencing hallucinations or visions as a medium lives with his whole ego, with his whole personality, in these states, which are definitely connected with his physical development. He loses sight of what he otherwise is; he lives only in what presents itself to his soul in an abnormal way.

The person who immerses himself in imaginative knowledge and also in the higher levels of what I am about to describe, sets a second personality apart from himself, the observer of the supersensible; but he always remains there, controlling and criticizing this observer of the supersensible, with his healthy human understanding, as he is in ordinary life.

Therefore, anthroposophy can be presented to anyone, it can be grasped with common sense, because even in the one who is an anthroposophical researcher, what presents itself to him in supersensible vision must first be checked and criticized with what he has remained alongside, with the bearer of common sense. But it is the case that by first concentrating on certain ideas, by doing so one also maintains the tendency, the inner tendency, to now keep these ideas in the soul, not to let go of these ideas again. It takes more strength than for ordinary forgetting to bring such ideas, which one has first placed in the soul with all one's strength, with the strongest strength of inner attention, out of the soul again.

The second exercise has been achieved, which must develop ideas that one has concentrated on sharply, I would say, that have taken over one completely, in order to get them out again. So that, after one has concentrated, I would say, after one has meditated on them, one can put down what I call empty consciousness.

When you develop this empty consciousness, when you develop the power to create this empty consciousness, you apply it from meditation, concentration, and then this consciousness is not filled with memories or impressions of the external world; it is truly empty.

But then, when this consciousness is empty, it does not remain empty for long, because the outer world penetrates into it, because one has initially created this consciousness oneself, one is awake without any content. But after some time, the content comes – which otherwise comes to us through development and is processed with the ordinary mind – that is the content of a supersensible, a spiritual world. And by having attained this imaginative realization through meditation and concentration, by having established this empty consciousness, one thereby gains insights into the spiritual world, into the supersensible world, which surrounds us just as the sensual world surrounds us. Now one learns: Once one has attained this — I now call it the initiated consciousness —, once one has attained this initiated consciousness: Now you stand inside everywhere in the spiritual world and besides with your common sense, your healthy senses, you have the same insight into the physical-sensual world as you otherwise have as an earth human.

The fact that these things develop side by side is the essential thing; then man will never be able to enter into pathological states when he is engaged in such research methods. But if one has trained oneself to suppress these forces, these images of meditation and concentration, one can create an empty consciousness and can also suppress the tableau of life that our inner being, our body of the power of becoming, has placed before our soul, how it has worked, how it has woven in all of us a supersensible one, since the beginning of our earthly existence. We can now, when we have appropriated these forces to create the empty consciousness, we can eliminate — when we have first brought the formative body into consciousness —, we can eliminate this formative body itself. We gradually achieve such a strong power that we can now also switch off this, our own spiritual world, that we can create an empty consciousness in relation to it. But then – my dear audience – when we create an empty consciousness in relation to this body, then the human soul, the human consciousness, is not merely filled with spiritual-soul content from the environment, as I have just described, but then this consciousness of the human being is filled with the spiritual and soul content that we ourselves were before we descended from the spiritual and soul world and accepted our physical body through the inheritance of matter and forces from our parents and ancestors. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of what we were before we took on a physical earthly body. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of our being before birth or before conception. This arises in supersensible knowledge, the second stage in the inspired knowledge that is attained in the way I have just described.

Anthroposophy is not able to conjure up something out of thin air, nor out of lightly-draped mysticism, but rather, anthroposophy must gradually conquer the insights by first drawing on the strength in the human disposition that leads into the supersensible existence. One defames anthroposophy when one merely calls it a philosophy. It is not based on philosophical speculation, but on a vision that is as vivid as any [sensory] vision can be, but which must be achieved by developing the powers that otherwise only slumber in the soul, as I have indicated in principle, and as you can find in the further explanations of it in the books mentioned.

But now, my dear attendees, something very special presents itself to the spiritual researcher. At the moment when he, so to speak, gets to know his humanity, his soul nature, as it was before his descent to earth, at that moment his physical body appears to him like an external object. He now lives, so to speak, with his newly created personality, as it were, transferred back to his existence before his physical body was. He now has this physical body in front of him as something external. And by having this physical body in front of him as something external, he looks at this physical body – that is what must be taken into account. He does not see this physical body merely as it is in ordinary life for physical perception, but he sees this physical body according to its inner organs, although these inner organs are spiritualized.

If you imagine the human heart, the human lungs, the human brain, the various human organs, not in physical terms with physical contours, but as processes, as inner activity, as ascending processes of becoming and growth, as descending processes of destruction and death, interacting with one another, if you think of the inner human organism in this way – but not the human being as a whole, as we usually have him before the physical observation, but also physically, but the physical in spiritual translation, I would say, if you imagine that, then this is what stands before the human being in the same moment when he sees his spiritual-soul existence as it was before he descended to earth.

I do not shrink back, my dear audience, because the things I am talking about are certain results of spiritual scientific research, and since I am simply, of course, unable to give all the intermediate links, which can, however, be found in the books mentioned can be found in the books mentioned, but I want to list the results — to say, at least in some areas, what must nevertheless seem quite paradoxical to today's man, namely to present that which, at the stage I have just characterized, to man, in the following way.

Consider, my dear audience, look into your inner being, you will find memories in your soul, memories that are connected with experiences, and believe that what emerges in the inner life of your soul as a pictorial life of ideas, as perceptions permeated with feeling, is what has been experienced. You can distinguish exactly, I would say the fine, delicate weaving of the soul that you recognize; and you can relate it to the robust outer physical of life, to which it is to be related. But what would happen if the following were to occur? If suddenly something were to emerge in the soul that makes you say to yourself, “Yes, where does that come from? I have never experienced anything like that.” You will not rest until you can relate what has emerged in your soul, which comes across like a memory, to a specific experience, and then you will be calm. And you always relate what is a fine spiritual weaving in your inner being to something robust and material in the outside world, to which you have had a connection.

Now, in the face of inspired knowledge, it is the case that the person is standing before his soul, I would say the entire interior of his organism with all the individual organs, with the forces that compose these organs, lungs, liver, everything is there; the person is looking at it from the inside as a physical being. Only, in recent times, this physicality appears to him to be more spiritually permeated, but it is the physical organization. And that is like having nothing but memories – we can compare it to that – of which we do not know what they refer to. But we can learn what what we encounter in our own organism refers to in the outside world. We learn, namely, by having acquired the empty consciousness, to see the outside world in a new form.

You see, my dear attendees, through our physical vision, also through physical science – astronomy, astrophysics, astrochemistry – we see the physical sun in a more or less precise or imprecise outline. But that is not the whole of the sun, just as what we see with our physical eyes is not the whole of the human being. In the moment when empty consciousness is established, we see, in addition, what presents itself to the outer eye in outer science, so to speak, a solar element that weaves through all of space that is accessible to us and that wafts as a form of power, that physically concentrates there, but that also spreads. We see a solar element in all of the space that is accessible to us.

And this sun-like quality, which is only recognized by the empty consciousness in inspired knowledge as a living being, this sun-like quality, when we meet a person, it combines in a remarkable way with what we recognize of ourselves. We perceive his physical body with our outer senses. Then, in a sense, what his physical body is as an extension is summarized in his soul. We have to imagine the soul as a concentrated form of the spatially extended; when we look at the outer great nature, at the cosmos, the conditions are the opposite. There is, for example, the physical body of the sun, the concentrated form, and the spiritual, which is now the form that is widely extended in space. But we perceive it. Just as we perceive the physical body of the human being with the outer senses as the widely extended, and only grasp it as concentrated in the soul, so we perceive the sun as an external revelation; and we perceive an inner configured life and weaving through the whole space accessible to us, an extending force-end of the sun-like. We observe how it lives into the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and also into the physical life of man. We now begin to relate something certain in our heart, in our lungs, to the sun-like, which we have only glimpsed through inspired knowledge.

And in the same way, we learn to recognize the spiritual aspect of the moon, the moon-like, and relate it to something else. We learn to recognize the sprouting, sprouting forces in our organism as the solar aspect; we learn to recognize what are the forces of decomposition, what are the forces of destruction, as the moon-like. We learn to relate other things in the great cosmos to the inner being.

Now, what are we learning now? In our ordinary lives, we encounter external events of a robust nature; these are the physical events. They are reflected in our thinking, in our feelings, as it were. We carry the spiritual within us. Externally, there is the robust physical. In relation to that which we perceive from the cosmos as spiritual, this spiritual is out there, and within us are our physical organs. Just as our ideas, our memories, are images of the physical universe that we experience, so our physical organs — as their spiritual translation shows us — are internal images, if I may use the term, physicalized images of that which is spread out in the great cosmos. We learn to relate our organs to the great cosmos, to relate them to the whole cosmos, that is, to the spiritual content of the cosmos. We grow with the riddles of our soul into the riddles of the cosmos, which we learn to look at externally.

Now we come to the thought exercises, and I would like to say that in addition to the transition from the thought exercises to something else – which I have characterized in the empty consciousness – we must add the will exercises.

A simplest will exercise – my dear audience – can still be done with imagining and thinking. It is carried out by doing what I would call backward thinking. Everyone can do these exercises in a simple way by recalling the events of the day backwards in reverse order in the evening, letting them pass before the soul; first what happened before going to bed, then something that happened a little earlier, and so on back to the morning, in as small portions as possible. One can also feel a special interest, one has a special interest from the event, one has a special interest in the processes from the fifth to the first re-experienced [real process]!

What is achieved through such real processes? It is, despite arising from the imagination, an exercise of the will. Otherwise, by imagining, we abandon ourselves to the external sequence of facts. We develop our soul life on the thread of external events, of external facts. Now we resist with our imagination what is there as a consequence of the external facts. We reverse the thought. To do this, a strong force is to be applied, a strong application of force is necessary, a stronger force than we usually apply. The will gradually moves out of our thinking.

We can then strengthen such exercises of will if we gradually break certain habits that we have and transform them into others. If we go even further; for example, if we say to ourselves at a certain age: You now want to get into the habit of something that for you is like a temperament trait, like a very intimate, inner, ingrained habit. It will take years before it becomes something natural in you, but you want to work on yourself daily. If you take yourself in hand, if you really take something that arises from thought and incorporate it into the will, then the will becomes something completely different! And then what happens is — it seems like just a comparison, but it is absolutely a reality, ladies and gentlemen. How is it that our eye is organized in such a way that it can serve to see? It is because the eye's own substance does not assert itself, but is, so to speak, selflessly integrated into our organism. In the moment when the eye asserts its own substantiality, for example in an eye disease, we can no longer see! Seeing – and the same applies to the other senses – perception is only possible because the organ of perception switches off its own materiality, in that it becomes, as it were, selfless.

Now I would never claim — of course not — that our whole organism is somehow diseased in relation to ordinary life or ordinary science. But this ordinary organism that we carry with us in our earthly life is, after all, designed for our external everyday life, for our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It is very healthy for that, but not for higher experiences, not for penetrating into the supersensible world. In this respect, it is like a diseased eye and, on the contrary, I would say it becomes even less transparent when we merely carry out mental exercises. Through these mental exercises, precisely that which is our heart, our lungs, becomes more opaque, like an external object. Through the exercises of the will, this opacity is accompanied by a transparency. We gradually come to perceive what actually happens between the intention to raise the arm and hand and the actual effect. That which, between one thought and the next, is immersed in sleep, that which descends as will into the organism, becomes tangible to perception.

But through this the organism — of course in the spiritual-soul sense, not as with the eye, but in the spiritual-soul sense — the whole organism becomes spiritually-soul transparent. In spiritual and soul terms, the human being becomes a single sensory organ. In this way, I would say, the human being develops opacity in one direction by getting to know his organs and learning to relate them to the cosmos. And on the other hand, by being able to pass arbitrarily from one to the other – that is what matters – he also develops the transparency of his whole organism.

And when he develops the transparency of his organism, then – my dear audience – that which otherwise appears in the physical world is developed to the highest degree in the spiritual-soul sense: the unfolding of love, that love which also underlies all our truly free actions, as I summarized it for the moral world – presented in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties – and which shows that in the spiritual life which is characteristic of ethics, of morality. I have described this special inclination of the will to the activity that unfolds in love from its ethical point of view; now I have to describe it from the point of view of knowledge.

But in this way, man comes to be truly free with his will from his physical organism, as he is free in seeing with his eye. He sees spiritually and soulfully through his physical organism. And he sees into the spiritual and soul world, so that he stands in it as he stands in the physical through his senses in a physical way. He learns to live in intuitive knowledge, which now stands in the reality of the spiritual.

Now, as the next experience, the image appears, the pictorial content of what the person then really experiences by passing through the gate of death. Man first became aware of his spiritual self in this order of realization, as I have described to you, independently of his physical body in relation to his thinking. In this way he gains knowledge of his being as it was before birth, or before conception. Now he becomes free of this body with his will, in that the body becomes transparent spiritually-mentally, in that the human being is in the spiritual-mental world. Now he has the image-knowledge of the real process that takes place at death, when the body not only becomes transparent, but is discarded, given over to the element of earth, and the spiritual-soul connects with the spiritual-soul world.

This has been prepared for through our entire life on earth, that what we behold through meditation, concentration and empty consciousness of the prenatal, or what lies before conception, is interrelated, that it connects with what emerges from the will. We learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of thought through will, and in the same way we learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of will through thought. World thoughts open up to us, not subjective thoughts, but thoughts that work out of the world. The world becomes transparent to us in thought when we place ourselves in this world in intuitive knowledge. The event of death appears before us, but it contains the causes for a real knowledge that has been conscientiously developed and that only those can confuse with all that appears today as occultism and the like who do not enter into that which is repeatedly and described as the conscientious method by which man can ascend to a spiritual realization that really allows him to approach the realm where the soul mysteries are experienced, but where also those experiences come up that are in a certain sense actually the answer to these soul mysteries. For in life we do indeed enter into facts.

We had to point out on the one hand the event, the fact of death. Then the soul leaves the body, leaves the body with which it was connected during its earthly existence. Man connects with the physical-sensual world in its conformity to law. And on the other hand, the person develops inwardly that through which the soul unites with the spiritual, as I have described. There the soul unites with the spiritual, and it experiences how, after it has detached itself from the body, it develops further with the spiritual as a unity after death, until it has developed to the point of birth or - we say - conception in the spiritual-soul world. And just as we have processes below that are simply carried over from the external natural laws, which play into the soul during life on earth, effecting its state, its mood, its happiness and unhappiness — as this is announced from within, so those processes are now weaving themselves, where the prenatal and the post-mortal elements interact. Just as we are dependent on our body, so we are dependent on our spiritual. And just as that which remains unconscious in the body remains unconscious for the soul until it is scientifically investigated by it, so that which flows to the soul from the spiritual, giving it mood, state, happiness and unhappiness, remains unconscious for the soul to which the receptive human soul is accessible at all.

That which is unconsciously experienced in the spiritual as an analogue, as the unconscious in the physical, plays as great a role for the soul and its independence as the physical and that which is linked to the physical. After all, something else is also similar to death, but in its similarity it is opposed to death; with our physical body we live in the outer world. By constantly absorbing this outer world through food, by allowing the laws that are in the outer world to continue to work in us, and by living in the spiritual world on the other hand, we absorb the spiritual laws into ourselves. And the spiritual laws touch the physical laws within us.

But what is the case with regard to physical laws? They are life, they are rhythmic life, they are constantly renewing themselves. We have to eat every day. If I may say something very trivial: we cannot be satisfied with having eaten yesterday or the day before or the day before that and remembering it today. This is the case with the external abstract, the knowledge intended for the ordinary consciousness; we do not assume that the memory of eating is enough for us.

What we take up from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is something that, in the spiritual realm, must have the same rhythmic existence for the human being as the physical and bodily processes otherwise do. We cannot remember — and be satisfied with — what we absorb as anthroposophy, as we can do in chemistry or in the external sciences.

Those who have ascended to the highest regions of anthroposophy feel that they must return again and again to what is for them the perception of the higher, supersensible world; otherwise something arises in them like spiritual hunger. This is just as real. Indeed, one cannot be satisfied with ordinary memories. We enter into a reality by seeking out that which shows us how the soul is connected to spiritual life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Anthroposophy has to say about the riddle of the soul, at least the beginning, I would say. In the short time available in a lecture, I had to sketch out how anthroposophy delves into the field of soul mysteries, how it actually shows, not just adheres to everyday life, but how it points beyond birth and death, how it points to a supersensible world, to which the soul with its eternal essence belongs as it belongs to the physical-sensory world with its body. By facing the fact of death, the human being learns to see through the reality of anthroposophical knowledge, and thus to achieve something in anthroposophical experiments, or let us say the beginning of a solution to the riddle of the soul, that becomes a truly necessary spiritual nourishment for him again and again.

But this is how knowledge comes into being that is alive. And anthroposophy is the basis for knowledge that is alive, that is not dead knowledge that is valid only for memory. But this is also how something arises from anthroposophy that can be something for life. But I need only point to one area, to the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, where teaching is given and education is cultivated entirely in the spirit of such an understanding of the human being, as it can arise from the contemplation of the whole, full human being, even in the child. We do not seek to realize this in the external transmission of a worldview. We do not teach an anthroposophical worldview. It is not suitable for children in the form in which it exists today. But what arises from the anthroposophically oriented worldview for teaching and education is a real engagement with the child's being, a real engagement with the true being of the human being.

What is needed in education today, which will develop humanity? Humanity will have to engage with the great tasks of life in a completely different way than is already the case today. Humanity will have to engage with the ever-increasing tasks of life in education and teaching in a completely different way than people are already capable of today.

And however much one may have against the Dornach building – and this applies to those present – it is shown in the artistic realm that which is otherwise presented in words as a world-view content!

Dear attendees,

I would like to use the following comparison again and again: take a nut and its shell. In the nut shell, in its curves and bends, you have the same laws, the same formations at work as in the nut kernel itself. The anthroposophical world view makes it just as necessary as it is necessary for the nut to form its outer shell according to the nut kernel, to have some corresponding outer framework. It could not have had just an outer shell. It could not have been something that does not have an inner life. No mere architect could possibly have erected a good building; that could not be the case with what we are developing as an anthroposophically oriented worldview.

What is willed by mere life for good seeing, what comes towards us as genuine forms, what comes towards us as genuine artistic forms in the pictorial and sculptural, must, although it remains artistic, contain no single symbol, no single allegory; instead, everything has flowed into the artistic. But it must have the same effect as what is otherwise presented in words at the Goetheanum. What is presented on the stage in Dornach is only a different artistic language for that which lives when it wants to become a word, in order to go out into the world as a word of world-view.

But what leads into spiritual, supersensible worlds, in that it proceeds from clear, methodical thinking and methodical research as never before in any external science, what leads into the supersensible, that not only provides a foundation for a living knowledge, for a living science, not only a creative force for artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

No matter how much one may have to criticize Dornach and his style – I am my own harshest critic, and some things would not be built the same way again – one only learns through practice. But that is not the point. What matters is the will! What matters is that one can truly strive towards a living artistic style from a living world view, so that the outer shell within the world works according to the same laws as the nutshell according to the nut, and like the nut kernel also has an outwardly corresponding shell. How external some old architectural style would be to a world view that is now being born out of the immediate urges and longings of contemporary humanity! But such a striving must at the same time lead into the deepest foundations of the human being.

What I mention last is not the last, and one might actually think that those who are public representatives of religious denominations would see not some antagonism in anthroposophy, but rather a help. For people today are shaped by popular science, even in the most popular knowledge and in the simplest minds. And that which presents the content of the supersensible must be measured against the education of humanity. Today, even at school, work is done according to the habits and methods of external science. In this way, the connection between the human being and the supersensible world is increasingly being neglected. Religious life would increasingly be allowed to fade away if it did not receive a new foundation, if it did not receive the support of knowledge, of provable knowledge of the supersensible world.

Therefore, the representatives of religious denominations should look to anthroposophy as a helper that wants to support precisely that which they should support most, and to do so in a way that present-day humanity will increasingly want to see. A Christian is truly a fainthearted one who does not realize that his Christianity is only truly supported by Anthroposophy in the present; no longer by that which is traditionally reproduced, but through the living contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, which we arrive at when we pass from the solution of the soul riddle, as we have presented it to our souls today, into the depths of religious life.

The third thing that should arise from this world view, which presents itself to the world as Anthroposophy , that does not want to think alone, that wants to become alive inwardly with all the soul forces in man, that wants to make an inner, spiritual man within the outer, bodily man tangible for one's own consciousness.

But that is what makes anthroposophy — however imperfect it still is today —, it is in its infancy, and I am the first to admit its imperfections, but I am also the one who could write all the criticisms that are written today myself. For the one who dares to say such things before the world today, as well as the things that have been said here before you today, also knows what can be objected to them, and he does not need to wait for what comes from this or that side as a judgment, out of an awareness that does not yet want to engage with Anthroposophy. He will not find anything new in the judgments, which mostly arise from a lack of understanding! I want to say this to show that the one who is inside Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, should not be surprised by what is encountered!

Dear attendees! If consciousness that does not engage with anthroposophy were right, then anthroposophy would not be needed. If anthroposophy could easily please everyone today, then it would not need to come forward at all! It does not aspire to be immediately accepted today, for it speaks to forces that lie much deeper in the soul; and yet it knows that even in those who contradict it, these yearning, driving forces for a scientific, artistic and religious deepening are present.

New paths are being sought in all three fields. Anthroposophy is aware of the weaknesses that still afflict the present day. But it would like to be — let me say this at the end, ladies and gentlemen, through its special method of research, through the life it evokes in the soul as a result of this method of research, through the deepening to which it can bring feeling and artistic insight in man —, it would like to be a foundation of a spiritual science. It wants to be that which leads people to the creativity of artistic creation and artistic attitude. And it ultimately wants to be that which inwardly develops a strong, soulful, spirit-filled vehicle for religious life as well.

If it endeavors to work in these three directions, then it may perhaps believe that it is working in the spirit of the most significant demands of today.

This is the 7th of 10 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin between 24 January and 20 April, 1918. (No. 67 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961). The title of this series of lectures is: The Eternal in the Human Soul, Immortality and Freedom. They were published in German as: Das Ewig in der Menschenseele. Unsterblichkeit und Freheit.

Everyone who is to some extent eager for knowledge and has realised how useful a true understanding of reality can be to human life desires to familiarise himself with the content of Spiritual Science as presented here. On the other hand, its methods for the attainment of knowledge are often irksome, because Spiritual Science is bound to show that the ordinary faculties of cognition—including those applied in orthodox science—cannot lead deeply into the spiritual life; and to be obliged to turn to different sources of knowledge is not an easy matter. True, if the study of Spiritual Science is free from preconceived notions and ideas, it will become more and more evident that ordinary, healthy human reason—provided it really gets to grips with life—is capable of grasping what Spiritual Science has to offer. But people are not willing, above all in the case of Spiritual Science, to apply this healthy human reason and ordinary knowledge of life, because they do not want to turn to something that can be achieved only through actual development of the soul. Although the facts presented by Spiritual Science can be investigated only by the methods to be described here, once the facts have been investigated they can be grasped by healthy human reason and ordinary experience. But because a certain mental laziness makes people hesitate to penetrate into Spiritual Science, even those who at the present time have an urge to know something about it prefer to turn to sources more in line with the methods applied in the laboratories, dissection-rooms and other institutions of modern science. And so in order to acquire a certain insight into the spiritual life, people who cannot bring themselves to approach Spiritual Science itself often prefer to concern themselves with abnormal phenomena of human life to be observed in the outer world of the senses. These people believe that the study of certain abnormal phenomena will elucidate certain riddles of existence. That is why Spiritual Science is so repeatedly and so mistakenly associated with endeavours to gain knowledge of spiritual reality by investigating all kinds of abnormal, borderline regions of human life.¹

For this reason I must also speak of borderline regions which through their very abnormality point to certain secrets of existence but can only really be understood through Spiritual Science and without it are bound to lead to countless fallacies about the true nature of spiritual life. The vast range, the interest and enigmatic character of the borderline region of which I shall speak is to some extent known to everyone, for it points to certain connections between external life and its hidden foundations. I am referring to man's life of dream. Starting from this life of dream it will be necessary also to consider other borderline regions of existence whose phenomena, if experienced in an abnormal way, might induce the belief that they lead a man to the foundations of life. I shall therefore also speak of the phenomena of hallucination, of visionary life and of somnambulism and mediumship, as far as this is possible in the framework of a single lecture.

Anyone who would have these borderline regions of human life explained in the light of Spiritual Science must bear in mind those essentials of genuine spiritual investigation through which they can be elucidated. From the range of what has been described in previous lectures I want therefore to select certain matters which will provide a basis for study of the phenomena in question. Spiritual Science must depend upon development of forces of the human soul which lie hidden in the everyday consciousness and also in the consciousness with which ordinary science works. As I have indicated, through certain exercises, certain procedures carried out purely in the life of soul and having nothing whatever to do with anything of a bodily nature, the human soul is able to evoke powers otherwise slumbering within it and so to gain insight into the true spiritual life. I must now briefly describe the essential preliminaries which enable the soul to make itself independent of the bodily element in acts of super-sensible cognition.

I have said in previous lectures that the attitude to be adopted to spiritual reality must differ from that adopted to external physical reality. Above all it must be remembered that what is experienced in the spiritual world by the soul when free from the body, cannot, like an ordinary mental picture, pass over into the memory in the actual form in which it is experienced. Whatever is experienced in the spiritual world must be experienced each time anew, just as an outer, physical reality must be confronted anew when it is actually in front of us and not merely remembered. Anyone who believes he can have genuine spiritual experience in the form of mental pictures which he can remember just as he remembers those arising in everyday life, does not know the spiritual in its reality. When, as is possible, a man subsequently recollects spiritual experiences, this is due to the capacity to bring such experiences into his ordinary consciousness, just as in,the case of perceptions of some outer, physical reality. Then the pictures can be recollected. But he must learn to distinguish between this recollection of mental pictures formed by himself and a direct experience of a spiritual happening, a direct encounter with a spiritual being. A special characteristic of body-free experience, therefore, is that it does not immediately penetrate into the memory.

Another characteristic is that when, in other circumstances, a man practises in order to be able to achieve something, the exercises enable him to do this more easily and with greater skill. In the domain of spiritual knowledge, strangely enough, the opposite is the case. The oftener a man has a certain spiritual experience, the more difficult it is for the soul to induce in itself the condition where this same spiritual experience is again possible. It is therefore also necessary to know the methods by which a spiritual experience can again become accessible, because it does not allow itself to be repeated in the same way.

The third characteristic is that genuine spiritual experiences pass so rapidly before the soul that alert presence of mind is required to capture them. Otherwise a happening passes so quickly that it has already gone by the time attention is directed to it. A man must learn to be master of situations in life where it is impossible to procrastinate and reflect upon what decision to take, but where decision must be rapid and sure. This alert presence of mind is essential if spiritual experiences are to be held in the field of attention. I mention these characteristics of spiritual experience because they at once show the great difference between an experience in the spiritual world and an experience in the outer, physical world of the senses and how little justification there is for people who know nothing to insist that the spiritual investigator simply brings ideas and concepts acquired from the outer world of the senses as reminiscences into some kind of imaginary spiritual world. Anyone who really knows something about the characteristics of the spiritual world, knows too that it differs so entirely from the world of the senses that nothing can be imported into it from the latter, but that the development of special faculties is essential before the spirit can confront spiritual reality.

Certain other conditions must also be fulfilled by one who wishes to be capable of genuine spiritual investigation. The first condition is that the soul must be immune as far as possible from inner passivity. A man who likes to give himself up dreamily to life, to make himself ‘passive’, as the saying goes, in order that in a dreamlike, mystical state the revelations of spiritual reality may flow into him—such a man is ill-adapted to penetrate into the spiritual world. For it must be emphasised that in the realm of true spiritual life the Lord does not give to his own in sleep! On the contrary, what makes a man fit to penetrate into the spiritual world is vigour and activity of mind, zeal in following trains of thoughts, in establishing connections between thoughts seemingly remote from each other, quickness in grasping chains of ideas, a certain love of inner, spiritual activity. This quality is indispensable for genuine spiritual investigation. Mediumistic tendencies and a talent for genuine spiritual knowledge are as different as night from day.

Another condition is that in his life of soul a genuine spiritual investigator must to the greatest possible extent be proof against suggestion, against allowing himself to be influenced by suggestion; he must confront the things of external life too with a discriminating, sceptical attitude of mind. A person who prefers to be told by others what he ought to do, who is glad not to have to arrange his life according to his own independent judgment and decisions, is not very suitable for spiritual investigation. Anyone who knows how great a role is played by suggestion in normal everyday life, also realises how difficult it is to combat the general tendency to succumb to it. Think only to what extent, in public life particularly, people allow things to be suggested to them, how few efforts they make to create in their own souls the conditions for independence of judgment and for governing their affairs by their own will. Those who study the findings of spiritual research because their healthy intelligence makes them desire relationship with the spiritual world are very often accused of blind belief in the investigator. But the fact is that blindly credulous adherents are anything but welcome to an investigator who tries to penetrate with conscious vision into the spiritual world. A society composed of credulous followers would be the caricature of a society suitable for the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. The genuine spiritual investigator will find, to his joy, that sooner or later those who come close to him develop independence of judgment and a certain inner freedom also in regard to himself, that they do not adhere to him blindly, under the influence of suggestion, but because of common interest in the spiritual world.

I shall speak now of yet another characteristic which can elucidate the relation of spiritual reality to physical reality and the attitude to be adopted by the human soul to the spiritual world. It is very often said that the spiritual investigator takes with him from the physical world of sense preconceived ideas which he then uses to describe some imagined spiritual world. But as I have already said, genuine experience of the spiritual world takes a different form each time. We may be quite sure that what we experience in the spiritual world always proves to be different from anything we previously believed. For this reason it is clear that the spiritual world can be reached only when the soul has been made fit for the experience of it. There is no question of carrying reminiscences of the physical world into an imaginary world. But there is something else which—paradoxical as it seems—will be confirmed by decades of experience of the things of the spiritual world. It is that however highly trained a person may be in body-free cognition, however well practised in seeing into the spiritual world, when he contemplates a particular being or happening—especially a happening which indicates a relationship between the spiritual world and outer, physical reality—he will very often find that his first experience is false. Hence the spiritual investigator acquires the caution which leads him to anticipate that the first experience will be misleading. Then, as he perseveres, it becomes evident to him why he was on the false track, and by comparing what is subsequently correct with what was formerly fallacy, he finally recognises the truth of the matter in question. As a rule, therefore, a genuine spiritual investigator will not communicate his findings to his fellow-men until a long time has elapsed since particular researches were made, because he knows that above all in the realm of the spiritual life, delusion and error have to be encountered and overcome in order finally to recognise the truth. This delusion and error are due to the fact that in investigating the spiritual life we take our start from the material world; we bring our powers of judgment, our mode of perception, from the material world into the spiritual world. At first we are always inclined to apply what we have thus carried into the spiritual world—hence the erroneous conclusions. But the very fact of having to realise each time anew how different the attitude adopted to spiritual things must be from that adopted to physical things, enables us for the first time to perceive the intimate characteristics of spiritual experience. It certainly seems paradoxical as compared with ordinary, everyday experience. But one who is able to look into the spiritual world knows, firstly, that the eternal, immortal essence of the human soul cannot come to conscious expression in the ordinary experiences connected with the body; the immortal essence of the soul is concealed, because here, in physical life, through his bodily constitution, a man can acquire knowledge of the physical only. That is why it is so necessary for the spiritual investigator to emphasise unambiguously that knowledge of the spiritual is acquired outside the body. The moment the body is in any way involved in the acquisition of such knowledge, this knowledge is falsified, even when remembrance—which is preserved in the body—plays a part.

Another outcome of a real grasp of the spiritual life is the knowledge that a man expels himself from the spiritual world to which the eternal core of the human soul belongs, when he surrenders his free will in any way and under the sway of coercion or suggestion allows what is in his soul to come to expression through his body in actions or even only through speech—that is to say, when anything that comes to expression through his body has not been mediated through the will. One fundamental condition for experiencing the spiritual world, therefore, is to recognise that the bodily functions must play no part in this knowledge. The other fundamental condition is that a man must make every effort to ensure that whatever he accomplishes through his body is the outcome of his own power of judgment, of the free resolve of his own will.

I was obliged to speak first of these conditions because they provide the basis for studying the abnormal provinces of the life of soul which we shall be considering. In true spirit-knowledge, what otherwise remains unconscious is revealed and this revelation sheds light upon the eternal, essentially free, core of being in the human soul. It is therefore possible to compare what is thus revealed with abnormal manifestations of the life of soul. The upsurging and ebbing world of dream which beats against human consciousness rather than actually passing into it, cannot really be counted among these abnormal manifestations. The world of dream has become the subject of much scientific and philosophical research, although it cannot be said that the methods applied with such brilliance in natural science are particularly suited to penetrate into the real nature of this borderline province of human life. The same may be said of the contention that thinking must be in strict keeping with that of natural science and surrender completely to the conceptions arising from it. Although, understandably enough, modern people claim to be free from any tendency to believe in authority, they are very inclined, under certain conditions, to do so. Whenever somebody who is publicly reputed to be a great thinker produces a bulky volume dealing with the investigation of abnormal psychic phenomena, numbers of people who really do not understand much about the subject, praise the book to the skies, and then, as a matter of course, our contemporaries, while disclaiming belief in authority, accept it as a reliable basis.

Among philosophical treatises on the life of dream, I want to refer particularly to a book on dream-phantasy by Johannes Volkelt, a German scholar of brilliant intelligence and at present Professor of Philosophy and Education at Leipzig University. He wrote the book in 1875, before he had reached professorial status. Even today this really valuable book is still held against him and is doubtless responsible for the fact that he is still only an Assistant Professor. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the very significant Swabian aestheticist, wrote a fine treatise about Volkelt's book. But academic prejudices, which during recent decades have led to a definite view of what is or is not ‘scientific’, are to blame for the fact that what might have been inaugurated, even if only meagrely, by that book, lies fallow and is obscured by current prejudices which prevent any real penetration into the life of dream.

In the framework of one short lecture I can give little more than a sketch, but I want for all that to speak of particular points in such a way that they can be illumined by Spiritual Science.

Everyone is familiar with the external characteristics of the upsurging and ebbing life of pictures arising in dreams. I shall speak of a few of these characteristics only. The dream arises as the result of some definite instigation. Firstly, there are dreams which have been instigated by the senses. A dream may arise because a clock is ticking away beside us. In certain circumstances the pendulum-beats become the trampling of horses, or perhaps something else. Certain sense-images, therefore, are found in the dream. I lay particular stress on this, for dream-experience bases itself upon numerous impressions received by the outer senses. But what works upon the outer senses never works in the dream in the same form as in the ordinary waking life of day. The sense-impression is always transformed into symbolism—a transformation that is actually brought about by the life of soul.

Such dreams occur very frequently. Johannes Volkelt narrates the following in his book. A schoolmaster dreams that he is giving a lesson; he expects a pupil to answer ‘ja’ to a question. But instead of answering ‘ja.’ the pupil answers, ‘jo’—which may well be a source of irritation to the teacher. He repeats the question and now the pupil does not answer ‘jo’, but ‘j-o’, whereupon the whole class begins to shout ‘fire-jo!’ The teacher wakes up as the fire-engine is racing past and the people are shouting, ‘fire-jo!’ The impression made upon the senses has been symbolised into the complicated action of the dream.

Here is another example given by Volkelt—wherever possible I shall only quote examples actually recorded in literature. A Swabian woman dreams that she is visiting her sister in a large town. The sister is the wife of a clergyman. The two sisters are in church listening to the sermon. The clergyman starts in a perfectly decorous way but suddenly seems to get wings and begins to crow like a cock. One sister says to the other: ‘What a very peculiar way to preach!’ And the sister replies: ‘The Consistory Court has decreed that this is how sermons are to be preached.’ Then the woman wakes up and hears a cock crowing outside. The crowing of the cock which would otherwise have been heard simply as such, has been transformed in this way in the soul; everything else has grouped itself around the crowing. These are examples of dreams instigated by the senses.

But dreams can also be due to inner stimuli, and again it is not the stimuli as such which appear, but the sense-image which has been transformed, cast into symbolism, by the soul. For example, someone dreams of a very hot stove; he wakes up with his heart thumping. Dreams of flying which occur very frequently, are due, as a rule, to some kind of abnormal process taking place in the lungs during sleep. Hundreds of such examples could be quoted and the different categories of dreams enumerated at great length. Although we cannot enter exhaustively into the deeper aspects of sleep, I want still to speak of certain points.

Literature offers no evidence of particular success in discovering elements in the human soul capable of showing what is actually going on in the soul when bringing about such transformations of the outer stimuli of dreams. But the question of paramount interest is this. What, in reality, is it in the soul that causes such different imagery to be connected with an outer stimulus, or also with a memory-picture emerging from the darkness of sleep? Here it must be said that what is actually working in the dream is not the faculty which in ordinary waking life enables man to link one mental picture to another. I could give you hundreds of examples which would prove what I can illustrate now only by one, for the sake of comparison. Think of the following. A woman dreams that she has to cook for her husband—sometimes an arduous duty for a housewife. She dreams that she has made one suggestion after another to him. To the first suggestion he answers: ‘I don't want that!’ To the second suggestion ‘I don't want that either!’ To the third suggestion: ‘Don't for heaven's sake inflict that upon me!’ And so it goes on. In the dream the woman is very miserable about all this and then an idea occurs to her. ‘There is a pickled grandmother on the floor; she is rather tough, but what about cooking her for you tomorrow?’ That too is a dream actually recorded in literature! Nobody who knows anything about the subject will doubt that the dream took such a form. You will at once say to yourselves : Anxiety is at the bottom of it. Something has happened to make the woman anxious. The mood of anxiety—which need not have anything whatever to do with the idea of the cooking and the rest—is transformed into a dream-picture of this kind. The picture is merely a clothing for the mood of anxiety. But during sleep the soul needs this picture in order to throw off the mood of anxiety. Just as you laughed about the pickled grandmother, so does the soul devise this grotesquely comic image as an adjunct to the other content of the dream, in order to overcome the anxiety and to induce an ironic, humorous mood. An oscillation, an alternation of moods can always be perceived in dreams and—like the pendulum of a clock—a swing between tension and relaxation, between anxiety and cheerfulness, and so on. What is of paramount importance in man's life of feeling is always the decisive factor in the structure assumed by the pictures of dream. From this point of view, therefore, the dream takes shape in order that certain tensions in the soul may be overcome. The picture which, as such, has no special significance, is born from this need to lead tension over to relaxation, relaxation over to tension. The soul conjures before itself something that can be an imaginative indication of the real gist of the matter.

Examination of the whole range of the life of dream brings to light two peculiar features which must be particularly borne in mind. The one is that what is usually called logic plays no part in dreams. The dream has a rule entirely different from that of ordinary logic for the way in which it passes from one object to the other. Naturally you will be able to insist that many dreams take a perfectly logical course. But this is only apparently the case, as everyone who can observe these things intimately, knows. If dream-pictures present themselves in logical sequence, the reason is not that you yourself produce this sequence during the dream but that you are placing side by side, mental images which you have already connected together logically at some time or which have been so connected by some agency in life. In such a case, logic in the dream is reminiscence; the logic has been imported into the dream; the action of the dream does not in itself proceed according to the rules of ordinary logic.

It can always be perceived that a deeper, more intimate element of soul underlies the action of the dream. For example—I am quoting something that actually happened. Someone dreams that he must go to see a friend and he knows that this friend will scold him for some reason. He dreams that he gets to the door of the friend's house, but at that moment the whole situation changes. On entering the house he comes into a cellar in which there are savage beasts intent upon devouring him. Then it occurs to him that he has a lot of pins at home and that they spurt fluids which will be able to kill these beasts. He finds then that he has the pins with him and he spurts the fluids at the savage animals. They suddenly change into little puppies which he feels he want to pat.—This is a typical course taken by a dream and you can see that here again it is a matter of the tension caused by the anxiety as to what the friend is going to say—the anxiety takes expression as the savage beasts—being relaxed as a result of the soul having brought about the transformation of the wild beasts into lovable puppies. Obviously, something quite other than logic is in evidence here.—And anyone who is familiar with examples of dreams knows that the following has often happened. Before going to bed, someone has made efforts to solve a problem, but has failed. Then, in a dream, as he says, he discovers the solution and can write it down in the morning when he wakes up. His story is quite correct but those who cannot rightly investigate such things will always misunderstand them. It must not be thought that the actual solution was found in the dream. What was found in the dream and is then thought to have been remembered, is something quite different. It is something that need have very little logic about it, but produces in the soul the beneficial effect of tension being led over to relaxation. Before going to sleep the man was in a state of tension because he could not solve the problem. He brooded and brooded; something was amiss with him. He was healed by the form taken by his dream and was therefore able to solve the problem when he woke up.

Moral judgment is also silent in dreams. It is well known that in dream a man may commit all kinds of misdeeds of which he would be ashamed in waking life. It can be argued that conscience begins to stir in dream, that it often makes itself felt in a very remarkable way. Think only of the dreams contained in Shakespeare's plays—poets generally have a good reason for such things—and you will find that they might appear to suggest that moral reproaches make themselves particularly conspicuous through dreams. Again this is an inexact observation. What is true is that in the dream we are snatched away from the faculty of ordinary moral judgment which in connection with human beings in outer life we must and can exercise. If the dream seems to present moral ideas and moral reproaches in concrete pictures, this is not due to the fact that as dreamers we form moral judgments, but that when we act morally the soul feels a certain inner satisfaction; we are inwardly gratified about something to which we can give moral assent. It is this state of satisfaction, not the moral judgment, that presents itself to the soul in the dream. Neither logic or moral judgment play any part at all in dreams. If the search for truth is sincere it is essential to set to work with far greater exactitude and depth than is usual in life and in science too. Such matters elude the crude methods usually applied. It is extremely significant that neither logic or moral judgment gain admittance into the world of dream.

I want to speak of still another characteristic of the dream which even when considered from the external point of view, indicates how the soul, when it dreams, is related to the world. This relation can, it is true, be fully clarified only by Spiritual Science. Anyone who studies the sleeping human being will be able to say, even from the external standpoint, that in sleep the human being is shut off alike from the experiences arising from his own life and also from the environment. Spiritual Science does of course make it clear that when man falls asleep he passes as a being of soul and spirit into the spiritual world and on waking is again united with his body. It is not necessary to take this into consideration at the moment, but simply to keep clearly in mind what can also be apparent to ordinary consciousness. The human being is shut off from his environment, and what rises out of his body into his ordinary consciousness is also stilled during sleep. Pictures do indeed surge up and fade away in dreams but their actual relation to the external world is not changed; the form assumed by the pictures is such that this relation remains as it was. The relation to the external world, that which as bald environment giving contour to the outer impressions, approaches man as he opens his senses during waking life—this does not penetrate into the dream. Impressions can indeed be made upon a man, but the characteristics of what the senses make out of those impressions are absent. The soul puts an emblem, a symbol, in the place of the ordinary, bald impression. Therefore the actual relation to the outer world does not change. This could be corroborated in countless cases. In the normal dream the human being is as shut off from the external world as he is in normal sleep; he is also shut off from his own body. What rises up from his bodily nature does not come to direct expression as is the case when he is united in the normal way with his body. If, for example, someone's feet get overheated because of a too warm covering, he would be aware in the ordinary waking state that his feet are too hot. In the dream he is not aware of it in this form, but he thinks he is walking on burning coal or something of the kind. Again it is a matter of transformation brought about by the soul.

Attempts to explain the nature of dream simply by using methods and sources available to external science will always be in vain, because there is nothing with which the dream can truly be compared. It occurs in the ordinary world as a kind of miraculous happening. That is the essential point. The spiritual investigator alone is in the position of being able to compare the dream with something else. And why? It is because he himself knows what is revealed to him when he is able to penetrate into the spiritual world. He realises that the ordinary logic holding good for explanations of the outer life of sense, no longer avails. Those who rise into the spiritual world must be capable of expressing in images what is experienced in that world. That is why I have called the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world, ‘Imaginative Cognition’. At that stage it is realised that the images themselves are not the reality but that through the images the reality is brought to expression. These images must, of course, be shaped in accordance with the true laws revealed by the spiritual world and not be the outcome of arbitrary phantasy. The spiritual investigator learns to know—quite apart from the physical world of sense—how one idea or mental picture is related to another, how images are given shape. This first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world is then capable of being compared with the unconscious activity at work in dreams. There a comparison is possible, and moreover something else comes to light as well.

A man who makes real progress in knowledge of the spiritual world gradually begins to experience that his dreams themselves are changing. They become more and more rational, and crazy images such as that of the pickled grandmother and the like gradually turn into pictures which have real meaning; the whole life of dream becomes charged with meaning. In this way the spiritual investigator comes to know the peculiar nature of the relation between the life of dream and the kind of life he must adopt in the interests of spiritual investigation. This puts him in the position of being able to say what it is in the soul that is actually doing the dreaming. For he comes to know something besides, namely, the condition of soul in which he finds himself while experiencing the pictures and ideas of genuine Imagination. He knows that with his soul he is then within the spiritual world. When this particular condition of the life of soul is experienced, it can be compared with the condition of the soul in dreams. This scrupulous comparison reveals that what is actually dreaming in the soul, what is active in the soul while the chaotic actions of dreams are in play, is the spiritual, eternal core of man's being. When he dreams, man is in the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul.

That is what emerges as the one result of spiritual investigation. I will characterise the other by telling you about a personal experience. Not long ago, after a lecture I had given in Zürich on the subject of the life of dream and cognate matters, I was told that several listeners who, on the basis of training in what is called Analytical Psychology or Psycho-Analysis, wanted to be considered particularly clever, were saying after my lecture: ‘That man is still labouring under mistaken notions which those of us who are schooled in Psycho-Analysis have long since outgrown. He believes that dream-life should be taken as something real, whereas we know that it is merely a symbolic form of the life of the psyche.’—I shall not go further into the subject of Psycho-Analysis today but simply remark that this ‘cleverness’ is based upon gross misunderstanding. For under no circumstances will a genuine spiritual investigator take what presents itself in dreams as reality in the actual form in which it is there presented. Unlike the psycho-analysts, he does not take even the course of the dream as being directly symbolic; he knows that the gist of the matter is something entirely different. Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them. One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else. In the course they take the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times. What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, not even its symbolism as the psycho-analysts maintain, but its inner dramatic action. From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams. This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream. There you have the gist of the matter. The dream therefore points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

Again and again I must emphasise that as far as I am concerned there is no question whatever of wishing to revive ancient notions in any domain. The antecedents of what is said here are not derived from any medieval or so-called oriental occult science, as was the case with Blavatsky and with others who draw upon all kinds of obscure sources. Whatever is said here is based on the consciousness that it can hold its own in the face of modern scientific judgment. If an opportunity for proving this were to occur, it could certainly be used. Spiritual Science is presented with full consciousness of the fact that we are living in the scientific age, with full cognisance of what natural science is able to say about the riddles of existence, but with full cognisance, too, of what it is not able to say about the regions of the spiritual life.

Where do the pictures which form the course of the dream, originate? It is like this. A man who is really free from his body in spiritual experience has the spiritual world before him with its happenings and its beings, whereas the dreamer has not yet awakened his consciousness to the degree where this is possible for him. His soul resorts to the reminiscences of ordinary life and the dream arises when the soul impacts the body. The dream is not experienced in the body but it is caused by the impact of the soul with the body. Hence the things which constitute the course of his life present themselves to the dreamer, but grouped in such a way that they bring to expression the inner tendencies of which I have spoken. In reality, therefore, the dream is experienced by a man's own essential being of soul-and-spirit. But it is not the Eternal that is experienced; what is experienced is the Temporal. It is the Eternal that is consciously active in the dream; but this activity is mediated by the Transitory, the Transient. The essential point is that in the dream the Eternal is experiencing the Temporal, the Transitory—the content of life.

I have now briefly explained the nature of dream as viewed in the light of Spiritual Science and why it is that the content of the dream is not an expression of what is actually going on in the soul when relaxation follows tension and tension follows relaxation. In the life of dream the soul is in the world of the Eternal, free from the body. But what enters into the consciousness as the clothing of this experience arises from the connection with the ordinary circumstances of life.

I pass now to the second borderline region of the life of soul where manifestations of the unconscious may occur in the form of hallucinations, visions and the like.² Even philosophers capable of sound judgment, such as Eduard von Hartmann for example, whose powers of discrimination and discernment I rate exceedingly highly, have been led to the mistaken belief—because they could not grasp the nature of the dream from the standpoint of Spiritual Science—that what comes as a picture before the soul in dream is really identical with a picture arising as an hallucination or vision. But these phenomena are essentially different from each other. Because the genuine spiritual investigator knows what condition of soul is present when he stands within the spiritual world and can compare this with the condition of the soul prevailing in dream, he is able to assess the meaning of certain peculiarities of the life of dream, for example, the absence of logic. The spiritual investigator knows that sensory experience is not without significance but that equally with body-free experience between death and a new birth it has its meaning and purpose in the life of man. It is precisely in our intercourse with the outer, material world that we can assimilate the logic streaming into the soul from that world. The spiritual investigator knows too that moral judgment comes to direct expression in physical life, in the experiences arising from civilisation. Genuine Spiritual Science will never lead to escapism or false asceticism but rather to a full appreciation of physical life, because logic, the capacity for moral judgment and moral impulses, are inculcated into the soul through its contact with the outer world during physical life.

In point of fact the dream passes only slightly into the abnormal life of soul. Spiritual Science shows that the soul is free from the body in dream, that the experiences of dream are independent of bodily experiences; they are separated from the link with the outer world that is present in waking life. In the dream, man is actually free from his body. Is this also the case in hallucinations, in visionary experiences? No, it is not! Hallucinations and visions are due precisely to abnormalities of the physical body. Visionary, hallucinatory activity in the life of soul can never occur independently of bodily experiences. Something in the body must always be disturbed or diseased, must be functioning improperly or too feebly, thus preventing a man from entering into the full connection that is present when he is using his nerves and senses in such a way that in experiencing himself, he is also experiencing the outer world. If an organ connected in any way with the faculty of cognition is diseased or too weak, a phenomenon such as an hallucination or a vision may arise: it resembles spiritual experience but is fundamentally different from it. Whereas in spiritual experience a man must be free from the body, this hallucinatory, visionary life sets in because something is either diseased or functioning too feebly in the body. Now what really lies at the bottom of hallucinations and visions? The ordinary process of ideation (Vorstellen) taking place normally in sensory life succeeds in being independent of those forces in the human organism which cause growth in childhood, bring about the inner functions of the body—metabolism, digestion, and so forth. I cannot speak in greater detail today of how that which as a bodily function underlies the normal life of ideation arises through part of the organism being lifted out of the sphere of purely animal life, of the processes of growth, digestion, metabolism and so forth. The basis of the normal life connected with the nerves is that a kind of soul-organism develops like a parasite out of the process of digestion, metabolism, etc. Now when, owing to particularly abnormal conditions, some organ of cognition is so affected that this soul-organism does not work through itself alone but that the bodily organ with its animal functions is working as well—this is due to disease or weakness of the organ concerned—the result is that the man does not devote himself to mental life independently of the forces of growth, digestion and metabolism, but that hallucinations and visions arise. What is organic activity in the vision ought really to be promoting growth, bringing about digestion and the distribution of the more delicate processes of metabolism. What happens in this condition is that animal functions are surging upwards into the soul-organism.

Life is not by any means sublimated in hallucinations and visions; on the contrary it is far rather permeated by the animal functions which do not, in other circumstances, extend into the soul-organism. What ought to be serving quite different processes is carried up into those of cognition, of mental perception. Hence hallucinations and visions are always an expression of the fact that something is not in order in the human being. True, what makes its appearance is a manifestation of the spiritual, but one of which Spiritual Science cannot make use; for Spiritual Science can make use only of what is experienced independently of the body.

You now see what an utter lack of foundation there is for the very general misconception that Spiritual Science acquires its knowledge through visions, hallucinations and the like. On the contrary, Spiritual Science shows that these states are always connected in some way with abnormalities in the body and that they must play no part whatever in its findings. Neither are hallucinations and visions ever identical in character with the pictures of dreams. The pictures of dreams arise outside the body and are only mirrored in it; hallucinations and visions arise because some bodily organ so to speak leaves a space free. If it were functioning normally the man would stand firmly in the physical world with healthy senses. But because a space is left free, the spiritual-eternal element which ought to remain invisible in the bodily organism comes to light through it. This condition is not merely a physical illness, it is a psychical abnormality, something that can only cloud and falsify the pictures from the spiritual world. Hence the fact that pictures arise when some bodily function is weakened, need cause no surprise. For how do sense-pictures come into being? They come into being because the forces which promote metabolism, digestion and the like in the normal way, are toned down and assert themselves in the soul-organism in a different form. If, then, these forces are toned down in the human being to a greater extent than is proper, abnormal consciousness is the result. The sense-pictures we have in normal consciousness are conditioned by bodily life that has been toned down to the normal extent. If the weakening is excessive, something that originates entirely from this improper condition makes its appearance. It can therefore be said that hallucinations and visions represent a striving that has been obstructed. As the human being develops from childhood to mature age, he is really striving to penetrate into his bodily organism. He endeavours so to develop his nature of spirit-and-soul that the body becomes the instrument for soul-activity. This is obstructed when something in the body is unhealthy. When the human being develops in such a way that his body becomes his servant, he grows into physical independence, into his egoity in the world of the senses, into the amount of egoism that is necessary to make him a self-based being, able to fulfil his destination as man. This egoism must of course be mingled with the necessary selflessness. The important thing is that a man shall permeate his life with the forces of his Ego. If certain obstructions make him incapable of doing so, his search for the requisite amount of egoism takes an abnormal path. This comes to expression in hallucinations and visions which are always due to the fact that through his bodily constitution a man cannot acquire the due amount of egoism necessary to his life.

To the borderline regions of the life of soul also belong the conditions produced when catalepsy or coma have led to somnambulism—which is akin to mediumship. Just as man's organism of thinking—I say expressly ‘organism of thinking’, not ‘mechanism of thinking’—must be constituted in a certain way to prevent the disorder I have just characterised as hallucination and vision from taking effect, so too the mechanism of the will—here I say ‘mechanism’—must be constituted in a certain way for normal life in the world of the senses. Just as the organism of thinking can bring about hallucinations and visions as manifestations of abnormal soul-life, so the will can be undermined when its mechanism is disturbed, quashed or paralysed in catalepsy, coma, or mediumship. True, if the spirit is not working upon it, the body is not able directly to evoke the will, but it is able, when certain organs are put out of action, when the mechanism of the will is brought to a standstill, to enfeeble the will, whereas the spiritual investigator, as I said at the beginning, can stand firmly in the spiritual world because his will works in full consciousness upon his body. If the body is paralysed in respect of the will, it quashes, suppresses, this will; man is then lifted away from the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul, as a being of eternity, and is cast into the physical environment which is, of course, also permeated with spiritual forces and entities. He is then thrust out of his real world into the element of spirit which unceasingly pervades and weaves through the physical. This is the case in somnambulism, this is the case in mediumship.

Those who in the sense indicated at the beginning of this lecture adopt an easy-going attitude where Spiritual Science is concerned, would like to investigate the spiritual world in the same way. But such people cannot reach the true spiritual world which guarantees eternal life for the soul; they can work only with what permeates and pervades the physical environment. What is working in the somnambulist, in the medium, works in the normal human being too, but differently. This may indeed sound strange, but it is nevertheless a finding of Spiritual Science. What is really working in the medium, in the somnambulist? In ordinary life we have a certain moral link with other human beings; we act out of moral impulses. I said that these moral impulses are generated by way of the physical body. We perform acts in the field of external civilisation, we learn to write, to read, we learn what the human will inculcates as a spiritual element into the outer physical world. With the forces employed by our soul in the activity of learning to read, of assimilating other cultural endowments, of entering into moral relationships with the world—with all these forces the soul of the somnambulist or the medium is connected in an abnormal way. This activity which is otherwise exercised only in the moral domain, in the domain of the cultural life, is transferred directly into the bodily constitution of the medium or the somnambulist; this is possible because the consciousness has been lowered and the soul disconnected. Whereas in normal life the human being is in contact with the surrounding world solely through his senses, in the case of the somnambulist and the medium, the whole man comes into connection, through his will-mechanism, with the surrounding world. This makes it possible for influences from a distance to take effect; a thought can also work into the distance and distant vistas—both spatial and temporal—can arise. But in most of these cases, what penetrates into the human organism is the spiritual element which pervades the physical world to which we belong as physical men, it is the spiritual element belonging to the cultural and moral life. But it penetrates in such a way that the soul is disconnected from the organism. Hence what is made manifest through the medium or the somnambulist does not lead to the being of spirit-and-soul in man but is simply a caricature of the workings of the spiritual upon man's bodily nature. Whereas in normal life the soul itself must be the intermediary between the truly spiritual and the body, in these abnormal states the spiritual is working directly on the body—but only in the sense I have described. The result is that with his consciousness disconnected, such a man becomes a kind of automaton; only those elements which belong externally to cultural or moral life are expressing themselves in him. From this it will be clear to you that, although it is disguised and masked in the most diverse way, what is to all appearances the spiritual does come to expression through mediumship and somnambulism, but only provided certain combinatory factors and associations are present; these cannot be discussed here because it would lead us too far afield. The essentials which come to expression in this way originate from the physical environment. Men who stand firmly on the ground of natural science but do not outgrow its established notions, would like to penetrate into the spiritual world to which the eternal core of man's being belongs, by taking to their aid the phenomena of somnambulism and mediumship. But this leads to countless fallacies and errors.

I shall now speak of one recent example. It is of great interest because it is characteristic of this whole domain. Here we have a scientist very highly esteemed in his own country, a scientist well versed in all the niceties of scientific methods and who therefore does not by any means go carelessly to work when he approaches these matters. I am referring to Sir Oliver Lodge, the celebrated English scientist. It is a very remarkable case, one that is connected with the present catastrophic events. Lodge was always attracted to the question of how a link could be established between the outer, physical world and the world to which man belongs when he has passed through the gate of death. But he wanted to remain firmly on a scientific foundation.—This attitude is of course characteristic of people who are not willing to have anything to do with the methods of Spiritual Science.—Lodge had a son who was serving on the French Front during the war, and one day the father received a strange letter from America. This letter informed Lodge that his son was facing great danger, but that the spirit of Myers—who had died ten years previously—would hold a protecting hand over the young man while the danger threatened. Frederick Myers had been President of the Society for Psychical Research; he had been occupied deeply with the study of super-sensible matters and Lodge and his family knew him well. It could therefore be presumed—if it is in any way accepted that a connection is possible between some happening in the super-sensible world and human life—that Myers would certainly hold a protecting hand over young Lodge when danger was looming before him. But the letter was extremely ambiguous—as letters of such a kind are always wont to be. Obviously young Lodge might be in danger, but he might also be saved from it, and then the writer of the letter would be able to say: ‘Did I not receive through a medium a message to the effect that Myers is protecting Lodge's son? Through the help of Myers the boy has been saved from the danger of death.’ But if the boy had been killed, the writer of the letter would equally well be able to say: ‘Myers is protecting him in the other world.’ If a third eventuality were possible, the letter could have been interpreted in that sense too.—It does not do to be unsceptical if we wish to get at the real truth of these matters.—Naturally, Lodge did not attach particular weight to the communication, for he was well aware that such things are capable of many interpretations.—The son was killed. Then his father received a second message to the effect that Myers was indeed protecting his son in the other world, and that there were people in England who would provide proof of it.—Certain ways of organising such matters do exist.—There were several mediums who were received into the circle of Sir Oliver Lodge's family—most of whom were sceptics. Manifestations of all kinds took place and Lodge has described them in detail in a bulky volume which is extremely interesting for many reasons. The phenomena there described do not, for the most part, differ greatly from others that have been put on record and there was no need for any particular excitement about them—nor indeed was any shown. Lodge would not have thought it worth while to describe these manifestations if something else had not happened. Because he was familiar with all the devices used in the scientific mode of research, in this instance too he set to work like a chemist making investigations in a laboratory and used every conceivable precautionary measure in order to establish the facts without possibility of dispute. People feel therefore that this book makes it possible to form a real judgment about the case in point, for Lodge describes it as a scientist would do.

Among all kinds of other cases he describes the one that may be regarded as a veritable experimentum crucis, and it caused a tremendous stir. Even the most incredulous journalists—and journalists are usually sceptical, whether or not always from well-founded judgment I could not say—were impressed by this crucial test case. The circumstances were as follows : A medium who claimed to be in communication with the soul of Myers as well as with the soul of Lodge's son, said that a fortnight before the latter was killed at the French Front, he had been photographed together with a number of his companions, and the photograph was minutely described—the placing of the officers, how young Lodge was sitting in the front row, how he was holding his hands, and so forth. It was then said that several photographs had been taken and that the grouping had altered slightly while this was being done. The different grouping was also indicated with the same precision—the position of young Lodge's hands and arms had changed, he was inclining towards the man next him, and so forth. An exact description was given of this photograph too. Now the photographs were not in England; nobody—neither the medium, nor any of the family, nor Sir Oliver Lodge himself—had seen them. It could only be assumed that the medium was rambling in imagination when describing the photographs. But lo and behold, after fourteen days these photographs arrived and tallied exactly with what the medium had said. That this was an experimentum crucis for Lodge and those intimately concerned, cannot be wondered at; and it is here that the real interest of the book lies. A genuine spiritual investigator will not, of course, be taken in—as in a certain respect Lodge himself was taken in—because the scrupulously exact presentation enables him to form an independent, objective judgment.

How comes it that a man who is not willing to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of true spiritual investigation does nevertheless find on such a path something that convinces him of the influx of a spiritual world? The genuine spiritual investigator would not be brought to a like conviction, because he knows what has actually happened in this case. Moreover he will be astonished that such a man as Lodge, in spite of his experience in scientific research, is an out and out amateur in these matters.

Anyone who has only a superficial acquaintance with these phenomena, perhaps by no means through independent vision but simply from literature, knows that in somnambulists and mediums there is a connection with the environment in the sense I have described, that the whole man is as it were transformed into sense-organs—with the result that automatic pre-visions in time arise. These pre-visions are always due to a sick or enfeebled life of soul. They have nothing to do with the world to which man belongs with the immortal part of his being; they have to do with what is spiritual in the physical sense-environment, especially with what the will of man brings to pass there. Just because Lodge describes conscientiously it becomes quite evident that the medium simply had a pre-vision, that he ‘saw’ the photographs a fortnight before they arrived in England. This may seem miraculous enough but these are quite ordinary phenomena. At all events this is not, as Lodge thinks, a proof that Myers was protecting his son. It may have been so, of course, but it would have to be investigated in research carried out in a body-free condition.

When there is unwillingness to take the path of Spiritual Science the temptations and allurements even for those who are conscientious researchers and confront such phenomena cautiously and critically, are very great. What can be learnt through these abnormal manifestations, whereby man is made into an automaton, must never become the content of a true science of the super-sensible world to which the eternal part of man's being belongs.

A great deal that might still be added would show in the same way how these borderline regions of man's life of soul point to something which, although it too rests in the realm of the Unconscious, can never reveal to man that which, in that same realm, is of the greatest significance of all—namely the spiritual world to which man belongs with the free, immortal part of his being. Among all these manifestations the life of dream alone remains within the sphere of the normal, because in dream the human being is not experiencing through the bodily constitution but through the spirit-and-soul; as a being of spirit-and-soul he strikes up against the body and the physical experiences. Hence in respect of the life of dream too, man is able to exercise correctives and to give it its right place in the rest of life; whereas in the case of what he experiences through his body in the way of hallucinations, visions, manifestations of somnambulism and mediumship he is not able to do this with his normal powers of discrimination.

In the next lecture we will go more deeply into something which in the course of cultural development brings constant blessing and upliftment to human life, namely ART. In dream, man experiences the spiritual world in such a way that as the result of impact with the bodily constitution, sense-images take shape. The experiences which arise in a true artist and in one who finds delight and inspiration in Art, also lie in regions beyond those of merely physical experience. True Art is brought from the super-sensible into the sense-regions of life, but in this case the process of clothing the experiences in pictures is not an unconscious one. Just as in the dreamer the soul's actual experience remains in the unconscious but reveals itself through what the soul—again unconsciously—adds as clothing to the experience itself, so the super-sensible experience of the artist and of the one who finds delight in a work of art, is brought into the sense-world. But in this case the clothing with the picture, with the Imagination which, arising from external life, gives the super-sensible experience a place in the sense-world, is consciously achieved. The gist of the next lecture will be that Art is in very truth a messenger from a super-sensible world, that delight in Art is a power which lifts the soul to the super-sensible world by way of sensory form, through sense-imagery.

And now to sum up what has been said today. It is true that man is led towards the region of spirit when he confronts these abnormal manifestations; for it is the spiritual world that shines into the life of man even if he is experiencing it in an abnormal way. But these abnormal manifestations may never be induced artificially, any more than pathological states may be induced for the purpose of acquiring knowledge.

What is it that remains from all these manifestations and phenomena as a vital admonition? It is that man shall find the way to true experience of the spiritual. We have heard that in the light of Spiritual Science the realm of dream is saved from the suspicion of being one of pathological experience—although naturally there may now and again be slight tendencies towards it. But when it is realised that through the seemingly chaotic life of dream man is admonished to find the path into the true spiritual world, the significance of such study becomes evident. A great world-riddle is knocking here at the door of human life. This world-riddle is the dream with its strange pictures in which logic and moral judgment are lacking but which are a definite signpost to the spiritual world itself. Hence we can find ourselves in agreement with what is said by the clear-sighted aestheticist and philosopher Vischer in his critique of Volkelt's book:

‘When the dream with all its rich meagreness, its meagre richness, with its ingenious stupidity and stupid ingeniousness, is contemplated in its unconscious creative activity, it will be recognised that it does nevertheless point to what is spiritual in the human being and can be sought after.’
And Vischer is also right when he says:

‘A man who believes that this spirit-realm of dream is not worthy to be a matter for genuine investigation, merely shows that he has not much spirit in him.’

The realm of dream is an admonition to man to seek for the spiritual world, and the aim of Spiritual Science is to fulfil this admonition. Whereas in the life of dream there can be pictures of the transitory only, for all that the soul's eternal core of being is active there, through spiritual-scientific knowledge it is possible for the soul also to be filled with pictures that give expression to the spiritual reality corresponding to its own inherent nature, thereby pointing to its allotted place in the world of spiritual reality as the senses point to its allotted place in the physical world.

REFERENCES (among many others):

Lecture-Courses by Rudolf Steiner.

True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. New edition, 1969.

Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. Lecture One.

The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (typescript).

History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Eleven lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Torquay, August, 1924. See also references below.

• 2. See references below.