The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the various matters we have considered here you will have gathered that among the many problems under discussion today that of education is the most important. We had to emphasize that the entire social question contains as its chief factor, education. From what I indicated a week ago about the transformation of education it will have become clear to you that within the whole complex of this subject the training of teachers is the most important auxiliary question. When we consider the character of the epoch that has run its course since the middle of the fifteenth century it becomes evident that during this period there passed through mankind's evolution a wave of materialistic trials. In the present time it is necessary that we work our way out of this materialistic wave and find again the path to the spirit. This path was known to humanity in ancient cultural epochs, but it was followed more or less instinctively, unconsciously. Finally, it was lost in order that men might seek it out of their own impulse, their own freedom. This path must now be sought in its full consciousness.

The transition through which mankind had to pass after the middle of the fifteenth century is what might be called the materialistic test of mankind. If we observe the character of this materialistic period and the development of culture of the last three or four centuries right up to our time, we shall see that this materialistic wave has most intensively and quite particularly taken hold of teacher training. Nothing could have such a lasting effect as the permeation of educational philosophy by materialism. We only need to look at certain details in present-day education to appreciate the great difficulties in the way of progress. Those who today consider themselves well-versed in the problems of education say again and again that all instruction, even in the lowest grades, must be in the form of object lessons. In the teaching of arithmetic, for instance, mechanical aids to calculating are introduced. The greatest value is placed upon having the child see everything first, and then form his own inner concepts about it. To be sure, the urge for such objectivity in education is in many respects fully justified. Nevertheless, it raises the question, what becomes of a child if he only receives object lessons? He becomes psychically dried up; the inner dynamic forces of his soul gradually die out. His whole being unites with the objective surroundings, and what should sprout from his inmost soul is gradually deadened. The way material is presented in much of our education today is connected with this deadening of the soul. People do not realize that one kills the soul, but it really happens. And the consequence is what we experience with people today. How many are problem-laden personalities! How many are unable in their later years to produce out of their own inner resources that which could give them consolation and hope in difficult times and enable them to cope with the vicissitudes of life! We see at present many shattered natures. At important moments we ourselves are doubtful as to the direction we should take.

All this is connected with the deficiencies in our educational system, particularly in teacher training. What then do we have to strive for in order to have the right teacher training in future? The fact that a teacher knows the answers to what is asked in his examinations is a secondary matter, for he is mostly asked questions for which he could prepare himself by looking them up in a handbook. The examiners pay no attention to the general soul-attitude of the teacher, and that is what constantly has to pass from him to his students. There is a great difference between teachers as they enter a classroom. When one steps through the door the students feel a certain soul-relationship with him; when another enters they often feel no such relationship at all, but, on the contrary, they feel a chasm between them and are indifferent to him. This expresses itself in a variety of ways, even to ridiculing and sneering at him. All these nuances frequently lead to ruining any real instruction and education.

The burning question, therefore, is, how can teacher training be transformed in future? It can be transformed in only one way, and that is, that the teacher himself absorb what can come from spiritual science as knowledge of man's true nature. The teacher must be permeated by the reality of man's connection with the supersensible worlds. He must be in the position to see in the growing child evidence that he has descended from the supersensible world through conception and birth, has clothed himself with a body, and wishes to acquire here in the physical world what he cannot acquire in the life between death and a new birth, and in which the teacher has to help.

Every child should stand before the soul of the teacher as a question posed by the supersensible world to the sense world. This question cannot be asked in a definite and comprehensive way in regard to every individual child unless one employs the knowledge that comes from spiritual science concerning the nature of man. In the course of the last three or four centuries we gradually acquired the habit of observing man only in regard to his outer, bodily constitution, physiologically. This concept is detrimental, most of all for the educator. It will, therefore, be necessary above everything else for an anthropology resulting from anthroposophy to become the basis for education in the future. This, however, can only happen if man is considered from the points of view we have frequently touched upon here, that characterize him in many respects as a threefold being. But one must make up one's mind to grasp this three-foldness with penetrating insight. From various aspects I have drawn your attention to the fact that man as he confronts us is, first, a man of nerves and senses; popularly expressed he is a head-man. As a second member we have seen, externally, that part in which the rhythmical processes take place, the chest-man; and thirdly, connected with the entire metabolism is the limb-man, metabolic man. What man is as an active being is externally brought to completion in the physical configuration of these three members of his whole organism:

Head-man, or nerve-sense man;

Chest-man, or rhythmical man;

Limb-man, or metabolic man.

It is important to understand the differences between these three members, but this is very uncomfortable for people today because they love diagrams. If one says that man consists of head-man, chest-man, limb-man, he would like to make a line here at the neck, and what is above it is headman. Likewise, he would like to draw a line in order to limit the chest-man, and so he would have the three members neatly arranged, side by side. Whatever cannot be arranged in such a scheme is just of no interest to modern man.

But this does not correspond to reality. Reality does not make such outlines. To be sure, man above the shoulders is chiefly head-man, nerve-sense man, but he is not only that. The sense of touch and the sense of warmth, for instance, are spread over the whole body, so that the head-system permeates the entire organism. Thus, one can say, the human head is chiefly head. The chest is less head but still somewhat head. The limbs and everything belonging to the metabolic system are still less head, but nevertheless head. One really has to say that the whole human being is head, but only the head is chiefly head. The chest-man is not only in the chest; he is chiefly expressed, of course, in those organs where the rhythms of the heart and breathing are most definitely shown. But breathing also extends into the head; and the blood circulation in its rhythm continues on into the head and limbs.

So, we can say that our way of thinking is inclined to place these things side by side, and in this we see how little our concepts are geared to outer reality. For here things merge; and we have to realize that if we separate head, chest, and metabolic man we must think them together again. We must never think them as separated but always think them together again. A person who wishes only to think things separated resembles a man who wishes only to inhale, never to exhale.

Here you have something that teachers in future will have to do; they must quite specially acquire for themselves this inwardly mobile thinking, this unschematic thinking. For only by doing so can their soul forces approach reality. A person will not come near to reality if he is unable to conceive of approaching it from a larger point of view, as a phenomenon of the age. One has to overcome the tendency to be content with investigating life in its details, a tendency that has been growing in scientific studies. Instead one must see these details in connection with the great questions of life.

One question will become important for the entire evolution of spiritual culture in future, namely, the question of immortality. We must become clear about the way a great part of humanity conceives of immortality, particularly since the time when many have come to a complete denial of it. What lives in most people today who, still on the basis of customary religion, want to be informed about immortality? In these people there lives the urge to know something about what becomes of the soul when it has passed through the portal of death.

If we ask about the interest men take in the question of the eternity of man's essential being, we come to no other answer than this, that the main interest they have is connected with man's concern about what happens to him when he passes through death. Man is conscious of being an ego. In this ego his thinking, feeling, and willing live. The idea that this ego might be annihilated is unbearable to him. Above all then he is interested in the possibility of carrying the ego through death, and in what happens to it afterward. Most religious systems, in speaking about immortality, chiefly bear in mind this same question: What becomes of the human soul when man passes through death?

Now you must feel that the question of immortality, put in this manner, takes on an extraordinarily egotistical character. Basically, it is an egotistical urge that arouses man's interest in knowing what happens to him when he passes through death. If men of the present age would practice more self-knowledge, take counsel with themselves, and not surrender to illusions as they do now, they would realize the strong part egotism plays in the interest they have in knowing something about the destiny of the soul after death.

This kind of feeling has become especially strong in the last three to four centuries when the trials of materialism have come upon us. What has thus taken hold of human souls as a habit of thought and feeling cannot be overcome through abstract theories or doctrines. But must it remain so? Is it necessary that only the egotist in human nature speak when the question of the eternal core of man's being is raised?

When we consider everything connected with this problem we must say: The fact that man's soul-mood has developed as we have just indicated stems from the way religions have neglected to observe man as he is born, as he grows into the world from his first cry, as his soul in such miraculous fashion permeates the body more and more; their neglect to observe how in man there gradually develops that part of him which has lived in the spiritual world before birth. How little do people ask today: When man is born, what is it that continues on from the spiritual world into man as a physical being?

In future primary attention will have to be paid to this. We must learn to listen to the revelation of spirit and soul in the growing child as they existed before birth. We must learn to see in him the continuation of his sojourn in the spiritual world. Then our relationship to the eternal core of man's being will become less and less egotistical. For if we are not interested in what continues in physical life from out the spiritual world, if we are only interested in what continues after death, then we are egotistical. But to behold what continues out of the spiritual into physical existence in a certain way lays the basis for an unegotistical mood of soul.

Egotism does not ask about this continuation because it is certain that man exists, and one is satisfied with that fact. But he is uncertain whether he still exists after death, therefore he would like to have this proved. Egotism urges him on to this. But true knowledge does not accrue to man out of egotism, not even out of the sublimated egotism that is interested in the soul's continuation after death. Can one deny that the religions strongly reckon with such egotism? This must be overcome. He who is able to look into the spiritual world knows that from this conquest not only knowledge will result but an entirely different attitude toward one's human environment. We will confront the growing child with completely different feelings when we are aware that here we have the continuation of what could not tarry any longer in the spiritual world.

From this point of view just consider how the following takes on a different aspect. One could say that man was in the spiritual world before he descended into the physical world. Up there he must no longer have been able to find his goal. The spiritual world must have been unable to give to the soul what it strives for. There the urge must have arisen to descend into the physical world, to clothe oneself with a body in order to search in that world for what no longer could be found in the spiritual world as the time of birth approached.

It is a tremendous deepening of life if we adopt such a point of view in our feelings. Whereas the egotistical point of view makes man more and more abstract, theoretical, and inclines him toward head-thinking, the unegotistical point of view urges him to understand the world with love, to lay hold of it through love. This is one of the elements which must be taken up in teacher training; to look at prenatal man, and not only feel the riddle of death but also the riddle of birth.

Then, however, we must learn to raise anthropology to the higher level of anthroposophy, by acquiring a feeling for the forms that express themselves in three-membered man. I said recently that the head in its spherical form is, so to say, merely placed on top of the rest of the organism. And the chest-man, he appears as if we could take a piece of the head, enlarge it, and we would have the spine. While the head bears its center within itself, the chest-man has its center at a great distance from itself. If you were to imagine this as a large head, this head then would belong to a man lying on his back. Thus, if we were to consider this spine as an imperfect head we would have a man lying horizontally, and a man standing vertically.

If we consider metabolic man, matters become still more complicated, and it is not possible to draw this in two dimensions. In short, the three members of the human organism, observed as to their plastic form, appear very different from one another. The head, we may say, is a totality; the chest-man is not a totality but a fragment; and metabolic man is much more so.

Now why is it that the human head appears self-enclosed? It is because this head, of all the members of man's organism, is to the greatest degree adapted to the physical world. This may appear strange to you because you are accustomed to consider the human head as the noblest member of man. Yet it is true that this head is to the greatest degree adapted to physical existence. It expresses physical existence in the highest degree. Thus, we may say, if we wish to characterize the physical body in its main aspects we must look toward the head. In regard to the head, man is mostly physical body. In regard to the chest organs, the organs of rhythm, man is mostly ether body. In regard to the metabolic organs, he is mostly astral body. The ego has no distinct expression in the physical world as yet.

Here we have arrived at a point of view which is very important to consider. We must say to ourselves, if we look at the human head we see the chief part of the physical body. The head expresses to the highest degree what is manifest in man. In the chest-man the ether body is more active; therefore, physically, the chest of man is less perfect than the head. And metabolic man is still less perfect, because in it the ether body is but little active and the astral body is most active. I have often emphasized that the ego is the baby; as yet it has practically no physical correlate.

So, you see we may also describe man in the following way: He consists of the physical body, characterized mostly by the sphere-form of the head; he consists of the ether body, characterized mostly by the chest section; he consists of the astral body, characterized mostly by metabolic man. We can hardly indicate anything for the ego in physical man. Thus, each of the three members—the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic system—becomes an image of something standing behind it: The head the image for the physical body; the chest for the ether body; metabolism for the astral body. We must learn to observe this, not in the manner of research clinics where a corpse is investigated, and no attention is paid to the question of whether a piece of tissue belongs to the chest or the head. We must learn to realize that head, chest, and metabolic man have different relationships to the cosmos and express in picture form different principles standing behind them. This will extend the present anthropological mode of observation into the anthropomorphic one. Observed purely physically, chest and head organs have equal value. Whether you dissect the lung or the brain, from the physical aspect both are matter. From the spiritual aspect, however, this is by no means the case. If you dissect the brain you have it quite distinctly before you. If you dissect the chest, let us say the lungs, you have them quite indistinctly before you, because the ether body plays its important role in the chest while man is asleep.

What I have just discussed has its spiritual counter-image. One who has advanced through meditation, through the exercises described in our literature, gradually comes to the point where he really experiences man in his three members. You know that I speak of this threefold membering from a certain point of view in the chapter of my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, where I indicate the Guardian of the Threshold. But one can also bring about a picture of this three-membering through strong concentration upon one's self, by separating head-man, chest-man, and metabolic-man. Then one will notice what it is that makes the head into this head we have. If through inner concentration we withdraw the head from its appendage, the rest of the organism, and have it before us without the influence of the other members, the head is dead; it is no longer alive. It is impossible, clairvoyantly, to separate the head from the rest of the organism without perceiving it as a corpse. With the chest-system this is possible; it remains alive. And if you separate the astral body by separating the metabolic system, it runs away from you. The astral body does not remain in its place, it follows the cosmic movements.

Now imagine you stand before a child with the knowledge I have just developed for you, and you look at him in an unbiased way. You observe his head, how it carries death in itself. You look at the influence of the chest upon the head; it comes alive. You see the child as he starts to walk. You notice that it is the astral body that is active in walking. Now the child becomes something inwardly transparent to you. The head—a corpse; the outspreading life in him when he stands still, is quiet. The moment he begins to walk you notice that it is the astral body that walks. Man can walk because this astral body uses up substances in moving, metabolism is active in a certain way. How can we observe the ego?—for everything now has been exhausted, so to say. You observe the head-man, the life-giving element of the chest-man, the walking. What remains by which we might observe the ego externally? I have already stated that the ego hardly has an external correlate. You can see the ego only if you observe a child in his increasing growth. At one year he is very little; at two he is bigger, and so on. As you connect your impressions of him year after year, then join in your mind what he is in the successive years, you see the ego physically. You never see the ego in a child if you merely confront him, but only when you see him grow. If men would not surrender to illusions but see reality they would be aware of the fact that when they meet a person they cannot physically perceive his ego, only when they observe him in the various periods of his life. If you meet a man again after twenty years you will perceive his ego vividly in the change that has taken place in him; especially if twenty years ago you saw him as a child.

Now I beg you not to ponder just theoretically what I have said. I ask you to enliven your thoughts and consider this when you observe man: Head—corpse; chest—vitalization; the astral body in walking; the ego through growing. Thus, the whole man comes alive who previously confronted you like a wax doll. For what is it that we ordinarily see of man with our physical eyes and our intellect? A wax doll! It comes alive if you add what I have just described.

In order to do this, you need to have your perception permeated by what spiritual science can pour into your feelings, into your relationship to the world. A walking child discloses to you the astral body. The gesture of his walking—every child walks differently—stems from the configuration of his astral body. Growth expresses something of the ego.

Here karma works strongly in man. As an example, somewhat removed from our present age, take Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I have characterized him for you from various aspects, as a great philosopher, as a Bolshevist, and so on. Now let us look at him from another point of view, imagining him as he passed us by on the street and we watched him as he went. We would see a man, stocky, not very tall. What does the manner in which he has grown, disclose? He is stunted. He puts his feet, heels first, firmly on the ground. The whole Fichte-ego expresses itself in this. Not a detail of the man do we miss when we observe him so—his growth stunted by hunger in his youth, stocky, putting his heels down firmly. We could hear the manner of his speech by observing him in this way from behind.

You see, a spiritual element can enter into the externalities of life, but this does not occur unless men change their attitude. For people today, such observation of their fellowmen might be an evil indiscretion, and it would not be very desirable if this were to spread. People have been so influenced by ever-growing materialism that they, for instance, refrain from opening letters that do not belong to them only because it is prohibited; otherwise they would do it. With such an attitude, things cannot change. But the more we grow toward the future the more must we learn to take in spiritually what surrounds us in the sense world. The start must be made with the pedagogical activity of the teacher in regard to the growing child. Physiognomic pedagogy; the will to solve the greatest riddle, MAN, in every single individual, through education.

Now you can feel how strong is the test for mankind in our times. What I have discussed here really presses forward toward individualization, toward the consideration of every human being as an entity in himself. As a great ideal the thought must hover before us that no one person duplicates another; every single individual is a being in himself. Unless we learn to acknowledge that everyone is an entity in himself mankind will not attain its goal on earth. But how far removed we are today from the attitude that strives for this goal! We level human beings down. We do not test them in regard to their individual qualities. Hermann Bahr, of whom I have often spoken to you, disclosed once how the education of our times tends to do away with individualization. He participated in the social life of the 1890's in Berlin, and one evening at a dinner party he was seated of course with one lady at his right, another at his left. The next evening he sat again between two ladies, but only from the place cards could he gather that they were two different ladies. He did not look at them very attentively because, after all, the lady of yesterday and the lady of today did not look any different. What he saw in them was exactly the same. The culture of society, and especially of industry, makes every human being appear the same, externally, not permitting the individuality to emerge. Thus, present-day man strives for leveling, whereas the inmost goal of man must be his striving for individualization. We cover up individuality, whereas it is most important to seek it.

In his instruction the teacher must begin to direct his insight toward the individuality. Teacher training has to be permeated by an attitude which strives to find the individuality in men. This can only come about through an enlivening of our thoughts about man as I have described it. We must really become conscious of the fact that it is not a mechanism that moves one forward, but the astral body; it pulls the physical body along. Compare what thus can arise in your souls as an inwardly enlivened and mobile image of the whole human being, with what ordinary science offers today—a homunculus, a veritable homunculus! Science says nothing about man, it preaches the homunculus. The real human being above everything else must come into pedagogy, for now he is completely outside of it.

The question of education is a question of teacher training, and as long as this fact is not recognized nothing fruitful can come into education. You see, from a higher point of view things so belong together that one can make a true connection between them. Today one strives to develop man's activities as subjects side by side. A student learns anthropology, he learns about religion; the subjects have nothing to do with each other. In fact, as you have seen, what one observes about man borders on the question of immortality, of the eternal essence of human nature. We had to link this question to one's immediate perception of man. It is this mobility of soul experience which must enter education. Then, inner faculties quite different from those developed today in teacher training schools will come into being. This is of great importance.

Today I wished to put before you the fact that the science of the spirit must permeate everything, and that without it the great social problems of the present time cannot be solved.

[ 1 ] The Austrian thinker, Bartholomaeus Carneri (1871–1909) attempted to open wide perspectives of world conception and ethics on the ground of Darwinism. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he published his work, Morality and Darwinism (1871), in which he used the new world of ideas as the basis of an ethical world conception in a comprehensive way. (Compare his books, Foundation of Ethics, 1881, Man as His Own Purpose, 1878, and Modern Man, Essays on Life Conduct, 1891.) Carneri tries to find in the picture of nature the elements through which self-conscious ego is conceivable within this picture. He would like to think this world picture so wide and so comprehensive as to contain the human soul within its scope. He aims at the reunion of the ego with the mother ground of nature, from which it has become separated. He represents in his world conception the opposite tendency to the philosophy for which the world becomes an illusion of the imagination and which, for that reason, renounces all connection with the reality of the world so far as knowledge is concerned.

Carneri rejects all moral philosophy that intends to proclaim for man other moral commandments than those that result from his own nature. We must remember that man is not to be understood as a special being beside all other things of nature but that he is a being that has gradually developed from lower entities according to purely natural laws. Carneri is convinced that all life is like a chemical process. “The digestion in man is such a process as well as the nutrition of the plant.” At the same time, he emphasizes that the chemical process must be raised to a higher form of evolution if it is to become plant or animal.

Life is a chemical process of a special kind; it is the individualized chemical process, for the chemical process can reach a point where it can maintain itself without certain conditions . . . that it formerly needed.

It is apparent that Carneri observes that lower processes are transformed into higher ones, that matter takes on higher forms of existence through the perfection of its functions.

As matter, we conceive the substance insofar as the properties that result from its divisibility and its motion effect our senses physically, that is to say, as mass. If this division or differentiation goes so far as to produce phenomena that are no longer sensually perceptible but only perceptible to our thinking, we say the effect of the substance is spiritual.

Also, morality does not exist as a special form of reality; it is a process of nature on a higher level. Therefore, the question cannot be raised: What is man to do to comply with some special moral commandment that is valid for him? We can only ask: What appears as morality when the lower processes develop into the higher spiritual ones?

While moral philosophy proclaims certain moral laws and commands that they are to be kept so that man may be what he ought to be, our ethics develops man as he is. It wants to do no more than to show him what he may at some time become. While the former moralizing philosophy knows of duties to be enforced by punishments, our ethics uphold an ideal from which any compulsion would merely distract because it can be approached only on the path of knowledge and of freedom.

As the chemical process individualizes itself into a living being on a higher level, so on a still higher level life is transformed into self-consciousness. The entity that has become self-conscious no longer merely looks out into nature; it looks back into itself.

The awakened self-consciousness constituted, if conceived dualistically, a break with nature, and man felt himself separated from nature. This breach existed only for him, but for him it was complete. It had not developed as suddenly as it is taught in Genesis, just as the days of creation must not be taken literally as days. But with the completion of self-consciousness, the breach was a fact and with the feeling of boundless lonesomeness that overcame man in this state, his ethical development began.

Up to a certain point nature leads life. At this point, self-consciousness arises, man comes into existence. “His further development is his own work and what keeps him on the course of progress is the power and the gradual clarification of his wishes.” Nature takes care of a11 other beings, but it endows man with desires and expects him to take care of their fulfillment. Man has within himself the impulse to arrange his existence in agreement with his wishes. This impulse is his desire for happiness:

This impulse is unknown to the animal. It knows only the instinct for self-preservation; to develop that instinct into the desire for happiness, the human self-consciousness is necessary as a fundamental condition.

The striving for happiness is the basis of all action:

The martyr who sacrifices his life, be it for his scientific conviction or for his belief in God, aims for nothing but his happiness. He finds it in the first case in his loyalty of conviction, and in the second case he expects it in a better world. To everyone happiness is the last aim and no matter how different the picture may be that the individual has of this happiness, it is to every sentient living being the beginning and the end of all his thinking and feeling.

As nature gives man only the need for happiness, this image of happiness must have its origin within man himself. Man creates for himself the pictures of his happiness. They spring from his ethical fantasy. Carneri finds in this fantasy the new concept that prescribes the ideals of our action to our thinking. The “good” is, for Carneri, “identical with progressive evolution, and since evolution is pleasure . . . happiness not merely constituted the aim but also the moving element that drives toward that aim.”

[ 2 ] Carneri attempted to find the way that leads from the natural order to the sources of morality. He believed he had found the ideal power that propels the ethical world order as spontaneously from one moral event to the next as the material forces on the physical level develop formation after formation and fact after fact.

[ 3 ] Carneri's mode of conception is entirely in agreement with the idea of evolution that does not permit the notion that a later phase of development is already pre-formed in an earlier one, but considers it as a really new formation. The chemical process does not contain implicitly animal life, and happiness develops as an entirely new element on the ground of the animal's instinct for self-preservation. The difficulty that lies in this thought caused a penetrating thinker, W. H. Rolph, to develop the line of reasoning that he set down in his book, Biological Problems, an Attempt at the Development of a Rational Ethics (1884). Rolph asks himself, “What is the reason that a form of life does not remain at a given stage but develops progressively and becomes more perfect?” This problem presents no difficulty for a thinker who maintains that the later form is already implicitly contained in the earlier one. For him, it is quite clear that what is at first implicit will become explicit at a certain time. But Rolph was not willing to accept this answer. On the other hand, however, he was also not satisfied with the “struggle for existence” as a solution of the problem. If a living being fights only for the satisfaction of its necessary needs, it will, to be sure, overpower its weaker competitors, but it will itself remain what it is. If one does not want to attribute a mysterious, mystical tendency toward perfection to this being, one must seek the cause of this perfection in external, natural circumstances. Rolph tries to give an explanation by stating that, whenever possible, every being satisfies its needs to a greater extent than is necessary.

Only by introducing the idea of insatiability does the Darwinian principle of perfection in the struggle for life become acceptable, for it is only thus that we have an explanation for the fact that the creature acquires, whenever it can do so, more than it needs for maintaining its status quo, and that it grows excessively whenever the occasion is given for it. (Biological Problems)

What takes place in this realm of living beings is, in Rolph's opinion, not a struggle for acquisition of the necessary means of life but a “struggle for surplus acquisition.” “While the Darwinist knows of no life struggle as long as the existence of the creature is not threatened, I consider this struggle as ever present. It is simply primarily a struggle for life, a struggle for the increase of life, not a struggle for existence.” Rolph draws from these natural scientific presuppositions the conclusions for his ethics:

Expansion of life, not its mere preservation, struggle for advantage, not for existence, is the rallying cry. The mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and striving for continuous improvement of the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and man. (Biological Problems)

[ 4 ] Rolph's thoughts stimulated Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to produce his own ideas of evolution after having gone through other phases of his soul life. At the beginning of his career as an author, the idea of evolution and natural science in general had been far from his thoughts. He was at first deeply impressed by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and from him he adopted the conception of pain as lying at the bottom of all existence. Unlike Schopenhauer and Eduard van Hartmann, Nietzsche did not seek the redemption from this pain in the fulfillment of moral tasks. It was his belief rather that the transformation of life into a work of art that leads beyond the pain of existence. Thus, the Greeks created a world of beauty and appearance in order to make this painful existence bearable. In Richard Wagner's musical drama he believed he found a world in which beauty lifts man beyond pain. It was in a certain sense a world of illusion that was quite consciously sought by Nietzsche in order to overcome the misery of the world. He was of the opinion that, at the root of the oldest Greek culture, there had been the will of man to forget the real world through a state of intoxication.

Singing and dancing man manifests himself as a member of a higher community. He has forgotten to walk and to speak and, in his dance, he is about to fly up into the air. (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)

With these words Nietzsche describes and explains the cult of the ancient worshippers of Dionysos, in which he saw the root of all art. Nietzsche maintained of Socrates that he had overpowered this Dionysian impulse by placing reason as judge over them. The statement, “Virtue is teachable,” meant, according to Nietzsche, the end of a comprehensive, impulsive culture and the beginning of a much feebler phase dominated by thinking. Such an idea arose in Nietzsche under the influence of Schopenhauer, who placed the untamed, restless will higher than the systematizing thought life, and under the influence of Richard Wagner who, both as a man and as an artist, followed Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche was, by his own inclination, also a contemplative nature. After having surrendered for awhile to the idea of the redemption of the world through beauty as mere appearance, he felt this conception as a foreign element to his own nature, something that had been implanted in him through the influence of Richard Wagner, with whom he had been connected by friendship. Nietzsche tried to free himself from this trend of ideas and to come to terms with a conception of reality that was more in agreement with his own nature. The fundamental trait of his character compelled him to experience the ideas and impulses of the development of a modern world conception as a direct personal fate. Other thinkers formed pictures of a world conception and the process of this formative description constituted their philosophic activity. Nietzsche is confronted with the world conceptions of the second half of the nineteenth century, and it becomes his destiny to experience personally all the delight but also all the sorrows that these world conceptions can cause if they affect the very substance of the human soul. Not only theoretically but with his entire individuality at stake, Nietzsche's philosophical life developed in such a way that representative world conceptions of modern times would completely take hold of him, forcing him to work himself through to his own solutions in the most personal experiences of life.

How can one live if one must think that the world is as Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner imagine it to be? This became the disturbing riddle for him. It was not, however, a riddle for which he sought a solution by means of thinking and knowledge. He had to experience the solution of this problem with every fibre of his nature. Others think philosophy; Nietzsche had to live philosophy. The modern life of world conception becomes completely personal in Nietzsche. When an observer meets the philosophies of other thinkers, he feels inclined to judge; this is one-sided, that is incorrect, etc. With Nietzsche such an observer finds himself confronted with a ,world conception within the life of a human being, and he sees that one idea makes this human being healthy while another makes him ill. For this reason, Nietzsche becomes more and more a poet as he presents his picture of world and life. It is also for this reason that a reader who cannot agree with Nietzsche's presentation insofar as his philosophy is concerned, can still admire it because of its poetic power.

What an entirely different tone comes into the modern history of philosophy through Nietzsche as compared to Hamerling, Wundt and even Schopenhauer! These thinkers search contemplatively for the ground of existence and they arrive at the will, which they find in the depths of the human soul. In Nietzsche this will is alive. He absorbs the philosophical ideas, sets them aglow with his ardent will-nature and then makes something entirely new out of them: A life through which will-inspired ideas and idea-illumined will pulsate. This happens in Nietzsche's first creative period, which began with his Birth of Tragedy (1870), and had its full expression in his four Untimely Meditations: David Strauss Confessor and Author; On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In the second phase of his life, it was Nietzsche's destiny to experience deeply what a life and world conception based exclusively on the thought habits of natural science can be to the human soul. This period is expressed in his works, Human, All Too Human (1878), The Dawn of Day (1881), and Gay Science (1882).

Now the ideals that inspired Nietzsche in his first period have cooled; they appear to him as bubbles of thought. His soul now wants to gain strength, to be invigorated in its feeling by the “reality” of the content that can be derived from the mode of conception of natural science. But Nietzsche's soul is full of life; the vigor of this inner life strives beyond anything that it could owe to the contemplative observation of nature. The contemplation of nature shows that the animal becomes man. As the soul feels its inner power of life, the conception arises: The animal bore man in itself; must not man bear within himself a higher being, the superman? Nietzsche's soul experiences in itself the superman wresting himself free from man. His soul revels in lifting the modern idea of evolution that was based on the world of the senses to the realm that the senses do not perceive, a realm that is felt when the soul experiences the meaning of evolution within itself. “The mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and striving for a continuous improvement of the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and man.” This conviction, which in Rolph was the result of contemplative observation, becomes in Nietzsche an inner experience, expressed in a grandiose hymn of philosophic vision. The knowledge that represents the external world is insufficient to him; it must become inwardly increasingly fruitful. Self-observation is poverty. A creation of a new inner life that outshines everything so far in existence, everything man is already, arises in Nietzsche's soul. In man, the superman is born for the first time as the meaning of existence. Knowledge itself grows beyond what it formerly had been; it becomes a creative power. As man creates, he takes his stand in the midst of the meaning of life. With lyrical ardor Nietzsche expresses in his Zarathustra (1884) the bliss that his soul experiences in creating “superman” out of man. A knowledge that feels itself as creative perceives more in the ego of man than can be lived through in a single course of life; it contains more than can be exhausted in such a single life. It will again and again return to a new life. In this way the idea of “eternal recurrence” of the human soul thrusts itself on Nietzsche to join his idea of “superman.”

[ 5 ] Rolph's idea of the “enhancement of life” grows in Nietzsche into the conception of the “Will to Power,” which he attributes to all being and life in the world of animal and of man. This “Will to Power” sees in life “an appropriation, violation, overpowering of the alien and weaker being, its annexation or at least, in the mildest case, its exploitation.” In his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche sang his hymn of praise to his faith in the reality and the development of man into “superman.” In his unfinished work, Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values, he wanted to reshape all conceptions from the viewpoint that no other will in man held higher sway than the will for power.

[ 6 ] The striving for knowledge becomes in Nietzsche a real force that comes to life in the soul of man. As Nietzsche feels this animation within himself, life assumes in him such an importance that he places it above all knowledge and truth that has not been stirred into life. This again led him to renounce all truth and to seek in the will for power a substitute for the will for truth. He no longer asks, “Is what we know true?” but rather, “Is it sustaining and furthering life?”

“What matters in all philosophizing is never ‘the truth’ but something entirely different, let us call it health, the future, power, life . . .” What man really strives for is always power; he only indulged himself in the illusion that he wanted “truth.” He confused the means with the end. Truth is merely a means for the purpose. “The fact that a judgment is wrong is no objection to it.” What is important is not whether a judgment is true or not, but “the question to what degree it advances and preserves life, preserves a race, perhaps even breeds a race.” “Most thinking of a philosopher is done secretly by his instincts and thus forced into certain channels.” Nietzsche's world conception is the expression of a personal feeling as an individual experience and destiny.

In Goethe the deep impulse of modern philosophical life became apparent; he felt the idea come to life within the self-conscious ego so that with this enlivened idea this ego can know itself in the core of the world. In Nietzsche the desire exists to let man develop his life beyond himself; he feels that then the meaning of life must be revealed in what is inwardly self-created being, but he does not penetrate essentially to what man creates beyond himself as the meaning of life. He sings a grandiose hymn of praise to the superman, but he does not form his picture; he feels his growing reality but he does not see him. Nietzsche speaks of an “eternal recurrence,” but he does not describe what it is that recurs. He speaks of raising the form of life through the will to power, but where is the description of the heightened form of life? Nietzsche speaks of something that must be there in the realm of the unknown, but he does not succeed in going further than pointing at the unknown. The forces that are unfolded in the self-conscious ego are also not sufficiently strong in Nietzsche to outline distinctly a reality that he knows as weaving and breathing in human nature.

[ 7 ] We have a contrast to Nietzsche's world conception in the materialistic conception of history and life that was given its most pregnant expression by Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx denied that the idea had any share in historical evolution. For him, the real factors of life constituted the actual basis of this evolution, and from them are derived opinions concerning the world that men have been able to form according to the various situations of life in which they find themselves. The man who is working physically and under the power of somebody else has a world conception that differs from that of the intellectual worker. An age that replaces an older economic form with a new one brings also different conceptions of life to the surface of history. If one wants to understand a historical age, one must, for its explanation, go back to its social conditions and its economic processes. All political and cultural currents are only surface-reflectings of these deeper processes. They are essentially ideal effects of real facts, but they have no share in those facts. A world conception, therefore, that is caused by ideal factors can have no share in the progressive evolution of our present conduct of life. It is rather our task to take up the real conflicts of life at the point at which they have arrived, and to continue their development in the same direction.

This conception evolved from a materialistic reversal of Hegelianism. In Hegel, the ideas are in a continuous progress of evolution and the results of this evolution are the actual events of life. What Auguste Comte derived from natural scientific conceptions as a conception of society based on the actual events of life, Karl Marx wants to attain from the direct observation of the economic evolution. Marxism is the boldest form of an intellectual current that starts from the historical phenomena as they appear to external observation, in order to understand the spiritual life and the entire cultural development of man. This is modern “sociology.” It in no way accepts man as an individual but rather as a member of social evolution. Man's conceptions, knowledge, action and feeling are all considered to be the result of social powers under the influence of which the individual stands.

Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) calls the sum total of the forces determining every cultural event the “milieu.” Every work of art, every institution, every action is to be explained from preceding and simultaneous circumstances. If we know the race, the milieu and the moment through and in which a human achievement comes into being, we have explained this work. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–65), in his System of Acquired Rights (1861), showed how conditions of rights and laws, such as property, contract, family, inheritance, etc., arise and develop. The mode of conception of the Romans created a kind of law that differed from that of the Germans. In none of these thoughts is the question raised as to what arises in the human individual, what does he produce through his own inner nature? The question that is always asked is: What are the causes in the general social conditions for the life of the individual? One can observe in this thought tendency an opposite inclination to the one prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century with regard to the question of man's relation to the world. It was then customary to ask: What rights can man claim through his own nature (natural rights), or in what way does man obtain knowledge in accordance with his own power of reason as an individual? The sociological trend of thought, however, asks: What are the legal and intellectual concepts that the various social groupings cause to arise in the individual?

The fact that I form certain conceptions concerning things does not depend on my power of reasoning but is the result of the historical development that produced me. In Marxism the self-conscious ego is entirely deprived of its own nature; it finds itself drifting in the ocean of facts. These facts develop according to the laws of natural science and of social conditions. In this world conception the impotence of modern philosophy with regard to the human soul approaches a maximum. The “ego,” the self-conscious human soul, wants to find in itself the entity through which it can assert its own significance within the existence of the world, but it is unwilling to dive into its own depths. It is afraid it will not find in its own depths the support of its own existence and essence. It wants to derive its own being from an entity that lies outside its own domain. To do this, the ego follows the thought habits developed in modern times under the influence of natural science, and turns either to the world of material events or to that of social evolution. It believes it understands its own nature in the totality of life if it can say to itself, “I am, in a certain way, conditioned by these events, by this evolution.”

Such philosophical tendencies show that there are forces at work in the souls of which they are dimly aware, but which cannot at first be satisfied by the modern habits of thought and research. Concealed from consciousness, spiritual life works in human souls. It drives these souls to go so deep into the self-conscious ego that this ego can find in its depths what leads to the source of world existence. In this source the human soul feels its kinship with a world entity that is not manifested in the mere phenomena and entities of nature. With respect to these phenomena and entities modern times have arrived at an ideal of research with which the scientist feels secure in his endeavor. One would now also like to feel this security in the investigation of the nature of the human soul. It has been shown above that, in leading thinkers, the striving for such security resulted in world pictures that no longer contain any elements from which satisfactory conceptions of the human soul could be derived. The attempt is made to treat philosophy according to the method of natural science, but in the process of this treatment the meaning of the philosophical question itself is lost. The task with which the human soul is charged from the very depth of its nature goes far beyond anything that the thinkers are willing to recognize as safe methods of investigation according to the modern habits of thought.

In appraising the situation of the development of modern world conception thus characterized, one finds as the most outstanding feature the pressure that the mode of thought of natural science has exerted on the minds of people ever since it attained its full stature. One recognizes as the reason for this pressure the fruitfulness, the efficiency of this mode of thinking. An affirmation of this is to be found in the work of a natural scientist like T. H. Huxley (1825–95). He does not believe that one could find anything in the knowledge of natural science that would answer the last questions concerning the human soul. But he is convinced that our search for knowledge must confine itself to the limits of the mode of conception of natural science and we must admit that man simply has no means by which to acquire a knowledge of what lies behind nature. The result of this opinion is that natural science contains no insight concerning man's highest hopes for knowledge, but it allows him to feel that in this mode of conception the investigation is placed on secure ground. One should, therefore, abandon all concern for everything that does not lie within the realm of natural science, or one should consider it as a matter of belief.

[ 8 ] The effect of this pressure caused by the method of natural science is clearly expressed in a thought current called pragmatism that appeared at the turn of the century and intended to place all striving for truth on a secure basis. The name “pragmatism” goes back to an essay that Charles Pierce published in the American journal, Popular Science, in 1878. The most influential representatives of this mode of conception are William James (1842–1910) in America and F. C. Schiller (1864–1937) in England, who uses the word “humanism.” Pragmatism can be called disbelief in the power of thought. It denies that thinking that would remain within its own domain is capable of producing anything that can be proved as truth and knowledge justifiable by itself. Man is confronted with processes of the world and must act. To accomplish this, thinking serves him in an auxiliary function. It sums up the facts of the external world into ideas and combines them. The best ideas are those that help him to achieve the right kind of action so that he can attain his purpose in accordance with the facts of the world. These ideas man recognizes as his truth. Will is the ruler of man's relation to the world, not thinking. James deals with this matter in his book, The Will to Believe. The will determines life; this is its undeniable right. Therefore, will is also justified in influencing thought. It is, to be sure, not to exert its influence in determining what the facts are in a particular case; here the intellect is to follow the facts themselves. But it will influence the understanding and interpretation of reality as a whole. “If our scientific knowledge extended as far as to the end of things, we might be able to live by science alone. But since it only dimly lights up the edges of the dark continent that we call the universe, and since we must form, at our own risk, some sort of thought of this universe to which we belong with our lives, we shall be justified if we form such thoughts as agree with our nature—thoughts that enable us to act, hope and live.”

According to this conception, our thought has no life that could possibly concentrate and deepen in itself and, in Hegel's sense, for example, penetrate to the source of existence. It merely emerges in the human soul to serve the ego when it takes an active part in the world with its will and life. Pragmatism deprives thought of the power it possessed from the rise of the Greek world conception. Knowledge is thus made into a product of the human will. In the last analysis, it can no longer be the element into which man plunges in order to find himself in his true nature. The self-conscious ego no longer penetrates into its own entity with the power of thinking. It loses itself in the dark recesses of the will in which thought sheds no light on anything except the aims of life. But these, as such, do not spring from thought. The power exerted by external facts on man has become excessively strong. The conscious ability to find a light in the inner life of thought that could illumine the last questions of existence has reached the zero point. In pragmatism, the development of modern philosophy falls shortest of what the spirit of this development really demands: that man may find himself as a thinking and self-conscious ego in the depths of the world in which this ego feels itself as deeply connected with the wellspring of existence, as the Greek truth-seeker did through his perceived thought. That the spirit of modern times demands this becomes especially clear through pragmatism. It places man in the focal point of his world picture. In man, it was to be seen how reality rules in existence. Thus, the chief question was directed toward the element in which the self-conscious ego rests. But the power of thought was not sufficient to carry light into this element. Thought remained behind in the upper layers of the soul when the ego wanted to take the path into its own depth.

[ 9 ] In Germany Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) developed his Philosophy of As-If (1911) along the same lines as pragmatism. This philosopher regards the leading ideas that man forms about the phenomena of the world not as thought images through which, in the cognitive process, the soul places itself into a spiritual reality, but as fictions that lead him to find his way in the world. The “atom,” for instance, is imperceptible. Man forms the thought of the “atom.” He cannot form it in order to know something of a reality, but merely “as if' the external phenomena of nature had come to pass through compound actions of atoms. If one imagines that there are atoms, there will be order in the chaos of perceived natural phenomena. It is the same with all leading ideas. They are assumed, not in order to depict facts that are given solely by perception. They are invented, and reality is then interpreted “as if” the content of these imagined concepts really were the basis of reality. The impotence of thought is thus consciously made the center of this philosophy. The power of the external facts impresses the mind of the thinker so overwhelmingly that he does not dare to penetrate with his “mere thought” into those regions from which the external reality springs. But as we can only hope to gain an insight into the nature of man if we have spiritual means to penetrate into the characterized regions, there can be no possibility of approaching the highest riddles of the universe through the “As-If Philosophy.”

[ 10 ] We must now realize that both “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy” have grown out of the thought practice of the age that is dominated by the method of natural science. Natural science can only be concerned with the investigation of the connection of external facts, of facts that can be observed in the field of sense perception. In natural science it cannot be a question of making the connections themselves, at which its investigation aims, sensually perceptible, but merely of establishing these connections in the indicated field. By following this basic principle, modern natural science became the model for all scientific cognition and, in approaching the present time, it has gradually been drawn into a thought practice that operates in the sense of “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy.” Darwinism, for instance, was at first driven to proclaim a line of evolution of living beings from the most imperfect to the most perfect and thus to conceive man as a higher form in the evolution of the anthropoid apes. But the anatomist, Carl Gegenbaur, pointed out as early as 1870 that it is the method of investigation applied to such an idea of evolution that constitutes the fruitful part of it. The use of this method of investigation has continued to more recent times, and one is quite justified in saying that, while it remained faithful to its original principle, it has led beyond the views with which it was originally connected. The investigation proceeded “as if” man had to be sought within the line of descent of the anthropoid apes. At the present time, one is not far from recognizing that this cannot be so, but that there must have been a being in earlier times whose true descendants are to be found in man, while the anthropoid apes developed away from this being into a less perfect species. In this way the original modern idea of evolution has proved to be only an auxiliary step in the process of investigation.

[ 11 ] While such a thought practice holds sway in natural science, it seems quite justified for natural science to deny that, in order to solve world riddles, there is any scientific cognitive value in an investigation of pure thought carried out by means of a thought contemplation in the self-conscious ego. The natural scientist feels that he stands on secure ground when he considers thinking only as a means to secure his orientation in the world of external facts. The great accomplishments to which natural science can point at the turn of the twentieth century agree well with such a thought practice. In the method of investigation of natural science, “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy” are actually at work. If these modes of conception now appear to be special philosophical thought tendencies also, we see in this fact that modern philosophy has basically taken on the form of natural science.

[ 12 ] For this reason, thinkers who instinctively feel how the demand of the spirit of modern world conception is secretly at work will quite understandably be confronted with the question: How can we uphold a conception of the self-conscious ego in the face of the perfection of the natural scientific method? It may be said that natural science is about to produce a world picture in which the self-conscious ego does not find a place, for what natural science can give as a picture of the external man contains the self-conscious soul only in the manner in which the magnet contains its energy. There are now two possibilities. We either delude ourselves into believing that we produce a serious statement when we say, “Our brain thinks,” and then accept the verdict that “the spiritual man” is merely the surface expression of material reality, or we recognize in this “spiritual man” a self-dependent essential reality and are thus driven out of the field of natural science with our knowledge of man. The French philosophers, Emile Boutroux (1845–1921) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), are thinkers who accept the latter possibility.

[ 13 ] Boutroux proceeds from a criticism of the modern mode of conception that intends to reduce all world processes to the laws of natural science. We understand the course of his thought if we consider that a plant, for example, contains processes that, to be sure, are regulated by laws effective also in the mineral world, but that it is quite impossible to imagine that these mineral laws themselves cause this plant life through their own content. If we want to recognize that plant life develops on the basis of mineral activity, we must presuppose that it is a matter of perfect indifference to the mineral forces if plant life develops from this basis. There must be a spontaneously creative element added to the mineral agencies if plant life is to be produced. There is, therefore, a creative element everywhere in nature. The mineral realm is there but a creative element stands behind it. The latter produces the plant life based on the ground of the mineral world. So it is in all the spheres of natural order up to the conscious human soul, indeed, including all sociological processes. The human soul does not spring from mere biological laws, but directly from the fundamental creative element and it assimilates the biological processes and laws to its own entity. The fundamental creative element is also at work in the sociological realm. This brings human souls into the appropriate connections and interdependence. Thus, in Boutroux's book, On the Concept of Natural Laws in the Science and Philosophy of Today (1895), we find:

Science shows us a hierarchy of laws, which we can, to be sure, bring closer and closer together but which we cannot blend into a single law. It shows us, furthermore, besides this relative dissimilarity of the laws, a mutual influence of these laws on each other. The physical laws affect the living being, but the biological laws are at work at the same time.

Boutroux turns his attention from the natural laws represented in the thinking of natural science to the creative process behind these laws. Emerging directly from this process are the entities that fill the world. The behavior of these entities to one another, their mutual effect on each other, can be expressed in laws that are conceivable in thought. What is thus conceived becomes, as it were, a basis of the natural laws for this mode of conception. The entities are real and manifest their natures according to laws. The sum total of these laws, which in the final analysis constitute the unreal and are attached to an intellectually conceived existence, constitutes matter. Thus, Boutroux can say:

Motion (what he means is the totality of everything that happens between entities according to natural laws) is, in itself, obviously as much an abstraction as thinking in itself. Actually, there are only living entities, their nature being halfway between the pure concepts of thinking and motion. These living entities form a hierarchy and activity circulates in them from above to below and from below to above. The spirit moves matter neither directly nor indirectly, for there is no raw matter and what constitutes the nature of matter is closely connected with what constitutes the nature of the spirit.

But if natural laws are only the sum total of the interrelation of the entities, then the human soul also does not stand in the world as a whole in such a way that it could be explained from natural laws; from its own nature it adds its manifestations to the other laws. With this step, freedom, the spontaneous self-revelation, is secured for the soul. One can see in this philosophical mode of thinking the attempt to gain clarity concerning the true essence of nature in order to acquire an insight into the relation of the human soul to it. Boutroux arrives at a conception of the human soul that can only spring from its self-manifestation. In former times, according to Boutroux, one saw in the mutual influences of the entities, the manifestation of the “capriciousness and arbitrariness” of spiritual beings. Modern thinking has been freed from this belief by the knowledge of natural laws. As these laws exist only in the cooperative processes of the entities, they cannot contain anything that might determine the entities.

The mechanical natural laws that have been discovered by modern science are, in fact, the bond that connects the external world with the inner realm. Far from constituting a necessity, they are our liberators; they allow us to add to the contemplation in which the ancients were locked up, a science of action.

These words point to the demand of the spirit of modern world conception that has repeatedly been mentioned in this book. The ancients were limited to contemplation. To them, the soul was in the element of its true nature when it was in thought contemplation. The modern development demands a “science of action.” This science, however, could only come into being if the soul could, in thinking, lay hold of its own nature in the self-conscious ego, and if it could arrive, through a spiritual experience, at inner activities of the self with which it could see itself as being grounded in its own entity.

[ 14 ] Henri Bergson tries to penetrate to the nature of the self-conscious ego in a different way so that the mode of conception of natural science does not become an obstacle in this process. The nature of thinking itself has become a world riddle through the development of the world conceptions from the time of the Greeks to the present age. Thought has lifted the human soul out of the world as a whole. Thus, the soul lives with the thought element and must direct the question to thought: How will you lead me again to an element in which I can feel myself really sheltered in the world as whole? Bergson considers the scientific mode of thinking. He does not find in it the power through which it could swing itself into a true reality. The thinking soul is confronted with reality and gains thought images from it. It combines these images, but what the soul acquires in this manner is not rooted within reality; it stands outside reality. Bergson speaks of thinking as follows:

It is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thoughts from the mobile reality, but there is no means whatever of reconstituting the mobility of the real with the fixity of concepts. (Introduction to Metaphysics)

Proceeding from thoughts of this kind, Bergson finds that all attempts to penetrate reality by means of thinking had to fail because they undertook something of which thinking, as it occurs in life and science, is quite incapable to enter into true reality. If, in this way, Bergson believes he recognizes the impotence of thinking, he does not mean to say that there is no way by means of which the right kind of experience in the self-conscious ego may reach true reality. For the ego, there is a way outside of thinking—the way of immediate experience, of intuition.

To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought . . . Symbolic knowledge is relative through preexisting concepts, which goes from the fixed to the moving, but not so intuitive knowledge, which establishes itself in the moving reality and adopts the life itself of things. (Introduction to Metaphysics)

[ 15 ] Bergson believes that a transformation of our usual mode of thinking is possible so that the soul, through this transformation, will experience itself in an activity, in an intuitive perception, in which it unites with a reality that is deeper than the one that is perceived in ordinary knowledge. In such an intuitive perception the soul experiences itself as an entity that is not conditioned by the physical processes, which produce sensation and movement. When man perceives through his senses, and when he moves his limbs, a corporeal entity is at work in him, but as soon as he remembers something a purely psychic-spiritual process takes place that is not conditioned by corresponding physical processes. Thus, the whole inner life of the soul is a specific life of a psychic-spiritual nature that takes place in the body and in connection with it, but not through the body. Bergson investigated in detail those results of natural science that seemed to oppose his view. The thought indeed seems justified that our physical functions are rooted in bodily processes when one remembers how, for instance, the disease of a part of the brain causes an impediment of speech. A great many facts of this kind can be enumerated. Bergson discusses them in his book, Matter and Memory, and he decides that all these facts do not constitute any proof against the view of an independent spiritual-psychical life.

In this way, modern philosophy seems through Bergson to take up its task that is demanded by the time, the task of a concentration of the experience of the self-conscious ego, but it accomplishes this step by declaring thought as impotent. Where the ego is to experience itself in its own nature, it cannot make use of the power of thinking. The same holds for Bergson insofar as the investigation of life is concerned. What must be considered as the driving element in the evolution of the living being, what places these beings in the world in a series from the imperfect to the perfect, we cannot know through a thoughtful contemplation of the various forms of the living beings. But if man experiences himself in himself as psychical life, he stands in the element of life that lives in those beings and knows itself in him. This element of life first had to pour itself out in innumerable forms to prepare itself for what it later becomes in man. The effusion of life (elan vital), which arouses itself into a thinking being in man, is there already manifested in the simple living entity. In the creation of all living beings it has so spent itself that it retains only a part of its entire nature, the part, to be sure, that reveals itself as the fruit of all previous creations of life. In this way, the entity of man exists before all other living beings, but it can live its life as man only after having ejected all other forms of life, which man then can observe from without as one form among all others. Through his intuitive knowledge Bergson wants to vitalize the results of natural science so that he can say:

It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution. (Creative Evolution)

[ 16 ] From lightly woven and easily attainable thoughts like this, Bergson produces an idea of evolution that had been expressed previously in a profound mode of thought by W. H. Preuss in his book, Spirit and Matter (1882). Preuss also held that man has not developed from the other natural beings but is, from the beginning the fundamental entity, which had first to eject his preliminary stages into the other living beings before he could give himself the form appropriate for him on earth. We read in the above-mentioned book:

The time should have come . . . to establish a theory of origin of organic species that is not based solely on one-sidedly proclaimed theorems from descriptive natural science, but is also in agreement with the other natural laws that are at the same time the laws of human thinking. What is necessary is a theory that is free from all hypothesizing and that rests solely on strict conclusions from natural scientific observations in the widest sense of the word; a theory that saves the concept of the species according to the actual possibility, but at the same time adapts Darwin's concept of evolution to its own field and tries to make it fruitful. The center of this new theory is man, the species unique on our planet: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers began with the objects of nature and then went astray to such an extent that they did not find the way that leads to the human being. This aim had been attained by Darwin only in an insufficient and unsatisfactory way as he sought the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals, while the naturalist should begin with himself as a human being in order to proceed through the entire realm of existence and of thinking and to return finally to humanity. . . . It was not by accident that the human nature resulted from the entire terrestrial evolution, but by necessity. Man is the aim of all telluric processes and every other form that occurs beside him has borrowed its traits from him. Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos. . . . When his germinating state (man in his potentiality) had come into being, the remaining organic substance no longer had the power to produce further human possibilities. What developed thereafter became animal or plan. . . .

[ 17 ] Such a view attempts to recognize man as placed on his ground by the development of modern world conception, that is to say, outside nature, in order to find something in such a knowledge of man that throws light on the world surrounding him. In the little known thinker from Elsfleth, W. H. Preuss, the ardent wish arises to gain a knowledge of the world at once through an insight into man. His forceful and significant ideas are immediately directed to the human being. He sees how this being struggles its way into existence. What it must leave behind on its way, what it must slough off, remains as nature with its entities on a lower stage of evolution surrounding man as his environment. The way toward the riddles of the world in modern philosophy must go through an investigation of the human entity manifested in the self-conscious ego. This becomes apparent through the development of this philosophy. The more one tries to enter into its striving and its search, the more one becomes aware of the fact that this search aims at such experiences in the human soul that do not only produce an insight into the human soul itself, but also kindles a light by means of which a certain knowledge concerning the world outside man can be secured. In looking at the views of Hegel and related thinkers, more recent philosophers came to doubt that there could be the power in the life of thought to spread its light beyond the realm of the soul itself. The element of thought seemed not strong enough to engender an activity that could explain the being and the meaning of the world. By contrast, the natural scientific mode of conception demanded a penetration into the core of the soul that rested on a firmer ground than thought can supply.

[ 18 ] Within this search and striving the attempts of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) take a significant position. In writings like his Introduction to the Cultural Sciences, and his Berlin Academy treatise, Contributions to the Solution of the Problem of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Right (1890), he offered expositions that are filled with all the philosophical riddles that weigh on the modern development of world conception. To be sure, the form of his presentation, which is given in the modern terminology used by scholars, prevents a more general impression being created by what he has to say. It is Dilthey's view that through the thoughts and imaginations that appear in his soul man cannot even arrive at the certainty that the perceptions of the senses correspond to a reality independent of man. Everything that is of the nature of thought, ideation and sense perception is picture. The world that surrounds man could be a dream without a reality independent of him if he were exclusively dependent on such pictures in his awareness of the real world. But not only these pictures present themselves in the soul. In the process of life the soul is filled with will, activity and feeling, all of which stream forth from it and are recognized as an immediate experience rather than intellectually. In willing and feeling the soul experiences itself as reality, but if it experienced itself only in this manner, it would have to believe that its own reality were the only one in the world. This assumption could be justified only if the will could radiate in all directions without finding any resistance. But that is not the case. The intentions of the will cannot unfold their life in that way. There is something obtruding itself in their path that they have not produced but that must nevertheless be accepted by them.

To “common sense” such a thought development of a philosopher can appear as hairsplitting. The historical account must not be deflected by such judgment. It is important to gain an insight into the difficulty that modern philosophy had to create for itself in regard to a question that seems so simple and in fact superfluous to “common sense,” that is, if the world man sees, hears, etc., may rightly be called real. The “ego” that had, as shown above in our historical account of the development of philosophical world riddles, separated itself from the world, strives to find its way back into the world from what appears in its own consciousness as a state of loneliness. It is Dilthey's opinion that this way cannot be found back into the world by saying that the soul experiences pictures (thoughts, ideas, sensations), and since these pictures appear in our consciousness they must have their causes in a real external world. A conclusion of this kind would not, according to Dilthey, give us the right to speak of a real external world, for such a conclusion is drawn within the soul according to the needs of this soul, and there is no guarantee that there really is in the external world what the soul believes in following its own needs. Therefore, the soul cannot infer an external world; it would expose itself to the danger that its conclusion might have a life only within the soul but without any significance for an external world. Certainty concerning an outer world can be gained by the soul only if this external world penetrates into the inner life of the “ego,” so that within this “ego” not only the “ego” but also the external world itself unfolds its life. This happens, according to Dilthey, when the soul experiences in its will and its feeling something that does not spring from within. Dilthey attempts to decide from the most self-evident facts a question that is for him a fundamental problem of all world conception. A passage like the following may illustrate this:

As a child presses his hand against a chair in order to move it, he measures his power against the resistance; his own life and the object are experienced together. But now let the child be locked up. It is in vain that he rattles against the door; now his entire excited will becomes aware of the compulsion of an overwhelming powerful external world that hinders and restricts, and compresses, as it were, his own self-willed life. The desire to escape from the displeasure and to gratify his impulses is followed by the consciousness of obstruction, displeasure and dissatisfaction. What the child thus experiences follows him through his entire adult life. The resistance becomes pressure. We seem to be everywhere surrounded by walls of actual facts through which we cannot break. The impressions remain, no matter how much we would like to change them; they vanish although we strive to cling to them; impulses of motion directed by the idea of avoiding something that causes pain are, under certain circumstances always followed by emotions that hold us within the realm of pain. Thus, the reality of the external world grows, so to speak, progressively more dense around us.

Why is such a reflection, which seems unimportant for many people, developed in connection with the highest problems of philosophy? It seems hopeless to gain an insight into man's position in the world as a whole from such points of departure. What is essential, however, is the fact that philosophy arrived at reflections of this kind on its way, to use Brentano's words once more, to “gain certainty for the hopes of Plato and Aristotle concerning the continued life of our better part after the dissolution of our body.” To attain sure knowledge of this kind seems to become more difficult the more the intellectual development advances. The “self-conscious ego” feels itself more and more ejected from the world; it seems to find in itself less and less the elements that connect it with the world in a way different from that of our “body,” which is subject to “dissolution.” While this “self-conscious ego” searched for a certain knowledge concerning its connection with an eternal world of the spirit, it lost the certainty of an insight in its connection with the world as revealed through the perception of the senses. In our discussion of Goethe's world conception, it was shown how Goethe searched for such experiences of the soul that carry it into a reality lying behind sense perception as a spiritual world. In this world conception the attempt is made to experience something within the soul through which it no longer lives exclusively within its own confines in spite of the fact that it feels the experienced content as its own. The soul searches for world experiences in itself through which it participates with its experience in an element that it cannot reach through the mediation of the mere physical organs. Although Dilthey's mode of reflection may appear to be quite unnecessary, his efforts must be considered as belonging to the same current of the philosophical development. He is intent on finding an element within the soul that does not spring from the soul but belongs to an independent realm. He would like to prove that the world enters the experience of the soul. Dilthey does not believe that such an entrance can be accomplished by the thought element. For him, the soul can assimilate in its entire life content, in will, striving and feeling, something that is not only soul but part of the real external world. We recognize a human being in our soul as real not by forming a representative thought picture of the person we see before us, but by allowing his will and his feeling to enter into our own will and sentiment. Thus, a human soul, in Dilthey's opinion, acknowledges a real external world not because this outer world conveys its reality through the thought element, but because the soul as a self-conscious ego, experiences inwardly in itself the external world. In this manner he is led to acknowledge the spiritual life as something of a higher significance than the mere natural existence. He produces a counterbalance to the natural scientific mode of conception with his view, and he even thinks that nature as a real external world can be acknowledged only because it can be experienced by the spiritual part of our soul. The experience of the natural is a subdivision of our general soul experience, which is of a spiritual nature, and spiritually our soul is part of a general spiritual development on earth. A great spiritual organism develops and unfolds in cultural systems in the spiritual experience and creative achievement of the various peoples and ages. What develops its forces in this spiritual organism permeates the individual human souls. They are embedded in the spiritual organism. What they experience, accomplish and produce receives its impulses not from the stimulation's of nature, but from the comprehensive spiritual life. Dilthey's mode of conception is full of understanding for that of natural science. He often speaks in his discussions of the results of the natural scientists, but, as a counterbalance to his recognition of natural development, he insists on the independent existence of a spiritual world. Dilthey finds the content of a science of the spiritual in the contemplation of the cultures of different peoples and ages.

[ 19 ] Rudolf Eucken (1864–1926) arrives at a similar recognition of an independent spiritual world. He finds that the natural scientific mode of thought becomes self-contradictory if it intends to be more than a one-sided approach to reality, if it wants to proclaim what it finds within the possible grasp of its own knowledge as the only reality. If one only observed nature as it offers itself to the senses, one could never obtain a comprehensive conception of it. In order to explain nature, one must draw on what the spirit can experience only through itself, what it can never derive from external observation. Eucken proceeds from the vivid feeling that the soul has of its own spontaneous work and creation when it is occupied in the contemplation of external nature. He does not fail to recognize in which way the soul is dependent on what it perceives through its sense organs and how it is determined through everything that has its natural basis in the body. But he directs his attention to the autonomous regulating and life-inspiring activity of the soul that is independent of the body. The soul gives direction and conclusive connection to the world of sensations and perceptions. It is not only determined by stimuli that are derived from the physical world but it experiences purely spiritual impulses in itself. Through these impulses the soul is aware that it has its being in a real spiritual world. Into its experiences and creations flow the forces from a spiritual world to which it belongs. This spiritual world is directly experienced as real in the soul that knows itself as one with that world. In this way, the soul sees itself, according to Eucken, supported by a living and creative spiritual world. It is his opinion that the thought element, the intellectual forces, are not powerful enough to fathom the depths of this spiritual world. What streams from the spiritual world into man pours itself into his entire comprehensive soul life, not only into his intellect. This world of the spirit is endowed with the character of personality of a substantial nature. It also impregnates the thought element but it is not confined to it. The entire soul may feel itself in a substantial spiritual connection.

Eucken, in his numerous writings, knows how to describe in a lofty and emphatic way this spiritual world as it weaves and has its being: The Struggle for a Spiritual Content of Life (1896), Truth Content of Religion (1901), Basic Outlines of a New Life Conception, Spiritual Currents of the Present Time, Life Conceptions of the Great Thinkers, and Knowledge and Life. In these books he tries to show from different points of view how the human soul, as it experiences itself and as it understands itself in this experience, is aware of being permeated and animated by a creative, living spiritual substance of which it is a part and a member. Like Dilthey, Eucken describes, as the content of the independent spiritual life, what unfolds in the civilizations of humanity in the moral, technical, social and artistic creations of the various peoples and ages.

[ 19 ] In a historical presentation as is herein attempted, there is no place for criticism of the described world conceptions. But it is not criticism to point out how a world conception develops new questions through its own character, for it is thus that it becomes a part of the historical development. Dilthey and Eucken speak of an independent spiritual world in which the individual human soul is embedded. Their theory of this spiritual world, however, leaves the following questions open: What is this spiritual world and in what way does the human soul belong to it? Does the individual soul vanish with the dissolution of the body after it participated within that body in the development of the spiritual life manifested in the cultural creations of the different peoples and ages? One can, to be sure, answer these questions from Dilthey's and Eucken's point of view by saying that what the human soul can know in its own life does not lead to results with respect to these questions. But this is precisely what can be said to characterize such world conceptions that they lead, through their mode of conception, to no means of cognition that could guide the soul or the self-conscious ego beyond what can be experienced in connection with the body. In spite of the intensity with which Eucken stresses the independence and reality of the spiritual world, what the soul experiences according to his world conception of this spiritual world, and in connection with it, is experienced through the body. The hopes of Plato and Aristotle, so often referred to in this book, with regard to the nature of the soul and its independent relation to the spiritual world are not touched by such a world conception. No more is shown than that the soul, as long as it appears within the body, participates in a spiritual world that is quite rightly called real. What it is in the spiritual world as an independent spiritual entity cannot be discussed within this philosophy. It is characteristic of these modes of conception that they do, to be sure, arrive at a recognition of a spiritual world and also of the spiritual nature of the human soul. But no knowledge results from this recognition concerning the position of the soul, the self-conscious ego, in the reality of the world, apart from the fact that it acquires a consciousness of the spiritual world through the life of the body.

The historical position of these modes of conception in the development of philosophy appears in its right light if one recognizes that they produce questions that they cannot answer with their own means. They maintain emphatically that the soul becomes in itself conscious of a spiritual world that is independent of itself. But how is this consciousness acquired? Only through the means of cognition that the soul has in and through its existence in the body. Within this form of existence a certainty of a real spiritual world arises. But the soul finds no way to experience its own self-contained entity in the spirit outside the body. What the spirit manifests, stimulates and creates within the soul is perceived by it as far as the physical existence enables it to do so. What it is as a spirit in the spiritual world and, in fact, whether or not it is a separate entity within that world, is a question that cannot be answered by the mere recognition of the fact that the soul within the body can be conscious of its connection with a living and creative spiritual world. To obtain an answer of this kind it would be necessary for the self-conscious human soul, while it advances to a knowledge of the spiritual world, to become aware of its own mode of life in the world of the spirit, independent of the conditions of its bodily existence. The spiritual world would not only have to enable the soul entity to recognize its reality but it would have to convey something of its own nature to the soul. It would have to reveal to the soul in what way it is different from the world of the senses and in what manner it allows the soul entity to participate in this different mode of existence.

[ 20 ] A feeling for this question lives in those philosophers who want to contemplate the spiritual world by directing their attention toward something that cannot, according to their opinion, be found within the mere observation of nature. If it could be shown that there is something with regard to which the natural scientific mode of conception would prove to be powerless, then this could be considered to guarantee the justification of assuming a spiritual world. A mode of thought of this kind had already been indicated by Lotze (compare in Part II Chapter VI of this volume). It found forceful representatives later in Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) and others. These thinkers are of the opinion that there is an element entering into the world conception that is inaccessible to the natural scientific mode of thought. They consider this element to be the “values” that are of decisive importance in human life. The world is no dream but a reality if it can be shown that certain experiences of the soul contain something that is independent of this soul. The actions, endeavors and will impulses of the soul are no longer sparks that light up and vanish in the ocean of existence, if one must recognize that there is something that endows them with values independent of the soul. Such values, however, the soul must acknowledge for its will impulses and its actions just as much as it must recognize that its perceptions are not merely produced by its own effort. Action and will impulses of man do not simply occur like facts of nature; they must be considered from the point of view of a legal, moral, social, esthetic or scientific value. It is quite right to insist that during the evolution of civilizations in different ages and of different peoples, man's views concerning the values of right, morality, beauty and truth have undergone changes. If Nietzsche could speak of a “revaluation of all values,” it must be acknowledged that the value of actions, thoughts and will intentions is determined from without in a similar way to the way perceptual ideation receives the character of reality from without. In the sense of the “philosophy of values” one can say: As the pressure or resistance of the natural external world make the difference between an idea that is a mere picture of fantasy or one that represents reality, so the light and approbation that fall on the soul life from an external spiritual world decide whether or not an impulse of the will, an action and a thought endeavor have a value in the world as a whole or are only arbitrary products of the soul. As a stream of values, the spiritual world flows through the lives of men in the course of history. While the human soul feels itself as living in a world determined by values, it experiences itself in a spiritual element. If this mode of conception were seriously carried out, all statements that man could make concerning the spiritual would have to take on the form of value judgments. The only thing one could then say about anything not revealed in nature and therefore not to be known through the natural scientific mode of conception, would be in which way and in what respect it possessed an independent value in the whole of the world. The question would then arise: [ 21 ] If one disregards everything in the human soul that natural science has to say about it, is it then valuable as a member of the spiritual world, and does it have a significant independent value? Can the riddles of philosophy concerning the soul be solved if one cannot speak of its existence but only of its value? Will not the philosophy of values always be forced to adopt a language similar to that of Lotze when he speaks of the continuation of the soul?

Since we consider every being only as a creature of God, there is no fundamentally valid right on which the individual soul, for instance as a “substance,” could base its claim in order to demand an eternal, individual, continued existence. Perhaps we can only maintain that every being will be preserved by God as long as its existence is of a valuable significance for the whole of His world plan. . . . (Compare page in Part II Chapter VI). of this volume.)

Here the “value” of the soul is spoken of as its decisive character. Some attention, however, is also paid to the question of how this value may be connected with the preservation of existence. One can understand the position of the philosophy of value in the course of the development of philosophy if one considers that the natural scientific mode of conception is inclined to claim all knowledge of existence for itself. If that is granted, philosophy can do nothing but resign itself to the investigation of something else, and such a “something else” is seen in these “values.” The following question, as an unsolved problem, can be found in Lotze's statement: Is it at all possible to go no further than to define and characterize values and to renounce all knowledge concerning the form of existence of the values?

[ 22 ] Many of the most recent schools of thought prove to be attempts to search within the self-conscious ego, which in the course of the philosophical development feels itself more and more separated from the world, for an element that leads back to a reunion with the world. The conceptions of Dilthey, Eucken, Windelband, Rickert and others are such attempts. They want to do justice both to the demands of natural science and to the contemplation of the experience of the soul so that a science of the spirit appears as a possibility beside the science of nature. The same aims are followed by the thought tendencies of Herman Cohen (1842–1918) (compare in Part II Chapter IV of this volume), Paul Natorp (1854–1924), August Stadler (1850–1910), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), Walter Kinkel (born 1871) and others who share their philosophical convictions. In directing their attention to the processes of thinking itself, they believe that in this highest activity of the self-conscious ego the soul gains hold on an inner possession that allows it to penetrate into reality. They turn their attention to what appears to them as the highest fruit of thinking. A simple example of this would be the thinking of a circle in which specific representative thought pictures of any circle are disregarded entirely. As much can be embraced in this way by pure thinking as can be encompassed by the power of our soul through which we can penetrate into reality. For what we can think in this way manifests its own nature through thinking in the consciousness of man. The sciences strive to arrive, by means of their observations, experiments and methods, at such results concerning the world as can be seized in pure thinking. They will have to leave the fulfillment of this aim to a far distant future, but one can nevertheless say that insofar as they endeavor to have pure thought, they also strive to convey the true essence of things to the possession of the self-conscious ego. When man makes an observation in the sensual external world, or in the course of historical life, he has, according to this conception, no true reality before him. What the observation of the senses offers is merely the challenge to search for a reality, not a reality in itself. Only when, through the activity of the soul, a thought appears, so to speak, to reveal itself at the very place where the observation has been made, is the living reality of the observed object integrated into real knowledge. The progressively developing knowledge replaces with thought what has been observed in the world. What the observation showed in the beginning was there only because man with his senses, with his everyday imagination, realizes at first for himself the nature of things in his own limited way. What he has at his disposal in this way has significance only for himself. What he substitutes as thought for the observation is no longer troubled by his own limitation. It is as it is thought, for thought determines its own nature and reveals itself according to its own character in the self-conscious ego. Thought does not allow the ego to determine its character in any way.

[ 23 ] There lives in this world conception a subtle feeling for the development of thought life since its first philosophical flowering within Greek intellectual life. It was the thought experience that gave to the self-conscious ego the power to be vigorously conscious of its own self-dependent entity. In the present age this power of thought can be experienced in the soul as the impulse that, seized within the self-conscious ego, endows this ego with the awareness that it is not a mere external observer of things but that it lives essentially in an intimate connection with their reality. It is in thought itself that the soul can feel it contains a true and self-dependent reality. As the soul thus feels itself interwoven with thought as a content of life that breathes reality, it can again experience the supporting power of the thought element as this was experienced in Greek philosophy. It can be experienced again as strongly as it was felt in the philosophy that took thought as a perception. It is true that in the world conception of Cohen and kindred spirits, thought cannot be considered as a perception in the sense of Greek philosophy. But in this conception the inner permeation of the ego with the thought world, which the ego acquired through its own work, is such that this experience includes, at the same time, the awareness of its reality.

The connection with Greek philosophy is emphasized by these thinkers. Cohen expresses himself on this point as follows. “The relation that Parmenides forged as the identity of thinking and being must persist.” Another thinker who also accepts this conception, Walter Kinkel, is convinced that “only thinking can know being, for both thinking and being are, fundamentally understood, one and the same.” It is through this doctrine that Parmenides became the real creator of scientific idealism (Idealism and Realism).

It is also apparent from the presentations of these thinkers how the formulation of their thoughts presupposes the century-long effect of the thought evolution since the Greek civilization. In spite of the fact that these thinkers start from Kant, which could have fostered in them the opinion that thought lives only within the soul, outside true reality, the supporting power of thought exerts itself in them. This thought has gone beyond the Kantian limitation and it forces these thinkers who contemplate its nature to become convinced that thought itself is reality, and that it also leads the soul into reality if it acquires this element rightly in inner work and, equipped with it, seeks the way into the external world. In this philosophical mode of thinking thought proves intimately connected with the world contemplation of the self-conscious ego. The fundamental impulse of this thought tendency appears like a discovery of the possible service that the thought element can accomplish for the ego. We find in the followers of this philosophy views like these: “Only thinking itself can produce what may be accepted as being.” “Being is the being of thinking” (Cohen).

Now the question arises: Can these philosophers expect of their thought experience, which is produced through the conscious work in the self-conscious ego, what the Greek philosopher expected of it when he accepted thought as a perception? If one believes to perceive thought, one can be of the opinion that it is the real world that reveals it. As the soul feels itself connected with thought as a perception, it can consider itself as belonging to the element of the world that is thought, indestructible thought, while the sense perception reveals only destructible entities. The part of the human being that is perceptible to the senses can then be supposed to be perishable, but what emerges in the human soul as thought makes it appear as a member of the spiritual, the true reality. Through such a view the soul can conceive that it belongs to a truly real world. This could be achieved by a modern world conception only if it could show that the thought experience not only leads knowledge into a true reality, but also develops the power to free the soul from the world of the senses and to place it into true reality. The doubts that arise in regard to this question cannot be counteracted by the insight into the reality of the thought element if the latter is considered as acquired by perception actively produced through the work of the soul. For, from what could the certainty be derived that what the soul produces actively in the world of the senses, can also give it a real significance in a world that is not perceived by senses? It could be that the soul, to be sure, could procure a knowledge of reality through its actively produced thoughts, but that nevertheless the soul itself was not rooted in this reality. Also, this world conception merely points to a spiritual life, but it cannot prevent the unbiased observer from finding philosophical riddles at its end that demand answers and call for soul experiences for which this philosophy does not supply the foundations. It can arrive at the conviction that thought is real, but it cannot find through thought a guarantee for the reality of the soul.

[ 24 ] The philosophical thinking at which A. v. Leclaire (born 1848), Wilhelm Schuppe (1836–1913), Johannes Rehmke (1848 – 1930), von Schubert-Soldern (born 1852), and others arrived, shows how philosophical inquiry can remain confined to the narrow circle of the self-conscious ego without finding a possibility to make the transition from this region into the world where this ego could link its own existence to a world reality. There are certain differences among these philosophies, but what is characteristic of all of them is that they all stress that everything man can count as belonging to his world must manifest itself within the realm of his consciousness. On the ground of their philosophy the thought cannot be conceived that would even presuppose anything about a territory of the world if the soul wanted to transcend with its conceptions beyond the realm of consciousness. Because the “ego” must comprise everything to which its knowledge extends within the folds of its consciousness, because it holds it within the consciousness, it therefore appears necessary to this view that the entire world is within the limits of this awareness. That the soul should ask itself: How do I stand with the possession of my consciousness in a world that is independent of this consciousness, is an impossibility for this philosophy. From its point of view, one would have to decide to give up all questions of this kind. One would have to become blind to the fact that there are inducements within the realm of the conscious soul life to look beyond that realm, just as in reading one does not look for the meaning in the forms that are visible on the paper, but to the significance that is expressed by them. As in reading, it is a question not of studying the forms of the letters as it is of no importance for the conveyed meaning to consider the nature of these forms themselves, so it could be irrelevant for an insight into true reality that within the sphere of the “ego” everything capable of being known has the character of consciousness.

[ 25 ] The philosophy of Carl du Prel (1839–99) stands as an opposite pole to this philosophical opinion. He is one of the spirits who have deeply felt the insufficiency of the opinion that considers the natural scientific mode of conception to which so many people have grown accustomed to be the only possible form of world explanation. He points out that this mode of conception unconsciously sins against its own statements, for natural science must admit on the basis of its own results

that we never perceive the objective processes of nature but rather their effect on us, not vibrations of the ether but light, not air vibrations but sounds. We have then, so to speak, a subjectively falsified world picture, but this does not interfere with our practical orientation because this falsification shows no individual differences and proceeds in a constant manner and according to law. . . . Materialism itself has proved through natural science that the world transcends beyond our senses. It has undermined its own foundation and it has sawed off the branch on which it had been sitting. As a philosophy, however, it still continues to sit on that branch. Materialism, therefore, has no right at all to call itself a philosophy … . It has only the justification of a branch of knowledge; furthermore, the world, the object of its study, is a world of mere appearance. To try to build a world conception on this foundation is an obvious self-contradiction. The real world is entirely different, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, from the one that is known to materialism, and only the real world can be the object of a philosophy. (Carl du Prel, The Riddle of Man.)

Such objections are necessarily caused by the materialistically colored mode of thought of natural science. Its weakness is noticed by many people who share the point of view of du Prel. The latter can be considered as a representative of a pronounced trend of modern philosophy. What is characteristic of this trend is the way in which it tries to penetrate into the realm of the real world. This way still shows the aftereffect of the natural scientific mode of conception, although the latter is at the same time most violently criticized. Natural science starts from the facts that are accessible to the sensory consciousness. It finds itself forced to refer to a supersensible element, for only the light is sensually perceptible, not the vibrations of the ether. The vibrations then belong to a realm that is, at least, extrasensory in its nature. But has natural science the right to speak of an extrasensory element? It means to limit its investigations to the realm of sense perceptions. Is anyone justified to speak of supersensible elements who restricts his scientific endeavors to the results of the consciousness that is bound to the senses and therefore to the body?

Du Prel wants to grant this right of investigating the supersensible only to a thinker who seeks the nature of the human soul outside the realm of the senses. What he considers as the chief demand in this direction is the necessity to demonstrate manifestations of the soul that prove the soul is also active when it is not bound to the body. Through the body the soul develops its sensual consciousness. In the phenomena of hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism, it becomes apparent that the soul is active when the sensual consciousness is eliminated. The soul life, therefore, extends further than the realm of consciousness. It is here that du Prel arrives at the diametrically opposite position to those of the characterized philosophers of the all-embracing consciousness who believe that the limits of consciousness define at the same time the entire realm of philosophy. For du Prel, the nature of the soul is to be sought outside the circle of this consciousness. If, according to him, we observe the soul when it is active without the usual means of the senses, we have the proof that it is of a supersensible nature.

Among the means through which this can be done, du Prel and many others count, besides the observation of the above-mentioned “abnormal” psychic phenomena, also the phenomena of spiritualism. It is not necessary to dwell here on du Prel's opinion concerning this field, for what constitutes the mainspring of his view becomes apparent also if one considers only his attitude toward hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism. Whoever wants to prove the spiritual nature of the human soul cannot limit himself to showing that the soul has to refer to a supersensible world in its cognitive process. For natural science could answer that it does not follow that the soul is itself rooted in the supersensible realm because it has a knowledge of a supersensible world. It could very well be that knowledge of the supersensible could also be dependent on the activity of the body and thus be of significance only for a soul that is bound to a body. It is for this reason that du Prel feels it necessary to show that the soul not only knows the supersensible while it is itself bound to the body, but that it experiences the supersensible while it is outside the body. With this view, he also arms himself against objections that can be raised from the viewpoint of the natural scientific mode of thinking against the conceptions of Eucken, Dilthey, Cohen, Kinkel and other defenders of a knowledge of a spiritual world. He is, however, not protected against the doubts that must be raised against his own procedure.

Although it is true that the soul can find an access to the supersensible only if it can show how it is itself active outside the sensual realm, the emancipation of the soul from the sensual world is not assured by the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism and hypnotic suggestion, nor by all other processes to which du Prel refers for this purpose. In regard to all these phenomena it can be said that the philosopher who wants to explain them still proceeds only with the means of his ordinary consciousness. If this consciousness is to be useless for a real explanation of the world, how can its explanations, which are applied to the phenomena according to the conditions of this consciousness, be of any decisive significance for these phenomena? What is peculiar in du Prel is the fact that he directs his attention to certain facts that point to a supersensible element, but that he, nevertheless, wants to remain entirely on the ground of the natural scientific mode of thought when he explains those facts. But should it not be necessary for the soul to enter the supersensible in its mode of thinking when the supersensible becomes the object of its interest? Du Prel looks at the supersensible, but as an observer he remains within the realm of the sensual world. If he did not want to do this, he would have to demand that only a hypnotized person can say the right things concerning his experiences under hypnosis, that only in the state of somnambulism could knowledge concerning the supersensible be acquired and that what the not-hypnotized, the non-somnambulist must think concerning these phenomena is of no validity. If we follow this thought consistently, we arrive at an impossibility. If one speaks of a transposition of the soul outside the realm of the senses into another form of existence, one must intend to acquire the knowledge of this existence within that other region. Du Prel points at a path that must be taken in order to gain access to the supersensible. But he leaves the question open regarding the means that are to be used on this path.

[ 26 ] A new thought current has been stimulated through the transformation of fundamental physical concepts that has been attempted by Albert Einstein (1879–1955). The attempt is of significance also for the development of philosophy. Physics previously followed its given phenomena by thinking of them as being spread out in empty three dimensional space and in one dimensional time. Space and time were supposed to exist outside things and events. They were, so to speak, self-dependent, rigid quantities. For things, distances were measured in space. For events, duration was determined in time. Distance and duration belong, according to this conception, to space and time, not to things and events. This conception is opposed by the theory of relativity introduced by Einstein. For this theory, the distance between two things is something that belongs to those things themselves. As a thing has other properties it has also the property of being at a certain distance from a second thing. Besides these relations that are given by the nature of things there is no such thing as space. The assumption of space makes a geometry that is thought for this space, but this same geometry can be applied to the world of things. It arises in a mere thought world. Things have to obey the laws of this geometry. One can say that the events and situations of the world must follow the laws that are established before the observation of things. This geometry now is dethroned by the theory of relativity. What exists are only things and they stand in relations to one another that present themselves geometrically. Geometry thus becomes a part of physics, but then one can no longer maintain that their laws can be established before the observation of the things. No thing has any place in space but only distances relative to other things.

[ 27 ] The same is assumed for time. No process takes place at a definite time; it happens in a time-distance relative to another event. In this way, temporal distances in the relation of things and spatial intervals become homogenous and flow together. Time becomes a fourth dimension that is of the same nature as the three dimensions of space. A process in a thing can be determined only as something that takes place in a temporal and spatial distance relative to other events. The motion of a thing becomes something that can be thought only in relation to other things.

[ 28 ] It is now expected that only this conception will produce unobjectionable explanations of certain physical processes while such processes lead to contradictory thoughts if one assumes the existence of an independent space and independent time.

[ 29 ] If one considers that for many thinkers a science of nature was previously considered to be something that can be mathematically demonstrated, one finds in the theory of relativity nothing less than an attempt to declare any real science of nature null and void. For just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the observation of nature. Contrary to this view, it is now maintained that the things and processes of nature themselves determine the relations of space and time. They are to supply the mathematical element. The only certain element is surrendered to the uncertainty of space and time observations.

[ 30 ] According to this view, every thought of an essential reality that manifests its nature in existence is precluded. Everything is only in relation to something else.

[ 31 ] Insofar as man considers himself within the world of natural things and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of this theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what is “substantial in itself' in the realm of nature but in transcending nature, in the realm of the spirit.

[ 32 ] It will not be possible to evade the theory of relativity for the physical world, but precisely this fact will drive us to a knowledge of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of the observation of nature. That the theory of relativity forces us to think in this way constitutes its value within the development of world conception.

[ 33 ] It was the intention of this book to describe the development of what may be called philosophical activity in the proper sense of the word. The endeavor of such spirits as Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoi and others had for this reason to be left unconsidered, significant as discussion of their contribution must appear when it is a question of following the currents that lead from philosophy into our general spiritual culture.

Those of you who have been attending these group lectures for years will perhaps have noticed that the themes have not been haphazardly chosen but have a certain continuity. In the course of each winter, too, the lectures have always had a certain inner connection, even if, on the surface, this has not been immediately apparent. Therefore it will obviously be of the utmost importance to follow up the various courses that are being held here alongside the actual group evenings, and which are intended for the purpose of bringing newer members up to the level, as it were, of these group lectures; for various things said here cannot be immediately understood by every newcomer. But there is something else we should note as well, which will gradually have to be taken into consideration in the various groups of our German section. As there is a certain inner thread in the lectures, it is incumbent upon men to form each lecture so that it is part of a whole. Therefore it is not possible to say the things that can be presented to advanced participants in that kind of single lecture in such a way that they are equally suitable for newcomers. We could speak about the same theme in a very elementary way, of course, but that would not do in face of the progressive path we are planning to take in the anthroposophical life of this particular group. This again is connected with the fact that the further we progress the more we can anticipate in the way of wide-spread lecture publications and reporting of lectures from one group to another. For with regard to these lectures I give in the groups it is becoming less and less immaterial whether you hear the one on one Monday and the next the following Monday. It may not be immediately apparent to the audience why the one lecture succeeds the other, yet it is important nevertheless; and when you lend lectures to one another you cannot take this into account at all. One lecture might get read before the other, and then it unavoidably gets misunderstood and causes confusion. I want to make a special point of this, as it is an essential part of our anthroposophical life. Even the inserting of a phrase here or there, or the over or under emphasising of a word depends on the whole development of the life of the group. Only when the publication of the lectures can be strictly supervised so that nothing is published unless it has been submitted to me, can any good come of this duplicating and publishing of lectures.

This is also a kind of introduction to the lectures about to be held in this group. There will be a certain inner connection in the course of this winter's lectures and all the preparatory material will eventually be directed towards a definite culmination with which the course will then close. Last week's lecture was a small beginning, and today's lecture will be a kind of continuation. But it will not continue like a newspaper serial, where the thirty-eighth installment follows on after the thirty-seventh. There will be an inner connection, even though the subject matter will appear to differ, and the connection will consist in the fact that the whole series will culminate in the final lectures. So, with these concluding lectures in view, we will start today by sketching the nature of illnesses, and next Monday we will talk about the origin, historic importance and meaning of the “Ten Commandments”. These could well appear to have nothing in common; however, you will eventually see that it all has an inner connection, and that these lectures should not be taken as separate ones, as is often the case with those given for a wider public.

We would like to speak today about the nature of illness from the point of view of spiritual science. As a rule people are not concerned about illness, or one or another type of illness at least, until they themselves fall sick with it, and even then their interest does not go much beyond the cure. That is, they are only concerned about their recovery. How this cure is effected is sometimes a matter of complete indifference, and the pleasantest thing is not to have any further responsibility for the “how”. Most of our contemporaries content themselves with the thought that the people who carry out the job have been appointed to do so by the authorities. In our time there exists in this sphere a much more rabid belief in authority than has ever existed in the religious sphere. The papacy of medicine, irrespective of its various forms, still makes itself felt with great intensity and will do so to an even greater extent in the future. Laymen are in no way to blame for the fact that this can and will be like this. For they do not think about these matters or care in the least about them unless it affects them personally and they suffer from an acute case that requires treatment. Thus a large section of the population calmly looks on whilst the papacy of medicine assumes greater and greater dimensions and insinuates itself into things in all manner of ways, like the way it is now speaking out and interfering so horribly in the education of children and the life of the schools, and claiming its right to a particular therapy. People do not care about the deeper significance that is actually behind all this. They look on whilst one or another law is instituted. People do not want to have any insight into these matters. On the other hand there will always be people who are personally affected and cannot manage with ordinary materialistic medicine, the basis of which does not concern them, but only the fact of whether they can be cured or not, and then they will apply to the people who work out of occultism—and there again they only care about whether they can be cured or not. But they do not care whether public life as a whole, with its methods and its way of understanding things, completely undermines a deeper method arising out of the spirit. Who cares whether the public prevents any cures being effected in the method based on occultism, or cares whether the one who applies the method is put in prison? These things are not taken seriously enough except when people are personally affected. However it is just the task of a really spiritual movement to awaken a consciousness of the fact that there has to be more than an egoistic desire for recovery; in fact there has to be knowledge of the deeper foundations in these matters, and this knowledge has to be made known.

In our age of materialism it appears to anyone who can see to the bottom of these matters as only too obvious why just the theory of illness in particular comes under the strongest influence of materialistic thinking. However, if we follow this or that slogan, or give special credit to this or that method, merely criticising what is trimmed with materialistic theories, despite the fact that it arises out of a scientific basis and is useful in many respects, we shall be making just as much of a mistake as if we were to go to the other extreme and put everything under the heading of psychological cures and suchlike, and fall victim in this way to all manner of one-sidedness. Present-day mankind must, above all, realise more and more that man is a complicated being and that everything to do with man is connected with this complexity of his being. If there is a kind of science holding the opinion that man consists merely of a physical body, it cannot possibly work beneficially with the healthy or the sick human being. For health and sickness, have a relationship to man as a whole and not to one part of him only, namely the physical body.

Nor must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies. Unless you make it your business to know what spiritual science can tell you about the nature of the fourth member of man's being, the ego, then however much you study anatomy and physiology you would not know anything about the nature of blood. That would be quite impossible. And you would never be able to say anything of any value about the illnesses connected with the nature of the blood. For the blood is the expression of the ego nature of man. And if Goethe's words in Faust: “Blood is a very special fluid” [see the lecture: Occult Significance of the Blood, e.Ed] are still quoted today, they do in fact say a very great deal. Present-day science has no inkling of the fact that scientists ought to treat blood, even physical blood, in an entirely different manner from any other organ of man's physical body, because these other organs are the expression of entirely different things. If the glands are the expression, the physical counterpart, of the etheric body, then even physically we have to look for something quite different in the composition of a gland, be it liver or spleen, than we have to look for in the blood that is the expression of a much higher member of man's being, namely the ego. And scientific methods must be guided by this if they are to show us how to work with these things. Now I want to say something which will really only be understood by advanced anthroposophists, yet it is important that it is said.

A materialistically-minded scholar of today takes it as a matter of course that when he makes a prick in the body blood will flow out that can be examined in all the known ways. And blood is described according to the method of investigating its chemical composition in exactly the same way as is done with any other substance, such as an acid. One thing, however, is left out of account, although, needless to say, it is not only bound to be unknown to materialistic science, but it is sure to be considered sheer folly and madness, and yet it is true: the blood flowing in the arteries, and sustaining the living body, is not what flows out when I make the prick and take out a drop. For the moment blood comes out of the body it changes to such an extent that we have to admit it is something quite different; and what flows out as coagulating blood, however fresh it is, is no proof of the living essence within the organism. Blood is the expression of the ego, a member of the human being that is at a high level. Even as physical substance blood is something that you cannot examine physically in its totality at all, because when you are able to see it, it is no longer the blood it was when it flowed in the body. It cannot be looked at physically, for the moment it is exposed to view and can be examined by some method similar to X-ray, you are no longer examining blood but something that is the external image of blood on the physical plane. These things will only gradually be understood. There have always been scientists in the world working out of occultism who have said this, but they have been called things like madmen or philosophers.

Everything to do with man's health or sickness really is bound up with man's manifold nature, with the complicity of his being; hence it is only through a knowledge of man arising out of spiritual science that we can arrive at a conception of man in health and in sickness. There are certain ailments in man's organism which can only be understood when we realise their connection with the nature of the ego, and these ailments also appear in a way—but in a limited way—in the expression of the ego, the blood. Then there are certain ailments in man's organism that point to an illness of the astral body and which therefore affect the external expression of the astral body, the nervous system. Now whilst mentioning this second case I shall have to ask you to be somewhat aware of the subtlety of thought necessary here. When man's astral body has an irregularity that comes to expression in the nervous system, the external image of the astral body, the first thing we notice physically is a certain disability in the functioning of the nervous system. Now when the nervous system cannot do its job in a certain area all kind of symptoms can result, affecting the stomach, head or heart. However, an illness that shows symptoms in the stomach does not necessarily point to a disability of the nervous system in a certain area and originate therefore in the astral body, it can come from something entirely different.

Those types of illnesses connected with the ego itself and therefore also connected with its external expression, the blood, appear as a rule—but only as a rule, for things are not so clear cut in the world, even though you can draw clear lines when you want to make observations—these illnesses appear as chronic illnesses. Various other disturbances appearing to begin with are usually symptoms. One or another symptom may appear, which nevertheless originates in a disturbance in the blood, and that has its origin in an irregularity of that part of the human being that we call the bearer of the ego. I could speak to you for hours about the types of illness that are chronic and which originate from the physical point of view in the blood and from the spiritual point of view in the ego. Those are chiefly the illnesses that are in the proper sense hereditary, and these are the illnesses that can only be understood by those people who look at the being of man from a spiritual point of view. Here and there are people who are chronically ill, who are, in other words, never really fit; they always have one or another thing the matter with them. To get to the bottom of this, we must ask ourselves what the actual basic character of the ego is like. What kind of a person is he? If you understand what life really is, then you will know that definite forms of chronic illnesses are connected with one or another basic soul character of the ego. Certain chronic illnesses will never occur in people who have a serious and dignified attitude to life but only in those of a frivolous nature. This can merely be an indication, to show the way these lectures are leading.

As you see, the first thing you have to ask yourself when somebody comes and says he has been suffering from this or that for years, is what kind of person is he fundamentally? You have to know what basic character type his ego is, otherwise you are bound to go wrong with ordinary medicine, unless you are lucky. The important thing in curing people of these, illnesses which are mainly the really hereditary ones, is to consider their whole surroundings, in so far as they can have a direct or indirect influence on the ego. When you have really got to know this aspect of a person, you may have to advise that he is sent to another natural surrounding, perhaps for the winter, if possible; or, if he has a certain job, to change it and encounter a different aspect of life. The essential thing will be to try to find the setting that will have just the right effect on the character of the ego. To find the right cure, you need, in particular, a wide experience of life, so that you can enter into the person's character and can say: For this person to recover, he must change his job. It is a matter of pinpointing what is necessary from the point of view of his soul nature. Sometimes, perhaps, just in this sphere, no recovery can be achieved at all, because it is impossible to effect a change; in many instances it can be effected, however, if people only know of it. A lot can be done for some people, for example, if they simply live in the mountains instead of the lowlands. These are the things that apply to the kind of illnesses that appear externally as chronic illnesses, and that are connected physically with the blood and spiritually with the ego.

Now we come to those illnesses that have their spiritual origin mainly in irregularities of the astral body and that appear in certain disabilities of the nervous system in one or another direction. Now a large part of the common acute illnesses are connected with what we have just mentioned, in fact most of them. For it is sheer superstition to believe that when someone has a stomach or heart complaint or even a clearly perceptible irregularity somewhere, the right treatment is to deal directly with the symptom. The essential thing could be that the symptom is there because the nervous system is incapable of functioning. Thus the heart can be affected simply because the nervous system has become incapable of functioning in the area where it ought to support the movement of the heart. It is quite unnecessary to maltreat the heart or, as the case may be, the stomach, for they may, in principle, have nothing directly the matter with them, for it is only the nerves that provide for them which are incapable of carrying out their job. If in a case like this the stomach complaint is treated with hydrochloric acid, it would be a mistake comparable to tinkering with an engine that is always running late because you think something is the matter with it—yet it still runs late. For you would find, on closer examination, that the engine-driver always gets drunk before driving; so you would do better to deal with the engine-driver, for the train would be punctual otherwise. So it could well be that with stomach complaints we have to treat the nerves that provide for the stomach instead of the stomach itself. In the domain of materialistic medicine, too, you may perhaps hear various remarks to this effect. But it is not just a matter of saying that with stomach symptoms you have to deal with the nerves first. This achieves nothing. You only achieve something when you know that the nerve is the expression of the astral body and seek for the causes in the irregularities to be found there. The question is, what is the main thing?

The first thing to consider in the treatment of this sort of complaint is diet and finding the right balance between what a person enjoys and what is good for him. What matters is his way of life, not with regard to externalities but regarding what has to be digested and worked through by him, and in this respect nobody can possibly know anything on the basis of purely materialistic science. We need to realise that everything around us in the wide world of the macrocosm has a relationship with our complicated inner world of the microcosm, and every kind of food there is has a definite connection with what is within our organism. We have heard often enough that man has passed through a long evolution, and how the whole of outside nature has been built up out of what has been thrust forth from man. Time and again in our studies we have gone back to the ancient Saturn period, where we found that there was nothing in existence apart from man, who, as it were, thrust forth the other kingdoms of nature: the plants, the animals, and so on. In that evolution man built up his organs in accordance with what they thrust forth. Even when the mineral kingdom was pushed out, certain specific inner organs arose. The heart could not have arisen if certain plants, minerals and mineral possibilities had not arisen externally in the course of time. Now what arose externally has a certain connection with what arose within. And only the person who knows of this connection can prescribe in individual cases how the macrocosmic element outside can be used in the microcosm, otherwise man will experience in a certain way that he is taking in something that is not right for him. So we have to turn to spiritual science for the actual basis of our judgment. It is always superficial to follow purely external laws taken from statistics or chemistry when prescribing dietary treatment. We need quite a different basis, for spiritual knowledge has to be active when we deal with man in health or sickness.

Then there are those types of illness, partly chronic and partly acute, which are connected with the human etheric body, and which therefore come to expression in man's glands. As a rule these illnesses have nothing to do with heredity, but a great deal to do with nationality and race. So that in the case of the illnesses originating in the etheric body and appearing as glandular complaints, we must always ask whether the illness is occurring in a Russian, an Italian, a Norwegian or a Frenchman. For these illnesses are connected with the national character and therefore take quite different forms. Thus for example a great mistake is being made in the field of medicine, for over the whole of Western Europe they have a completely wrong view of spinal consumption. Although they have the right judgment of it for the West [Europeans, they are quite wrong about it where the East European population is concerned, because it has quite a different origin there, as even these things still vary considerably nowadays. Now you will realise that the mixture of peoples affords us a certain survey. Only the person who can distinguish differences in human nature can make any judgment at all. These illnesses are simply treated externally today and lumped together with acute illnesses, whilst they really belong to quite a different field. Above all we must know that the human organs that come under the influence of the etheric body, and which can fall sick as a result of irregularities of the etheric body, have quite definite relationships with one another. There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon—the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know, if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for these things have a direct connection.

In occult medicine these things are also described by applying the images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail—and this would show spiritually in the etheric body—without the illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and yet these are principally those illnesses—and from this you will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field of occultism—for which specific remedies are to be used. This is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals. For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly whether they are connected with the national character, and all the organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the first ones for which specific remedies can be used.

Now perhaps what you are imagining is that if it is necessary to send a person to another place, you will not be able to help him as a rule if he is tied to a job and cannot move. The psychological method is indeed always effective. What is called the psychological method works best of all when the Illness is actually in a person's ego being. Thus when a chronic illness of this type occurs, one that is in the blood, psychological remedies are justified. And if they are carried out in the right way, their effect on the ego will entirely compensate for what impinges on him from outside. Wherever you look you will be able to see the subtle connection between what a man experiences in his soul when he is habitually working behind a work bench and when he gets the chance to enjoy country air for a short while. The joy that lends wings to his soul can be called a psychological method in the widest sense. Then, if the therapist is carrying out his method properly, he can gradually exercise his own influence in place of this, and psychological methods have their strongest justification for this form of illness and should not be overlooked, because most of the illnesses came from an irregularity of the ego being of man.

Then we come to the illnesses arising out of irregularities of the astral body. Although purely psychological methods can be used, they certainly lose their greatest value, therefore they are seldom used for these. Dietary remedies apply here. The type of illness we described in third place are actually the first in which we are justified in using external medicines to assist the course of recovery. If we see man as the complicated being he is, the treatment of illnesses will also be a broad-minded one, and one-sidedness will be avoided.

The only illnesses left now are those that actually originate in the physical body itself, having to do with the physical body, and these are the actual infectious diseases. This is an important chapter and will be considered in greater detail in one of the coming lectures, after we have first of all dealt with the real origin of “Ten Commandments”. For you will see that this really has a connection. Today, therefore, I can only just mention that there is this fourth type of illness, and that a deeper understanding of these involves knowing the nature of everything connected with the human physical body. The basis of these illnesses is not physical but very much of a spiritual nature. When we have looked at the fourth type we shall still not have finished with all the important illnesses, for we shall see that human karma also plays in. That is a fifth category to be considered.

Let us say, then, that we shall gradually attain an understanding of the five different forms of human illness, that stem from the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and also from karmic causes. The sphere of medicine will not improve until this whole sphere includes a knowledge of the higher members of man's being. Up to now we have not had a medical practice that has really come to grips with what is at stake. Although, as with many another occult insight, these things have to be brought up to date and put in a modern form, you must realise that this wisdom is, in some respects, not new.

Medicine arose from spiritual knowledge and has become more and more materialistic. And perhaps in no other science can we see so clearly how materialism has overtaken mankind. In earlier times people were at least conscious of the fact that they had to have a knowledge of man's fourfold being in order to understand it. There have been instances of materialism before, of course, and even earlier than four hundred years ago clairvoyants observed materialistic thinking arising all around them in this sphere. Paracelsus, for instance, who is taken for a madman or dreamer and not understood at all today, drew full attention to the increasing materialism of medical science centred in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and also certain parts of Germany. And just because of his responsible position in the world, Paracelsus felt compelled—as we do today—to draw attention to the difference between medicine based on spiritual knowledge or on materialism. Perhaps it is even more difficult nowadays to achieve anything with paracelsian thinking. For in those days the materialistic approach to medicine was not so rigidly opposed to the paracelsian approach as materialistic science is today to any insight into the real, spiritual nature of man. What Paracelsus said about this, therefore, still applies today, though its significance would be less readily recognised. If we look at the opinions held today by the people working at the dissecting benches and in laboratories, and at the way research is applied to the understanding of man in health and in sickness, we could, to a certain extent, react similarly to the way Paracelsus did. It might not be appropriate, though, to add a plea for understanding and forgiveness, too, perhaps, as Paracelsus did to his local contemporaries in the medical sphere—that is, with any real hope of forgiveness. For Paracelsus himself said he was not a man of good breeding, nor had he moved in high circles; he lacked grace and refinement, therefore he would be forgiven if what he said was not always couched in the best language. Whilst discoursing on the nature of the different illnesses Paracelsus said the following about the foreign and also the German medical doctors: “It is a bad business, all those foreign doctors, to name those in Montpellier, Salerno and Paris, who want to have all the credit and pour scorn on everybody else, yet they themselves know nothing and can do nothing, and it is common knowledge that it is nothing but talk and show. They are not ashamed of their enemas and purgatives, and rely on them even if the patient is dying. They boast about all the anatomy they know, and they cannot even see the tartar on people's teeth, let alone anything else. Fine doctors they are, even without spectacles on their noses. What kind of eyesight and anatomy have you got? You can do no earthly good with them, and see no further than your own noses. They work so hard, too, those German swindlers and thieves of doctors and newly-hatched fools, that when they have seen everything, they know less than they did before. So they choke in filth and corpses and afterwards put on holy airs—they ought to be thrown to the rabble!”

Yesterday we saw what profound contents are concealed within the first words of the Gospel of St. John and we shall now be able to summarize our observations by saying that the writer of this Gospel pointed to the creation of a pre-humanity in the far distant past and indicated that, according to Esoteric Christianity, everything leads back to the Word or the Logos. The Logos was already a creating power even in the ancient Saturn Period; it then became Life while our Earth was passing through its existence as the Sun, and it became Light while the Earth was passing through the ancient Moon state. Under the influence of divine spiritual forces and powers, in the course of the three planetary states of evolution, the human creature reached the point in his development at which he became penetrated by the human ego, the Earth having now developed into our present planet. Thus we may say that a creature, like a kind of seed, came over to the Earth from the ancient Moon, consisting of a physical body, derived from the divine, primal Word; an ether or life body having its source in divine Life; and an astral body issuing from divine Light. Within this creature's inmost being, during life upon the Earth, the light of the ego itself was now enkindled and this three-fold bodily nature, physical, etheric and astral, became capable of saying to itself “I AM.” Thus, in a certain sense, we may call the Earth evolution, the evolution of the “I AM,” the evolution of the self-consciousness of the human race. This “I AM,” this capacity for full self-consciousness, developed slowly and gradually in the course of the evolution of Earth humanity. We must clearly understand how this evolution of Earth humanity proceeded, how slowly and gradually the ego, that is to say, full self-consciousness, made its appearance within it.

There was a stage of our earthly evolution which we call the ancient Lemurian period. It is the earliest period of our life upon the Earth in which men appeared in the form they, in general, possess today. Then, for the first time, what we may call the incarnation of the ego, the true inner being of man, took place within the three bodies, the astral, ether and physical bodies. After that came the Atlantean period when humanity dwelt for the most part upon the ancient continent of Atlantis, a region forming today the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, and which sank beneath the waters through the great Atlantean flood, remembrance of which has been preserved in the deluge-sagas of nearly all peoples. In harmony with their inner natures, men have passed through successive incarnations during the post-Atlantean period right up to our present day. As has been stated, it was in fact during the Lemurian period that our souls were incarnated for the first time in a three-fold entity, consisting of physical body, ether body and astral body, as we have learned to know them. What preceded this will be left for a later consideration. Thus we must go far back into the past if we wish to consider the course of evolution, for the human being evolved very slowly and gradually to his present condition of existence.

From the standpoint of Spiritual Science what does occultism call our “present existence?” It calls it a state of consciousness which the present day human being possesses from the morning when he awakens until the evening when he falls asleep. During that time, by means of his outer physical senses, he sees the objects about him. From the evening when he falls asleep, until the morning when he awakens, he does not see the objects about him. Why is this so? We know that it is because during the day, under present evolutionary conditions, the real inner human being, namely, the ego and astral body, are within the physical and ether bodies upon the physical plane; in other words, they are in the physical world. Thus the astral body and the ego can make use of the physical organs for hearing and seeing in the physical world, for observing physical things. From the evening when we fall asleep, until the morning when we awaken, the ego and astral body are out of the physical world on the astral plane. There they are detached from the physical eyes and ears and therefore are not able to observe what is about them.

The alternating state of waking by day and sleeping by night developed slowly and gradually. This was not yet the case in the ancient Lemurian period when the human being for the first time passed through a physical incarnation. At that time the ego and astral body were only for a very brief portion of the day within the physical body, by no means as long a period as now. Therefore, because the human being was outside of his physical body for a longer time and entered it only for a brief period in a waking state, life during the Lemurian period was very different from life as we experience it. Our state of unconsciousness during the night, when we are not merely in the act of dreaming, is a state that has developed slowly and gradually. Day and night consciousness were very differently apportioned during the Lemurian period. At that time everyone still possessed a dull clairvoyant consciousness, and during the night, when they were out of the physical body and in the spirit world, they perceived this spirit world around them, although not so clearly as we of the present see the physical objects about us during the day. We should not simply compare this perceiving in the spiritual world with the present dreaming. The present dream-state is only like a last stunted remnant of this ancient clairvoyance. However, the same images were perceived at that time as are perceived today in dreams, but they had a very real meaning. Let us be quite clear about the meaning of these images.

In ancient times, the human being, living a very brief portion of the twenty-four hours in waking-consciousness (a much shorter time than we today), saw the external, physical objects very dimly as though wrapped in a mist. The capacity to see physical objects as we do today developed very slowly. At that time he saw the first indication of a physical body enveloped in a mist just as we can see the lamps surrounded by a mist, by a kind of light-aura, when we walk through the streets on a misty evening. This, however, is only an illusion. But that is the way mankind at first saw physical bodies emerging about him, and when he slept he did not sink into unconsciousness, but during his sleep-consciousness, images emerged, pictures in colour and form. At that time there was around him a world, in comparison with which, the most vivid dream-world of today is only a weak, dim echo. These images signified something psychic and spiritual in his environment. At that time, in the beginning of his earthly course, when during his night wanderings he approached a creature harmful to him, he did not see it as we would now see it—for example, he did not see the lion approaching him as a lion's form—but he saw emerging an image of colour and form and instinctively it told him that here was something harmful to him, something that would devour him, something he must avoid. These were true images of something psycho-spiritual occurring about him. All that belonged to the soul and spirit was seen in the night, and evolution proceeded in such a way that slowly and gradually the human being immersed himself in his physical body for a longer and longer time. Ever shorter grew the night, longer and longer lasted the day, and the more he lived within his physical body, the more the nightly clairvoyant images disappeared and the more did the present waking-consciousness emerge.

However, we must not forget that a truly genuine self-consciousness, such as should be acquired during life upon the earth, can only be attained by submersion in a physical body. Prior to this, the human being did not feel himself as an independent entity, but as a part of divine spiritual beings from whom he was descended. Still possessing a dull clairvoyance, he felt himself a part of a divine spiritual consciousness, part of a divine ego, just as the hand feels itself a part of the physical organism. He could not have said of himself “I AM,” but would have said “God is”—and “I in Him.”

As we shall see more and more, a very special mission was reserved for the Earth, which had, during its evolution, passed through three earlier stages, Saturn, Sun and Moon. Do not imagine that the different planetary life-conditions can be considered as existing alongside of one another, one planet exactly equivalent to the other. Divine creation is not simply a repetition of something already existing. Each planetary existence had a very definite mission. The mission of our Earth is the cultivation of the principle of love to its highest degree by those beings who are evolving upon it. When the Earth has reached the end of its evolution, love should permeate it through and through. Let us understand clearly what is meant by the expression: The Earth is the planetary life-condition for the evolution of love.

In Spiritual Science we say that the ancient Moon preceded the Earth. This ancient Moon, as planetary stage of evolution, had also a mission. It did not yet have the task of developing love, but it was the planet or the cosmos of wisdom. Before it reached our earthly condition, our planet passed through the stage of wisdom. A simple and one might say logical observation will illustrate this to you. Just look about you at all the creatures of nature. If you do not observe them merely with your understanding but with the forces of your heart and soul, then you will find wisdom everywhere stamped upon nature. The wisdom of which we are here speaking, is a kind of spiritual substance lying at the foundation of all things. Observe anything you wish in nature, and you will find it there. Take, for example, a piece of the thigh-bone and you will see that it is not composed of a solid mass, but it is a fine interweaving of supports which are arranged into a marvelous structure. And if we seek to discover the law upon which this bone is constructed, we find that it follows the law which develops the greatest strength with the least expenditure of material in order to be able to support the upper part of the human body. Our engineering art is not yet so far advanced that it can build such a highly artistic structure as the all over-ruling wisdom has fashioned. Mankind will not possess such wisdom until later in its evolution. Divine wisdom pervades the whole of nature; human wisdom will only gradually reach this height. In the course of time human wisdom will inwardly acquire what divine wisdom has secreted within the Earth. Just as wisdom was prepared upon the Moon, that it might be found everywhere on the Earth, so is love now being prepared here in this Earth evolution. If you were able to look back upon the ancient Moon with clairvoyant vision, you would see that wisdom was not to be found everywhere at that time. You would find many things still lacking in wisdom. Only gradually throughout the whole of the Moon evolution was wisdom stamped upon the outer world. When the Moon had fully completed its evolution, everything was then pervaded by a wisdom which was to be found everywhere. Inner wisdom first appeared upon the Earth with the human being, with the ego. This inner human wisdom had to be developed by degrees.

Just as wisdom was evolved upon the Moon, in order that it might now be found in all things, so in like manner is love evolving. Love came into existence first in its lowest, its most sensuous form, during the Lemurian period, but during the course of life upon the earth, it will become ever more and more spiritualized, until at last, when the earth has reached the end of its evolution, the whole of existence will have become pervaded with love, as today it is pervaded with wisdom, and this will be accomplished through the activity of human beings if they but fulfil their task.

The Earth will then pass over to a future planetary condition which is called Jupiter. The beings who will wander about upon Jupiter, just as human beings move about upon the earth, will find love exhaling from all creatures, the love which they themselves, as human beings, will have placed there during their life upon the earth. They will find love in everything just as we today find wisdom everywhere. Then human beings will develop love out of their own inner selves in the same way that they are now little by little evolving wisdom. The great cosmic love that here upon the Earth is beginning its existence will then permeate all things. The materialistic mind does not believe in a cosmic wisdom, only in a human wisdom. If men would consider the course of evolution with unprejudiced minds, they would be able to see that all cosmic wisdom in the beginning of the Earth's evolution was advanced as far as human wisdom will be at the end of it. In those times when names were more accurately chosen than they are today, the subjective wisdom active in the human being was called “intelligence,” in contra-distinction to the objective cosmic wisdom. Men do not notice that what they discover in the course of Earth-life had already been won during life upon the Moon and implanted in the earth by divine-spiritual beings. Let us take an example.

How it is drummed into the heads of the school children, the great progress humanity has made through the discovery of paper! But wasps had already produced paper many thousands of years ago, for what the wasps build into their nests consists of exactly the same substance as that out of which men now produce paper and it is produced by the wasp in exactly the same way—only by means of a life-process. The wasp-spirit, the group-soul of the wasps, which is a part of divine-spiritual substance, was the discoverer of paper long before men made the discovery.

The human being, in fact, always follows along groping his way behind the cosmic wisdom. As a principle, all that men will discover in the course of the Earth's evolution is already present in nature. But what the human being will really give to the Earth is love, a love which will evolve from the most sensuous to the most spiritualized form of love. This is the mission of the Earth-evolution. The Earth is the cosmos of love.

Let us ask:—What then is essential for love? What is essential in order that one person love another? It is this—that he be in possession of his full self-consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can love another in the full sense of the word if this love be not a free gift of one person to another. My hand does not love my organism. Only one who is independent, one who is not bound to the other person, can love him. To this end the human being had to become an ego-being. The ego had to be implanted in the threefold human body, so that the Earth might, through mankind, fulfil its mission of love. Therefore, you will understand Esoteric Christianity when it says:—Just as other forces, of which wisdom is the last, streamed down from divine beings during the Moon period, so now love streams into the Earth and the bearer of love can only be the independent ego which develops by degrees in the course of the evolution of the Earth.

The human being, however, had to be very slowly prepared for all this, likewise for his present kind of consciousness. Let us suppose, for instance, that in the ancient Lemurian period, the human being had been immersed in his physical body—he would then at that time have seen the full outer reality, but at such a swift tempo he would not have been able to implant love in the world. He had to be guided little by little to his earthly mission. The first instruction in love was given him during the time of a dawning consciousness, before he possessed full self-consciousness, before he was evolved far enough to observe the objects about him with clear, waking-day consciousness. Thus we see that during those ages when the human being still possessed an ancient, dreamy clairvoyant consciousness, when the soul was for long periods outside the physical body, love was being implanted within him in his dull, not yet self-conscious condition. Let us clearly picture the soul of this human creature of olden times which had not yet reached the height of full self-consciousness.

The human being fell asleep at night, but there existed no abrupt transition from waking to sleeping. Images emerged, vivid dream-pictures, which, however, possessed a living relationship to the spirit world—this means that the human creature familiarized himself with the spirit world during sleep. Into him, into his dull state of consciousness, the Divine Spirit dropped the first seed of all love activity. The power that manifests itself as love in the course of evolution on the Earth streamed at first into mankind during the night. The God who brought the true earthly mission to the Earth revealed Himself first in the night to the dim, ancient clairvoyant consciousness before He could reveal Himself to clear, waking day-consciousness.

Then slowly and gradually the time spent in a dim, clairvoyant state of consciousness became shorter and shorter, the day-consciousness became ever longer, and the boundaries of the aura around the physical objects gradually lessened and disappeared, the objects taking on clearer and clearer outlines. Formerly the sun and moon were seen surrounded by a mighty halo as though lying in a mass of fog. Only slowly did the whole aspect become clear and objects assume distinct outlines. By degrees the human being arrived at this condition. What he then saw externally, while the sun shone upon the earth, revealing to him by means of visible light the whole of earth-life, minerals, plants and animals—all this he experienced as the revelations of the Divine in the outer world.

From the standpoint of Esoteric Christianity, what is it that is visible during waking-day consciousness? In the broadest sense of the word, we may ask:—Of what does the Earth consist? It is a manifestation of divine powers, an outer material manifestation of inner spirituality. If you turn your gaze upward toward the sun or toward what is to be found upon the earth, you will see everywhere a manifestation of Divine-Spirituality. This Divine-Spirituality, in the present form, lying as it does at the foundation of all that appears to clear, waking-day consciousness, in other words, the invisible world behind this entire visible day-world, this is called in Esoteric Christianity, the “Logos” or the “Word.” For just as from the human being speech can finally come forth, be uttered from his own inner being, so too has everything, animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom first come forth into existence from the Logos. Everything is an incarnation of the Logos and just as your soul rules invisibly within your inner being and creates an external body, so too everything in the world of a soul nature creates for itself the external body fitted to it and manifests itself through some sort of physical organism. Where, then, is the physical body of the Logos, of which the Gospel of St. John speaks? It is this we wish today to bring more and more into our consciousness. In its purest form, this external physical body of the Logos appears especially in the outer sunlight. But the sunlight is not merely material light. To spiritual perception, it is just as much the vesture of the Logos, as your outer physical body is the vesture of your soul.

If you were to confront a human being in the same way the greater part of humanity today confronts the sun, you could never learn to know that human being. Your relation to each human individual possessing a feeling, thinking and willing soul would be such that instead of presupposing a psycho-spiritual part within him, you would simply touch a physical body and imagine that it might even be made of papier maché. If, however, you wish to penetrate to the spiritual in the sunlight, you should consider it just as you consider the bodily part of a human being in order to learn to know his inner nature. The sunlight has the same relationship to the Logos as your body has to your soul. In the sunlight something spiritual streams down upon the Earth. If we are able to conceive not only the sun-body, but also the sun-spirit, we find that this spiritual part is the love that streams down upon the Earth. Not alone the physical sunlight awakens the plants into life—they would wither and die if the physical sunlight did not act upon them—but together with the physical sunlight, the warm love of the Godhead streams to earth. Human beings exist in order that they may take into themselves the warm love of the Divine, develop it and return it again to the Divine. But they can only do this by becoming self-conscious ego-beings. Only then will they be able to render back this love.

When men began—at first for a very short time—to live in waking-day consciousness, they could perceive nothing of the light, that light which at the same time enkindled love. The light shone into the darkness, but the darkness was unable yet to comprehend it. If this light, which is at the same time the love of the Logos, had only manifested itself during the short day hours, humanity would not have been able to grasp this light of love. But love streamed into human beings in the dull clairvoyant dream-consciousness of those ancient times. Now, let us glance behind existence at a great significant cosmic mystery.

Let us express it thus:—The cosmic guidance of our earth was of such a character that for a time, in an unconscious way, love streamed into humanity in its dim, clairvoyant state of consciousness and inwardly prepared it to receive this love in full, clear, waking-day consciousness. We have seen that our Earth gradually became the cosmos that was to accomplish this mission of love. The earth is shone upon by the present sun. Just as human beings dwell upon the earth, and little by little receive love into themselves, so too do other much higher beings dwell upon the sun and enkindle love, because the sun has reached a higher stage of existence. The human being is an earth-dweller and to be an earth-dweller means to be a creature which appropriates love unto itself during the Earth-period. A sun-dweller in our time means a being that can enkindle love, a being that can permit love to flow into the earth. The earth-dweller would not have developed love, would not have been able to receive it, had not the sun-dwellers sent down ripened wisdom to them with the rays of light. Because the light of the sun streams down upon the earth, love is developed there. That is a very real truth. Those beings who are so exalted that they can pour forth love have made the sun their scene of action.

When the ancient Moon had completed its evolution, there were seven great beings of this kind who had progressed far enough to pour forth love. Here we touch upon a deep mystery which Spiritual Science reveals. In the beginning of the Earth-evolution, there was on the one side the childlike humanity which was to receive love and become ready for the reception of the ego—and on the other side there was the sun which separated from the earth and rose to a more exalted existence. Seven principle Spirits of Light, who at the same time were the dispensing Spirits of Love, were able to evolve upon this sun. Only six of them, however, made the sun their dwelling-place and what streams down to us in the physical light of the sun contains within it the spiritual force of love from these six Spirits of Light or, as they are called in the Bible, the six Elohim. One separated from the others and took a different path for the salvation of humanity. He did not choose the sun but the moon for his abode. And this Spirit of Light, who voluntarily renounced life upon the sun and chose the moon instead, is none other than the one whom the Old Testament calls “Jahve” or “Jehova.” This Spirit of Light who chose the moon as a dwelling-place is the one who from there pours ripened wisdom down upon the earth, thus preparing the way for love. Now, let us consider for a moment this mystery which lies behind the outer facts.

The night belongs to the moon and it belonged to the moon to a much greater degree in that ancient time when the human being was not yet able to receive the force of love in the direct rays of the sun. At that time he received the reflected force of ripened wisdom from the moonlight. This ripened wisdom streamed down upon him from the moonlight during the time of night-consciousness. Therefore, Jahve is called the Ruler of the Night who prepared humanity for the love that was later to manifest during full waking-consciousness. Thus we can look back to that ancient past in human evolution when spiritually that event occurred which is merely symbolized by the heavenly bodies, the sun on the one side, the moon on the other. (See drawing). During the night, at certain times, the moon sends down to us the reflected force of the sun, but it is the same light which also shines upon us directly from the sun. Thus in ancient times, Jahve or Jehova reflected the force of matured wisdom, the force of the six Elohim, and sent this force down into human beings while they slept, preparing them to become capable later, by degrees, of receiving the power of love during waking-day consciousness.

The above drawing attempts in a symbolic manner to show the waking-day human being when his physical and etheric bodies are dependent upon the Divine and his ego and astral body are within the physical and ether bodies upon the physical plane. Here the whole human organism is shone upon by the sun from without. We now know that for the humanity of primeval ages, night was much longer and much more filled with activity than it is at present. The astral body and ego were then outside of the physical and ether bodies, the ego existing wholly within the astral world, and the astral body sinking into the physical body from without, having, however, its entire inner being still embedded in the divine-spiritual world. Therefore, the sun could not shine directly upon the human astral body and enkindle in it the force of love. Hence, the moon, which reflects the sunlight, was active through Jahve or Jehova. The moon is the symbol of Jahve or Jehova and the sun is none other than the symbol for the Logos, which is the sum of the other six Elohim. This drawing, which you should study, and upon which you should meditate, tries to indicate this in a symbolic way and if you reflect upon it, you will discern what deep, mystery-truths are presented in it, namely: that during long periods of time, in sleep-consciousness, the force of love was being implanted in human beings by Jehova, in a manner of which they were themselves unconscious. In this way they were being made capable of experiencing the Logos, of feeling the force of Its love. One can ask:—How was this possible, how could that take place? We come now to the other side of the mystery.

We have said that the human being was destined for self-conscious love upon the earth. He must, therefore, have a leader, a teacher, during his clear day-consciousness, a leader who stands before him so that he can be perceived by him. Now it was only during the night, in dim consciousness, that love could be implanted within the human being. But little by little something happened, something happened in full actuality which made it possible for him to see outwardly, physically, the Being of Love itself. But how could that occur? It could only take place, because the Being of Divine Love, the Being of the Logos, became a man of flesh, whom men by means of their physical senses could perceive upon the earth. It was because mankind had developed to a condition of perceiving by means of outer senses that God, the Logos, had Himself to become a sense-being. He had to appear in a physical body. This was fulfilled in Christ-Jesus, and the historical appearance of Christ Jesus means that the forces of the six Elohim, or of the Logos, were incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of our Christian era and were actually present in Him in the visible world. That is the important thing. The inner force of the sun, the force of the Logos-Love assumed a physical human form in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. For, like an external object, like an outer being, God had to appear to the earthly, human sense-consciousness in a bodily form.

You will ask what was that Being Who appears at the beginning of our era as Christ-Jesus? It was the incarnation of the Logos, of the six other Elohim, whose advent had been prepared by Jahve-God who preceded them. This figure of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ or the Logos was incarnated, brought into human life, into human history itself, what previously streamed down upon the earth from the sun, what was present only in the sunlight. “The Logos became flesh.” It is upon this fact that the Gospel of St. John places the greatest importance and the writer of this Gospel had to lay great emphasis upon it because it is a fact that after the appearance of a few initiated Christian pupils who understood what had occurred, there followed others who could not fully understand it. They understood full well that at the foundation of all material things, behind all that appears to us in substantial form, there exists a psycho-spiritual world. But what they could not comprehend was that the Logos itself, by being incarnated in an individual human being, became physically visible for the physical sense-world. This they could not comprehend. Therefore, that teaching which appeared in the early Christian centuries called the “Gnosis,” differs from the true Esoteric Christianity on this point. The writer of the Gospel of St. John pointed to this fact in powerful words, when he said: “No, you should not look upon the Christ as a super-sensible, ever invisible being only, one Who is the foundation of all material life, but you should consider this the important thing: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’” This is the fine distinction between Esoteric Christianity and the primal Gnosis. The Gnosis, as well as Esoteric Christianity recognizes the Christ, but the former only as a spiritual being and in Jesus of Nazareth it sees at most a human herald, more or less bound to this spiritual being. It holds firmly to an ever invisible Christ. On the contrary, Esoteric Christianity has always held the idea of the Gospel of St. John, which rests upon the firm foundation of the words: “And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us!” He Who was there in the visible world is an actual incarnation of the six sun Elohim, of the Logos! With the incarnation of the Logos, the earthly mission—or in other words, what the earth was to become through the Event of Palestine—first really began. Previously, all was only a preparation.

What then did the Christ, who dwelt within the body of Jesus of Nazareth, especially have to represent Himself to be? It may be said He had to represent himself as the great bringer and quickener of the self-conscious, independent human being. Let us express this living Christ-teaching in a few short, paradigmatic sentences. The earth exists in order that full self-consciousness, the “I AM,” may be given to mankind. Previously, everything was a preparation for this self-consciousness, for this “I AM;” and the Christ was that Being Who gave the impulse that made it possible for every human being—each as an individual—to experience the “I AM.” Only with His advent was the powerful impulse given which carries earth humanity forward with a mighty bound. We can follow this by means of a comparison of Christianity with the Old Testament teaching. In the latter, the human being did not yet fully feel the “I AM” in himself. He still possessed a remnant of a dreamy state of consciousness, held over from those ancient times when he did not feel himself as a personality, but as a part of a Divine Being, just as the animal today is still a member of a group-soul. Mankind had its beginning in the group-soul and then advanced to a state of independent, personal existence, in which every individual experiences the “I AM,” and the Christ is the force that has brought it to this consciousness of the “I AM.” Let us consider this for a moment in its full inner significance.

The follower of the Old Testament did not feel himself as much enclosed within his own individual personality as did the follower of the New Testament. He did not yet say as a personality, “I am an I.” He felt himself within the whole ancient Jewish people and experienced the group-ego of his folk. Let us enter in a living way into the consciousness of a follower of the Old Testament. The Christian feels the “I AM” and gradually will learn to feel it more and more, but the follower of the Old Testament did not feel the “I AM” in this way. He felt himself as a member of the entire folk and looked up to its group-soul. And if he wished to express this in words, he would have said: “My consciousness reaches up to the Father of the whole people, to Abraham; we—I and Father Abraham—are one. A common ego encompasses us all, and I only feel myself safe within the spiritual substantiality of the world when I feel myself resting within the whole folk-substance.” Thus the follower of the Old Testament looked up to Father Abraham and said: “I and Father Abraham are one! In my veins flows the same blood that flows in the veins of Abraham.” He felt Father Abraham as the root from which every individual Abrahamite had sprung as a stem.

Then Christ-Jesus came and said to his nearest, most intimate initiates: Hitherto, mankind has judged only according to the flesh, according to blood-relationship. Through this blood-relationship, men have been conscious of reposing within a higher invisible union. But you should believe in a still higher spiritual relationship, in one that reaches beyond the blood-tie. You should believe in a spiritual Father-substance in which the ego is rooted, and which is more spiritual than the substance which as a group-soul binds the Jewish people together. You should believe in what reposes within me and within every human being, in what is not only one with Abraham, but one with the very divine foundation of the world. Therefore Christ-Jesus, according to the Gospel of St. John, emphasizes the words: “Before Father Abraham was, was the I AM!” My primal ego mounts not only to the Father-Principle that reaches back to Abraham, but my ego is one with all that pulses through the entire cosmos, and to this my spiritual nature soars aloft. I and the Father are one! These are important words which one should experience; then will one feel the forward bound made by mankind, a bound which advanced human evolution further in consequence of that impulse given by the advent of the Christ. The Christ was the mighty quickener of the “I AM.”

Now, let us try to hear a little of what His most intimate initiates said, how they expressed what had been revealed to them. They said: Heretofore, no individual physical human being has ever existed to whom this name of “I AM” could be applied; He was the first to bring to the world the “I AM” in its full significance. Therefore, they named Christ-Jesus the “I AM.” That was the name in which the closest initiates felt themselves united, the name which they understood, the name “I AM.” We must in this way delve deeply into the most significant chapters of the Gospel of St. John. If we take that chapter where we find the words: “I am the Light of the world,” we must interpret them literally, quite literally. Now, what was this “I AM” which for the first time appeared in carnate form? It was the force of the Logos that streamed to earth in the sunlight. All through the entire eighth chapter, beginning with the twelfth verse which is usually entitled “Jesus, the Light of the World,” we find a transcription of this profound truth concerning the meaning of the “I AM.” When you read this chapter, emphasize the words “I” or “I AM” wherever they appear and realize that “I AM” was the name in which the initiates felt themselves united. Then you will understand it and it will seem to you that this chapter must then be read in somewhat the following manner:

Then Jesus spoke to His disciples and said: That which is able to say “I AM” to itself, is the Force of the Light of the World, and whoever follows after me will see in clear, waking consciousness what those who wander in darkness do not see.

But those who clung to the old belief that only by night can the Light of Love be implanted within the human being, those who were called the Pharisees, answered: Thou callest upon thy “I AM” but we call upon Father Abraham. In this way we feel the power which justifies us in acting as self-conscious beings. We feel ourselves strong when we immerse ourselves in the substance of a common ego which reaches to Father Abraham.

Jesus said:—If one speaks of the I, as I speak, then is the testimony a true one; for I know that this I comes from the Father, from the primeval foundation of the world and I know whither it tends.

Now, let us consider those important words of Chapter VIII, verse 15, which should be translated in the following manner:

Ye judge all things according to the flesh, but I judge not the perishable that is in the flesh.

And if I judge, then is my judgment true. For the I does not exist for itself alone, but it is united with the Father from whom it has descended.

That is the meaning of this passage. Thus everywhere you find reference to a common Father. We are now able to bring the idea of the Father still more clearly before our souls. Then we see that the words, “Before Father Abraham was, was the I AM,” contain the living essence of the Christian doctrine.

Today we have gone deeply into the words of the Gospel of St. John, more deeply than we would have been able had I interpreted them from an external point of view. We have drawn these words out of Spiritual Wisdom and have alluded to certain important words in the Gospel of St. John which show the very essentials of Christianity. We shall see that just by understanding such germinal and primal key-words, light and clarity will be brought into the whole of the Gospel.

Let us consider all this as a teaching that was given in the Christian esoteric schools, a teaching which the writer of the Gospel has transcribed—in a way which we shall discuss—in order that he might hand it down to posterity for those who really wish to penetrate into its meaning.

[ 1 ] In the observation of man from the point of view of a supersensible mode of cognition, the general principles of this method become immediately applicable. This observation rests upon the recognition of the “revealed mystery” within the individual human being. Only a part of what supersensible cognition apprehends as the human being is accessible to the senses and to the intellect dependent upon them, namely, the physical body. In order to elucidate the concept of this physical body, our attention must first be turned to that phenomenon which, as the great riddle, lies spread out over all observation of life, that is, to death and, in connection with it, to so-called lifeless nature—the mineral kingdom—which always bears death within it. We have, thereby, referred to facts that are only fully explainable through supersensible knowledge, and to which a large part of this volume must be devoted. Here, however, a few thoughts must first be offered for the sake of orientation.

[ 2 ] Within the manifest world, the physical body is the part of man having the same nature as the mineral world. On the other hand, what differentiates man from the mineral cannot be considered as physical body. Especially important in an unbiased consideration is the fact that death lays bare the part of man that, after death, is of the same nature as the mineral world. We can point to the corpse as that part of man subject to the processes of the mineral realm. It can be emphasized that in this member of man's being, the corpse, the same substances and forces are active as in the mineral realm, but it is necessary to emphasize, equally strongly, the fact that at death the decay of the physical body occurs. Yet we are also justified in saying that while it is true that the same substances and forces are active in both the human physical body and the mineral, their activity during life is dedicated to a higher purpose. Only when death has occurred is their activity similar to that of the mineral world. They then appear as they must appear, according to their own nature, namely, as the dissolver of the physical bodily form.

[ 3 ] Thus, in man we have to differentiate sharply between the visible and the concealed. For during life the concealed must wage constant battle against the substances and forces of the mineral element in the physical body. When this battle ceases, the mineral activity comes to the fore. We have thereby drawn attention to the point where the science of the supersensible must enter. It must seek that which wages the above-mentioned battle. It is just this that is hidden from sense-observation and is only accessible to supersensible observation. In a later chapter of this work we shall consider how the human being is able to reach the point where this hidden something becomes manifest to him just as the phenomena of the senses are manifest to the ordinary eye. Here, however, we shall describe the result of supersensible observation.

[ 4 ] It has already been indicated that the description of the path on which man attains to a higher perception can be of value to him only after he has become acquainted in simple narrative form with the disclosures of supersensible research. For in regard to the supersensible realm it is possible to comprehend what has not yet been observed. Indeed, the right path toward perception is that which proceeds from comprehension.

[ 5 ] Even though that hidden something, which in the physical body carries on the battle against disintegration, is only observable by higher perception, yet its effects are clearly evident to the reasoning power that limits itself to the manifest. These effects express themselves in the form or shape into which the mineral substances and forces of the physical body are fashioned during life. This form disappears by degrees and the physical body becomes a part of the rest of the mineral world when death has occurred. Supersensible perception, however, is able to observe, as an independent member of the human entity, what prevents the physical substances and forces during life from taking their own path, which leads to dissolution of the physical body. Let us call the independent member the ether or lifebody.—In order to prevent misunderstandings from the very beginning, two things should be borne in mind concerning this designation of a second member of the human entity. The word “ether” is used here in a sense quite different from the one in use in present day physics, which, for example, designates the vehicle of light as ether. Here, however, the word will be limited to the meaning given above. It will be used for what is accessible to higher perception and for what is recognizable to sense-observation only in its effects, that is through its ability to give a definite form and shape to the mineral substances and forces existing in the physical body. The word “body” also must not be misunderstood. In designating the higher things of existence, it is necessary to use the words of ordinary language, and for sense-observation these words express only the sensory. From the standpoint of the senses, the ether body is, naturally, nothing of a bodily nature, however tenuous we may picture it.¹

[ 6 ] Having reached, in the presentation of the supersensible, the mention of this ether body or life body, the point has also been reached where such a concept will have to encounter the opposition of many present-day opinions. The evolution of the human spirit has led to the point where in our age the discussion of such a member of the human organism must be considered as something unscientific. The materialistic mode of thought has reached the point of seeing in the living body nothing but a combination of physical substances and forces, like those to be found in the so-called lifeless body, in the mineral. The combination in the living is supposed to be more complicated than in the lifeless, however. Not so long ago, ordinary science, too, held still other points of view. Whoever has followed the writings of many serious scientists of the first half of the nineteenth century realizes that at that time “real natural scientists” were conscious of the fact that something exists in the living body besides what is present in the lifeless mineral. They spoke of a “life force.” This “life force,” to be sure, is not visualized as having the nature of the lifebody designated here, but an inkling that something of the kind exists, underlies such a concept. This “life force” was thought of as though supplementing in the living body the physical substances and forces as the magnetic force supplements the mere iron in the magnet. Then came the time when this “life force” was discarded from the store of scientific concepts. Purely physical and chemical causes were to suffice for everything. In this respect, a reaction has set in today among many modern scientific thinkers. It is admitted on many sides that the assumption of something similar to “life force” is not, after all, pure nonsense. The scientist who admits this, however, will not be inclined to make common cause with the point of view presented here concerning the life body. It is useless, as a rule, to enter into a discussion, from the standpoint of supersensible knowledge, with people holding such views. It ought rather be the concern of this knowledge to recognize that the materialistic mode of thought is a necessary concomitant phenomenon of the great progress in natural science in our age. This progress rests upon an enormous improvement in the means of sense-observation, and it lies in the nature of man, during his evolution, at times to bring to a certain degree of perfection particular faculties at the cost of others. Exact sense-observation, which has developed so significantly through natural science, caused the cultivation of those human capacities that lead into “hidden worlds” to retreat into the background, but the time has come again when this cultivation is necessary. Acknowledgment of the concealed, however, will not be won by contending against opinions that result with logical accuracy from the denial of the concealed, but by placing the concealed itself in the proper light. Then those for whom “the time has come” will acknowledge it.

[ 7 ] It was necessary to speak of this here in order to keep people from assuming that the author is ignorant of the viewpoint of natural science when he speaks of an “ether body” that in many circles is considered as something purely fantastic.

[ 8 ] This ether body, then, is a second member of the human entity. For supersensible cognition, it possesses a higher degree of reality than the physical body. A description of its appearance to supersensible perception can only be given in a subsequent chapter of this book after the sense in which such descriptions are to be taken has become clear. For the present it may suffice to say that the ether body penetrates the physical completely and that it is to be looked upon as a kind of architect of the latter. All organs are preserved in their form and shape by means of the currents and movements of the ether body. The physical heart is based upon an “etheric heart,” the physical brain upon an “etheric brain,” and so forth. The ether body is organized like the physical body, only with greater complexity. Wherever in the physical body separated parts exist, in the ether body everything is in living, interweaving motion.

[ 9 ] The human being possesses this ether body in common with the plants, just as he possesses the physical body in common with the mineral element. Everything living has its ether body.

[ 10 ] Supersensible observation advances from the ether body to a further member of the human entity. In order to aid the student in forming a visualization of this member, it points to the phenomenon of sleep, just as it pointed to the phenomenon of death when it spoke of the ether body. All human endeavor rests upon activity in the waking state, in so far as the manifest is concerned. This activity, however, is only possible if man again and again gathers new strength for his exhausted forces from sleep. Action and thought disappear in sleep; all suffering, all pleasure are submerged for conscious life. As though out of hidden, mysterious depths, conscious forces arise out of the unconsciousness of sleep as man awakens. It is the same consciousness that sinks into shadowy depths when we go to sleep and arises again when we awaken. The power that awakens life again and again out of a state of unconsciousness is, according to supersensible cognition, the third member of the human entity, We may call it the astral body. Just as the physical body is unable to retain its form by means of the mineral substances and forces contained in it, but only by being interpenetrated by the ether body, so likewise the forces of the ether body are unable, by themselves, to illuminate this body with the light of consciousness. An ether body, left entirely to itself, would have to remain in a continuous state of sleep. We might also say: it could only maintain a plant-existence within the physical body. An awakened ether body is illuminated by an astral body. For sense-observation, the activity of the astral body disappears when man sinks into sleep. For supersensible observation, the astral body still exists, but it appears to be separated or withdrawn from the ether body. Sense-observation is not concerned with the astral body itself, but only with its effects within the manifest, and during sleep these effects are not directly present. In the same sense that man has his physical body in common with the minerals, his ether body with the plants, he is, in regard to his astral body, of the same nature as the animals. Plants are in a continuous state of sleep. A person who does not judge accurately in these things can easily fall into the error of ascribing a kind of consciousness also to plants that is similar to that of animals and men in their waking state. That, however, can happen only if he has an unclear idea of the nature of consciousness. It is then stated that if an external stimulus is applied to the plant it makes certain movements like the animal. One speaks of the “sensitivity” of some plants that, for example, contract their leaves if certain outer stimuli act upon them. Yet it is not the characteristic of consciousness that a being reacts to certain stimuli, but that the being experiences something in its inner nature that adds something new to the mere reaction. Otherwise, one could also speak of consciousness when a piece of iron expands under the influence of heat. Consciousness is present only when, through the effect of heat, the being, for example, inwardly experiences pain.

[ 11 ] The fourth member of his being that supersensible cognition must ascribe to man has nothing in common with the world of the manifest surrounding him. It is what distinguishes him from his fellow-creatures and through which he is the crown of creation belonging to him. Supersensible cognition forms a conception of this additional member of the human entity by calling attention to the essential difference in the experiences of waking life. This difference appears at once when man realizes that in the waking state he stands, on the one hand, always in the midst of experiences that of necessity come and go, and that, on the other hand, he has experiences in which this is not the case. This becomes especially clear when human and animal experiences are compared. The animal experiences with great regularity the influences of the outer world, and under the influence of heat and cold, pain and pleasure, under certain regularly recurring processes of its body, it becomes conscious of hunger and thirst. The life of man is not exhausted with such experiences. He can develop passions and desires that transcend all this. In the case of the animal it would always be possible, were we able to go far enough, to show where the cause for an action or sensation lies, outside of or within the body. With man this is by no means the case. He can produce desires and passions for whose origin neither the cause within nor without his body is sufficient. We must ascribe a special source to everything that falls within this domain. In the light of supersensible science this source can be seen in the human ego. The ego can, therefore, be called the fourth member of the human entity.—If the astral body were left to itself, pleasure and pain, feelings of hunger and thirst would take place in it; but what would not occur Is the feeling that there is something permanent in all this. Not the permanent as such is here called the “ego,” but what experiences this permanency. We must formulate the concepts precisely in this realm, if misunderstandings are not to arise. With the becoming aware of something enduring something permanent in the change of the inner experiences the dawning of the “ego feeling” begins. The fact that a being feels hunger, for example, cannot give it an ego feeling. Hunger arises when the renewed causes of it make themselves felt within the being in question. It pounces upon its food just because these renewed causes are present. The ego feeling appears when not only these renewed impulses drive the human being to seek food, but when pleasure has arisen at a previous appeasement of hunger and the consciousness of this pleasure has remained, thus making not only the present experience of hunger, but the past experience of pleasure the driving force in the human being's search for food.—Without the presence of the ether body, the physical body would decay. Without the illumination by the astral body, the ether body would sink into unconsciousness. In like manner the astral body would have to let the past sink, again and again, into oblivion, were it not for the “ego” to carry this past over into the present. What death is for the physical body, and sleep for the ether body, oblivion is for the astral body. One might also say that life belongs to the ether body, consciousness to the astral body, and memory to the ego.^c1

[ 12 ] It is even easier to fall into the error of ascribing memory to animals than it is to ascribe consciousness to plants. It is very natural to think of memory when a dog recognizes its master whom he has not seen perhaps for a long time. Yet, in reality, this recognition does not rest upon memory, but upon something quite different. The dog feels a certain attraction to its master. This attraction proceeds from the master's personality. This personality causes pleasure in the dog when the master is in its presence, and every time the master's presence reoccurs, it causes a renewal of this pleasure. Memory, however, is only present when a being not only feels with its experiences in the present, but when it retains also those of the past. One might acknowledge this and still fall into the error of thinking that the dog has memory. For it might be said that the dog mourns when its master leaves it, therefore it has retained a memory of him. That also is an incorrect conclusion. Through sharing the master's life, his presence becomes a need to the dog and it, therefore, experiences his absence in the same way that it experiences hunger. Whoever does not make these distinctions, will not arrive at clarity concerning the true relationships of life.

[ 13 ] Out of certain prejudices, one might object to this exposition by maintaining that it cannot be known whether or not there exists in the animal anything similar to human memory. Such an objection, however, is the result of untrained observation. Anyone who can observe quite factually how the animal behaves in the complex of its experiences notices the difference between its behavior and that of the human being, and he realizes that the animal's behavior corresponds to the non-existence of memory. For supersensible observation this is quite clear. Yet, what arises as direct experience in supersensible observation may also be known by its effects in this domain through sense-perception permeated by thought activity. If one says that man is aware of his memory through inner soul-observation, something he cannot carry out in the case of the animal, one states something based upon a fatal error. What man has to say to himself about his capacity for memory he cannot derive from inner soul-observation, but only from what he experiences with himself in relation to the things and occurrences of the outer world. Man has these experiences with himself and with another human being and also with animals in exactly the same way. He is blinded by pure illusion when he believes that he judges the existence of memory merely by means of inner observation. The power underlying memory may be called an inner power; the judgment concerning this power is acquired, also in regard to one's own person, through the outer world by directing one's attention to the relationships of life. Just as one is able to judge these relationships in regard to oneself, so one can judge them in regard to the animal. In regard to such things our current psychology suffers from its wholly untrained, inexact ideas, deceptive to a great degree because of errors in observation.

[ 14 ] Memory and oblivion signify for the ego what waking and sleeping signify for the astral body. Just as sleep permits the cares and troubles of the day to disappear into nothingness, oblivion spreads a veil over the bad experiences of life, blotting out a part of the past. Just as sleep is necessary for the restoration of the exhausted life forces, so man has to eradicate certain parts of the past from his memory if he is to approach new experiences freely and without bias. But precisely through forgetting, strength develops for perception of the new. Consider certain facts, like that of learning to write. All the details the child has to experience in learning to write are forgotten. What remains is the ability to write. How would man be able to write if at every stroke of the pen all the past experiences in learning to write were to arise again in the soul as memory?

[ 15 ] Memory appears in various stages. Its simplest form occurs when a person observes an object and, after turning away, is able to call up its mental image, is able to visualize it. He has formed this image while perceiving the object. A process has taken place between his astral body and his ego. The astral body has aroused the consciousness of the outer impression of the object. Yet knowledge of the object would last only as long as the latter is present, if the ego were not to absorb this knowledge and make it its own.—It is at this point that supersensible perception separates the bodily element from the soul nature. One speaks of the astral body as long as one considers the arising of knowledge of an object that is present. What, however, gives permanence to this knowledge one designates as soul. From what has been said we can see at the same time how closely the human astral body is connected with that part of the soul that gives permanence to knowledge. Both are united into one member of the human entity. This union, therefore, may also be called astral body. If we desire an exact designation, we may call the human astral body the soul body, the soul, in so far as it is united with this soul body, we may call the sentient soul.

[ 16 ] The ego rises to a higher stage of its being when it directs its activity toward what it has made its own out of the knowledge of the objects. This is the activity by which the ego severs itself more and more from the objects of perception in order to work within what it has made its own. The part of the soul in which this occurs may be designated the intellectual or mind soul.—It is characteristic of both the sentient and intellectual souls that they work with what they receive through the impressions of the objects perceived by the senses, and what is retained from this in memory. The soul is here completely surrendered to what is external to it. What it makes its own through memory it has also received from outside. But it can pass beyond all this. It is not alone sentient soul and intellectual soul. For supersensible perception it is easiest to give an idea of this passing beyond by pointing to a simple fact, the comprehensive significance of which, however, must be appreciated. This fact is the following: In the whole range of language there is one name that, through its very nature, distinguishes itself from every other name. That name is “I.” Every other name may be given by every man to the object or being to whom it applies. The “I” as designation for a being has meaning only when this being applies it to itself. The name “I” can never resound to the ear of a human being from without as his designation; only the being himself can apply it to himself. “I am an ‘I’ to myself only. For every other person I am a ‘you’ and everyone else is for me a ‘you.’ ” This fact is the outer expression of a deeply significant truth. The true nature of the “I” is independent of all that is external; therefore its name “I” cannot be called to it by anything external. Those religious denominations that have consciously maintained their relationship with supersensible perception designate the “I” as the “Ineffable Name of God.” By using this expression, reference is made to what has been indicated. Nothing of an external nature has access to that part of the soul with which we are concerned here. Here is the “hidden sanctuary” of the soul. Only a being with whom the soul is of like nature can gain entrance there. The God who dwells within man speaks when the soul becomes aware of itself as an I. Just as the sentient and intellectual souls live in the outer world, so a third soul member immerses itself in the Divine when the soul gains a perception of its own being.

[ 17 ] The above conceptions may easily be misunderstood as an attempt to identify the I with God. But it has not been stated that the I is God, but only that it is of the same nature and essence as the Divine. Would anyone contend that a drop of water is the sea when he says that the drop is of the same essence or substance as the sea? If we wish to use a comparison, we may say that the drop of water has the same relationship to the sea that the I has to the Divine. Man can find the Divine within himself because his innermost being is drawn from the Divine. Thus he acquires, through this, the third member of his soul, an inner knowledge of himself, just as he gains through his astral body a knowledge of the outer world. Therefore, occult science can call this third member of the soul the consciousness soul; and, in this sense, the soul consists of three members: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul, just as the corporeal part of man consists of three members—the physical body, the ether body, and the astral body.

[ 18 ] Psychological errors of observation, similar to those already mentioned concerning the judging of the capacity of memory, make it difficult to gain the proper insight into the nature of the I. Much that people believe they understand can be regarded as a refutation of the above, yet it is in reality a confirmation. This is the case, for example, with the remarks about the I which Eduard von Hartmann makes in his Outline of Psychology ² “In the first place, consciousness of self is more ancient than the word I. Personal pronouns are a rather late product of the evolution of languages and have only the value of abbreviations. The word I is a short substitute for the speaker's own name, but a substitute that each speaker, as such, uses for himself, no matter by what proper name others may call him. Consciousness of self can be developed in animals and in uneducated deaf and dumb persons to a high degree, even without reference to a proper name. Consciousness of the proper name can fully replace the lack of use of the word I. With this insight the magical nimbus is eliminated which for many people envelops the little word I; it cannot add the slightest thing to the concept of self-consciousness, but receives its whole content solely from the latter.” It is possible to be quite in agreement with such points of view; also with the contention that no magical nimbus be bestowed upon the little word, I, which would only dim a thoughtful consideration of the matter. But the nature of a thing is not decided by the way the verbal designation for this thing has gradually been brought about. The important point is the fact that the essential nature of the ego in self-consciousness is “more ancient than the word I” and that man is compelled to use this little word—endowed with the qualities belonging to it alone—for what he experiences, in his reciprocal relationship with the outer world, differently from the way the animal can experience it. Nothing can be known concerning the nature of the triangle by showing how the “word” triangle has been evolved; likewise, nothing can be decided concerning the nature of the I by knowing how this word has taken form in the evolution of language out of a different verbal usage.

[ 19 ] The true nature of the I reveals itself only in the consciousness soul. For while the soul sinks itself into other things in feeling and intellect, as consciousness soul it takes hold of its own being. Therefore this I can be perceived by the consciousness soul only through a certain inner activity. The visualizations of external objects are formed just as these objects come and go, and these visualizations continue to work in the Intellect by means of their own force. But if the I is to observe itself, it cannot simply surrender itself; it must, through inner activity, first lift its being out of its own depths in order to have a consciousness of it. With the perception of the I, with self-contemplation, an inner activity of the I begins. Through this activity, the perception of the I within the consciousness soul has a significance for man quite different from the observation of all that reaches him through the three corporeal members and the two other members of the soul. The force that discloses the I within the consciousness soul is indeed the same force that manifests in all the rest of the world. This force does not, however, appear directly in the body and in the lower members of the soul, but reveals itself by degrees in its effects. The lowest manifestation is the manifestation through the physical body; this then mounts up by stages to what fills the intellectual soul. One might say that, with each step upward, one of the veils that envelop the hidden falls away. In what fills the consciousness soul, the hidden enters unveiled into the innermost temple of the soul. Yet it appears there only like a drop out of the ocean of all-pervading spirituality. Here, however, man must first take hold of this spirituality. He must recognize it in himself, then he will be able to find it also in its manifestations.

What here like a drop penetrates into the consciousness soul, occult science calls the spirit. Thus the consciousness soul is united with the spirit, which is the hidden in all that is manifest. If man wishes to take hold of the spirit in all manifestation, he must do it in the same way he takes hold of the ego in the consciousness soul. He must direct the activity that has led him to the perception of this I toward the manifest world. He, thereby, develops to higher stages of his being. He adds something new to the corporeal and soul members. The next thing is that he, himself, also conquer what lies hidden within the lower members of his soul, and this happens through his work on his soul, proceeding from the ego. How man is engaged in this work becomes evident if one compares a person who still surrenders himself to his lower passions and so-called sensual lust, with a noble idealist. The latter develops out of the former if he rids himself of certain low inclinations and turns toward nobler ones. In doing so he has worked on his soul, ennobling and spiritualizing it out of his ego. The ego has become master within the soul-life. This can be carried so far that no desire, no enjoyment can gain entrance into the soul without the I being the power that makes the entrance possible. In this way, the whole soul now becomes a manifestation of the I, as this was previously the case with the consciousness soul alone. In fact, all cultural life and all spiritual human endeavor consists in a work that has as its aim this rulership of the ego. Every human being living in the present age is engaged in this work whether he wants it or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

[ 20 ] Through this work, however, higher stages of the being of man are reached. Through it, man develops new members of his being. These lie as the concealed behind what is manifest to him. Not only can he become master of the soul by working on the latter through the power of the ego so that the soul drives the concealed into manifestation, but he can also extend this work. He can extend it to the astral body. The I thus takes possession of this astral body by uniting itself with the latter's hidden nature. This astral body, overcome and transformed by the ego, may be called the spirit self. (This is what, in connection with oriental wisdom, is called “manas.”) In the spirit self we have a higher member of man's being, one which, so to speak, exists within it as a germ and which emerges more and more as it actively works upon itself.^c2

[ 21 ] Just as the human being conquers his astral body by penetrating to the hidden forces standing behind it, so, too, in the course of evolution, does this happen with the ether body. The work upon the ether body is, however, more intensive than the work upon the astral body, for what is concealed in the former is enveloped by two veils, while the concealed in the astral body is veiled by only one. It is possible to form a concept of the difference in the work on these two bodies by pointing to certain changes that can take place in man in the course of his development. Let us call to mind how certain human soul qualities develop when the ego is working upon the soul; how passion and desire, joy and sorrow may change. It is only necessary to think back to the time of childhood. At that time, what was man's source of pleasure? What caused him pain? What has he learned in addition to what he was able to do in childhood? All this is only an expression of the way the ego has gained mastery over the astral body. For this body is the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow. Compare this with how little certain other qualities of man change in the course of time, for example, his temperament, the deeper peculiarities of his character, and so forth. A person, hot-tempered as a child, will often retain certain aspects of this violent temper in later life. This is such a striking fact that there are thinkers who wholly deny the possibility of any change in the fundamental character of a human being. They assume that this is something that remains unchanged throughout life, manifesting in one way or another. Such a judgment is merely based upon lack of observation. Anyone who has the capacity of observing such things can perceive clearly that also man's temperament and character change under the influence of his ego. To be sure, this change is slow when compared with the change in the qualities described above. The relationship between the two kinds of changes may be compared with the advancing of the hour hand of a clock in relation to the minute hand. The forces that bring about this change of character or temperament belong to the hidden realm of the ether body. They are of like nature with the forces that rule in the kingdom of life, that is to say, with the forces of growth and nutrition and those that bring about reproduction. Subsequent explanations in this book will shed the right light upon these matters.—The I is not working upon the astral body if the human being simply gives himself up to pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but if the peculiarities of these soul qualities change. Likewise, the work extends to the ether body if the ego applies its activity to the changing of its traits of character, of its temperament, and so forth. Also on this latter change every human being is working, whether he is conscious of it or not. The strongest impulses producing this change in ordinary life are the religious ones. When the I allows the impulses that flow from religion to act upon it again and again, they form within it a power that works right into the ether body and transforms it in much the same way that lesser life-impulses cause a transformation of the astral body. These lesser impulses of life, which come to man through study, contemplation, ennobling of the feelings, and so forth, are subject to the manifold changes of existence; religious experiences, however, imprint upon all thinking, feeling, and willing a uniform character. They shed, as it were, a common, uniform light over the entire soul-life. A man thinks and feels this way today, tomorrow differently. The most varied causes bring this about. But if a person through his religious feelings, whatever they may be, divines something that persists throughout all changes, he will relate his current soul experiences of thinking and feeling to that fundamental feeling just as he does with his soul experiences of tomorrow. Religious creed, therefore, has a far-reaching effect upon the whole soul-life; its influence becomes ever stronger in the course of time, because it works by means of constant repetition. It therefore acquires the power of working upon the ether body.—The influence of true art has a similar effect upon the human being. If, through outer form, through color and tone of a work of art, he penetrates to its spiritual basis with thought and feeling, then the impulses that the I thus receives work down even into the ether body. If we think this thought through to the end we can estimate what a tremendous significance art has for all human evolution. We have referred here only to a few instances that give to the I the impulse to act upon the ether body. There are many similar influences in human life that are not so apparent to the observing eye as those that have been mentioned. But from these it is evident that hidden within man there is another member of his being that the I gradually develops. This member may be called the second spiritual member, the life spirit. (It is called “buddhi” in oriental wisdom.) The expression “life spirit” is the appropriate term for the reason that the same forces are active in what it designates as in the “life body”; only, in these forces, when they manifest themselves as life body, the human ego is not active. If they manifest as life spirit, however, they are permeated by the activity of the I.

[ 22 ] The intellectual development of man, his purification and ennobling of the utterances of feeling and will are the measure of his transformation of the astral body in spirit self; his religious and many other experiences imprint themselves upon the ether body and transform it into life spirit. In the usual course of life this occurs more or less unconsciously. On the other hand, what is called initiation of man consists in his being directed by supersensible knowledge to the means that enable him to undertake this work on the spirit self and life spirit in full consciousness. These means will be discussed in later parts of this book. For the present, it was a question of showing that, beside the soul and the body, the spirit is also active within the human being. We shall see later how this spirit, in contrast to the transient body, belongs to the Eternal in man.

[ 23 ] The activity of the I is not exhausted with its work upon the astral and ether bodies; it extends also to the physical body. A trace of the influence of the I upon the physical body can be seen when, for example, under certain circumstances a person blushes or turns pale. In this case the I is actually the cause of a process in the physical body. If, through the activity of the I, changes take place in man in respect of its influence upon the physical body, the I is actually united with the hidden forces of this physical body, with the same forces that cause the physical processes to take place. It can be said, then, that the I, through this activity, works upon the physical body. This expression must not be misunderstood. It must not be imagined that this activity is something grossly material. What appears in the physical body as gross matter is only the manifested part of it. Behind this manifested part lie the hidden forces of its being, and these forces are of a spiritual nature. We are not speaking here of work upon a material substance, of which the physical body seems to consist, but of the spiritual work upon the invisible forces that bring this body into existence and allow it to decay. In ordinary life this work of the I on the physical body enters human consciousness indistinctly. Complete clarity of consciousness in this respect is acquired only if man, under the influence of supersensible knowledge, takes this activity consciously in hand. Then the fact emerges that there is still a third spiritual member in man. It is what may be called spirit man, in contrast to the physical man. (In oriental wisdom this spirit-man is called “atma.”)

[ 24 ] It is easy to be misled in respect of the spirit man, owing to the fact that in the physical body we see the lowest member of man's being, and it is, therefore, hard to be reconciled to the idea that work on the physical body brings into being the highest member of the human entity. But just because the physical body conceals the active spirit within it behind three veils, the highest form of human endeavor is needed to unite the I with this hidden spirit.

[ 25 ] Thus in occult science man presents himself as a being composed of various members. Those of a corporeal nature are the physical body, the ether body, and the astral body. Those belonging to the soul are sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. The I, the ego, spreads out its light within the soul. The members possessing a spiritual nature are spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. We see from the above descriptions that the sentient soul and the astral body are closely united and in a certain respect form a whole. In a similar manner, consciousness soul and spirit self are a whole, for the spirit flashes up within the consciousness soul and from there rays through the other members of human nature. With this in mind, we can also speak of the following membering of the human being. We may combine astral body and sentient soul into a single member, likewise consciousness soul and spirit self, and the intellectual soul we may call the I, since it partakes of the I nature and, in a certain respect, is already the I that has not yet become conscious of its spiritual nature. We have, therefore, seven members of man: 1. physical body, 2. ether or life body, 3. astral body, 4. I, 5. spirit self, 6. life spirit, and 7. spirit man.

[ 26 ] Even for those who are accustomed to materialistic ideas this membering of man according to the number seven would not possess anything “vaguely magical,” which they often ascribe to it, if they but held to the meaning of the above description and did not, from the very outset, themselves introduce this magical element into the matter. It is from the standpoint of a higher form of observing the world and in no other way that we ought to speak of these seven members of man, just as we speak of the seven colors of light or of the seven tones of the scale, (considering the octave as a repetition of the tonic.) Just as light appears in seven colors, and tone in a sevenfold scale, so does the homogeneous human nature appear in the above-mentioned seven members. Just as the number seven in tone and color bears nothing of “superstition” in it, so is this also the case in regard to the sevenfold membering of the human being. (On one occasion, when this question was discussed verbally, it was said that in the case of colors the number seven does not hold good, since beyond red and violet there are other colors that are not visible to the eye. Even in this respect, however, the comparison with the colors agrees, for the being of man extends beyond the physical body on the one side and spirit man on the other, only these extensions are “spiritually invisible” to the spiritual means of observation in the same way that the colors beyond red and violet are invisible to the physical eye. This comment had to be made because the opinion so easily arises that supersensible perception is not particular with respect to natural scientific thinking, that it is amateurish in this regard. But whoever pays strict attention to what is meant by the statements made here will find that, in fact, they are nowhere in contradiction to true natural science—neither when facts of natural science are used for illustration nor when, in the remarks made here, a direct relationship to natural-scientific research is indicated.)

• 1. In his book, Theosophy, the author has discussed the fact that with the designation “ether body” or “life body” he has no intention of renewing the old concept of “life force” discarded by natural science.
• c1. Expositions of the kind in this book about the faculty of memory can easily be misunderstood. For those who only observe external processes will not readily detect the difference between what happens in the animal or even in the plant when something appears that resembles memory, and what is here described as actual memory in man. Certainly, if an animal carries out an action a third or fourth time, it may then so perform it that the outer process appears as though the action were the result of memory and what is learned through it. Like some natural scientists and their adherents, one may, indeed, extend the concept of memory or recollection to such a point that one says that when the little chick pops from the shell and immediately pecks at the grain, knowing even how to make the movements of its head and body in order to reach its object, it could not have learned this in the shell, but that it was learned through the thousands and thousands of creatures from which it has descended. (Ewald Hering, for example, states this.) We may declare that the phenomenon under discussion has the appearance of memory. We shall, however, never gain a real comprehension of man's being if we do not hold in mind what appears quite especially unique in the human being as the process of real perception of previous experiences at subsequent times, not merely as an influence of past states into later ones. Here in this book this perception of the past, not merely the reappearance—even though changed—of the previous in the subsequent, is called memory. If one were to use the word memory for the corresponding processes in the plant and animal kingdoms, then one ought to have a different word for the processes of memory in man. It is not the word, however, that is important in the above presentation, but, for the sake of understanding the human being, the significant thing is the recognition of the difference between what occurs in man on the one hand, and in animal and plant on the other. What may appear as highly intelligent actions in animals has also no connection whatever with what is here called memory.
• 2. Eduard von Hartmann, Grundniss der Psychologie, Vol. 111, p.55. Bad Sachsa, 1908.
• c2. No fixed boundary can be drawn between the changes resulting from the activity of the ego in the astral body and those taking place in the ether body. They pass over into each other. If man learns something and through it gains a certain power of discrimination, then a change has occurred in the astral body; if however, this judgment or discrimination so alters his soul condition that he becomes accustomed, after he has learned something about a matter, to feel differently about it from previously, a change has then taken place in the ether body. Everything that becomes a possession of the human soul that can be recalled in memory is based upon a change in the ether body. What becomes, by degrees, an immutable treasure of memory, rests on the fact that the work performed on the astral body has been transferred to the ether body.

The last great incision into the historical evolution of mankind is the one that took place—we have often spoken of it—in the first third of the 15th century, and that marks the transition from the evolution more particularly of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul to that of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. For we live in an age when the evolution of the Spiritual Soul is taking place, and it is an age that is entirely bereft of true insight into the connections of the human being with the deeper impulses and forces of Nature, or rather of the Spirit that is in Nature. To-day, when we speak of man and his constitution as physical man, we speak, for instance, of the chemical substances, enumerating them under the heading of what the chemist calls the elements. But it is of about as much value for a man to know that something he eats contains carbon and nitrogen as it is for a watch-mechanic to know that the watch he has in his hand consists of glass and, shall we say, silver and some other substances. All this kind of knowledge that traces back the real substance of man's nature to these material abstractions—hydrogen, oxygen and the like—affords no true knowledge of the human being. The mechanism of the watch has to be understood by seeing in it a connected system of forces; and similarly, if we would understand the nature and being of man, we must recognise how the various impulses that are to be found working in all the kingdoms of Nature work in the human being;—for there they work differently than in the other kingdoms of Nature. In modern times however there is no longer any true vision of the connection of man with the Universe. Until the 14th or 15th century this vision and knowledge persisted; though degenerate, it was still present in greater or less degree, and instinctively gifted natures were able still to make use of it. But later on, save for a few men like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and others, the true insight into man's connection with the Universe, little by little, died completely away.

What does the newer Natural Science, that has gradually grown up since the 15th century, know of the relation, let us say, of the plant world or of the animal world to the human being? The scientist examines the plants in their chemical constitution and tries by some means or other to study these same chemical constituents of the plant as they appear in man. Finally perhaps he tries to form an idea—generally he fails!—of the influence of the substances on the healthy and on the diseased human being. All this investigation however results in a darkening of knowledge. The important thing to-day, if we are really desirous of going forward in our knowledge of man on the foundation of historical insight, is that we should learn to know again what is the real relation of the human being to the Nature that he finds around him.

Until the time of the last great revolution in men's consciousness that took place in the 15th century, there was still a clear perception of the great difference that exists in the metals, as between those that are found in the human being and those that are found in Nature. When we set out to consider the various substances in man's physical nature, certain metals show themselves in greater or less degree. For example, iron is present in the human organism, in combination with various other substances; magnesium is also present, and we could name many others. Before the 15th century men were keenly alive to the difference between such metals as these we have mentioned, that are found when we examine the human organism, and such metals as are present in external Nature but are not at any rate quickly apparent in the human organism. The men of these earlier times said: Man is a microcosm; whatever is present in the world outside him, in the macrocosm, is present in some form or other in him. And this was for them no mere general principle in the abstract: had they gone but a little way in initiation knowledge, it followed inevitably from what they knew of the nature of man and of the nature of the Universe. They knew that we can only come to a true understanding of man when we bring together in one the whole of Nature, with all her impulses, with all the substances that she contains. Then we have a picture, an imagination of the being of man. And a disturbing element enters the picture when we meet with something outside in Nature that cannot be found in man.

So thought a student of Nature of the 9th, 10th or 11th century. In those times, however, something else was known, namely, that that which man receives by way of physical nourishment is only a part, perhaps not even the most important part, of all that serves to maintain his physical organism, or rather his whole human organism throughout.

Now, to go beyond physical nourishment and include also breathing presents no difficulty to the man of the present day; for breathing too is a form of assimilation. But it would not occur to him to go any farther. The earlier student of Nature went farther. It was clear to him that when man uses his eye to perceive things, he does not merely see with the eye, but during the process of perception he receives through the eye in infinitely minute quantities something of the substance of the World-All. And not through the eye alone, but through the ear and through other portions of the organism. And the medieval student of Nature was fully aware of the very great importance of those substances which occur in a slight measure only in the human organism, such as, for example, lead, and which man receives in infinitely minute quantities that may be found where we little suspect their presence.

Lead is a metal that cannot immediately be demonstrated as occurring in man. But lead is, as a matter of fact, distributed throughout the entire physical Cosmos in a state of very fine dilution, and the human being takes up lead from the Cosmos by means of processes that are many times more delicate than the process of breathing. The human being is perpetually excreting substances, throwing them off from the periphery. You not only cut your nails, you continually throw off substances from your skin. But whilst substance is thus given off, other substance is taken up and received into the organism.

This was the kind of thought in which a student of Nature lived, who belonged to medieval times,—to the 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th century. He had no balances, he had none of the coarser measuring instruments with which to determine how the substances and forces worked; for him it was a matter of entering deeply into the inner qualities of Nature, of understanding her inner impulses and her connection with the human being. And men were able in this way to know many things that they will one day begin to know again. For, if truth be told, nothing is known to-day of the real nature of the human being.

You know how when we investigate the constitution of man, we sum it up in the following way,—in order to have some kind of classification and plan: man is composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, or ego-organisation. Well and good. In the first instance these terms are mere words: but it is good to begin with them, each person can form from them some small idea of the truth. But if we want to make use of this classification in practical life, especially if we want to use it in medicine—admittedly a highly important ‘practice’ in life, and one that depends at every step on our knowledge of the human being,—then we cannot possibly remain at the words, we must enter into that which is behind the words and gives them their content. We ask first: what about the physical body? How can we gain a true idea of it? (You will see presently why I am developing this line of thought). Take any object on the Earth, outside the human being; let us say, for instance, a stone. A stone falls to the ground. We say, the stone is heavy, it is attracted by the Earth, it has weight. We discover other forces working in the stone. If it is formed into a crystal, then form-building forces work in it. These too are related to the earthly forces. In short, when we look around in the world, we find all about us substances that are subject to the earthly nature.

Keep that clearly in mind: we have, to begin with, substances that are subject to the earthly nature.

Someone whose thoughts on these things are not clear, will perhaps come and show you a piece of coal, a piece of black coal. What is it in reality? In the neighbourhood of the Earth, it is coal; but the moment you were to take it but a short distance—comparatively speaking—away from the Earth, it would cease to be coal. What makes it coal is nothing but the forces of the Earth. Thus you can say: Here is the Earth, and the forces of the Earth are within it; but the forces of the Earth are also in every single object that I find here on the Earth. And the physical body of man, although of course it is marvellously combined and held together, is nevertheless essentially such an object, standing in subjection to these physical forces of the Earth, the forces that come from the centre of the Earth. The physical body of the human being can therefore be described as that which is subject to the forces coming from the centre of the Earth.

Now there are other forces on the Earth besides. These other forces come from the whole environment of the Earth, from the far circumference. Imagine for a moment that you are going out and out, away from the Earth into unmeasured distances. From these unmeasured distances forces work upon the Earth, working inwards to it from every direction. Yes, it is a fact, such forces do exist, coming from all directions of the Universe and working in everywhere towards the centre of the Earth. It is possible to gain quite a clear and concrete picture of them in the following way.

You will remember that the most important substance that forms the basis everywhere of the organism, whether it be of plant, animal or man, is albumen. And albumen also forms the basis for the germ of a new plant, animal or human organism. From a fructified germ cell proceeds that which evolves into an organism, and the substance of the germ is albumen. In these days, instead of pursuing true science, men build up all kinds of imaginations, and they make a picture to themselves of this albumen as composed of substances in intricate chemical combination. It is composed, so they say, of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a trace too of phosphorus, all in complicate combination. And so the atomist comes to see in albumen the example par excellence of chemical combination. The atoms and molecules have to be thought of as arranged in a most complicated manner. And in the mother-animal or mother-plant arises this complicated albumen-molecule, or whatever you choose to call it; it develops further and the new animal comes to birth from it, arising, that is, purely through inheritance.

From the spiritual point of view, all this is sheer nonsense. The truth is that the albumen of the mother animal is not a complicated chemical combination at all, it is all broken up, destroyed and reduced to chaos. The albumen that is otherwise contained in the body is still to some extent organised, but albumen that forms the basis for propagation is distinguished by this very characteristic, that it is in a condition of complete disorganisation. The substances that are contained in it are reduced to chaos and are in no sort of combination, they are tossed and jumbled together to form a mere accumulation without order or proportion; and on this very account the albumen is no longer subject to the Earth. So long as the albumen can by some means or other be held together in inward cohesion, so long is it subject to the forces that work from the centre of the Earth. The moment the albumen is inwardly split up and destroyed, it comes under the influence of the whole sphere of the Cosmos. Forces work in upon it from every quarter. And then we have the tiny particle of albumen that forms the basis for reproduction. This tiny particle is an image of the entire Cosmos, because albumen substance has been split up, destroyed and reduced to chaos—converted, that is, into cosmic dust and thereby fitted to become exposed to the working of the entire Cosmos.

Of all this men have to-day simply no knowledge at all. They imagine the old hen has the complicated albumen. This is included in the egg, and thence arises the new hen. It is the albumen continued, it has gone on evolving. Then the germinal substance is developed once again; and so it goes on from hen to hen. In actual fact it is not so. Every time the transition takes place from one generation to the next, the albumen is exposed to the whole Cosmos.

On the one hand, therefore we have the earthly substances, subject to the earthly or central forces. But we can also imagine these earthly substances exposed in certain circumstances to the forces that work in from all quarters, from the farthest limits of the universe. The latter forces are the ones that work in the human etheric body. The etheric body is subject to the forces of the Cosmos. These are real conceptions of physical body and etheric body.

Suppose you stand there and ask, what is my physical body? The answer is, it is that body which is subject to the forces proceeding from the centre of the Earth. What is my etheric body? It is that in you which is subject to the forces streaming in on all sides from the periphery. You can even show it in a drawing. Imagine that this is the human being. His physical body is the one that is subject to the forces that go towards the centre of the Earth. His etheric body is the one that is subject to the forces streaming in from all sides, from the ends of the Universe. Here we have a system of forces in man. There are forces that pull downward,—they are really present in all organs that are upright,—and there are forces that pour in from without, tending inward. You can actually perceive in the form of man where the one kind and the other are more represented. Study the legs and it is obvious, their form is due to the fact that they are more adapted to the earthly forces. The head is more adapted to the forces of the periphery. In like manner you may also study the arms, and this is not uninteresting. Hold your arms close to your body, and they are subject to the forces that go towards the centre of the Earth. Move them in a living way, and you yourself will be subjecting them to the forces streaming in from all sides of the periphery.

Such indeed is the difference between arms and legs. The legs are invariably subject to the central forces of the Earth, while the arms are so only in a certain posture, that is to say, conditionally. Man is able to lift them out of the domain of the earthly central forces and place them in the midst of those forces which we call the ethereal forces, the forces pouring in from the periphery. And so you can see for all the single organs, how they are placed in the whole cosmic system. Here then you have your physical body and your etheric body.

How is it with the astral body? In space, there is no other kind of forces besides these two. The astral body receives its forces from beyond space. While the etheric body receives them from everywhere, from the periphery, the astral body receives them from beyond all space.

We can actually find certain places in Nature where the physical forces of the Earth enter into the midst of the etheric forces that stream in from all sides. You may imagine albumen to begin with as a substance present in the physical Earth. So long as sulphur, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are in any way chemically recognisable in it, the albumen is in fact subject to the earthly forces. But the moment it enters the sphere of the reproductive process, it is lifted out of the physical forces. The forces of the circumference of the Universe begin to work upon it in its disorganised condition. New albumen comes into being as an image of the whole Universe.

But you see, sometimes the following situation emerges. The disorganisation, the breaking down of the albumen cannot go far enough. You may have albumenous substance of this kind in connection with some animal for instance. For reproduction to take place, it should be possible for it to be divided, broken down entirely, so that it may submit itself to the forces of the whole Cosmos. But the animal is somehow prevented from delivering, for purposes of reproduction, such albumenous substance as would be able straight-away to submit itself to the whole macrocosm. To be capable of reproduction, albumenous substance must submit itself to the whole macrocosm. But the animal in this case is in some way unable to form albumenous substance capable of reproduction without further assistance. This is how it is with the gall-fly. What then does the gall-fly do? It lays its egg in some part of a plant. Again and again you may find these galls, in oaks, and in other trees where the gall-fly lays her eggs. In the leaf, for instance, you can see these strange formations. Within each one is the egg of a gall-fly. Why does it happen so? Why is the egg of a gall-fly laid in an oak leaf, with the result that the oak-apple is formed, holding within it the egg, which is now able to develop? The reason for this is as follows. The plant-leaf contains within it an etheric body, which is adapted to the whole cosmic ether. It comes to the assistance of the egg of the gall-fly. Left alone, the gall-fly's egg is helpless. Hence the gall-fly lays it in a portion of a plant which contains already an etheric body included in the whole system of the cosmic ether. The gall-fly therefore approaches the oak in order to get help in the breaking down of its albumen, so that the world-periphery may be able to work via the oak leaf, via the oak. Alone, the egg of the gall-fly would be doomed to destruction, for it cannot be broken down, it holds together too strongly.

Here we can gain an insight into a strange working of Nature. But this same working is present in Nature in other places too. Suppose for instance that the animal is not merely incapable of providing germ substance which can expose itself to the cosmic ether for the sake of reproduction; suppose it is not even able to transform any substances within it into inner means of nourishment, that is, to use them for its own inner nourishment. The example of the bee lies near at hand. The bee cannot eat anything and everything. It can only eat what the plant has already prepared for it. And now observe something very strange and remarkable. The bee goes to the plant, seeks out the honey juice, absorbs it, assimilates it within itself, and then builds up what we admire so, the wonderful cell structure of the beehive. Here we observe two most strange and wonderful processes: the bee sitting on the flower outside and sucking in the juice, and then, having gone into the beehive, building up from within itself in co-operation with the other bees the cells of wax that will be filled with honey.

What is it that really takes place? You must look carefully at the shape of the cells. They are like this and here comes another joined on to it, and so on, and so on. They are small cells, and similar in form to something else we find in Nature, only there the hollow space is filled up; they are shaped like quartz crystals, like the crystals of silicic acid. If you go into the mountains and examine the quartz crystals, you will find you can draw them, too, in that form. The drawing will, it is true, show some irregularity of shape, but in the main the form will be similar to the form of the bee-cells that are arranged side by side. Only, the cells of the bee are made of wax and the quartz is made of silicic acid.

When we follow up the matter, we find that long ago at a certain point of time in the evolution of the Earth the quartz-crystal was first formed in the mountains. It was formed under the prevailing etheric and astral influences, with the aid of silicic acid. There you have forces that come from the circumference, working, as ethereal-astral forces, and building the quartz crystals in the siliceous substance. Everywhere in the mountains you will find these crystals with their wonderful hexagonal forms. What you find in the solid crystals, you find again as hollow forms—as hollow spaces—in the cells of wax, in the beehive.

For what happens? The bee takes from the flower that which once upon a time brought the quartz crystal into being. The bee fetches it up out of the flower and makes with the substance of her own body imitations of the quartz crystal. A process thus takes place between bee and flower that is similar to what took place long ago in the macrocosm.

I tell you these things that you may understand how necessary it is not merely to take cognisance of the presence of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, all of which analysis is piteously abstract, but to observe and note the marvellous formative processes, the intimate inner conditions that prevail in Nature and her processes. Once, long ago, science was instinctively built up on such observation. But that all passed away in the course of the historical evolution of mankind; it came to an end about the 15th century. We must win it back. We must find our way again into the intimate connections of Nature and of her relation with man. Only when we are able once more to recognise such connections can we hope to find again a true insight into the healthy as well as into the diseased human being. Otherwise all pharmacology remains merely a matter of testing and experimenting, without any perception of the inner connections that are at work.

The period from the 15th century until now may be described as an unfruitful period in the evolution of the human spirit. It has borne man down beneath its weight. Man has looked out upon plant and animal, upon human being and upon mineral, and all the while without any real knowledge of them whatsoever; he has been brought right out of connection with the world and the universe. Now at length it has landed him in chaos as far as his relation with the great world is concerned; he lives without knowing that he is in any sort of connection with the world around him. In the days when men pondered and meditated upon such things, it was known that every time reproduction took place, the whole macrocosm speaks. In the germ or seed that is capable of reproduction comes to birth a minute image of the whole macrocosm. All around is the great world; and in the tiniest germ is an offspring of the influences that stream in from the great world from every direction.

In the human being we may see working together, first of all the forces that are the physical-central forces of the Earth. These forces work in all the organs of the human being. But everywhere in him work also, in an opposite direction, the forces that stream in from all sides, the etheric forces. Look at the liver, for example, or the lungs: you will only understand them when you know that in them are working together the forces that come from the centre of the Earth and the forces that come in from every direction from the circumference of the Universe. Then we have also certain organs that are permeated by the astral body, or again by the ego-organisation, whilst others are less permeated by these higher members. In the condition of sleep, of course, the human being as a whole has not his astral body and ego-organisation in him at all. Now imagine that some organ, let us say one of the lungs has through some circumstance become too strongly affected by the forces that stream in everywhere from the Cosmic All. The lung will in consequence become diseased, for a certain harmony and balance is necessary between that which works in the lung from the centre of the Earth and that which streams in upon it from all parts of the circumference. If you can succeed in finding mineral substances which will provide a counterpoise in the lung to the too strongly working etheric forces, then you will have a remedy wherewith to eliminate their over-activity. The reverse may also happen. The etheric forces may become too weak, and the physical forces that work from the centre of the Earth grow correspondingly too strong. This time you will search the whole kingdom of the plants to discover something that shall strengthen the etheric forces in the organ where they are weak; and then you will have your remedy for this condition. It is quite impossible to find even the slightest remedy by an observation of the physical body alone, for the physical body of man has in itself no ground for telling anything about its own constitution. The so-called normal process that goes on in the physical body is a process of Nature. But the process that goes on in illness is likewise a process of Nature. If you have what is called a normal healthy liver, you have a liver in which processes of Nature take place. And if you have a liver in which there is an abscess, you have also a liver in which processes of Nature take place. The difference can never be found by investigating the physical body. All you can do from investigation of the physical body is to establish the fact that the appearance is different in the one case from the other. You can learn nothing of the cause. If you have an abscess on the liver, you will only be able to discover the cause of it when you know that in such a case, for example, the astral body enters much more powerfully into the liver than it should. What you have to do is to drive out of the liver the astral body, which has taken possession there too strongly. From all this it is clear that there is really no possibility of speaking about the healthy and the diseased human being in a way that accords with the facts, unless we go beyond the physical body and include also in our consideration the higher members of man's being. We shall indeed only regain a pharmacology when we go beyond the physical body, for the nature of illness is simply not demonstrable from the physical body alone.

At the present time my purpose is merely to set forth these things in their historical aspect and connections. It must, however, be pointed out that with the gradual dimming and darkening of that which has been brought over from olden times, all real knowledge of the human being has died right away. And now to-day we are faced with the necessity of acquiring once again a knowledge of the human being. Such knowledge will be attainable when we are once again in a position to understand the relationship of the human being to the surrounding kingdoms of Nature.

Suppose, then, we take our start from the ego-organisation of the human being. If, through initiation science, we have attained to imaginative cognition and are able to perceive the ego-organisation of man, then we may ask ourselves: With what portion of the human organism (in its present state) does this ego-organisation stand in especially near relation? It stands in an especial relation with all that is mineral in the human being. Hence when you receive into yourself some essentially mineral substance,—for example, when you take some salt on your tongue—it is the ego-organisation in you that immediately pounces upon this mineral substance. And as the substance is carried further into the body, all the while,—even when the salt substance is in the stomach—the ego-organisation remains with it. The salt goes still further, it undergoes various changes, it passes through the intestines,—never once does the ego-organisation leave hold of her salt! They behave like two closely related things, two things that belong to one another: the ego-organisation, and the salt that enters the human being.

It is quite another matter when you eat, for example, a poached egg, or any substance of a similar—albumenous—consistency. The ego-organisation is very little concerned when you have a piece of poached egg on your tongue. Afterwards, as it slips down into the stomach, the astral body concerns itself with it, but again only to a very small extent. Then it goes further. And now, first the etheric and then the physical body begin to act intensively upon it. They break down within you the albumen that you receive into your organism with the egg. The egg itself is now made entirely of mineral within you. It is broken down and destroyed. All life is driven out of it. It is destroyed within you. At the walls of the intestines the albumen substance that you have taken into you from outside ceases to be albumen in any sense, becomes entirely mineral in character. And now it passes over into the ego-organisation; from this point the mineralised albumen is taken up by the ego-organisation.

Thus, the ego-organisation concerns itself only with what is mineral. And all mineral substances are changed through its action; in the human organism they become different from what they were outside it. No mineral substance can remain the same within the human organism as it is outside. The ego-organisation has to look after this in a very thorough manner. Nor is it only such substances as cooking salt and the like that are seized upon by the ego-organisation and inwardly changed to something quite different. The human being is surrounded by a certain condition of warmth, but that external condition of warmth must never be allowed to penetrate the human being. You can never have your finger full of that which is all around you as external warmth. This warmth can but act as a stimulus, you yourself must create and produce the warmth that you have within you. The moment you are merely, so to say, an object and do not yourself create your own warmth or cold, but let the warmth from outside extend its influence into you exactly as it does into any external object,—in that moment you become ill. The external warmth,—not even a substance, but the warmth itself makes you ill. Suppose you have here a towel or a sponge, and over there is a fire. The warmth of the fire, which can spread out all around quite easily, will permeate the towel or the sponge. The towel or sponge only carries a little further the radiating warmth of the fire. When, however, the warmth of the fire reaches the skin of the human being and acts upon the senses, stimulating them, then it must no longer simply spread in this way; then the reaction must come, the inner warmth must be created from within. If a person catches cold, his condition results from the fact that he has not merely let himself be stimulated to create his own inner warmth, but has let the external cold enter to some extent beneath the skin. Thus he does not take his place in the world as a fully active human being who fills himself with his own activity and his own impulses, but plays rather the part of an object that lets the activities and influences of the outer world pass through him. That is the essential nature of the ego-organisation that it takes up into itself what is mineral and completely changes it from within, converting it into something altogether different.

Not until we have died does the mineral turn back again into the mineral of external Nature. So long as we are alive on the Earth, and have the mineral enclosed in our skin, so long does the ego-organisation continue to change it perpetually. Similarly, whatever we take up into ourselves that is of a plant nature is perpetually changed by the working of the astral body. It is in everything of a mineral nature that the ego-organisation brings about a thorough metamorphosis; not merely in the solid mineral, but also in the liquid and gaseous mineral, and the mineral that is in the state of warmth or heat.

Of course, when we speak in quite an ordinary way, we may say: Here is some water. I drink it. Now I have the water inside me. The truth is, however, that the moment my organism receives the water, then by reason of the action of my ego-organisation, the water inside me is no longer the same as the water outside. It only becomes the same again when I give it off in the form of perspiration, or in some other way convert it into water. Inside my skin water is not water, it is living fluid.

In this manner we shall have to alter our thought about a great many things. To-day I have only been able to give you small indications. Think them over. Think how the albumen has to be broken down and disorganised in order that it may be exposed to the influences of the whole macrocosm. Think how the water I drink becomes in me living fluid and is no longer the inorganic water it was before, but is water permeated by the ego-organisation. Think how, when you eat cabbage—outside you it was cabbage, inside you the astral body receives the cabbage into itself and transforms it into something new. And here we come to the consideration of very important processes in the human body. We learn to perceive how we have in our metabolic system processes that are only one evolutionary stage removed from the metabolisms that we have, for example, in our brain—the metabolisms that go to make up the nervous system, and so forth. I will speak further on this tomorrow and make clear, in connection with these processes, the radical difference between men of the 12th and of the 20th century. We shall thus come to see the necessity for new impulses to enter in, if there is to be progress in the understanding of health and disease, and if the knowledge of man is not to die out altogether and nothing more ever be known of the healthy or of the diseased human being.

So what does the gentleman say? He says: What you can grasp with your hands is science. The rest is a figment of the imagination. Everyone can imagine things and have them imagined, because you can't know anything about all that. And if people take comfort in all kinds of supernatural things, well, you don't have to take that away from them.

It is absolutely terrible to see the confusion in which this matter has ended up. But now I would like to show you that these gentlemen have completely forgotten how to think when it comes to this science. I would like to show you this with another passage from this book. For what does the gentleman do, who pushes everything that cannot be grasped with his hands into the realm of belief? He says: To speak of an ego, which should actually dwell in man as an eternal ego, is actually scientific nonsense, because the ego is, after all, only the sum of all that is otherwise in us. We are accustomed to summarizing everything we imagine, everything we feel, from beginning to end, into a whole. And then, when we have summarized it into a whole, we say “I.” – So says the Lord.

Now, however, he wants to make this clear. He wants to make it clear that the word 'I' really only summarizes everything that one experiences. Because then the 'I' is just a mere word if one only summarizes in this way. So he makes a comparison. He compares everything that a person experiences with a mass of soldiers, with a company of soldiers. So what I experienced as a child, what I played as a child, what I felt in the game, that is one troop of soldiers; what I experienced a little later is the other troop of soldiers, and so on; to this day, I summarize all of this as the individual soldiers are combined into a company, and I say “I.” So he says. So he compares all the individual experiences of the soul with a company of soldiers, and he summarizes them as one summarizes, and does not say, Miller and Lehmann and so on, but says: The company 12 and so on. So he summarizes everything that one experiences in the soul as I, into a company of soldiers. Then he continues: “On the other hand, a word must be said here about the ego, insofar as one can also understand by it the circumstance that from the period of life when consciousness is somewhat developed, man always feels as the same personality, as the same ego.” He says, then: Man must finally be weaned of the idea that he feels as an ego, he must be accustomed to the idea that it is only as if one were a company of soldiers.

"This fact, viewed from our standpoint, should have nothing particularly surprising about it. First of all, if we want to get to the bottom of this matter, we must be clear about what we actually mean by the individual personality in relation to the external world.” So at first he gives a nice admonition that we have to form an idea. He answers: ”It is the result of all kinds of individual ideas, but especially of those that summarize the direct interactions of the organism with the external world into a more or less compact whole. In our view, the idea of the self is nothing more than an abstract idea, and indeed of the highest order, built on the sum of all the ideas, feelings and desires of an individual, but in particular of all the ideas of the interrelations between one's own body and the outside world. The concept encompasses all of this, just as the concept of the plant kingdom encompasses the infinite sum of all plants. The word 'I' – now this is where it gets interesting! “is the representative of all these ideas, much as the military leader is the representative of all the individual soldiers. Just as one can say of the deeds of a military leader that he always forms the more or less obscure unconscious background for the ideas of the individual soldiers and army detachments, in exactly the same way the mass of individual concrete ideas and feelings forms the background of the concept of the ego."

Now, gentlemen, look at how the man thinks. Now, the book is very learned, that must be assumed, it is at the cutting edge of science. The man says: You have a company of soldiers and the commander. But you only summarize the soldiers; the commander is merely their representative. It is the same with the ideas and feelings. You summarize all the ideas and feelings and the ego is merely their representative.

Yes, but if the ego is the representative, just the word, then with the company of soldiers you must also see the army commander only as a word. Have you ever discovered that the army commander leading a company of soldiers is just a word composed of all the individuals? Now, you could imagine that the army commander is not particularly clever. Sometimes the ego is not particularly clever either. But to imagine that the army commander is nothing but a mere word - and that is what he needs as a comparison for how the ego relates to ideas - proves that when the cleverest people start talking about the supernatural, they become very stupid. Because, right, you can prove to them that when they make a comparison, it is without any logic. There is not the slightest logic in it.

After Mr. Erbsmehl has made this fine comparison, he continues: “From this it follows that the respective concept of the self is entirely dependent on the underlying idea. This is most clearly evident in the way it gradually develops in a child. But every adult thinking person can also account for how they feel in every respect as a different self today than ten years ago.

Now I ask Mr. Erbsmehl or Mr. Burle whether they feel like a completely different person than ten years before! Surely you can distinguish whether you are now a completely different person than ten years ago! But you come across passages like that in books at every turn today. The most ordinary facts of life are turned upside down. Of course it is mere nonsense when someone says that he feels he is a completely different person today than he was ten years ago. But that is what these gentlemen say. But the moment you start thinking about the self, whether it is the same today as it was ten years ago, you no longer get the chance to say: the self dies when the corpse dies. — Why is that?

I have already explained to you, gentlemen, that you cut your nails, skin flakes off and so on; all this happens in seven to eight years. You no longer have any of the material that you had ten years ago. Just as your skin flakes off, your insides are constantly moving away from your body. You see, your body is like this: it sheds its upper layer; then the next layer moves forward, then that layer sheds itself; then the next layer moves forward, sheds itself again, and after seven to eight years everything has shed itself. Where is that? Where is the body you had ten years ago? Yes, it has undergone the same process, only in a somewhat more complicated way, that the corpse undergoes when it is placed in the grave. The corpse dissolves into the earth. If you were to break the body down into such small pieces as the scales that are constantly falling off you, or as the nails you cut off when you cut them into such small pieces, you would not even notice that the body is going anywhere. You could blow it away. And so, over a period of seven to eight years, the physical body dissolves into the external world.

But if you still feel like an ego today, and the physical body died two to three years ago, then the ego has nothing to do with the physical body as you have it there. So you could say. But you see, it has so much to do with it that if, for example, you take a piece of chalk, you will say: I took the chalk. Every person says that. I had a schoolmate – I think I have told you this before – who, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, was on the way to becoming a real materialist. We often went for walks together, and he always said: It is quite obvious to me that we have no self, we only have a brain; the brain thinks. I always told him: Yes, look, you say: I walk, you even say: I think; why are you lying? If you really tell the truth, you would have to say: My brain thinks! — You don't even have to say “my” because “my” already points to an ego; there must already be an ego if you say “my”. People never say: My brain thinks, my brain walks, my brain takes the chalk. It doesn't occur to them at all, because in life a person cannot be a materialist. He would immediately say nonsense if he were a materialist.

But in theory, people make materialism their own and do not consider that real science knows that we no longer have the body we had eight to ten years ago, that the ego has remained. And in the same way you can remember back to your early childhood, to the second, third, fourth, fifth year. It would never occur to you to say that it is not the same self that used to run around as a boy back then. But let us assume that you have now reached the age of forty; by the age of thirty-three you have lost one body, by the age of twenty-six you have lost the second body, by the age of nineteen you have lost the third body, by the age of twelve you have lost the fourth body, by the age of five you have lost the fifth body. You have lost five bodies and your self has always remained the same. So this self is preserved throughout your entire life on earth.

But this self can also do something with your body. The body it loses, the ego can direct continuously. You see, when I walk, my legs, although they are old, are in reality only six to seven years old at most. But I direct them with the old ego that was already there when I walked around as a boy. The ego is still walking around. The ego directs the body during life on earth.

Now I have told you that during the period of time that you no longer remember, the child learns to walk, to speak and to think. Of course, you can no longer remember the time when you could not yet think. So you learn to walk, to move in general, to use your body, to speak and to think. You learn that. And to do that, you have to direct your body as well. You cannot, as a child still crawling on all fours, straighten up the body without your will. When you move your hand, the I says: I move the hand - the I with its will. But in the same way, the will also causes the child to straighten up. The child learns to speak with the will. The child learns to think with the will. So we have to ask: where does it come from that the child learns all this? And here we come to the fact that through the “whole of earthly life, despite the fact that the body is continually being replaced, the I always remains the same, that this I is still the same in the time when we have learned to think, to speak and to walk. This I was already active in the body.

If you cut off the tip of your nose — it only needs to be a small piece, right, because a lot of it is not healthy, but you can cut off so much that it does you no harm — and look at it under the microscope, you will again see such a wonderful body with a structure that is very beautifully built. Yes, gentlemen, you have no idea how beautiful the tiniest part of your nose is! Admirably beautiful! And so it is with every part of the human body. It is beautifully constructed, beautifully arranged. The best sculptor could not do better.

There is only one structure in the human organism where everything must be destroyed and only mere matter must be present – I already drew your attention to this last time – and that is the egg from which a human being develops. And at fertilization, the last act takes place; everything of the matter that has been formed is removed.

So that one can say: the bone is beautiful; everything in the material is beautiful. The tip of the nose is no longer as beautiful as the bone, but it is still beautiful. But the egg, from which a person will later develop, contains only a completely disordered material, because everything is fragmented in it. There is no atom, there is no formation at all. Why?

A human soul cannot simply enter a bone. Superstitious people sometimes believe that there is a little devil sitting somewhere in their bones or limbs. Well, sometimes this is the case in a somewhat figurative sense, but a human being cannot enter such a bone. Nor can a person enter the tip of your nose.

I knew a lady who claimed to have a little ghost in her left index finger, and she would ask it anything she wanted to know. If she should go for a walk, she would ask it, and so on. But of course that is nonsense, a superstition. What we have to say to ourselves is: into such a well-formed bone, or even into the tip of our nose, no human being, no human soul, no human spirit can enter directly. The thing is this: The human soul-spiritual, the actual I, can only enter the egg germ because there the substance is only dust, world dust. There the soul now works the world dust with the powers it has brought with it from the spiritual world.

If people believe that what a person is comes simply through ordinary inheritance from father and mother, then one must assume that the human being is already a little human being. But that is contrary to science. Science says that the protein is completely pulverized. And it is from this pulverized protein that the soul, which comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, actually builds the human body.

Now you may ask: But why does the child resemble the mother or the father? Yes, gentlemen, the reason for this is that the child always imitates. The one who says: This child is the spitting image of his father – could actually say something else. You see, if we wait a little while with the child, we have a child that looks very much like, say, its father or mother, although this is not at all how it is expressed. But such things are not the concern of the learned gentlemen. But, you see, let's wait a little, let's not judge already when the child is eight or fourteen days or a month old, let's wait until the child is three or four years old. That's when the child started speaking. Then someone comes along and says: Gosh, the father is German, so the child has also started speaking German. It must have inherited it from the father, because the father is German. That is quite remarkable! Since the child came out of the egg, the language must have been in the egg. It is just wonderful that the child, when it came out of the egg, out of the mother's body, could not yet speak! But, of course, the child did not inherit the ability to speak; the child acquired it through imitation. The language is similar to that of the father and mother. But it would not occur to anyone to say that the child inherited the language.

Likewise, the face is similar. But why is the face similar? Yes, because the soul, when it allows itself to be born through a mother or to be begotten through a father who is Mr. Miller, makes the face similar to the father or mother, just as the child later makes the language similar to the language of the father and mother. You just have to consider that. In speech, the child works out the sounds and words by making itself similar to its parents or educators. But even earlier, the soul unconsciously works on the face or even the gait, like a sculptor. And because the child is born into the family and makes itself similar, when it has no consciousness yet, the similarity arises in the same way as the similarity of speech arises.

You see, gentlemen, in this way one comes to the conclusion that man actually comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, and builds his body with all its similarities himself. Now just take a look at the little child. The little child is born. When children are born, sometimes, despite the fact that all mothers find them very beautiful, one cannot easily distinguish them from little animals. Isn't it true that human beings are such little animals when they are born – in relation to later, of course. They really are quite unsightly, these little children. But gradually the soul works inside and makes everything more and more similar to a human being, until the moment comes when the child learns to walk; that is, as I told you last time, it finds itself in the equilibrium position of the earth. Then the child learns to speak. It learns to use the organs in its chest, because these organs are located in the chest. Then the child learns to think, that is, it learns to use the organs in its head.

Now, let us think about this. The child learns to walk, that is, to keep his balance and to move. What does he learn when he walks? Well, he learns to use his limbs while walking. But you cannot use your limbs without using your metabolism at the same time. When you use your limbs, something of us is always burned. Substances are burned. Even when you just move an arm, substances are being burned inside it. Metabolism is connected to the limbs. Walking, keeping one's balance, moving has to do with metabolism and with the limbs.

Then the child learns to speak. What has that got to do with? Speaking has to do with the chest organs, with breathing. The child can already breathe when it is very small. But connecting words with the expelled air is what the child learns with the chest organs. So: keeping balance is connected with the limbs, speaking with the chest, and thinking with the head, the nerves.

But now, we have three parts of the human being. Note that there are only three. First, we have the limbs and metabolism; second, we have the chest; third, we have thinking, the head. We have three parts of the human being.

Now let us take a look at the child. When a child is born, it is not only outwardly dissimilar to an adult human being. The cheeks are dissimilar, the whole shape; it is dissimilar at the forehead; isn't it, the child is dissimilar on the outside. But on the inside it is even more dissimilar. The brain matter of a child is more like a brain pulp. And by the age of seven, by the time the child gets its second teeth, this pulp, this brain pulp, is beautifully formed. From the age of seven, the human brain has a truly wonderful structure. The soul, the spirit within it, has made it, the soul-spiritual within it.

But you see, gentlemen, we as children could not develop this brain so wonderfully up to the age of seven if we were not constantly in contact with the world. If, for example, you have a child who is born blind, you can immediately see that the optic nerves and thus a whole piece of the brain remain a kind of pulp. It is not beautifully developed. If a person is born deaf, the auditory nerves, which go from the ear and cross here (it is drawn), and then go over there, remain a piece of brain mush along the way. So we can only properly develop our brain in the first seven years of life because we have the senses.

But the things you can grasp with your hands outside, the brain does not train that. You could, for all I care, stuff tangible substances through the nostrils into the brain – you would ruin the brain, but it would not be educated. So all tangible matter is of no use to you in building up the brain in the first seven years. Only the finest matter that lives in the light comes into consideration, for example. Only ether comes into consideration.

You see, that is very important. We absorb the ether through all our senses. So what works from our head? It is not the physical body that works from the head into the child, and into the rest of the organism. The physical body does not work in the child while the child is developing its brain so wonderfully, but the etheric body does. The etheric body, which, as I have already mentioned, we continue to possess for two or three days after death, is at work in the child, and it is this that causes the human brain to develop perfectly, thereby making the child a thinking human being. So we can say: the etheric body is at work in the thinking.

There we have found the first supersensible element of the human being: the etheric body. A child could not develop its brain, it could not have a human brain inside it, if it could not work with the ether all around. Later, by straining the muscles, you can make the muscles stronger through the physical. But, let's say, for example, the left parietal lobe in the brain, you can't make it stronger with something physically tangible. If you want to make the muscle stronger, you can do that by attaching a weight to it and lifting it again and again, thus overcoming the heaviness. But you have to make the muscle stronger through the tangible. Just as you have the muscle here, the biceps, and can make it stronger by lifting and lowering weights, so, if you look at your head from the front, you have a lobe of the brain here. It hangs over here like the arm hangs here. You can't attach any weight to it. And yet, what happens in the arm muscle during training cannot be compared to what happens in this lobe of the brain! At the beginning, when we are born, it is a pulp; when we are seven years old, it is wonderfully developed. Just as the arm muscle becomes stronger through lifting and lowering the weight, that is, from something tangible, from something visible, so the brain becomes stronger through what is in the ether. Just as the human being is connected to the environment through his physical body, so he is also connected to the environment through his etheric body. And from that he has the thinking. Through that he forms the inside of his head in the first seven years.

Once the human being has developed thinking, then, I would like to say, he returns to speech. Learning to speak is something completely different than learning to think. Learning to think is precisely what works on the formation of our body. This makes us, so to speak, sculptural, I would say, this thinking. It works in us so that we truly become a complete human being by the age of seven. During this time, we also learn to speak. But you see, it is not possible for us to learn to speak in the same way as we learn to think. For when we speak, what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, you see, when you lift a heavy weight or strike with your arm with terrible force, your arm hurts. To hurt means to have a feeling. We really have a feeling when we exert any limb too much and somehow hurt it. Whenever we feel pain, we have hurt something, even if only very slightly. We have a feeling. But, gentlemen, all language comes from feeling. If you listen to the child, you can hear how language comes from feeling. The child will learn: “Ei, ei” in its language. What does it want to express when it says “Ei, ei”? It nestles up. It likes the person to whom it says “Ei, ei”. It lays its little head down when it says “Ei, ei”. And so it is with all words; it is the same with everything that is spoken: a feeling underlies it. Yes, the feeling does not come from the brain, and the feeling does not come from what the brain develops from.

You see, if there were no sunlight shining through our eyes, the ether around us would not be able to work on us. We could not live properly for the first seven years. During the first seven years, the child also has more feeling. It learns language by imitation. But feeling is at work in this imitation. And we have to say: light cannot evoke feeling. When we learn language through feeling, something else is present in us. That which then works in language, whereby the human being can speak, is not just the etheric body, it is then the human being's astral body. So that we can say: secondly, to learn to speak, we have the astral body – that is just an expression, I could just as easily say differently – we have the astral body, which works primarily in the chest, in breathing, which then transforms into speaking.

You see, it is always the belief that man, with his physical body, has, let us say, hunger and thirst. But that is nonsense. Imagine a machine that is driven by water. You have to give the machine water. All right, then it will work, and if you don't give it water, it will stop working. What does that mean: the machine stops working? It means that you have to give it water again, you have to let it drink. But the machine is not thirsty beforehand. The machine is not thirsty; it may stop working, but it is not thirsty beforehand, otherwise it would cry out. It does not do that. It is not thirsty.

What is the connection in humans? When a child is thirsty, it does not behave like a machine. It does not just stop moving. On the contrary, a child starts screaming when it is thirsty. What is the connection between thirst and screaming? Screaming is not in the substance, but it is also not in the ether. The ether can form the structure; it can thus form that which is our form. But the ether does not cause us to scream. If the ether were to cause us to scream, there would be a terrible, perhaps not a roar, but a continuous hissing in the world. Because if we look, it is the ether that, together with our eye, causes us to see. The ether is constantly entering our eye. That is why we see. Yes, but when the ether enters our eye, it does not start in the eye: s-s-s-e-] —, no, that is not the etheric body of the human being; it does not lisp. Just imagine if, just because we are looking, there were a constant whispering in a room, that would be a nice story! So the etheric body does not scream or whisper. There is something else there. That is the astral body. And when a child is thirsty and cries out, there is a feeling of thirst in the astral body. And this crying out is what brings the child's feeling to our ears.

But all that I have described to you now could not yet lead to my walking. Because, you see, if I form my body from the head through the etheric body, I could remain like a statue my whole life. My body could be formed, I could roar like a lion; my roar could still be formed from the astral body. But when I want to come into balance as a child, when I want to apply the will to walk, to grasp, to come into balance, where I always say: I walk, I grasp, I come into balance - there it is still the I that comes into it, which is something other than the etheric body and the astral body. And this I lives in the limbs and in the metabolism. When you move your limbs, it is the I that moves them. So you have three parts of the human being in addition to the physical body: you have the etheric body, the astral body and the I (diagram on page 138).

And you see, these three parts of the body can also be perceived if one only trains to do so. But modern science does not want this training. And now I will tell you how modern science actually behaves when it does not want this.

You have all dreamt before. While dreaming, you believe that it is all real. Sometimes you wake up with a terrible fear, for example when you are standing at the edge of an abyss and feel dizzy and about to fall. Now you wake up, completely drenched in sweat. Why? Well, because you thought the abyss was real. You are lying quietly in bed, it is not dangerous at all, but you wake up from the danger that you saw in the image. Imagine if you slept your whole life – that would be a nice story for some. There are those who sleep their whole life.

Once upon a time, there was someone who had learned the Copernican theory and was a terribly lazy fellow. Now, he was lying in the ditch. Another one came by and said, “Why are you lying there?” “Because I have so much to do!” “Well, you guy, you're lying there, you're not doing anything.” So he said, “I have to go around the sun with the earth, and I want to stay behind! It's uncomfortable for me, it's too much work!"

Not true, some people would not even want to go around the sun with the earth! But we do our whole waking life with. You see, if we only dreamt our whole life, then we in Europe could lie in bed, someone could take our body, maybe even our bed, so as not to wake us, and take it on a ship to America – of course, angels would have to do it, because people couldn't do it so quietly – but we could be shipped to America. We continued to dream there, all that could be done to us, we don't know anything about ourselves. If we were dreaming, we would never know how the nose touches, how the left hand touches the right hand. And yet, gentlemen, we would have a whole life. If you dreamt your whole life through, it would be something else – we would be able to fly in our dreams, for example. You can't fly on earth; in your dreams you fly. We would think of ourselves as completely different beings, and so on.

But consider, a world would be around us if we were to dream the whole of life. And we wake up. Let us say: I wake up and dreamt that during the night – let me take a very telling example – I was hanged, or beheaded. Let us assume that one dreams that one has been beheaded. Well, gentlemen, if you dreamt your whole life, you would naturally always believe that you had been beheaded. It wouldn't bother you as much as it does here. You would perhaps experience it more often, dreaming that you were being beheaded, and you would believe that it wouldn't bother you. Now you wake up – and lo and behold, you've taken a book with you into bed. While tossing and turning, it came to rest at the back. Now you are lying on it with your head on the edge of the book, and the fact that you are lying uncomfortably seems to you in your dream as if you had been beheaded. When you have woken up, you realize what the dream means; after awakening, you can explain to yourself where the dream came from.

So you have to wake up first. It's waking up that matters. People who dream their whole lives would think that the dream world is their only reality. We only start to think of the dream world as a fantasy world when we wake up.

Now, gentlemen, in bed, a person wakes up of his own accord and through the surrounding world, which shakes him up. But we only wake up from the life in which we are immersed, which we believe is only the tangible, when we make an effort. And how one awakens from it, I have just described in the book: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Just as one wakes from a dream and knows that the dream is a world brought about by waking, so one wakes from waking through higher knowledge and then knows that our ordinary world comes from what one now perceives of the higher waking. One knows this.

Therefore, the future science must not just dream away in the world, always just trying: How do you do it in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet? but it must guide people to wake up now. Then one will no longer say: Man is only a physical, material body, but then one will say: Man consists of physical matter, of the etheric body, astral body and I. And of these one can then say: One now knows what wakes up from the corpse when one dies. Because the etheric body had to approach the physical body first and shape the physical body through the head. The astral body had to approach first, had to dig itself into the chest a little, then the person learned to speak. And the I had to approach the physical body and had to bring it into balance in the outer world. Through this, he learned to move his limbs and to adapt his metabolism to the movements. So the human being brings his etheric body, his astral body and the ego from the spiritual world, and he shapes the chaotic substance, which is pulverized, into an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. And what he brings with him when he comes into the world, he carries out again through death. I have already indicated to you how that is. It is so that if one really considers this higher science of waking up, one can speak about life after death and before earthly life in the same way as one speaks about this earthly life. We will do that next time. Then the question of how a person looks without a body, namely before fertilization, will be fully answered.

The next lecture will be on Monday at nine o'clock. It is a bit difficult now, of course, but that doesn't matter. The fact that it is difficult is only because people are never prepared for these things in their youth. If they were prepared, it would not be difficult for them at all. Today, I might say, people have to struggle so that they can learn later what is not prepared for people in their youth. But when you see that people today only manage to say: the commander is only the summary of a company of soldiers, then you will also see that today's science already needs to be improved. And that is what really leads to an understanding of the supernatural.

My dear friends,

We saw yesterday how the peoples concerned in forming world-history may be divided on the one hand into what may be called the continuous stream of evolving knowledge and wisdom, and, on the other, the life-element which at a certain time must unite with this wisdom. It is an example of the cooperation—immense in its consequences—of the different one-sided elements in world-existence in order to produce a complete and harmonious whole. And I have already pointed out how the after-effect is to be perceived right into our own times, on the one hand, of the lifeless knowledge-principle, the ageing wisdom-principle, and, on the other hand, of the life-without-knowledge, which unites itself like a young shoot in humanity's evolution with the knowledge-principle, brought down from antiquity and becoming dry and withered.

Now today we will consider the world of the same facts somewhat more subjectively, will give our attention to it in direct connection with a consideration of the nature of man. We will place once more before our soul the familiar fact of the rhythmic alternation that occurs in man's daily life; namely, that he alternates in the course of his daily life between the union of his four members—the physical man, the etheric man, the astral man and the ego-man—and a sort of separation of these four members into two and two—the union of the physical man with the etheric man, and of the ego with the astral man.

The alternation of sleeping and waking rests indeed upon this rhythmic succession of the more or less united condition of these four members and their separation. We have already spoken on one occasion of how the fact now expressed can be considered more closely and exactly, but for today's study what has been said can serve for a broad foundation.

If we think of the human being in sleep it can happen that, without any special development having been undergone, he has the following experience. A definite consciousness, particularly in specially clear and aware moments of waking up, can come before his soul that at the moment of waking he, as soul-being, lifts himself out of a living and weaving in what one might call a finely spiritualised existence.

It must strike most people, if the conditions are favourable, that they do not awake from sleep as if out of a nothingness, but as if they emerged from a full but much more etheric, lighter weaving and living than what we pass through from waking up to going to sleep. It will certainly have already struck many people, in waking, that they lived during sleep in an element in which they felt themselves to be actually cleverer than they were when awake. The majority of men must on awaking have said to themselves: Yes, this or the other came; it placed itself before my soul ... I knew quite exactly: I have experienced something there that I cannot bring clearly enough into the waking consciousness. And then one can find oneself quite stupid in contrast to the cleverness in which one was during this nocturnal weaving and living, in this far more etheric element than the life of the physical world is from waking up to going to sleep. One was with one's whole being—of this one must be clear—immersed in a weaving and living which is around us just as is the physical living and weaving for the physical consciousness, but which cannot be grasped by this physical consciousness, and is generally completely forgotten in the moment of waking.

But all the same, and even without any special occult training, a man can be clear that during sleep he was weaving in such an element as he cannot fully take with him into the waking life. This fact too, of which everyone can really very easily convince himself, is understood when we take the wonderful primeval two-fold saying to which we referred yesterday, that two-fold utterance which says: Because men have learnt to know or to distinguish good and evil, because they have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they shall not eat of the Tree of Life.

What does it really mean: Not eat of the Tree of Life? You will perhaps no longer find incomprehensible what I have to say concerning these words if you bring before your soul in a reasoned way the meaning of ‘to have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Each can say to himself: If what we call the Luciferic temptation had not taken place, man would obviously be in a different position in this earthly life; for as he is now, the effect of the Luciferic temptation is mingled in his earthly life. This means: in our earthly life we attain to a certain kind of knowledge, a certain way of confronting things with our intellect and reason in order to get certain knowledge of the things of the world. Nevertheless it is quite clear that we should have had a different knowledge of things if the Luciferic temptation had not come to pass. This is exactly what the two-fold utterance implies. It means that the knowledge we obtain of the world and its phenomena is a knowledge that has entered through the Luciferic influence, a knowledge that represents the course of evolution which has entered through the partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. All our knowledge is the sort—such as it has become—that had to enter as a result of the tasting of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Had man not partaken of this Tree, then a different knowledge must needs have been there from that which exists under the present ‘normal’ circumstances, where Lucifer works within our existence.

But now when this unconsciousness of sleep is overcome, when it is possible through a spiritual-scientific methodical development to know something of what really goes on in that weaving and living in an etheric element, then we become aware how we actually spend our life between going to sleep and waking. We spend this life from going to sleep to awaking—it is a fact that can shatter one—in, one might say, the arms of Lucifer. And one can understand the deep mystery that underlies this whole world of facts when we see: in the same moment that man was punished by being forbidden to eat of the Tree of Life, Lucifer was condemned to eat of the Tree of Life perpetually. And since Lucifer lays claim to what weaves and lives from falling asleep to awakening which appears to us so endlessly clever when it echoes to us in waking, then this weaving and living in what does not come to our consciousness (because Lucifer claims it for himself) has quite a definite result.

Thus we can say: Our living and weaving in the fine etheric element that I have indicated, is something of which Lucifer takes possession ... and because Lucifer takes possession of it, it comes about that something predestined for men by the Jahve-Godhead does not take place. It was destined for man by the Jahve-Godhead that on awaking he should possess in his etheric and physical bodies what is weaving and living there in sleep. I must draw this somewhat diagrammatically (see p.5a) so that you may perhaps see more exactly what we are concerned with. I might describe through this (red) the ego living outside the physical body during sleep; the part of our astral that lives during sleep outside the physical I will indicate through this (yellow); what of our physical body remains in bed through this (blue), and what of our etheric body remains in bed I will indicate with this (ochre yellow).

Now the following was determined from the beginning. It was designed for man by the evolving Jahve-Godhead that on his awaking the etheric weaving and living which has been described should dip down into both the etheric body and the physical body. You must not be horrified that it is Lucifer who weaves with us while we live in the fine etheric element from going to sleep to awaking. I have already in various lectures indicated that it is quite false if people think they must be on their guard against Lucifer in every sphere of life. That is a materialistic prejudice. Spiritual beings are not there because they actually ought not to be there. And most people act in a wrong may towards the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings when they seem to wish to have nothing to do with what is Luciferic or Ahrimanic. It is a matter of appreciating beings where they are in their element and knowing that they only work harmfully in elements where they do not belong. So it is right for earthly life that Lucifer lives and weaves, from our going to sleep to awaking, in the element of which we men are to know nothing, since we already have the other knowledge which is an effect of the tasting of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But in the moment of waking, something comes in which we must unfathom if we would understand the necessary development of life that should come today through the world-concept of Spiritual Science. When in specially favourable moments one is aware in one's consciousness of this living and weaving like an echo; this interweaving of which we feel the after-experience, ought to come into our etheric body and physical body when we wake. For what is weaving there is our astral body. This lives and weaves in the swelling cosmic sea—and what it there weaves out, what it lives through and experiences, ought to come into our etheric body and also into our physical body.

If I wished to make a drawing of the intention of the Jahve Divinities guiding earthly evolution, I should have to draw this living and weaving in which our astral body dwells during the night so as to show that all this enters our etheric body as well as our physical body in our waking condition. That I have drawn here would show how the experiences of our astral body would be absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies when we wake up. This should have entered in the course of human earthly evolution or of earthly human evolution if the original purposes of the Jahve-deities could have been accomplished.

This, however, on account of the Luciferic temptation at that time, has not come about. Something else, however, happened, so we must draw the state of affairs which then entered somewhat differently.

If that is the physical body (blue) and that the etheric body (yellow ochre) (all schematically sketched), then the experience of the astral body really only comes into the etheric body, at most presses against the physical body and influences it somewhat. In reality it only enters the etheric body. I am not obliged to draw it like this (b) because it is kept back, because it halts through finding a boundary at the physical body, but because—through a secret pact between Lucifer and Ahriman which has appeared in consequence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic interweaving in earthly evolution—because Lucifer in the moment of our waking hands over to Ahriman what actually ought to enter the physical body. That which would therefore be here (a) from the night's experience is not given over to our physical body, but to Ahriman in our physical body. To distinguish it as Ahrimanic I will draw it like this (yellow spots)—(c). And the important fact exists: Ahriman experiences in our physical body Lucifer's experiences during our sleep. This is, in other words, the reason why we cannot ourselves bring our night's experiences into our day-consciousness—because Lucifer hands them over to Ahriman at the moment of waking. Only while they strike their bargain and settle their pact with one another, something comes to our consciousness in the ordinary dream, while it is being passed from the hands of Lucifer into the hands of Ahriman. This too is one aspect of the sleep-life and dream-life.

Let us now consider the ordinary knowledge that we have during the time between waking up and going to sleep. This knowledge, such as we have it, is thus a consequence of the fact that we have partaken of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What happens is that during the day we gain knowledge about things. From waking to sleeping we gain knowledge of things, a knowledge that our intellect combines, putting one thing with another on the basis of the sense perceptions. We gain this knowledge of things, as must be self-evident to you, through our ego. It is a knowledge that man experiences as earth-man. Man as earth-man, has attained to knowledge because to his other three principles, brought over from Saturn Sun and Moon, the ego has been added upon Earth. As earthly man, in the ego, we experience the knowledge that is our ordinary human knowledge, all in fact which we can acquire about the world under the circumstances of our earthly existence. But the knowledge that we obtain like this has precisely the peculiarity of becoming obscured in our ego. It becomes obscured in our ego as soon as we go to sleep.

Hence arises this fact also: we gain knowledge from waking up to going to sleep, but the moment we go to sleep, it ceases to be in our consciousness, that is to say, it goes out of our ego. Philosophers who make the ego the basis of philosophy and then say: We can make the ego the foundation of philosophy because it is the permanent thing in human life between birth and death, utter a very common absurdity; for the ego, as man experiences it, is extinguished every night. So let us hold these facts before us; that we gain knowledge, that knowledge is however gained through the ego, and the ego is extinguished for our condition between falling asleep and awaking.

Whence does that come? This knowledge is really gained in the sphere of existence which we know to be assigned to Ahriman. We know, in fact, that Ahriman has his kingdom in the ordinary outer physical plane, because all death is allotted to him. (I spoke on this once in special detail in the lectures given in Munich.)¹

We traverse Ahriman's realm with our consciousness from waking to going to sleep, and inasmuch as we develop our ordinary everyday knowledge in the way to which we are committed by the Luciferic temptation, it always brings us into the realm of Ahriman in the time we spend between waking and sleeping. We are actually always weaving and living in the kingdom of Ahriman with our ordinary search for external knowledge, for knowledge connected with the outer sense world.

Lucifer—we must always keep this separate—has brought this about, but it is not the kingdom of Lucifer in which we live and weave, but we live and weave and have our existence in Ahriman's realm; and indeed that is very easy to understand since Ahriman as we know is in our physical body. He helps us perpetually when we want to gain knowledge through the physical body. We gain knowledge in the first instance through the physical body, through the senses, the ordinary instruments of the physical body. There within sits Ahriman;

Lucifer gives to him in the moment of our waking, what he has experienced in us during the night. During the day, in connection with Ahriman, we strive after what we call our knowledge in the world; on our falling asleep Ahriman richly repays the gift which Lucifer gave him at our moment of waking.

Whereas at the moment of waking Lucifer gives over to Ahriman for our physical body what he has passed through with us during sleep, at the moment of our going to sleep, Ahriman gives over to Lucifer, what he has experienced with us all day. This then is handed over by Ahriman to Lucifer. And while our whole day's experience ought really to be carried over to the whole night's experience, and I should then have to draw the night's experience like this (a), the truth is that what was gained by day only passes into the astral body. In the ego it is seized by Lucifer (b) so that in the time from our sleeping to our waking up Lucifer experiences in us what continues to live and weave in us from the day's knowledge, from what we have gained for ourselves from waking to going to sleep. We can thus say: Ahriman, instead of ourselves, enjoys during the day our night experiences; and Lucifer instead of us, enjoys in our ego, during our sleep, our day's experiences. In our physical body Ahriman relishes his repast, in our ego Lucifer; Ahriman during the day, Lucifer during the night.

Now it is a matter of discovering the consequences for our human life of these facts. Let us first examine the fact that from our going to sleep to awaking, Lucifer claims our ego. This, you see, prevents us from re-living in the night the knowledge we experience by day, what we contemplate in the world, what judgments we make, what we differentiate, what we combine in the world. We should really live it through, if we could continue it during the night. According to the original purpose of the Jahve-deities we were to gain the knowledge during the day and live it through, work through it, during the night. Had this intention been realised, then we should have a quite different science from what we now have. We should have a science that was really a living science, where every concept which we experience would be alive in us, where, moreover, we should know that concepts which we form during the day are shadows of living beings, as I have often described; for during the night we should see clearly all that we experience during the day. During the day we form some or other concept; in the night all the concepts would wake up and live, and we should know that it was all elemental living beings. That is what we should know. From falling asleep to waking up we should know that what lives and weaves in the world is direct life; elemental working and weaving and life. This cannot be so for us because Lucifer seizes it, because Lucifer takes it away from us. And so he takes from us the life- of science. Every night he sucks out the life of science for himself, and for us remain only the abstract ideas, the dead concepts, which are given us through science. Humanity has a science that is sucked out by Lucifer, well sucked out by Lucifer!

That is the reason why science gives the impression that it cannot get near to what actually lives and weaves in things, why it appears as if one made dead concepts out of the living and weaving. Science seems a kind of compilation, something through which one feels one always stays outside life, never comes inside life. All that philosophers from time immemorial have sweated—I should say, have philosophised—over the boundaries of knowledge, over the impossibility of arriving at the basis of existence, rests upon the fact that they felt: Beneath what we can grasp in concepts lies the living life. This we cannot approach because Lucifer sucks it up and claims for himself, and so, in other words, makes the concepts dry and abstract.

Now let us take the other case. What would happen if we were not at the mercy of the fact that on waking up Ahriman lays claim to our night-experience? What would enter us on awaking? We should possess in our day consciousness the whole connection with our experiences of the night. In other words, we should bring the whole spiritual world into our day consciousness and in what we have as day-consciousness would intermingle what we have lived through in the night. We should not be able to have the sort of relation we have now between our day consciousness and the night experiences, since this exists by virtue of what Lucifer has effected in our day consciousness. But if Lucifer had not influenced this day consciousness in the way described we should approach things in quite a different way. Then our approach to them would be in harmony with what comes into us from our night experiences. That would produce a very considerable alteration in all that we experience during the day.

Our daily life consists, as you know, of observing things, forming ideas and concepts of them. Then of course we also combine ideas, but between birth and death we always couple together something that we have gone through in the day with something else that we have gone through by day. If the position were different, if the night experiences came properly into the life of day, then we should combine each day experience with what has stayed with us like a memory of the night experiences.

As it is now, we meet a person—and we say to ourselves: I know this person. But why do we say, I know this person? Only for the simple reason that we have seen him before in our day's experiences. We combine the one day experience with the other and that is expressed in our saying: We know this man. It would be entirely different if we were to bring in the night experiences in the way I have indicated. Then by day we should know: this or that spiritual being corresponds to him. We should have experienced him in the night, we should be able to identify him with his spiritual background; we should have the physical woven through by the spiritual. And thus would the whole world make itself concrete, woven through with the spirit. By reason of the Luciferic temptation, however, this cannot be, the spirit remains outside, it is not left for us. Ahriman claims it for himself, and so it remains in the etheric body alone (Diagram (b) page 5a). There it remains in the etheric body, it does not come to concrete form, it does not come to the point where one really sees it in the objects. One can only say: I feel in my etheric body that this spiritual element is there as something weaving and living. One feels it in the etheric body but one does not get it out into what one sees.

I hope you mark how this is: the spiritual element, instead of entering our physical body and showing itself to us at every turn, stays behind in the etheric. But we feel it in us and can say: The Spirit is there, it lives and weaves in the world but it does not make itself concrete for us. Above all, what we experience of the spiritual in this way, cannot become knowledge. It would be knowledge for us if it entered the physical body. It remains faith, since it is experienced merely in the etheric body. All that lies in mere faith as rejection of concrete knowledge arises from man's quite justifiable feeling that he will keep within normal life, he will not come to this making concrete, he is afraid of possible errors there.

Thus you see: Faith is Knowledge held back in the etheric body. The knowledge that we have by day is held back in the astral body, and is thus in the night knowledge held back in the astral body, becoming therefore devoid of life. On the other hand the living faith that is devoid of knowledge, because its knowledge is taken by Ahriman, confronts knowledge devoid of faith, the knowledge whose faith is taken away through Lucifer. See that here (p.9) we can add: Lucifer experiences in our ego Ahrimanic experiences.

I should like to epitomize in these two phrases what perhaps can remain in your memory from the extraordinarily important matters considered today. These studies have shown in particular the share of Ahriman and Lucifer in our life, have shown how Lucifer and Ahriman work together so that we may not possess the harmony between faith and knowledge, but have instead the wrong duality, of faith without knowledge, and knowledge without faith.

It is entirely false to think that we can ever flee from Ahriman or Lucifer. It is much more correct that Ahriman and Lucifer have their proper world mission, for all that has been Shown as happening, had to happen; mankind had to be led in the way we have described. Mankind had to be guided for a time through a stream which then found its outflow in what was depicted yesterday, in the gradually dying knowledge. There were certain peoples of the world with a predominating tendency which led to the condition which is sketched here (Diagram (c), p.5a) and there streamed towards this, as I described yesterday, a type of humanity from Central Europe who were so constituted that they had rather developed this condition (Diagram (b), p.5a).

And solely through the co-operation and harmonising of these two streams of humanity can the living grasp of the Christ Impulse come about.

For it is also possible for these two streams to fall apart and not reckon with each other in the comprehension of Christ and the Christ Impulse. Let us suppose that the one stream the stream issuing from Europe—is subject to the predisposition of being overpowered by Ahriman during the waking state. Let us suppose this stream became strongly developed and strove for an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then its development would lead it to reject the facts which are connected with the external occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha; it wishes to have nothing through the physical body. Inasmuch as it is overpowered by Ahriman it will not penetrate into a concrete grasp of this whole great cosmic event of the descent of the Christ to Earth, and so on. It much prefers to find support in Jesus, through man's inner etheric nature, and founds a Jesus-ology, a science of Jesus; it rejects the part of the Mystery of Golgotha that takes effect outside in the world.

The predominance of this stream (diagram b) has little interest in the direct connection of man's inner nature with the man in Christ, with Jesus; it looks far more to what it is accustomed to look—the abstract grasp of what works out there in the cosmos—this stream strives towards a Christology. The other looks chiefly to Jesus, this one to Christ. One can only know the truth if one conceives of Jesus-Christ or Christ-Jesus as a unity in the way shown by Spiritual Science, which seeks to overcome both the one-sided aspects. It is just as clear that there is a Cosmic Being, the Christ, who was outside the earth sphere before the Mystery of Golgotha, and who through this Mystery came into the earthly sphere and so gave the whole human evolution a new impulse (so that an earthly event was prepared beforehand in the Cosmos), as it is clear that this event is intimately connected with Jesus of Nazareth. That is to say, one must be clear that the Christ, as He was before the Mystery of Golgotha, could not have brought the cosmic happening into the earthly happening without the physical human body of Jesus, and that He therefore had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha. We must be clear that it was necessary for the Christ to go through what He did go through, in the body of Jesus.

It is not a matter of Jesus alone or of the Christ alone, in a one-sided way, but of Christ Jesus. What happened on earth has not happened through the Christ, but through the fact that Christ lived in Jesus. A Christology is just as impossible as a mere Jesus-ology; the one and only possibility is a spiritual science of Christ-Jesus. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha belongs of necessity to what had to enter earthly evolution.

Thus if that is to happen which is foreshadowed by the Mystery of Golgotha—namely, that a right relation shall enter between Lucifer and Ahriman in respect of what happens in the world through man, then it must be recognized how these two powers, Lucifer and Ahriman, work together in the human being. Man must confront this working together consciously. And this he will do when he seeks through Spiritual Science to characterise the two streams and thereby find the way to Christ-Jesus. This, too, is what is to be shown in that carved work which we venture to assume will one day find a place in an outstanding position in our Building. The Archetype of Man in the centre, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings at the sides. So that in the whole structure of the group we have a direct expression of what will be enacted in mankind's future evolution as regards the Trinity in place of what was enacted in the past. We have this expression in the triad: Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman.

We will speak of this next time.

• 1. ‘The Secrets of the Threshold’ Munich, 1913.

[ 1 ] Just as imagination may be called a spiritual seeing, so may Inspiration be called a spiritual hearing. Of course, it must be quite clear that by the expression “hearing” is meant a perception still further removed from sensory-hearing in the physical world than “sight” in the imaginative (astral) world is removed from seeing with the physical eyes. It can be said of the imaginative world's light and color phenomena that the radiant surfaces and colours of sensory-objects are as if lifted from these objects and released from them to float free in space. But this gives only an approximate idea, for “space” in the imaginative world is in no way like it is in the physical. Whoever fancies that he has before him imaginative color-pictures when he is seeing freely floating coloured particles in ordinary space dimension is in error.—But the forming of such color representations is, nevertheless, the way to the imaginative life. Whoever tries to put a flower before his mind's eye, and then separates off from his picture everything that does not represent color, so that an image of the coloured surface, separate from the flower, is suspended before his soul, can gradually through such exercises arrive at an Imagination. This picture itself is not yet such Imagination, but is more or less preliminary fantasy suggestion. Imagination, that is, the real astral experience first exists when not only the color is wholly lifted apart from the sense impression, but when also the three-dimensional space has fully lost itself. That this is the case can be confirmed only by a certain feeling. This feeling is described by saying that one no longer feels oneself “outside” but “inside” the color-picture and has the consciousness of partaking of its coming into being. If this feeling is not there, if one remains standing before the thing as before a sense-bound color-picture, then one has to do, not yet with real Imagination, but with something of the fanciful. It should not be said that such fantasy pictures are wholly worthless. They can actually be etheric reflections—like shadows—of real astral facts. As such they have their own value in occult-scientific training. They can form a bridge to true astral (imaginative) experiences.—A certain danger lurks in the observation only if the observer does not fully apply his sound human judgment at this frontier between the sensible and the supersensible. It is not to be expected that an unfailing test can be given whereby at this frontier he can differentiate illusion, hallucination, and the fantastic from reality. Such a general rule would surely be comfortable. But comfort is a word that the occult student should strike from his vocabulary.—It can only be said that he who would acquire clarity of discernment in this sphere must already be intent upon it in the ordinary life of the physical world. Whoever takes no care in ordinary life to think sharply and clearly will fall a victim to all possible illusions on his ascent into higher worlds. It has only to be considered how many snares of everyday life beset sound judgment. How often human beings do not see in an unconfused way what exists, but rather what they crave to see! In how many cases do men believe something, not because they have discerned it, but because it is acceptable to them to believe! Or what errors arise because one does not go to the bottom of a thing, but forms a hasty judgment! All these reasons for deception in ordinary life might be multiplied indefinitely. What tricks are played upon sound judgment by partisan feeling, passion, and so forth. If such errors of judgment in ordinary life are disturbing and often disastrous, they are the greatest conceivable danger to the wholesomeness of the supersensible experience. No general rule can be given to the student for his guidance in the higher worlds, beyond the advice to do everything possible for his healthy power of discernment and for his sound, independent judgment.

[ 2 ] When the observer in the higher worlds once knows what Imagination really is, he soon acquires the conviction that the pictures of the astral world are not merely pictures, but manifestations of spiritual beings. He comes to know that these imaginative pictures have reference to spirit or soul being just as do sensory colours to sensory things or beings. In particular, he will, of course, have yet much to learn. He must learn to discriminate between color formations that are opaque and those that are quite transparent and in their inner nature clear and radiant. In fact, he will perceive formations that seem to be continually producing their color-light anew from within, and that therefore are not only fully illuminated and transparent, but are forever radiating light from within. He will link the opaque formations to lower beings, the clear, luminous ones to intermediate entities; the inwardly radiant ones will be for him manifestations of higher spiritual beings.

[ 3 ] If we would arrive at the truth about the imaginative world, we must not form too narrow a concept of spiritual sight, for in that world there are not mere light and color perceptions, comparable to the sight experiences of the physical world, but also impressions of heat and cold, of taste and smell, and still other experiences of the imaginative “senses” for which the physical world offers no likeness. Impressions of heat and cold are, in the imaginative (astral) world, revelations of will and intention on the part of soul and spirit beings. Whether such a being aims at good or evil comes to light in a definite effect of heat or cold. Astral beings can also be “tasted” or “smelled.”—Only what constitutes in the actual sense the physical element of tone and sound is almost wholly lacking in the real imaginative world. In this connection absolute stillness prevails there. But instead, for the progressing spiritual observer, there is offered something quite different, comparable to tone and sound, to music and speech, in the sense world. This higher element steps in when every tone and sound from the outer physical world is wholly hushed; indeed, when even the faintest inner soul echo from this sphere of the outer world is silenced. Then there occurs for the observer what may be called an understanding of the significance of the imaginative experiences. If we were to compare what is now experienced with something in the physical world we could only come near to explaining the matter by referring to something that does not exist at all in that world. Let it be supposed possible to perceive the thoughts and feelings of a human being without hearing his words with the physical ear; such a perception might be comparable to a direct comprehension of the imaginative element referred to as “hearing” in the spiritual sense. What “speaks” are the color and light impressions. In lightings-up and dimmings-down, in the color metamorphosis of images are revealed harmonies and discords that unveil the feelings, representations, and thought life of soul and spirit beings. Just as tone becomes speech in physical man when thought is imprinted in it, so do harmonies and discords of the spirit world grow into manifestations that are definite thought entities. To this end, darkness must fall upon that world if thought is to be revealed in its immediacy. The experience here is: The bright color-tones—red, yellow, and orange—are seen to fade away, and it is perceived how the higher world darkens through green to blue and violet; at the same time a waxing of inner will energy is experienced. Full freedom with regard to space and time is experienced; there is a feeling of being in motion. Certain linear forms and shapes are experienced. These are not experienced as though seen to be drawn before one in any spatial expanse, but rather as though in continuous movement every single curve, every form, was followed by the ego. In fact, the ego is at once felt as the draughtsman and the drawing material. Every linear direction, every shift in position, is at one and the same time an experience of this ego. The ego stirred to motion is recognised to be bound up with the world's creative forces. The laws of the world are no longer something that the ego perceives outwardly, but a truly miraculous fabric that it is helping to weave.—Occult science designs all kinds of symbolic drawings and pictures. When these really correspond to fact and are not mere invented figures, they are based on the observer's experiences in higher worlds, which are to be viewed as described above.

[ 4 ] So is the world of Inspiration placed within the Imaginative world. When the Imaginations begin to unveil their meanings in “silent speech” to the observer, the world of Inspiration arises within the Imaginative world.

[ 5 ] Of that world that the spiritual observer penetrates in this way, the physical is a manifestation. Whatever of the physical world is accessible to the senses and the sense bound intellect is only the outer side. To cite a single example, the plant as observed with physical senses and physical intellect is not the whole plant being. Whoever knows only this physical plant resembles a being who might be able to perceive the finger nail of a man, but to whom the perception of man himself would be inaccessible. But the structure and being of the finger nail is understandable only when explained by the whole nature of man. Thus in truth the plant is comprehensible only when one knows what pertains to it as the whole human nature relates to the man's fingernail. But what is related to the plant cannot be found in the physical world. The plant is related to something fundamental that can only be unveiled by Imagination in the astral world, and, further, to something that will be revealed only through Inspiration in the spirit-world.—Thus the plant as a physical organism is the revelation of a being comprehensible by Imagination and Inspiration.

[ 6 ] From the foregoing it is evident how for the observer of higher worlds there opens up a path that has its beginning in the physical world. Namely, he can start from the physical world and from its manifestations rise to the higher being sustaining them. If he starts from the animal kingdom, he can rise by this means into the imaginative world; if he takes his start from the plant world, spirit observation will lead him through Imagination to the world of Inspiration. If this path is taken, within the imaginative and inspiration worlds will soon be found beings and facts not at all revealed in the physical world. It must not, therefore, be believed that in this way acquaintance is made only with those beings of the higher worlds that have physical manifestations. Whoever has once entered the imaginative world comes to know a multitude of beings and occurrences of which the observer of what is merely physical has not the slightest inkling.

[ 7 ] Now, to be sure, there is another way. It does not take its start from the physical world. It makes man directly clairvoyant in the higher regions of existence. For many persons this method might have more power of attraction than the one above indicated. But for our life-conditions only the ascent from the physical world should be chosen. It requires of the observer the self-renunciation that is necessary if he is first of all to examine the physical world around him and accumulate knowledge and, especially, experience. In any case, it is the method best suited to our present-day cultural conditions. The other way presupposes the prior acquisition of soul qualities extremely hard to attain under modern life-conditions. Even though such soul qualities have again and again been stressed with full sharpness and clarity in past writings, still most people have no idea at all, or at most, an inadequate one—of the degree to which these qualities (for example, selflessness and devoted love ) must be acquired for attainment of the higher worlds without starting from the firm ground of the physical. If anyone should be awakened in the higher worlds without having attained the requisite degree of the corresponding soul qualities, the result must be unspeakable misery. Now it must not be believed, however, that the soul qualities characterized above can be dispensed with by one making his start from the physical world and its experiences. To believe this would also be an error of serious consequences. But such a start allows for the gradual acquisition of these qualities in the measure, and above all in the form, possible in our present life conditions.

[ 8 ] Another thing comes into consideration in this regard. If the start is made in the way indicated from the physical world, a living connection is retained with this physical world in spite of the ascent into higher worlds. A full understanding continues for all that happens in it, and the full energy to work in it. Indeed, this understanding and energy increase in a most helpful way just through the knowledge of the higher worlds. In every realm of life, even in what seems most prosaically practical, the knower of the higher worlds will work better and more usefully than the non-knower, provided he has preserved the living connection with the physical world.

[ 9 ] But whoever is awakened in the higher spheres of existence without starting from the physical world is only too readily estranged from life; he becomes a hermit, confronting his contemporaries without understanding or sympathy. Indeed, it even happens that people of incomplete development in this respect—not, of course, those with perfect development—look down with a certain disdain upon the experiences of the physical world and feel themselves superior, and so forth. Instead of their sympathy toward the world being heightened, such people become hardened, self-seeking natures in the spiritual sense. The temptation to all this is truly not slight, and those striving for the ascent into the higher worlds may well pay attention to it.

[ 10 ] From Inspiration the spiritual observer may rise to Intuition. In the manner of expression of occult science this word denotes in many respects the exact opposite of that for which it is often used in ordinary life. In the ordinary sense intuition is spoken of when one has in view a notion dimly felt to be true, which still lacks clear, conceptual definition. A preliminary step toward knowledge, rather than knowledge itself, is seen therein. An idea of this nature may—according to that definition—illuminate a great truth like a flash of lightning, but it can first have value as knowledge when founded on conceptual judgment. Sometimes also intuition designates something “felt” as truth, of which one is fully convinced, but which one will not weigh down with intellectual judgment. People who become acquainted with spiritual-scientific knowledge, often say: That was always clear to me “intuitively.” All this must be put entirely aside if the term Intuition is to be kept in view in its true significance meant here. In this application Intuition is not a mode of cognition which with regard to clarity lags behind intellectual knowledge, but one that far surpasses it.

[ 11 ] In Inspiration the experiences of the higher worlds speak their meaning. The observer lives in the qualities and actions of the beings of these higher worlds. If, as described above, he follows with his ego a lineal direction or the shape of a figure, he knows that he is not within the being itself, but within its qualities and functions. Already in imaginative cognition he has, indeed, experienced the feeling of being not outside, but inside the color-images; but he knows no less clearly that these color-images are not in themselves independent beings, but the qualities of such beings. In Inspiration, he is conscious of his becoming one with the deeds of such beings, with the manifestations of their will; in Intuition, for the first time, he merges his own self into that of self-contained beings. This can happen in the right way only if the emergence takes place, not by the effacement, but by the complete maintenance of his own being. Any “losing of oneself” in another being is bad. Therefore only an ego fortified to a high degree within itself can without damage plunge into another being.—Something has been grasped intuitively only if the feeling has arisen with regard to it that in it there is expressing itself a being of the self-same nature and inner content as one's own ego. Whoever examines a stone with his outer senses and seeks to understand its peculiarities with his intellect and by the usual scientific resources comes to know only the outer aspect of the stone. As spiritual observer he proceeds to imaginative and inspired knowledge. By dwelling within Inspiration he can come to an additional feeling. This may be characterized in the following way by a comparison. Suppose one sees a man on the street. To begin with, he makes a fleeting impression upon the observer. Later one becomes better acquainted with him; then comes the moment when one becomes such a friend that soul opens itself to soul. The experience goes through when the veils of the soul fall thus away and one ego confronts the other, is comparable to that when, to the spiritual observer the stone appears solely as an outer manifestation, and he advances to something related to the stone as the fingernail to the human body, and which lives itself out as an ego like one's own ego.

[ 12 ] That kind of knowledge that leads into the “innermost nature” of beings is first attained for man in Intuition. In the discussion of Inspiration, mention has been made of the transformation the spiritual observer's inner soul constitution must undergo if he wishes to arrive at this mode of cognition. In this connection it has been stated that, for instance, an incorrect conclusion must extend its effects not only to the intellect, but to the sensing nature, that it must cause grief, pain, and the observer must systematically cultivate such inner experience. Of course, as long as this pain springs from the sympathies and antipathies of the ego, and from partisan attitudes, the preparation for Inspiration cannot be considered adequate. Such involvement of the soul is far removed from the inner sympathy that the ego must feel for the pure truth—as truth—if it would arrive at the proclaimed goal. If cannot be too strongly emphasised that all forms of interest that prevail in ordinary life as pleasure and pain in relation to truth and error, must first be silenced, and then a totally different kind of interest, wholly without self-seeking, must enter in if anything is to be done for cognition through Inspiration. This one quality of the inner soul life is, however, but one means of preparation for Inspiration. There is an unlimited number of others that must be added to it, and the more the spiritual observer refines himself with regard to what has already served him for Inspiration, the better equipped he will be to approach Intuition.

[ 1 ] The human organization does not consist of a self-contained system of interlocking processes. If it were such a system it could not be the bearer of the soul or the spirit. It is only because the human organism is continually decaying or entering the path of lifeless mineral activity in its nerve and bone substance and in the processes with which these substances are incorporated, that the soul and spirit can have the human organism as their basis.

[ 2 ] In the nervous tissues the protein disintegrates. But in these tissues, unlike what happens in the egg-cell and other organic forms, it is not built up again by coming into the domain of the influences radiating in toward the earth. It simply disintegrates. Through this the ether-influences radiating in through the sense organs from the objects and processes of the environment, as well as those that are formed when the organs of movement are involved, are thereby enabled to use the nerves as organs along which they are carried throughout the body.

[ 3 ] In the nerves there are two kinds of processes: the disintegration of protein, and the permeation of this disintegrating substance with etheric substance, whose flow is started and stimulated by acids, salts, and materials of the character of phosphorus and sulphur. The equilibrium between the two processes is mediated by fats and water.

Seen in their essential nature, these are processes of disease which permeate the organism all the time. They must be balanced by no less continuous processes of healing.

[ 4 ] This balance is brought about through the blood, which contains not only those processes that constitute growth and metabolism, but in addition a constant healing action by which the nerve processes inducing illness are opposed.

[ 5 ] In the plasma substance and in the fibrinogen the blood contains those forces which serve the growth and metabolism in the narrower sense. In that which appears as an iron content when the red corpuscles are examined, there lies the origins of the blood's healing property. Accordingly, iron also appears in the gastric juice, and as iron-oxide in the chyle. In all of these, sources are created for processes that counterbalance the processes of the nerves.

[ 6 ] Iron reveals itself, upon examination of the blood, as the only metal which, within the human organism, retains a certain tendency toward crystallization. It thus asserts, even within the body, forces which are in fact none other than the external, physical, mineral forces of nature. Within the human organism they form a system of forces that is orientated in the sense of outer physical nature. This is, however, perpetually being overcome by the ego-organization.

[ 7 ] We have therefore two systems of forces. The one has its origin in the nerve processes; the other in the blood-formation. In the nerve processes, pathogenic processes only develop to the degree that the perpetual counter-influence of the blood processes is able to heal them. These nerve-processes are brought about in the nervous substance, and hence in the organism as a whole, by the astral body. The blood processes, on the other hand, are those in which the ego-organization within the human organism confronts outer physical nature, which is here continued into the body and subjugated by the ego-organization to its own formative process.

[ 8 ] In this inter-relationship we can directly grasp the essential processes of becoming ill and healing. If there arises within the body increases of those activities which are present in their normal measure in all that is stimulated by the nervous process then there is illness. And if we can confront such processes by others presenting reinforcement of certain effects of outer nature in the organism, a healing effect can then be brought about if these effects of outer nature can be mastered by the ego-organism and are such as to counterbalance processes directed in opposition.

[ 9 ] Milk contains only small quantities of iron. Milk is the substance which as such represents least in its activities, pathogenetic forces; the blood must perpetually expose itself to all that produces illness; it requires therefore the organized iron, that is to say the iron which has been received into the ego-organization—the haematin—as a continually acting remedy.

[ 10 ] For a remedy which is to influence a morbid condition appearing in the inner organization, or one that is brought about externally but takes its course within the organism, the first point is to discover how and to what extent the astral organization is working so as to bring about, at some point in the body, a disintegration of protein such as is induced by the nervous organization in the normal way. Let us assume that we are dealing with obstructions in the lower abdomen. We can observe in the presenting pain an excessive activity of the astral body. In which case we are dealing with a characteristic situation for the bowel organism.

[ 11 ] The important question now is: how is the intensified astral influence to be counterbalanced? This can be done by introducing substances into the blood which can be taken hold of by just that part of the ego-organization which works in the intestinal system. These are potassium and sodium. If we introduce these into the organism in some preparation—or through the organization of a plant, e.g., Anagallis arvensis—we take away the excessive nerve-effect of the astral body and through the blood, bring about the transition of the astral body's excess action to that activity of the named substances mastered by the ego-organization.

[ 12 ] If the substance is given in mineral form, we shall have to take care that the potassium or sodium enters the circulation of the blood in the right way, so as to arrest the metamorphosis of protein before the point of disintegration; this may be done by the use of auxiliary remedies, or better still by combining the potassium or sodium in the preparation with sulphur. Sulphur has the peculiar property of helping to arrest the disintegration of albumen; it holds as it were the organizing forces of proteins together. Brought into the circulation in such a way as to maintain its union with potassium or sodium, it will make its effect felt in the region of those organs to which potassium or sodium have a special affinity. This applies to the intestinal organs.