The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of the lectures given here last winter we considered the Being of Christ from many different aspects and we endeavoured in various ways to point out that what we know as the Christ-Impulse is the most powerful factor for the development of mankind that we have ever possessed in the whole evolution of the earth. It is therefore easy to understand that, in the first place, this subject can never be exhausted, that there could be no end to all one might do to elucidate further the Christ-Impulse from all sides, and moreover, when all is said and done, all that is of profoundest interest to man is really connected with the appearance of Christ. We saw that the Gospels themselves attempted to approach the subject of the Being of Christ from four different sides, and we touched upon several of the secrets contained in the different Gospels. We were only able up to a certain point to throw light on that of St. Matthew. It must be left for the present, and we shall return to the secrets of St. Matthew's Gospel in lectures to be given at a later time, after which we can venture further into the depths of St. Mark's Gospel. If we were now, at the conclusion of our winter lectures in this group, to give more sketchy indications of what remains to be discussed, it would interfere with the harmony of the lectures to be given later. To-day, as also in our next lecture, we shall touch upon questions which in a certain respect relate to the Christ-Problem; in fact, we shall to-day refer to the question of the connection between the human conscience and the intervention of the Christ-Impulse in the development of mankind. In so doing we also achieve another object. Next Thursday the public Lectures on ‘The Human Conscience’ will be given, and we shall speak on that same subject in our group-meeting to-day. There is a definite purpose in this—one which, as time goes on, will often be apparent to our Spiritual vision. The object is to show that the same subject can be spoken of in a different way in a study-group such as this, from the way in which it must be handled in a public lecture, intended for persons who are not members of our movement. The Anthroposophist, among many other capacities which he must acquire, must also acquire a feeling of how matters concerning the world can be approached from many standpoints and from many different sides, and that a man who has already mastered certain basic facts can both speak and hear of a subject in a different way from one who has not. When we speak in a study-group we assume that the minds of those present have to some extent become accustomed to the conceptions of a Spiritual world, that as regards their thoughts and feelings they are already in that world and are therefore able, by means of those thoughts and feelings, to form a concept of the human conscience. The answer to such questions can be drawn from much greater depths in a study-group than in a public lecture given to a non-Anthroposophical audience. Those public lectures have indeed the mission, by means of the phenomena of the soul-life,—introduced in the first place as external experience,—of giving a sort of proof that the truths known to Spiritual Science are truths indeed. That is a different task for the Spiritual Scientist, who probably brings with him certain inner convictions and perhaps even certain opinions about the Spiritual world. He must gradually learn to become acquainted with ideas and concepts from all sorts of different sources and sides which will help him to make certain things clear, and he must leave off looking at things and speaking of them in one way only, though that method, of course still prevails in external life.

The question of the human conscience is one that must stir the very depths of our souls. For centuries philosophers and thinkers the whole world over, have been more interested in this subject than in any other. With regard to the phenomenon of conscience one might easily succumb to the illusion—which has often been here described as such—of believing that everything to be found in the human soul to-day, was always to be found there. Yet, as we know, the various soul-faculties and processes which man has developed in the course of thousands of years, were very different in primeval times from what they are now. Much of what is now most prized and valued in our soul-life, we did not possess when we wandered on earth thousands of years ago, in other incarnations. There is a purpose in these many incarnations of ours, as we have often emphasised. The purpose is that the soul should in the course of its development from one incarnation to another, acquire ever-new capacities and forces; that it should have a history of its own; that its earth-existence should be a time of learning to realise that the soul was not the same when our incarnations just began as it is now, and that moreover in the distant future it will again he different. The human conscience too,—that precious possession of the human soul, which speaks like the voice of God in each individual man or woman, warning them of good or evil—even this precious gift was not always in man's inner being. Conscience, too, is something that has developed. And indeed it is not so very long ago, comparatively speaking, that the human conscience announced its presence, since when it has developed more and more. Yet precious as this possession is to us, it is not intended that it should continue to live in the human soul in all the ages yet to come, just in its present form. It will develop further, and take different forms; it will discover itself as something which man had to acquire, and which will bear fruit. And in later ages, when these fruits are his, it will be something upon which man can look back, saying: There once was a time when, in the course of my passage through the different incarnations, I was able to embody into my soul that which is now my conscience, and I am now enjoying the fruits of that! Just as we now look back at a time when our souls were in other incarnations and did not possess what we call conscience, so in later times our souls will look back at the present time and exclaim: Hail to that past! Thanks for the gifts which in the past became our human conscience! If we had not then been able to develop a human conscience in our souls, we should now lack what we need for our present life!

From this we see that conscience forms part of the treasures of the soul at the present time, and if we understand something of the nature and being of the human conscience it gives us a sort of understanding of our age, and of its psychic life. Man's conscience came into being; that is a fact we have often referred to in various connections. In the public lecture next Thursday I shall state that one can, as it were, point to the very time when conscience was first discovered in the human soul. If we go back a few centuries into ancient Greece, about five hundred years before the Christian era, we come to the great poet, Æschylos. When we let the personages depicted by the mighty genius of the old Greek dramatist work upon us, we do not find what is to-day called conscience, or at any rate not designated by that name. Five hundred years before the Christian era the greatest dramatist then existing had no words to express what we now call the human conscience. If he wanted to express that process in the human soul which corresponds to what we now call conscience, he had to do so in this way:—If a man committed the sin of murdering his mother, he was, through the might of the event made to see into the Spiritual worlds and there he perceived certain figures, which were known to the ancient Greek as the Erinyes and later to the Romans as the Furies. Thus, according to Æschylos, a man who had committed the evil deed of murdering his mother, did not, as he would to-day, hear the reproachful voice of conscience in his inner being; but something drove him to spiritual vision, and he saw around him figures, the avengers of his deed.

This is one of the remarkable proofs to be found in the historical development of man, of what has just been asserted, that in olden times the capacities of the human soul were quite different. We have repeatedly emphasised that only gradually has the soul developed to its present power of perceiving the physical-sense world through the senses, and of using reason as it is used to-day. We stated that in olden times the soul possessed a certain clairvoyance as a normal capacity. At the time of Æschylos this only appeared in special cases. For instance, it became clairvoyant when it was to see what it had brought about in the physical world by its wrong-doing. The soul of Orestes became clairvoyant after the murder of his mother. He then saw the spirits he had aroused in the spiritual world by his deed. They encompassed his soul on all sides. There was nothing of the nature of conscience in his soul; but a clairvoyant consciousness set in, enabling him to see the disorder brought about in the spiritual world by his wrong-doing. In olden times we find that when an evil deed was accomplished, no voice of conscience was heard, for in those days the soul was in a clairvoyant condition and could see what came about in the external world in consequence of a wrong.

What is it then that occurs when a wrong is done? Something is brought about by ourselves in the spiritual world. It is a purely materialistic belief that a wrong can take place without anything taking place in the spiritual world; it produces quite definite processes therein,—effects radiate from us which, though invisible to sense perception can be clearly seen by spiritual sight. These spiritual processes, radiating from one who has done wrong, provide nourishment for certain Spiritual beings who are actually present in the spiritual world. Such beings cannot approach man at all times; they can only do so when the radiations resulting from evil actions emanate from him. It is just the same as with a room—if it is quite clean no flies will enter it; there are no flies in a perfectly clean room; but if food is left about or dirt of any kind, the flies come immediately—so, the moment a man radiates certain spiritual emanations as a result of his evil action, he is surrounded by beings who feed on them. These are the beings whom Æschylos, the great Greek dramatist, depicts around Orestes. What we to-day know as the inner voice, Æschylos represented in external forms because he was so conscious of it; for he knew that in special cases, a certain clairvoyant consciousness which was formerly the common possession of all men, could still be aroused. There is always something remaining in later times of what existed previously, but it appears atavistically, and only in abnormal cases. No blame should attach to Shakespeare for representing something of the nature of an objective conscience.

We need only trace Greek Art a little further, from Æschylos to Euripides, who in his tragedies shows us that he already had the idea of conscience. In ancient Greece we can see how the idea of conscience gradually came into being during the last five hundred years before Christ. Look where you will in the old Testament for a word corresponding to what we to-day call conscience: you will not find one. Conscience, as a quality, drew into the human soul; and if, instead of contemplating short spans of time we look at great periods, we see that conscience entered the human soul at about the same time as the Christ Impulse. We might say that conscience followed close on the Christ Impulse; it entered the historical development of the world almost like the shadow of that Impulse. In order to understand this, we must call to mind much that we have learned in the course of past years and make it fruitful for our understanding of what the human conscience really is.

If we wish in a deeper sense to grasp what conscience is, we must call to mind that particular period of time during which mankind in the course of its development was approaching the Christ Impulse and in which it absorbed this Impulse, and then gradually passed into our own, when development proceeded further. We know that this includes three epochs of civilisation in the development of man, which we designate as the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin and our present period. (The two epochs preceding these we may for the moment leave out of consideration; for our own souls were then too far removed from the possibility of having even an inkling of what we mean to-day by the concept of conscience.) In the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation we see a gradual preparation of everything which subsequently rose to the greatest height possible, so that in the Graeco-Latin civilisation it might be able to reach and absorb the significant impulse we know as the Christ Impulse. And in our own age we see the epoch in which this Impulse will be further developed, and this will be continued increasingly in the epoch still to come. Now, if we recollect more closely the development of man from the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, through the Graeco-Latin, into our own, it is clear that in each of these epochs one part of the human soul was developed. Of these, what we know as the Sentient Soul was developed during the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch. That means that we had at one time to be incarnated in Egyptian-Chaldean bodies, so as to be in a position to acquire aright those qualities which serve for the special development of the Sentient Soul. We then as souls, took that quality with us into our next incarnations during the Graeco-Latin epoch, in order then to develop the intellectual or mind-soul, or soul of higher-feeling. And we live in our present incarnations with the fruits of what we gained in that Epoch, so as to be able now, gradually to bring to a higher stage of development, what we call the forces of the Spiritual- or Consciousness-soul. (Dr. Steiner has, since 1923, called this the Spiritual Soul.)

So that our souls—as human beings—have been developed throughout these three epochs; and when our own age comes to its conclusion, our souls will then rise to the development of the quality of Spirit-Self. That will come about in the sixth epoch of civilisation. Thus we see, what a profound purpose there is in our going through successive incarnations, namely, that we may gradually acquire these faculties with which we, as human souls, are acquainted,—and in a wider sense acquire those also which extend beyond the mere life of the soul.

Thus, during the Egyptian-Chaldean culture our souls acquired the forces of the Sentient Soul and brought them to their full development;—during the Graeco-Latin age we developed the intellectual soul or soul of higher feeling. Man had to develop in a normal way as far as the intellectual soul; for then only could the Christ-Impulse be exercised upon him.

Now this development took place in quite a different way in different parts of the earth. If we were to allow ourselves to believe, in an easy sort of way, that the development of mankind proceeds in the most simple way possible, we should never arrive at an understanding of that development. One must indeed learn much before one can even to some slight extent grasp the great thoughts of the guiding Cosmic Beings! When man asserts that the truth is simple, that is great arrogance on his part; it shows that he wants to twist the truth to suit his own convenience. It is simply a love of ease which leads him to assert that the truth must be simple. The truth is indeed very complicated, and the spirit of the guiding cosmic beings can only be grasped by us when we make the most intense efforts to plunge into their thoughts, into their most subtle and intimate thoughts. So we ought not to believe that we have exhausted everything, when we say that: our souls have gradually evolved through Egyptian-Chaldean, the Graeco-Roman, and our own epoch. Let us now for a moment transport ourselves to that time when there was as yet no Graeco-Latin, but only Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation.

There were also human beings living then in Greece and in the countries of the Roman Empire; they lived in the countries of the Graeco-Romans before that age began. And in our own countries, on the soil we tread to-day, there were human beings living at the time when the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation was playing its part in Asia and Africa. While certain souls, in Asia and Africa, at the epoch of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, were more particularly going through all that was to prepare them to receive the Christ-Impulse, others living in the regions of the subsequent Graeco-Latins were preparing to bring something quite different into the collective development of mankind. In our own countries too, there were people living then who were preparing themselves for something else. Not only do our souls take up different qualities in successive ages, but during the same age they live together side by side.

In this way different influences are brought to bear on the souls and further complications thus arise in evolution. By this means more is brought into the development of humanity than if everything went along smoothly in a straight line. It is indeed a fact that preparations had to be made in the Graeco-Latin lands, as also in our own, that the right thing might be brought into the development of civilisation from various sides. The Asiatic and African peoples had one mission and the South European peoples another,—while the peoples inhabiting Northern and Central Europe had a different one again. They all had to bring quite different qualities into the collective development of humanity, and they were able to do so because both their gifts and their training were essentially different.

When we turn our gaze towards the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, to the souls who reached their zenith in that particular age, we must say: These peoples developed certain qualities of the Sentient-Soul, qualities which can be specially developed by the study of the wonderful teachings which then flowed from the sacred centres of Egypt, or from the marvellous astrology which could be learnt in a similar centre in Chaldea. That which flows from the various centres was sent for the very purpose of aiding the soul's progress. The true meaning of what thus flows forth is not to be found in the content of the streams of civilisation, but in what they contribute to the development of the human soul. The content itself passes away! Only those who in a deeper sense have not all their wits about them can believe otherwise than that in a few centuries of time our contemporary science will just as much have sunk into oblivion, as certain things connected with the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation have done to-day. Anyone who believes that the Copernican conception of the universe yielded eternal verities, is making a very great mistake; that will become a thing of the past later on, just as have the discoveries of old Egypt to-day. As far as the content of these things is concerned they pass away, like many another thing in the development of humanity. For instance, in that wonderful picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, familiar to you all, at any rate in reproduction, there are only faint outlines to be seen to-day; and we know that before long nothing will remain of the work into which Leonardo da Vinci put his best powers. Some day there will be just as little left of Raphael's works, which so move our souls to-day, when we allow ourselves to be affected by them. All these works of art will perish and there will be no memory of them on the physical plane. The content of these pictures will succumb to death, like the content of the civilizations themselves. But when we stand before these pictures we ought to remember that they flowed out of Raphael's soul, and that his soul was different after he had conjured them forth from what it was before. Thousands and thousands of people who are moved and uplifted by these pictures, are made different through having this experience. And someday, when the whole earth crumbles into dust—as it certainly will,—the external arrangements organised by the various civilisations will no longer exist. But what the souls have acquired will pass over with them into eternity. What the civilisations give us, is given for the advantage of human souls, for into human souls was poured forth what flowed from the Sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and which—for that time—was exalted wisdom. The souls of men were thereby to be brought a step further; and to the extent that they did advance further, to that extent were they ripe to encounter new treasures, which then, in the Graeco-Latin Age helped the human souls a little further still. If our own souls had not absorbed what they could in the Graeco-Latin Age, they could not now be living into the spiritual soul. That constitutes progress in time.

If we recollect various things said in the public lectures, we are aware that what we call the ‘ I,’ the ego, works in the three soul-principles. Out of the chaos of soul-experiences that we encounter in the Sentient-Soul, Intellectual-Soul and Consciousness- or Spiritual-Soul, the ego gradually develops, crystallising itself there from:—but not in the same way in different parts of the earth. For instance, while the souls in Asia and Africa, during the Egyptian-Chaldean Age, had been developed by the influence so long exercised upon them by the revelations of the Chaldean and Egyptian Sanctuaries,—the peoples in Europe who were far removed from these as regards distance, had developed in such a way that they were in a sense ahead of them. In the European countries men had already in a certain sense developed the ego in the Sentient-Soul,—they had developed a strong feeling for the ego.

Here we come to an extremely important point; those men passed over to Asia and Africa who could wait with their ego until there should have developed in the Sentient-Soul that which was to be the result of the influence of the Egyptian and Chaldean sacred knowledge. Souls were incarnated in the regions subject to this culture, who, more or less without any distinct feeling of the ego-nature, absorbed the sublime teachings and lofty culture. The lofty culture of ancient Chaldea was poured into a Sentient-Soul as yet unconscious of its ego. Here in the North, no such lofty culture was sunk into the soul. It remained more or less uncultivated, but on the other hand, in this very lack, the Sentient-Soul, which had never experienced the warm glow of the revelations pouring in from the Sanctuary knowledge, developed the Consciousness of an ego. We may say that among the peoples of Egypt and Chaldea the ego-consciousness was late in coming, it waited till the Sentient-Soul had absorbed a certain culture and until the later soul-principles had developed. In Europe the ego did not linger, it developed at once in the Sentient-Soul, but on the other hand, it waited till the later soul-principles had been developed before absorbing certain qualities pertaining to the treasures of civilisation. Thus there were certain souls, incarnated in Asia, and Africa, who had hardly any consciousness of their ego but who, in their Sentient-Souls, were granted revelations of a high order; while in Europe there were souls who, without having any high degree of culture, were able to emphasise their individual ego; they could both look upon and feel themselves as men, as human individuals. The people of the Greek and Latin countries occupied a middle place between the two extremes and they had the mission of developing the qualities of the Intellectual-Soul. They developed the ego in the Intellectual-Soul,—while at the same time they were also able in that soul to absorb certain forms of civilisation. Thus then, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture waited, holding back the ego for a later time, while the European culture developed it prematurely; but the Graeco-Latin culture in a sense kept the balance, for it developed a certain civilisation at the same time as the ego.

In this way we can divine a great mystery of our human development, and without knowledge of this we can never understand why the Christ-Impulse could find so unhindered an entrance into Europe and why it gained so much influence there. Why was this? Could Christ have appeared in Europe? Might He not have incarnated there in a carnal body? No! that would not have been possible. He appeared in the Graeco-Latin Age, that in which the Intellectual-Soul was developed. That age was particularly adapted to come forward to meet Christ, as it were. But Christ could not have made his appearance in Europe, because of the strong ego-feeling prevailing there. This strong, individual feeling of self, was not adapted to produce one single person having the sole prerogative of being able to provide the vehicle for the highest. A premature ego-feeling, a too great feeling of the equality of mankind, had developed in the countries of Europe. It would have been impossible there for one person to tower so greatly above his contemporaries, as did the one who was to provide the vehicle for the Christ. If Christ was to find a body fit for Him to occupy, there must be no premature appearance of the feeling of ‘ I.’ He had, therefore, to appear on the borders of the Egyptian-Chaldean and of the Graeco-Latin culture, where it was possible for a body to be formed not having the premature ego-feeling within it, but having nevertheless the profoundest comprehension of the Spiritual world given by the Egyptian and Chaldean cultures. But if Europe had not the power of preparing a body for the Christ, yet, just because it had prematurely developed the ego in the very dawn of the new life, it had also acquired other faculties, which served—after Christ had appeared—to bring to mankind a full consciousness of the ego, to help men to a full understanding of it. This was possible because the European peoples had acquired the feeling of the ‘ I ’ too early and had as it were grown up with it.

This must be borne in mind if we wish to understand the newer civilisation. In Asia and Africa we find people who know much concerning the world-secrets, and who are skilful in the setting up of certain symbols—who have in fact cultivated their Sentient-Soul in such a way that they have a rich soul-life; but their Sense of Ego is weak. In Europe we find people who have received less culture through revelations from without; but on the other hand we find there the type of man who looks to himself, who finds the strongest support in himself. So in Asia the ground was prepared for the coming of Christ, for there a body could be found into which He could draw in,—and in Europe we find the people best prepared to understand the bringer of the ego-consciousness. He brought to the peoples of Europe what they were longing for. Hence it was in Europe that Christian Mysticism was developed, that wonderful Mysticism in which a man sought to draw Christ into his own soul, into his own ego.

Thus the wise guidance of the World prepared mankind in different parts of the earth, so that each epoch of development should find what is right for that time. It is one of the great assets acquired by studying the conception of the world presented by Spiritual Science, that we gain more and more strongly a sense of the wise way in which the development of humanity and of the whole world has been carried on. We see how for thousands of years souls were prepared on the soil of Europe, that they might develop as early as possible a firm centre in their inner being, and for this very purpose they were actually kept back from acquiring the forces so highly evolved in Asia. Therefore, the stream of culture flowed across from Asia, while the strong sense of the personal ego was being developed in Europe. Again, we can actually point out how the Adriatic almost constituted a boundary between a rather weaker sense of self in Greece, where a man did not so much feel himself to be a separate individual as an Athenian, a Spartan, a Theban, a member of his city,—and the Roman culture on the other side, where the strong ego-feeling was developed in the consciousness of the Roman citizen, who stood firmly on his own ground as an individual person. In Greece we still find the ego somewhat of a retiring nature; man still took in more from the outer world, in such a way that the ego need not be present. If we cross the Adriatic and come to Rome we find the Roman citizen standing firmly on his feet—already conscious of his ego. All this is connected with deep and significant sub-depths. These things do not occur on the physical plane without corresponding events taking place in the Spiritual world. We see that in the culture of Greece there was still a strong influence of the ego that was withheld. Much in Greece was still taken impersonally. The Greek did not feel himself to be a separate citizen, but a member of the organism of Athens, Sparta, or Thebes. This had to be done away with. The longing of man to draw things into himself from without must disappear, and as he becomes more and more a Westerner he must learn to find entrance into the inner part of his soul. What is to be formed by the masses, must be lived and experienced in advance by the Great Leaders, the Great Individualities of humanity. Let us keep before our minds the fact to which we have often referred—that the Greek still had a strong consciousness that what was given him from without, apart from his having greatly developed his inner personality, was of particular value. Once more I would remind you of the saying of a very cultured Greek, which gives us a deep insight into the longings of the Greek people. ‘Better be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realms of shades!’ The great value of the invisible, of the super-sensible life, had not then been realised. That which could be drawn from the environment without the help of the ego, is drawn from that environment. It is profoundly moving to perceive how at this juncture, at the turning-point of the times, a great Leading Personality stands like a sign-post, to cast off the disposition towards the earlier and to put on the disposition for the new; to ring forth far and wide, speaking as it were for the spiritual-world: ‘A time is now coming when men must no longer take into themselves that which can flow into their personality apart from the ego, but rather that which enters it through the ego!’

This deed was accomplished by one of the great Sages of ancient Greece; it was in part fulfilled in Empedokles, in the island of Sicily. In many of the legends which to-day are only told as tales, great depths lie concealed. Empedokles,—the great Sage who was not only a great philosopher but an Initiate into the deep mysteries of his time, who was both one of the greatest statesmen of all times and also a sacrificial priest,—of him the legend (which in an occult sense is true) relates as follows. Having completed his task in Sicily, Empedokles threw his body into Etna, that his external sheaths might be united with the soil of Sicily, thereby to record that ‘firm faith in the ego would follow, now that the outer had disappeared!’ The sacrifice of the outer sheaths of Empedokles was accomplished when he surrendered them to Etna. There is a deep occult truth behind this. Among the Spiritual experiences in Sicily to-day is the following. If spiritually one breathes the air of Sicily one can still trace in it the after-effects of the deed of Empedokles!—His soul has continued to incarnate; but his body attained a special significance by having been consciously given over to the elements, so that it can still be found in the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily to-day. The body of Empedokles forms a considerable part of the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily. It was a very important moment to me—such things can be discussed within our groups—when a few days ago I was able to tell our Palermo friends in their actual presence, that if anyone wanders in Sicily with a spiritual consciousness, he certainly still breathes spiritually, even to-day, that which has permeated the air of Sicily ever since the death of Empedokles!

So now we see that the boundary between East and West,—which we, speaking in an external and spatial sense, have referred to as the Adriatic Sea,—was indicated by a great Leader of Humanity, who, as he was to work on further in the West, stripped off the principle by means of which man could grow in the East, desiring to preserve for the future development of man that which is exalted above all the elements of the external physical plane.

It is a very great thing to become aware of these distinctions for they show how, in regions widely separated in space, different effects are being prepared in order that in this variety the greatest may be attained. It is through the co-operative effects of differentiation that the goal of the collective development of mankind must be attained. By this we can see that Christ, after having appeared in the East, went across to the West, there to be accepted by those who were made ready for this by a strong ego-consciousness; that they might thereby understand the Bringer of that consciousness. That is the secret of Christ's entrance into the West, that He there found souls prepared for Him, and that those souls accepted Him. Thus in the East we see humanity doing everything possible to prepare a body or a corporality,—consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body—into which could penetrate the Christ, He who, together with the ego-consciousness and by means of it, brings the impulse of Love to the earth. Love is that which, in its most psychic and spiritual form, came to the earth with Christ, appearing in its psychic and spiritual form in the East,—for thus we first see it—and then flowing on further, to the West, where it is understood. In this way do we see development progressing further.

In what way was the ego-consciousness able so to work in the West that it felt itself related to Christ? What had happened to the souls who had prematurely taken up the ego-consciousness?

The Egyptian-Chaldean people waited for the spiritual or Consciousness Soul before they developed the ego; the Graeco-Latin peoples developed it in the Intellectual-Soul or soul of higher feeling; the culture of Northern Europe had prematurely developed the ego in the Sentient-Soul. That was in the human soul early in those countries; thus the Sentient-soul and the ego-consciousness worked together there in a different way than anywhere else in the world. In Northern Europe they first made themselves felt in the development of mankind. What was the result of the Ego-consciousness being firmly established in the Sentient-Soul in the European peoples, before a Christ had entered into the development of mankind, and before the latter had taken up what had been developed in Asia?

Because of this a force had been developed in the soul of man, together with the Sentient Soul, which could only have been developed through the Sentient-Soul being permeated with the ego-feeling while still quite virginal and uninfluenced by other civilisations. This permeation of the Sentient-Soul with the sense of self (the ego-sense) has grown into man's conscience. This accounts for the wonderful innocence of conscience! How does it speak? It speaks in the same way in the simplest and most primitive of men, as it does in the most complex soul. It says quite simply: that is right! that is wrong! without any theory or dogma. When it says: that is right, or that is wrong, what it tells us works with the might of an instinct or an urge. You will only find it developed in this way in the West. Therefore it throws its first rays like a rosy dawn, towards Greece and from thence towards Rome, where indeed we find it very strongly developed. We first meet with the word conscience,—conscientia—in the works of the Roman writers. Whereas among the Greeks we only find the first sporadic hints of it in Euripides, we find the Romans quite familiar with it, it had then become a word in general use. This is because of the influence of that strain of culture which came into being through the mutual inter-permeation of the Sentient-Soul and ego-feeling; for the ego-feeling, which lifts men up from the lowest to the highest, already speaks in the Sentient-Soul,—in which hitherto nothing spoke but instincts, desires and passions,—and speaks there like a voice from God, urging man to do what is right that he may press up to the higher ego.

In this way we can trace the first rise of conscience among the peoples of Europe. From thence it spreads its rays abroad to the other peoples of the Earth. Thus through a wise world-guidance, the humanity in one part of the world was so prepared that conscience could be added as a contribution to the whole collective development of humanity. We have now mentioned everything that can throw light upon conscience. We mentioned that indefinable attribute of conscience, its pressing forth from the depths of the soul. Conscience speaks like an urging impulse; but it is not an impulse. Those philosophers who so describe it, are far from hitting the mark. It speaks with the same power as does the Spiritual-Soul itself when it appears; but yet with elemental, original forces.

So, we see: Love appears on the earth in the East; Conscience in the West. The two belong together; as Christ appears in the East, so Conscience awakens in the West, that through it Christ may be accepted. In the simultaneous occurrence of the fact of the Christ-Event and the comprehension of it, and in the preparation for these two things in different parts of the Earth, we see the ruling of an infinite Wisdom guiding our development. We have thus indicated the past history of Conscience.

If we recollect what has often been emphasised,—that now, after the conclusion of Kali-Yuga, we are going through a transition in which new forces will have to be developed,—we shall easily understand that we are now faced with important questions regarding the further development of conscience. In the last lecture we strongly and clearly emphasised the fact that we are advancing towards a new Christ-Event, in that the soul will become capable of perceiving the Christ by means of a certain etheric clairvoyance, and of re-experiencing, in itself, the Event of Damascus. We are therefore justified in asking the question: What will happen as regards the parallel experience, that of the development of conscience, in the epochs towards which we are advancing? We will go into this question next Sunday (8th May), for the best way of celebrating our White Lotus Day will be to point out the living nature of the movement of Spiritual Science, and to explain that the conscience of man is in a state of transition. We shall see that light can be thrown upon it from many different sides. The public lecture will treat the subject quite exoterically, but even in these lectures many a thing can now be mentioned, because they have been going on for a number of years. Conscience can be spoken of in a deep sense, as we have done to-day,—or quite exoterically as we shall do on Thursday,—or it may be gone into yet more profoundly. But it will be some time before we can do that.

To-day, the 8th May, the Theosophical Society celebrates the Day of the White Lotus, which to the outer world is known, in the usual terminology of the day, as the death-day of the instigator of that Spiritual stream in which we now stand. To us it would seem more appropriate to select a different designation for to-day's festival, one taken from our knowledge of the Spiritual world and which should run more like this: ‘The day of transition from an activity on the physical plane to one in the Spiritual worlds’. For to us it is not only an inner conviction in the ordinary sense of the words but an ever-increasing knowledge, that what the outer world calls death is but the passing from one form of work, from an activity stimulated by the impressions of the outer physical world, to one entirely stimulated by the Spiritual world. When to-day we remember the great instigator, H. P. Blavatsky, and the leading persons of her movement who have also now passed over into the Spiritual realm, let us in particular try to form a clear idea of what we ourselves must make of our Spiritual movement so that it may represent a continuation of that activity which she exercised on the physical plane as long as she remained on it; so that on the one hand it may be a continuation of that activity and at the same time be possible for the Foundress herself to continue her work from the Spiritual world, both now and in the future. On such a day as this it is seemly that we should in a sense break away from our usual study of theosophical matters, and theosophical life, and should instead go through a sort of conscientious retrospect, a retrospect concerning what the tasks and duties the theosophical movement sets before us, and which may also lead us to a sort of prevision of what this movement should become in the future, and what we should do, and avoid doing.

What we are carrying on as the Theosophical movement came into the world as the result of certain quite special circumstances and certain historical necessities. You know that there was here no question, as in other Spiritual movements or unions of any sort,—of one or more persons determining to follow certain ideals according as the quality of their hearts and minds leads them to feel enthusiasm for these ideals, trying to enthuse other people and to induce them to form societies or unions for carrying these into practice. Not in this way should we view the Theosophical movement if we understand it aright. We only do this if we look upon it as an historical necessity of our present life: something which, regardless of what people feel or would like to feel about it, was bound to come, for it already lay in the womb of time, so to speak, and had to be brought to birth. In what way then may we regard the Theosophical movement? It may be considered as a descent, a new descent of Spiritual life, of Spiritual wisdom and Spiritual forces, into the sensible physical world from the super-sensible ones. Such a descent had to take place for the further development of man, and must repeatedly take place in the future. It cannot of course be our task to-day to point out all the different great impulses through which Spiritual life has flowed down from the super-sensible worlds in order that the soul-life of man should be renewed when it had, so to speak, grown old; but in the course of time this has frequently occurred. One thing, however, must be borne in mind.

In the primeval past, not long after the great Atlantean catastrophe which the traditions of the various countries record as the story of the Flood, came that impulse that we may describe as the inflow of Spiritual life that poured into the development of mankind through the Holy Rishis. Then came that other stream of Spiritual life that flowed down into man's evolution through Zarathustra or Zoroaster, and we find another stream of like nature in that which came to the old Israelites through the revelations of Moses.

[ 1 ] With what has been presented so far, we have clarified the idea of knowing. This idea is now given in human awareness without any mediation, insofar as it is limited to knowing itself. The ego (without mediation the center of awareness) is given external perception, internal perception, and perception of its own self-existence (sein eigenes Dasein). (It hardly needs to be said that we do not want the term "center" to be associated with a theoretical view of the nature of consciousness, but rather that we are only using it as a stylistic shorthand for the overall characteristic features of awareness.) The ego feels the urge to find more in what is given than what is immediately given. It goes beyond the given world to the second world of thinking, and it combines the two through a free decision (about possible reality) which we have settled on as the idea of knowing.

Herein lies a fundamental difference between (firstly) the way, in objective human awareness, in which concept and immediately-given show themselves bound together in total reality, and (secondly) that which has value regarding the remaining world-content. With every other part of the world picture, we must imagine that the connection is original and necessary from the outset. Only at the beginning of knowing does an artificial separation occur for knowing, which ultimately will again be uplifted (aufgehoben), by means of the appropriate recognition of the original nature of what is objective.

Things are different with human awareness. Here the connection is only present if it is carried out consciously in actual activity. With any other object, the separation has no meaning for the object, only for knowing does it have meaning. The connection is the first thing here, the separation is the derivative. The act of knowing only carries out the separation, because in its own way, it cannot take possession of the connection unless it has separated first. But the concept and the given reality of awareness are originally separate. The connection is what is derived, and that is why knowing is described here in this way.

Because in consciousness the idea and the given necessarily appear separately, the whole of reality is split into these two parts, and because consciousness can only bring about the combination of the two elements mentioned through its own activity, in this way it arrives at full reality through bringing to reality the act of knowing. The remaining categories (ideas) would necessarily be linked to the corresponding forms of the given, if they were not included in knowing; the idea of knowing can be united with the given related to it only through the activity of awareness. A real consciousness exists only when it realizes itself, when it brings itself to reality (sich selbst verwirklicht). I believe that I am sufficiently prepared to expose the fundamental error of Fichte's Principles of Science (Wissenschaftlehre) and at the same time to provide the key to understanding it.

Fichte is the philosopher who felt most vividly (among Kant's successors) that the foundation of all scientific thinking (Wissenschaft),⁶⁵ could only stand within a theory of consciousness, but he never realized why that was so. He felt that what we call the second step of epistemology, and to which we give the form of a postulate, must really be carried out by the ego. We see this for example, in his following words. “The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), insofar as it is intended to be a systematic science (just like all possible sciences insofar as they are intended to be systematic), arises through a stipulation of freedom, which here in particular stipulates the art of handling intelligence in raising it to consciousness at all.— Through this free handling (Handlung), the necessary action of intelligence, already itself a form, will now be taken up substantially as the new form of perception of experience (des Wissens) or aware existence (Bewußtseins)..." ⁶⁶ What is here understood by the art of handling of intelligence, expressing what is darkly felt in clear terms, is nothing other than fully bringing into awareness the idea of knowing. If Fichte had been fully aware of this, he would simply have had to formulate the above sentence like this: The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) must raise knowing, insofar as it is still an unconscious activity of the ego, into awareness-existence (Bewußtsein). It must show that the objectification of the idea of knowing is carried out in the ego as a necessary action.

[ 2 ] In his attempt to define the activity of the ego, Fichte concludes, "Whoever’s existence (essential being) consists solely in the fact that it assumes itself as being, that is the ego, as an absolute subject.” ⁶⁷ For Fichte, this positioning of the ego is the first unencumbered active handling that “lies at the basis of all other awareness of existence.” ⁶⁸ In Fichte's sense, the ego can only begin all its activity through an absolute decision. But for Fichte it is impossible to help this activity (which is absolutely done by the ego) to find any content for its actions. For it has nothing upon which to direct this activity, and by which it should determine itself. His ego is supposed to carry out an act, but what should it do? Because Fichte did not establish the concept of knowing that the ego should realize, he struggled in vain to find any progression from his absolute act to a further determination of the ego. Yes, he finally declares regarding such a progression, that the investigation into this lies outside the limits of theory. In deducing what the mental picture is, he assumes neither an absolute activity of the ego nor of the “non-ego”, but takes his start rather from something determined and at the same time determining, because nothing else is or can be contained directly in consciousness.

What determines this determination remains completely undecided in theory, and through this indeterminacy we are driven beyond theory into the practical part of scientific theory.⁶⁹ With this clarification, Fichte destroys knowing altogether. For the practical activity of the ego belongs to a completely different arena. Clearly, the postulate I made above can only be realized through a free action of the ego, but if the ego is to behave in a way of knowing, then it is important that the determination of the ego is to realize the idea of knowing. It is certainly true that the ego can do many other things of its own free will. But the epistemological foundation of all sciences is not based on a characteristic of the free ego, but rather on a characteristic of the knowing ego. However, Fichte allowed himself to be influenced too much by his subjective tendency to place the freedom of the human personality in the brightest light. Harms rightly remarks in his speech on Fichte's philosophy S.15, "His world view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and his epistemology has no other character." Cognition would have absolutely no task if all areas of reality were given in their totality. But since the ego, so long as it is not integrated by thinking into the systematic whole of the world picture, is nothing other than something directly given, simply showing what it does is not sufficient. Fichte, however, is of the opinion that everything is already done for the ego by simply looking for it. “We must seek out the first principle (absolutely without presuppositions) of all human knowing. It cannot be proven or determined if it is to be the absolute first principle.” ⁷⁰

We have seen that in proving and defining, only the content of pure logic is out of place, not required. The ego, however, belongs to reality, where it is necessary to determine the presence of this or that category in the given. Fichte didn't do that. And this is the reason why he gave his scientific theory such a wrong shape. Zeller notes ⁷¹ that the logical formulas through which Fichte wants to arrive at the concept of the ego only poorly disguise the fact that Fichte wants to achieve the already preconceived purpose of getting to this starting point at all costs. These words refer to the first form that Fichte gave to his scientific theory in 1794. If we hold on to the fact that Fichte, based on the whole nature of his philosophizing, could have wanted nothing other than to have science begin through an absolute power decree, then there are only two ways in which this beginning appears understandable. One was to touch consciousness in some of its empirical activities and to crystallize the pure concept of the ego by gradually peeling away everything that does not originally follow from it. The other way, however, was to start with the original activity of the ego and to reveal its nature through self-reflection and self-observation. Fichte took the first path at the beginning of his philosophizing, but as his philosophizing coursed along, he gradually moved on to the second.

[ 3 ] Building on Kant's synthesis of “transcendental apperception”, Fichte found that all activity of the ego consisted in the assembly of the material of experience according to the forms of judgment. Judging consists in linking the predicate with the subject, which is expressed in a purely formal way by the sentence “a” = “a”. This proposition would be impossible if the unknown factor “x” that connects the first and second “a” were not based on an absolute ability to posit. Because the sentence does not mean: “a” is, but rather: if “a” is, then “a” is. There can be no question of postulating “a” absolutely. There is nothing left to arrive at something totally valid, other than to declare the positing itself to be absolute. While the “a” is conditional, the positing of the “a” is unconditional. But this setting is an act of the ego. The ego therefore can posit absolutely and unconditionally. In the sentence “a” = “a”, one “a” is only posited by presupposing the other; namely it is set by the ego. Fichte states, “If ‘a’ is posited in the ego, then it is posited.” ⁷² This connection is only possible under the condition that there is something in the ego that is always the same, something that moves from one “a” to the other. And the “x” mentioned above is based on this constant. The ego that posits one “a” is the same as that which posits the other. And that means “I” “I” This sentence expressed in the form of the proposition: “If I am, then so it is”, but this proposition has no meaning. The ego is not placed under the presupposition of another, but rather it presupposes itself. But that means it is absolute and unconditional.

The hypothetical form of the judgment, which belongs to all judgments without the presupposition of the absolute ego, is transformed here into the form of the absolute existential sentence: “I simply am”. Fichte also expresses this as follows: “The ego originally posits its own being.” ⁷³ We see that Fichte's entire derivation is nothing but a kind of pedagogical discussion to lead his readers to the point where the knowledge of the unconditioned activity of the ego dawns on them. The purpose is to make clear to his readers, that without this activity of the ego, there is no ego at all.

[ 4 ] We now want to look back at Fichte's train of thought. If you look more closely, it turns out that there is a crack in it, and one that calls into question the correctness of the view of the original act. What really is absolute in the positing of the I? The judgment is made: If “a” is, then “a” is. The “a” is placed by the ego. There can be no doubt about this setting. But even if it is unconditional as an activity, the ego can only set something. It cannot posit “activity in and of itself”, but only a specific activity. In short: the setting must have a content. But it cannot take this from itself, otherwise it could do nothing but set forever. There must therefore be something for the positing, for the absolute activity of the ego, which is realized through it. Without the ego taking hold of something given and positing it, it can posit nothing, and therefore cannot posit. This is therefore shown by a Fichte-like sentence that the ego posits its existence, this existence is a category. We are back to our statement: The activity of the ego is based on the ego positing the concepts and ideas of the given out of its own free decision. Only because Fichte unconsciously sets out to establish the ego as something that has existence does he reach his conclusion. If he had developed the concept of knowing, he would have arrived at the true starting point of the theory of knowing (epistemology), that the ego posits knowing. Since Fichte did not make it clear to himself what determines the activity of the ego, he simply described the positing of existence as the character of this activity. But in doing so he also limited the absolute activity of the ego. For if only the “existence-positing” of the ego is unconditional, then everything else that emanates from the ego is conditional. But every path to get from the unconditional to the conditional is also cut off. If the ego is unconditioned only in the direction indicated, then the possibility for it to posit something other than its own being through an original act immediately ceases. The need therefore arises to give the reason for all other activity of the ego. Fichte searched for one in vain, as we have already seen above.

[ 5 ] Therefore, he turned to the other path described above to derive the ego. As early as 1797 in his First Introduction to the Doctrine of Scientific Awareness he recommended self-observation as the right thing to do to recognize the ego by its very own character. “Pay attention to yourself, turn your gaze away from everything that surrounds you and peer into your inner self. This is the first demand that philosophy makes to its apprentices. There is no talk of anything outside of you, but only of yourself.” ⁷⁴ This way of introducing the Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), however, has a great advantage over the other. For self-observation does not in fact deliver the activity of the ego one-sidedly in a certain direction, it does not merely show it as positing existence, but rather it shows it in its all-round development, how it tries to think and understand the immediately given content of the world. Introspection shows the ego how it builds its worldview from the combination of the given and the concept. But for anyone who has not gone through the consideration above, who does not know that the ego only comes to the full content of reality when it approaches the given with thinking, for him the process of knowing appears as the world spinning out of the ego. For Fichte, the worldview becomes more and more a construction of the ego. He increasingly emphasizes that what is important in scientific teaching is to awaken the sense that can overhear the ego constructing the world. Anyone who can do this appears to Fichte to be at a higher level of knowing than someone who only sees the constructed, the finished existence. Anyone who only looks at the world of objects, does not recognize that they are created by the ego. But whoever looks at the ego in its construing sees the basis of the finished world picture, and knows how it came about, for it appears to him due to certain given prerequisites. Someone with ordinary consciousness only sees what is posited, what is determined in this or that way. He lacks insight into the antecedents, into the reasons why it is set this way and not otherwise. According to Fichte, the conscious experience of perceiving with logic and clarity (das Wissen) is the task of a completely new sense. I find this most clearly expressed in his Introductory lectures on his Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) that he read aloud in the fall of 1813 at the University of Berlin: “This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sensory tool through which a new world is created that does not exist at all for the ordinary person." ⁷⁵ Also: “The world of the new sense (and thereby itself) is for the moment clearly determined. It is seeing the antecedents on which judgment is based. It is something that itself grounds the grounds of existence, which is exactly why, because it is this, is not itself again and is an existence.” ⁷⁶

[ 6 ] Here too, Fichte lacks a clear insight into the content of the activity carried out by the ego. He never got through to it. That is why his Wissenschaftslehre could not become what it otherwise would have had to become given its entire structure, which is a theory of knowing as basic philosophical science. Once it was recognized that the activity of the ego must be determined by the ego itself, it was obvious to think that it also receives its determination from the ego. But how can this happen other than by giving content to the purely formal actions of the ego. But if this is really to be introduced by the ego into its otherwise completely undetermined activity, then it must also be determined according to its nature. Otherwise, it could at most be realized by a “thing in itself” lying in the ego, whose tool is the ego, but not by the latter itself. If Fichte had attempted this definition, then he would have arrived at the concept of knowing, which is to be realized by the ego. Fichte's teaching of science is proof that even the most astute thinker will not succeed in having a fruitful impact in any field if one does not arrive at the correct thought form (category, idea), which when supplemented with what is given, gives reality. Such a thinker is the same as a person who listens to the most wonderful melodies, but doesn't hear them at all, due to having no feeling for melody. Consciousness, as a given, can only be characterized by someone who knows how to put himself in possession of the “idea of consciousness”.

[ 7 ] Fichte came quite close to the correct insight. In 1797 he found in his Introduction to the Principles of Science that there were two theoretical systems, dogmatism,⁷⁷ in which the ego is determined by things, and idealism, in which things are determined by the ego. In his view, both stand as possible worldviews. Both allow consistent implementation. But if we give in to dogmatism, then we must give up the independence of the ego and make it dependent on the thing-in-itself. We are in the opposite situation when we pay homage to idealism. Which of the systems one or the other philosopher wants to choose, Fichte simply leaves it up to the discretion of the ego. But if it wants to preserve its independence, it would suspend belief in things outside of us and surrender to idealism.

[ 8 ] All that Fichte had needed was to have considered that the ego cannot come to any real, well-founded decision and determination if it does not presuppose something that helps it to make one. All determination from the ego would remain empty and contentless if the ego does not find something full of content and thoroughly determined that makes it possible for it to determine what is given and thus also allows the choice to be made between idealism and dogmatism. But this thoroughly full-of-content world is the world of thinking. And determining what is given through thinking means knowing. We may linger on Fichte’s work wherever we want, but everywhere we will find that his train of thought immediately takes root when we think of the completely gray, empty activity of the ego as being filled and regulated by what we have called the process of knowing.

[ 9 ] The ego can put itself into activity through freedom, which makes it possible for it to make real the category of knowing through self-determination. In the rest of the world, the categories are linked to the given that corresponds to them through objective necessity. Investigating the nature of free self-determination will be the task of ethics and metaphysics based on our epistemology. This task will also have to discuss the question of whether the ego is also able to realize ideas other than knowing. it is already clear from the comments made above, however, that the realization of knowing occurs through freedom. For if what is immediately given and the associated form of thinking are united by the ego in the process of knowing, then the unification of the two elements of reality that otherwise always remain separate in consciousness can occur only through an act of freedom.

[ 10 ] Through the preceding discussion, light will be thrown on critical idealism in a completely different way. To anyone who has studied Fichte's system in detail, it appears to be a matter close to the heart of this philosopher to maintain the principle that nothing can enter the ego from outside, nothing that is not originally posited by the ego itself. But this entails that no idealism will ever be able to derive from the ego that form of world content that we have described as the immediately given. This form can only be given, never construed from thinking. Just consider that even if we were given the rest of the color gamut, we would not be able to add even one shade of color purely from the ego. We can form a picture of the most distant areas of the country, areas that we have never seen, if we have experienced similar elements individually as given. We then combine these individual elements we have experienced into a picture based on the descriptions given to us. But we will strive in vain to spin out of ourselves even a single element of perception that never lay in the realm of the “given”. It is quite different to simply to become acquainted (kennen) with something in the given world. it is also different to recognize (erkennen) the essential nature of something or someone. The latter, although it is intimately linked to the content of the world, is not clear to us unless we build reality ourselves from what is given and from thinking. The actual “what” of the given is posited for the ego only by the ego itself. But the ego has absolutely no reason to put the essential nature of a “given” inside itself, for it sees the matter first in a totally unencumbered way. Therefore, what is posited by the ego as the essential nature of the world is not posited without the ego, but through it.

[ 11 ] It is not the first form in which reality confronts the ego that is its true form, but the last form that the ego makes out of it. That first form has no meaning at all for the objective world, and only has such a meaning as a basis for the cognitive process. Therefore, the shape of the world that theory gives to it is not the subjective one, but rather that which is first given to the ego. If one wants to continue along with Volkelt’s followers, who call this given world experience, one must say that scientific knowing completes the organization of our awareness that appears in subjective form as experience, as emerging world-picture as what it essentially is.

[ 12 ] Our epistemology provides the basis for an idealism that understands itself in the true sense of the word. It establishes the belief that the essence of the world is conveyed in thinking. The relationship between the parts of the world's content can be shown by nothing other than thinking, whether it is the relationship of the heat of the sun to the heated stone, or of the ego to the outside world. Thinking alone is the element that determines all things in their relationships to one another.

[ 13 ] The objection that Kantianism could still make would be that the essential determination of the given as characterized above is only one for the ego. In the spirit of our basic conception, we must reply to this that the split between the ego and the external world only exists within the given, and therefore that “for the ego” has no meaning when compared to the thinking observation that unites all opposites. The ego as something separated from the outside world is completely lost in the thinking world view, so it no longer makes any sense to speak of determinations solely for the ego.

• 65. t/n In this sense science is consciously thinking about experiences with clarity and logic
• 66. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 71.
• 67. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 97.
• 68. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 69. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.
• 70. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 71. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605.
• 72. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.
• 73. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.
• 74. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 75. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 76. J. G. Fichtes Nachgelassene Werke. Herausgegeben von J. H. Fichte, Bd. 1, Bonn 1834, S.4 und S.16.
• 77. t/n The meaning of dogmatism here is unclear. Here it sounds like materialism, but with the recent growing acceptance of materialism, dogmatism has come to be seen as something like Bishop Berkeley’s spiritism. In the modern view (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on idealism), idealism is often paired with its opposite realism, and materialism with its opposite spiritism. Anyone holding a specific world-view usually accuses those holding different views of being dogmatic, that is, holding beliefs that are unquestioned, undefended, and unsubstantiated.

This winter we have given a whole series of talks on spiritual science with the specific purpose of coming more closely in touch with the whole nature of man's being. We have looked at the great riddle of man from as many aspects as possible. Today we will make it our task to speak of something that is absolutely a part of everyday life. And perhaps, for the very reason that we start from something really commonplace, we shall see that life's riddles really encounter us on all sides, and that we ought to take hold of them, so that in understanding them we see into the depths of the world. For the things of the spirit, and altogether that which is greatest, is not to be sought in unknown distances, for it reveals itself in the most ordinary things of life. In the smallest most insignificant things of life we can find the greatest wisdom, if we can only understand this. Therefore let us include in this cycle of lectures this winter a study of the everyday theme of laughing and weeping from the spiritual scientific point of view.

Laughing and weeping are certainly very common things in human life. But only spiritual science can bring a deeper understanding of these phenomena, because spiritual science is the only thing that can penetrate into the deepest parts of man's being where he is distinctly different from the other kingdoms with whom he shares this globe. By virtue of the fact that man has acquired on this globe the greatest and most powerful share of divinity, he towers above his fellow creatures. Therefore only a knowledge and understanding that reaches the spirit will really fathom man's real nature. Laughing and weeping deserve to be properly observed and appreciated, for they alone can remove the preconception that would rank man's nature too close to that of animals. The way of thinking that would so dearly like to reduce man as near as possible to animal level, emphasises as strongly as it can that a high level of intelligence is to be found in the various accomplishments of animals, an intelligence often far superior to that of man. But this does not particularly surprise the spiritual scientist, for he knows that when the animal does something intelligent it does not arise out of an individual element in the animal but out of the group soul. It is very difficult, of course, to make the concept of the group soul convincing for external observation, even though it is not absolutely impossible. But one thing should be noticed, for it is accessible to any kind of external observation if it is extensive enough: the animal, neither weeps nor laughs. Certainly there will be people who maintain that animals also laugh and weep. But you cannot help such people if they do not want to know what laughing and weeping really imply, and therefore ascribe it to animals as well. A person who really observes the soul knows that the animal cannot weep but at the most howl, nor can it laugh but only grin. We must be alive to the difference between howling and weeping, grinning and laughing. We must go back to some very significant events if we want to throw light on the real nature of laughing and weeping.

From lectures given in various places, including Berlin, and particularly the one about the nature of the temperaments, you will remember that there are two streams in human life. One stream includes all the human capacities and characteristics we inherit from our parents and other ancestors, and which can be passed on to our descendants, and the other stream consists of the qualities and characteristics we have by virtue of being born an individuality. This stream takes on the inherited characteristics like a sheath, its own qualities and characteristics originating from past lives in previous incarnations.

Man is essentially a twofold being: one part of his nature he inherits from his forefathers, the other part he brings with him from earlier incarnations. Thus we differentiate between the actual kernel of man's being which passes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation, and the sheaths surrounding it, comprising the inherited characteristics. Now it is true that the actual individual kernel of a man's being, that passes from incarnation to incarnation, is already united with his physical bodily nature before birth, so you should not imagine that when a man is born it is possible under normal conditions for his individuality to be exchanged. The individuality is already united with the human body before birth.

But at what moment this kernel of individuality can start its formative work on man is a different matter. The individual kernel is already in the child, as we said, when the child is born. But before birth as such it cannot bring to effect the capacities it has acquired in past lives. It must wait until after birth. So we can say that before birth there are active in man the causes of all those characteristics and qualities we can inherit from parents and ancestors. Although the kernel of man's being is there, as we said, it cannot take control until the child has come into the world.

When the child has entered the world this kernel of individuality begins to transform man's organism, assuming that circumstances are normal, of course, as it is different in exceptional cases. It changes the brain and the other organs so that they may become its instruments. Thus it is chiefly the inherited qualities that are visible in the child at birth, and little by little the individual qualities work their way into the general organism. If we wanted to speak of the individuality's work on the organism before birth, that is quite another chapter. We can for instance also say that the individuality is actively engaged in choosing his parents. But this, too, is basically done from without. All the work that is done before birth by the individuality takes place from without, for example through the mother. But the actual work of the individuality on the organism itself does not begin until the child has come into the world. And because this is so, the really human part can only start, little by little, to come to expression in the human being after birth.

To start with, therefore, the child has certain qualities in common with animal nature, and these are just those qualities that find their expression in today's subject, laughing and weeping. In the first weeks after birth the child really cannot either laugh or weep in the proper sense of the words. As a rule it is forty days after birth when the child cries its first tears and also smiles, because that is the moment when the kernel from previous lives first enters the body and works on it to make it a vehicle of expression. It is just this which gives man his superiority over the animal, that in the case of animals we cannot say that an individual soul passes from incarnation to incarnation. The basis of animal nature is the group soul, and we cannot say that what is individual in the animal is reincarnated. It returns to the group soul and becomes something that only lives on in the animal group soul. It is only in man that the fruits of his efforts in one incarnation survive and, after he has gone through Devachan, pass into a new incarnation. In this new incarnation it gradually transforms the organism, so that it becomes not only the expression of the characteristics of his physical ancestors but also of his individual abilities, talents, and so on.

Now it is just the activity of the ego in the organism that calls forth laughing and weeping in a being such as man. Laughing and weeping are only possible in a being that has his ego within his own organism and whose ego is not a group ego as it is with the animals. For laughing and weeping are nothing less than a delicate, intimate expression of the ego-hood within the bodily nature. What happens when a person weeps? Weeping can only come about when the ego feels weak in relation to what faces it in the environment. If the ego is not in the organism, that is, if it is not individual, the feeling of weakness in relation to the outer world cannot occur. Being in possession of ego-hood, man feels a certain disharmony in his relationship to the environment. And this feeling of disharmony is expressed in the desire to defend himself and restore the balance. How does he restore the balance? He does so in that his ego contracts the astral body. In the case of sorrow that leads to weeping, we can say that the ego feels itself to be in a certain disharmony with the environment, and it tries to restore the balance by contracting the astral body within itself, squeezing together its forces, as it were. That is the spiritual process underlying weeping. Take weeping as an expression of sorrow, for example. You would have to examine sorrow carefully in every single case, if you wanted to see what was causing it. For example, sorrow can be the expression of being forsaken by something you previously had. There would be a harmonious relationship of the ego to the environment if what we have lost were still there. Disharmony occurs when we have lost something and the ego feels forsaken. So the ego contracts the forces of its astral body, compresses it as it were, to defend itself against being forsaken. This is the expression of sorrow leading to tears, that the ego, the fourth member of man's being, contracts the forces of the astral body, the third member.

What is laughter? Laughter is something that is based on the opposite process. The ego tries as it were to loosen the astral body, to expand and stretch it. Whilst weeping is brought about by contraction, laughing is produced through the relaxing and expanding of the astral body. That is the spiritual state of affairs. Every time someone weeps, the clairvoyant consciousness can confirm that the ego is contracting the astral body. Every time someone laughs, the ego is expanding and making a bulge in the astral body. Only because the ego is active within man's being and not working as a group ego from outside can laughing and weeping arise. Now because the ego only gradually begins to be active in the child, and at birth it is not yet actually active, and has as it were not yet taken hold of the strings which direct the organism from within, the child can neither laugh nor weep in its earliest days but only learns to do so to the extent that the ego becomes master of the inner strings that are, in the first place, active in the astral body. And because everything spiritual in man finds expression in the body, and the body is the physiognomy of the spirit—condensed spirit—these qualities we have been describing are expressed in bodily processes. And we can learn to understand these bodily processes from the spiritual point of view if we become clear about the following:

The animal has a group soul, or we could say a group ego. Its form is imprinted upon it by this group ego. Then why has the animal such a definite form, a form that is complete in itself? This is because this form is imprinted upon it out of the astral world, and essentially it has to keep it. Man has a form, which, as we have stressed many a time, contains as it were all the other animal forms within it as a harmonious whole. But this harmonious human form, the human physical body, has to be more mobile within itself than an animal body. It must not have such a rigid form as an animal body. We can see that this is so in man's changing facial expressions. Look at the fundamentally immobile face of the animal, how rigid it is, and compare that with the mobile human form, with its change of gesture, physiognomy, and so on. You will admit that within certain limits, of course, man has a certain mobility, and that in a way it is left to him to imprint his own form on himself because his ego dwells within him. Nobody is likely to say that a dog or a parrot has as individual an expression of intelligence on its face as a human being, unless he were just making comparisons. Speaking of them in general it could certainly be so, but not individually, because with dogs, parrots, lions or elephants the general character predominates.

With man we find his individual character written in his face.

And we can see the way his particular individual soul forms itself more and more in his physiognomy, especially in its mobile parts. Man still has this mobility because man can give himself his own form from within. It is this fact of being able to work creatively on himself that raises man above the other kingdoms.

As soon as man changes the general balance of forces in his astral body from out of his ego this also appears physically in the expression of his face. The normal facial expression and muscular tension that a man has all day is bound to change when the ego makes a change in the forces of the astral body. When, instead of holding the astral body in its normal tension, the ego lets it go slack and expands it, it will work with less force on the etheric and physical bodies, resulting in certain muscles changing their position. So when in the case of a certain display of feeling the ego makes the astral body slack, certain muscles are bound to have a different tension from normal. Laughter, therefore, is nothing else than the physical or physiognomical expression of that slackening of the astral body that the ego brings about. It is the astral body, from within, under the ego's influence, that brings man's muscles into those positions that give him his normal expression. When the astral body relaxes its tension the muscles expand and laughter occurs. Laughter is a direct expression of the ego's inner work on the astral body. When the astral body is compressed by the ego in the grip of sorrow, this compression continues into the body, resulting in the secretion of tears which in a certain respect is like a flow of blood brought about by the compression of the astral body. This is what these processes really are. And that is why only a being that is capable of taking an individual ego into himself and working from out of it on himself can laugh and weep. The individuality of the ego begins at the point where the person is capable of tensing or relaxing the forces of the astral body from within.

Every time we see someone smiling or weeping we are confronting the proof of man's superiority over the animals. For in the astral body of the animal the ego works from outside. Therefore all the conditions of tension in the animal's astral body can only be produced from outside, and the inner quality of such an existence cannot express itself in an external form like laughter and weeping.

Now we shall see much more in the phenomena of laughing and weeping if we observe the breathing process when people laugh or cry. This enables us to see deeply into what is happening. If you watch the breathing of someone who is weeping, you will notice that it consists essentially of a long out-breath and a short in-breath. It is the opposite with laughing: a short out-breath and a long in-breath. Thus the breathing process changes when the human being is under the influence of the phenomena we have been describing. And you only need a little imagination to find the reasons why this must be so.

In the phenomena of weeping the astral body is compressed by the ego. This is like a squeezing out of the breath: a long out-breath. In the phenomenon of laughing there is a slackening of the astral body. That is just as though you were to pump the air out of a certain space, rarefy the air, and the air whistles in. It is like this with the long in-breath when you laugh. Here, so to say, in the change in the breathing process we see the ego at work within the astral body. That which is outside in the case of the animal, the group ego, can actually be glimpsed at work in man, for this particular activity is even accompanied by a change of breathing. Therefore let us show the universal significance of this phenomenon.

Animals have a breathing process that is so to speak strictly governed from outside and is not subject to the inner individual ego in the way it has been described today. That which sustains the breathing process and actually regulates it was called in the occult teaching of the Old Testament ‘Nephesh’. This is really what we call the ‘animal soul’. The group ego of the animal is the nephesh. And in the Bible it is stated quite correctly: And God breathed into man the nephesh—the animal soul—and man became a living soul. This is often wrongly understood, of course, because people cannot read such profound writings today, they are too biased. For instance when it says: And God breathed nephesh, the animal soul, into man, it does not mean He created it at that moment, for it already existed. It does not say that it was not previously in existence. It was there, outside. And what God did was to take what had previously been in existence outside as group soul and put it into man's inner being. The essential thing is to understand the reality of an expression like this. One can ask what came about through the fact that the nephesh was put into man? It made it possible for man to rise above the animals and to develop his ego with inner activity, so that he can laugh and cry and experience joy and pain in such a way that they work creatively in him.

And that brings us to the significant effect that pain and joy have in life. If man did not have his ego within him he could not experience pain and joy inwardly and these would have to pass him by meaninglessly. However, as he has his ego within him and can work from within on his astral body and consequently on his whole bodily nature, pain and joy become forces that can work creatively in him. All the joy and pain we experience in one incarnation become part of us, to carry over into the next incarnation; they work creatively in our being. Thus you could say that pain and joy became creative world forces at the same time as man learnt to weep and laugh, that is, at the same time as man's ego was put into his inner being. Weeping and laughter are everyday occurrences, but we do not understand them unless we know what is actually happening in the spiritual part of man, what actually goes on between the ego and the astral body when a man laughs or cries.

Now all that forms man is in continuous development. That man has the ability to laugh or cry is due to the fact that he can work on his astral body from out of his ego. This is certainly correct. But on the other hand man's physical body and also his etheric body were already predestined to have an ego working within them when man entered his first earthly incarnation. Man was capable of it. If we could squeeze an individual ego into a horse, it would feel highly uncomfortable in there, because it would not be able to do a thing; it could find no outlet for the individual work of the ego. Imagine an individual ego in a horse. The individual ego would want to work on the astral body of the horse by compressing or expanding it, and so on. But if an astral body is joined to a physical and etheric body that cannot adapt themselves to the forms of the astral body, then the physical and etheric bodies create a tremendous hindrance. It would be like trying to fight a wall. The ego inside the being of the horse would want to compress the astral body but the physical and etheric bodies would not follow suit, and this would drive the horse mad. Man had to be predestined for such an activity. For that to be so he had right at the beginning to receive the kind of physical body that could really become an instrument for an ego and could gradually be mastered by the ego. Therefore the following can also occur: The physical and the etheric body can be mobile within themselves, proper vehicles of the ego, so to speak, but the ego can be very undeveloped and not yet exercise proper mastery over the physical and etheric body. We can see this in the fact that the physical and etheric bodies act as sheaths for the ego but not so that they are a complete expression of the ego. This is the case with the kind of people who laugh and cry involuntarily, giggle on every occasion and have no control over the laughter muscles. This shows that they have a higher human nature in their physical and etheric bodies but have at the same time not yet brought their humanity under the control of the ego. This is why giggling makes such an unpleasant impression. It shows that man is at a higher level with regard to that which he can do nothing about than he is with regard to that which he can already do something about. It always makes such an unpleasant impression when there is a being who does not prove to be at the level to which external conditions have brought him. Thus laughing and weeping are in a certain respect absolutely the expression of the ego nature of man, because they can only arise through the fact that the ego dwells in the being of man. Weeping can be an expression of the most terrible egoism, for in a certain way weeping is only too often a kind of wallowing in sensual pleasure. The person who feels forsaken compresses his astral body with his ego. He tries to make himself inwardly strong because he feels outwardly weak. And he feels this inner strength through being able to do something, namely shedding tears. A certain feeling of satisfaction—whether it is admitted or not—is always connected with the shedding of tears. Just as in different circumstances a kind of satisfaction is obtained from smashing a chair, tears are often shed for no further reason than the sensual pleasure of inner activity; pleasure wearing the mask of tears, even if the person is not conscious of it.

Laughter can be seen to be a kind of expression of ego nature because if you really enquire into it you will find that laughter can always be attributed to the fact that the person feels superior to the people and happenings around him. Why does a person laugh? Someone invariably laughs when he fancies himself to be above what he sees. You can always find this statement verified. Whether you are laughing at yourself or at someone else your ego is always feeling superior to something. And out of this feeling of superiority it expands the forces of its astral body, broadens and puffs them up. Strictly speaking this is what is really at the root of laughter. And this is why laughter can be such a healthy thing. And this pluming oneself should not be condemned in the abstract as egoistic, for laughter can be very healthy when it strengthens man's feeling of selfhood, especially if it is warranted and leads him beyond himself. If you see something in your surroundings or in yourself or others that is absurd, a feeling of being above such absurdity is sparked off and makes you laugh. It is bound to happen that man feels superior to something or other in the environment, and the ego brings this to expression by expanding the astral body.

If in the breathing process you understand what we tried to explain with the statement: And God breathed nephesh into man, and man became a living soul, you will also sense the connection this has with laughing and weeping, for you know that whilst laughing and weeping even man's breathing process itself changes. By means of this example we have shown that really the most everyday things can be understood only when we take spirit as the starting point. We can understand laughing and weeping only when we understand the connection between the four members of man's being. In the days when people still to some degree possessed clairvoyant traditions and had at the same time the ability to portray the gods with real imagination, they portrayed them as happy beings, whose chief quality was a kind of happy laughter. And not for nothing did people ascribe howling and gnashing of teeth to those regions of world existence in which primarily something resembling exaggerated egoism holds sway. Why was this? It was because laughter on the one hand signifies a raising of oneself, a setting up of the ego above its environment; that is, the victory of the higher over the lower. Whereas weeping signifies a knuckling under, a withdrawal from what is outside, a becoming smaller, the ego feeling forsaken, a withdrawal into itself. Sadness in life is so moving, because we know that it will and must be overcome, but how very different, hopeless and not at all moving is the appearance of sorrow and tears in that world where they can no longer be overcome. There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into darkness.

We must pay good attention to these feelings that can come over us when we make a broad survey of what comes to expression in man as the work of the ego upon itself, and follow them up in their subtlest details. Then we shall have understood a great deal of things that meet us in the course of time. We must be conscious of the fact that there is a spiritual world behind the physical, and that what appears in human life as the alternations between laughing and weeping, when we meet them apart from man, appear on the one hand as the happy light of Heaven and on the other hand as the dark, bitter misery of Hell. These two aspects are absolutely there at the root of our world, and we must understand our middle world as deriving its forces from these two realms.

We shall get to know many more things about the being of man. But I would like to say that one of the deepest chapters on the being of man is that of laughing and weeping, despite the fact that laughing and weeping are such everyday occurrences. The animal does not laugh or cry because it does not have the drop of divinity within it that man bears in his ego-hood. And we can say that when in the course of his life the human being begins to smile and to weep, this proves to anyone who can read the great script of nature that a divine spark is really living within man, and when a man laughs this spark of God is active in him seeking to raise him above all that is base. For smiling and laughing are elevating. On the other hand when a man weeps it is again the spark of God warning him that his ego could lose itself if it did not strengthen itself inwardly against all feelings of weakness and of being forsaken. It is the God in man admonishing the soul, in laughing and weeping. This accounts for the wrath that comes over anyone who understands life when he sees unnecessary weeping. For unnecessary weeping betrays the fact that instead of living and feeling with the environment, the pleasure of being within ones own ego is too great. But bitter feelings also arise in anyone who understands the world when the elevating of the ego above its surroundings, which otherwise expresses itself in healthy laughter, is found in someone as an end in itself, as indiscriminate laughter, or as malicious criticism. For he realises that if the ego does not draw into itself all it can from its environment, and does not want to live with its environment, but raises its ego nature above it without cause, then this ego nature will not have the necessary depth or necessary upward thrust that we can only acquire by taking from the environment everything we possibly can for the development of the ego. Then the ego will move backwards instead of forwards. The right balance between sorrow and joy makes a tremendous important contribution to human development. When sorrow and joy are not just within a man's own self but have their justification in the environment, and when the ego wants to establish the correct relationship between sorrow and joy and the surrounding world all the time, then sorrow and joy will be real evolutionary factors for man.

Great poets often find such beautiful words for the kind of sorrow and joy that are in no way rooted in arrogance nor in a contraction of the ego but originate out of the relationship between the ego and the environment, where their balance has been disturbed from outside, and which alone explains why a man laughs and weeps. We can understand it because we can see that it is in and through the outer world that the relationship between ego and outer world has been disturbed. That is why man must laugh or weep; whereas if it only lies within man, we cannot understand why he is laughing or crying because then it is always unfounded egoism. That is why it is so moving when Homer says of Andromache, when she is under the twofold grip of concern for her husband and concern for her baby: ‘She could laugh while she cried!’ This is a wonderful way of describing something normal in weeping. She is neither laughing nor weeping on her own account. The right relationship is there with the outside world, when she has to be concerned about her husband on the one hand and on the other about her child. And here we have the true relationship of laughing and weeping, that they balance one another: smiling while crying—crying while laughing. A natural child often expresses itself this way too, for its ego has not become so hardened in itself as later on in adulthood, and it can still cry while it laughs and laugh while it cries. And the one who understands these things can again ascertain the fact that whoever has overcome his ego to the point of no longer seeking the causes of laughter and weeping in himself but finding them in the outer world, can also laugh while he cries and cry while he laughs. Indeed, in what goes on around us every day, we have, if we understand it, the real expression of the spiritual. Laughing and weeping are something which can in the highest sense be called the physiognomy of the divine in man.

When we penetrate more deeply into the human soul and consider its nature from the point of view here intended, we are repeatedly reminded of the ancient saying by the Greek sage, Heraclitus¹⁶ “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We shall be speaking here of the soul and its life, not from the standpoint of contemporary psychology, but from that of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science stands firmly for the real existence of a spiritual world behind all that is revealed to the senses and through them to the mind. It regards this spiritual world as the source and foundation of external existence and holds that the investigation of it lies within the reach of man.

In lectures given here, the difference between Spiritual Science and the many other standpoints of the present day has often been brought out; and need be mentioned only briefly now. In ordinary life and in ordinary science it is habitually assumed that human knowledge has certain boundaries and that the human mind cannot know anything beyond them. Spiritual Science holds that these boundaries are no more than temporary. They can be extended; faculties hidden in the soul can be called forth, and then, just as a man born blind who gains his sight through an operation emerges from darkness into a world of light and colour, so it is with a person whose hidden faculties awake. He will break through into a spiritual world which is always around us but cannot be directly known until the appropriate spiritual organs for perceiving it have been developed. Spiritual Science asks: How are we to transform ourselves in order to penetrate into this world and to gain a comprehensive experience of it? And Spiritual Science must ever and again point to the great event which enables a man to become a spiritual investigator and so to direct his gaze into the spiritual worlds, even as a physicist sees into the physical world through his microscope. Goethe's words are certainly valid in their bearing on the spiritual world:

Secretly, in the light of day,
Nature's veil may not be lifted.
What'er to your inquiring spirit
She will not freely reveal,
You cannot forcibly extract it,
Not with levers, not with screws.¹⁷

Of course, the investigator in the sense of Spiritual Science has no such instrumental aids. He has to transform his soul into an instrument; then he experiences that great moment when his soul is awakened and the spiritual world around him reveals itself to his perception. Again, it has often been emphasised here that not everyone needs to be a spiritual investigator in order to appreciate what the awakened man has to impart. When knowledge resulting from spiritual research is communicated, no more is required of the listener than ordinary logic and an unbiased sense of truth. Investigation calls for the opened eye of the clairvoyant; recognition of what is communicated calls for a healthy sense of truth; natural feeling unclouded by prejudice; natural good sense. The point is that teachings and observations concerning the soul should be understood in the light of this spiritual research when in later lectures we come to speak of some of the humanly interesting characteristics of the soul. Just as anyone who wants to study hydrogen or oxygen or any other chemical substance has to acquire certain capabilities, so is observation of the life of the soul possible only for someone whose spiritual eye has been opened. The investigator of the soul must be in a position to make observations in soul-substance, so to speak. We must certainly not think of the soul as something vague and nebulous in which feelings, thoughts and volitions are whirling about. Let us rather remind ourselves of what has been said on this subject in previous lectures.

Man, as he stands before us, is a far more complicated being than he is held to be by exoteric science. For Spiritual Science, the knowledge drawn from external physical observation covers only a part of man—the external physical body which he has in common with all his mineral surroundings. Here, the same laws apply as in the external physical-mineral world, and the same substances function. As a result of observation, however, and not on the strength merely of logical inference, Spiritual Science recognises, beyond the physical body, a second member of man's being: we call it the etheric body or life-body. Only a brief reference can here be made to the etheric body—our task today is quite different—but knowledge of the underlying members of the human organism is the foundation on which we have to build. Man has an etheric body in common with everything that lives. As I said, only the spiritual investigator, who has transformed his soul into an instrument for seeing into the spiritual world, can directly observe the etheric body. But its existence can be acknowledged by a healthy sense of truth, unclouded by contemporary prejudices. Take the physical body: it harbours the same physical and chemical laws that prevail in the external physical-mineral world. When are these physical laws revealed to us? When we have before us a lifeless human being. When a human being has passed through the gate of death, we see what the laws that govern the physical body really are. They are the laws that lead to the decomposition of the physical body; their effect on it is now quite different from their action during life. They are always present in the physical body; the reason why the living body does not obey them is that during life an antagonist of dissolution, the etheric or life-body, is also present and active there.

A third member of the human organism can now be distinguished: the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of urges, desires and passions—of everything we associate with the emotional activities of the soul. Man has this vehicle in common with all beings who possess a certain form of consciousness: with the animals. Astral body, or body of consciousness, is the name we give to this third member of the human organism.

This completes what we may call the bodily nature of man, with its three components: physical body, etheric body or life-body, astral or consciousness-body.

Within these three members we recognise something else; something unique to man, through which he has risen to the summit of creation. It has often been remarked that our language has one little word which guides us directly to man's inner being, whereby he ranks as the crown of earthly creation. These flowers here, the desk, the clock—anyone can name these objects; but there is one word we can never hear spoken by another with reference to ourselves; it must spring from our own inner being. This is the little name ‘I’. If you are to call yourself ‘I’, this ‘I’ must sound forth from within yourself and must designate your inmost being. Hence the great religions and philosophies have always regarded this name as the ‘unspeakable name’ of that which cannot be designated from outside. Indeed, with this designation ‘I’, we stand before that innermost being of man which can be called the divine element in him. We do not thereby make man a god. If we say that a drop of water from the sea is of like substance with the ocean, we are not making the drop into a sea. Similarly, we are not making the ‘I’ a god when we say it is of like substance with the divine being that permeates and pulses through the world.

Through his inner essence, man is subject to a certain phenomenon which Spiritual Science treats as real and serious in the full sense of the words. Its very name fascinates people today, but in its application to man it is given full rank and worth only by Spiritual Science. It is the fact of existence that we call ‘evolution’. How fascinating is the effect of this word on modern man, who can point to lower forms of life which evolve gradually into higher stages; how enchanting when it can be said that man himself has evolved from those lower forms to his present height! Spiritual Science takes evolution seriously in relation, above all, to man. It calls attention to the fact that man, since he is a self-conscious being with an inner activity springing from the centre of his being, should not limit his idea of evolution to a mere observation of the imperfect developing towards the more nearly perfect. As an active being he must himself take hold of his own evolution. He must raise himself to higher stages than the stage he has already reached; he must develop ever-new forces, so that he may approach continually towards perfection. Spiritual Science takes a sentence, first formulated not very long ago, and now recognised as valid in another realm, and applies it on a higher level to human evolution. Most people today are not aware that as late as the beginning of the 17th century the learned as well as the laity believed that the lower animals were born simply out of river-mud. This belief arose from imprecise observation, and it was the great natural scientist, Francesco Redi,¹⁸ who in the 17th century first championed the statement: Life can arise only from the living. Naturally, this statement is quoted here in the modern sense, with all necessary qualifications. No-one, of course, now believes that any lower animal—say an earth-worm—can grow out of river-mud. For an earth-worm to come into existence, the germ of an earth-worm must first be there. And yet, in the 17th century, Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno,¹⁹ for his statement had made him a terrible heretic.

This sort of treatment is not usually inflicted on heretics today, at least not in all parts of the world, but there is a modern substitute for it. If anyone upholds something which contradicts the belief of those who, in their arrogance, suppose they have reached the summit of earthly wisdom, he is looked on as a visionary, a dreamer, if nothing worse. That is the contemporary form of inquisition in our parts of the world. Be it so. Nevertheless, what Spiritual Science says concerning phenomena on higher levels will come to be accepted equally with Francesco Redi's statement regarding the lower levels. Even as he asserted that “life can issue only from the living”, so does Spiritual Science state that “soul and spirit can issue only from soul and spirit”. And the law of reincarnation, so often ridiculed today as the outcome of crazy fantasy, is in fact a consequence of this statement. Nowadays, when people see, from the first day of a child's birth, the soul and spirit developing out of the bodily element; when they see increasingly definite facial traits emerging from an undifferentiated physiognomy, movements becoming more and more individual, talents and abilities showing forth—many people still believe that all this springs from the physical existence of father, mother, grandparents; in short, from physical ancestry.

This belief derives from inexact observation, just as did the belief that earth-worms originate from mud. Present-day sense-observation is incapable of tracing back to its soul-spiritual origin the soul and spirit that are manifest before our eyes today. Hence the laws of physical heredity are made to account for phenomena which apparently emerge from the obscure depths of the physical. Spiritual Science looks back to previous lives on earth, when the talents and characteristics that are evident in the present life were foreshadowed. And we regard the present life as the source of new formative influences that will bear fruit in future earthly lives.

Francesco Redi's statement has now become an obvious truth, and the time is not far distant when the corresponding statement by Spiritual Science will be regarded as equally self-evident—with the difference that Francesco Redi's statement is of restricted interest, while the statement by Spiritual Science concerns everyone: “Soul and spirit develop from soul and spirit; man does not live once only but passes through repeated lives on earth; every life is the result of earlier lives and the starting point of numerous subsequent lives.” All confidence in life, all certainty in our work, the solution of all the riddles facing us—it all depends on this knowledge. From this knowledge man will draw ever-increasing strength for his existence, together with confidence and hope when he looks towards the future.

Now what is it that originates in earlier lives, works on from life to life, and maintains itself through all its sojourns on earth? It is the Ego, the ‘I’, designated by the name which a person can bestow on no-one but himself. The human Ego goes from life to life, and in so doing fulfils its evolution.

But how is this evolution brought about? By the Ego working on the three lower members of the human being. We have first the astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of instinct, desire and passion. Let us look at a person on a low level, whose Ego has done little, as yet, to cleanse his astral body and so is still its slave. In a person who stands higher we find that his Ego has worked upon his astral body in such a way that his lower instincts, desires and passions have been transmuted into moral ideals, ethical judgments. From this contrast we can gain a first impression of how the Ego works upon the astral body.

In every human being it is possible to distinguish the part of the astral body on which the Ego has not yet worked from the part which the Ego has consciously transformed. The transmuted part is called Spirit-Self, or Manas. The Ego may grow stronger and stronger and will then transmute the etheric body or life-body. Life-spirit is the name we give to the transformed etheric body. Finally, when the Ego acquires such strength that it is able to extend its transforming power into the physical body, we call the transmuted part Atma, or the real Spirit-man.

So far we have been speaking of conscious work by the Ego. In the far-distant past, long before the Ego was capable of this conscious work, it worked unconsciously—or rather sub-consciously—on the three bodies or sheaths of man. The astral body was the first to be worked on in this way, and its transmuted part we call the Sentient Soul, the first of man's soul-members. So it was that the Ego, working from the inner being of man, created the Sentient Soul at a time when man lacked the requisite degree of consciousness for transmuting his instincts, desires and so forth. In the etheric body the Ego created unconsciously the Mind-Soul or Intellectual Soul. Again, working unconsciously on the physical body, the Ego created the inner soul-organ that we call the Consciousness Soul. For Spiritual Science, the human soul is not a vague, nebulous something, but an essential part of man's being, consisting of three distinct soul-members—Sentient Soul, Mind-Soul, Consciousness Soul—within which the Ego is actively engaged.

Let us try to form an idea of these three soul-members. The spiritual investigator knows them by direct observation, but we can approach them also by means of rational thinking. For example, suppose we have a rose before us. We perceive it, and as long as we perceive it we are receiving an impression from outside. We call this a perception of the rose. If we turn our eyes away, an inner image of the rose remains with us. We must carefully distinguish these two moments: the moment when we are looking at the rose and the moment when we are able to retain an image of it as an inner possession, although we are no longer perceiving it.

This point must be emphasised because of the incredible notions brought forward in this connection by 19th century philosophy. We need think only of Schopenhauer,²⁰ whose philosophy begins with the words: The world is my idea. Hence we must be clear as to the difference between percepts and concepts, or mental images. Every sane man knows the difference between the concept of white-hot steel, which cannot burn him, and white-hot steel itself, which can. Perceptions bring us into communication with the external world; concepts are a possession of the soul. The boundary between inner experience and the outer world can be precisely drawn. Directly we begin to experience something inwardly, we owe it to the Sentient Soul—as distinct from the sentient body, which brings us our percepts and enables us to perceive, for example, the rose and its colour. Thus our concepts are formed in the Sentient Soul, and the Sentient Soul is the bearer also of our sympathies and antipathies, of the feelings that things arouse in us. When we call the rose beautiful, this inward experience is a property of the Sentient Soul.

Anyone who is unwilling to distinguish percepts from concepts should remember the white-hot steel that burns and the concept of it, which does not. Once, when I had said this, someone objected that a man might be able to suggest to himself the thought of lemonade so vividly that he would experience its taste on his tongue. I replied: Certainly this might be possible, but whether the imaginary lemonade would quench his thirst is another question. The boundary between external reality and inner experience can indeed always be determined. Directly inner experience begins, the Sentient Soul, as distinct from the sentient body, comes into play.

A higher principle is brought into being by the work of the Ego on the etheric body: we call it the Mind-Soul, or Intellectual Soul. We shall have more to say about it in the lecture on the Mission of Truth; today we are concerned especially with the Sentient Soul. Through the Intellectual Soul man is enabled to do more than carry about with him the experiences aroused in him by his perceptions of the outer world. He takes these experiences a stage further. Instead of merely keeping his perceptions alive as images in the Sentient Soul, he reflects on them and devotes himself to them; they form themselves into thoughts and judgments, into the whole content of his mind. This continued cultivation of impressions received from the outer world is the work of what we call the Intellectual Soul or Mind-soul.

A third principle is brought into being when the Ego has created in the physical body the organs whereby it is enabled to go out from itself and to connect its judgments, ideas and feelings with the external world. This principle we call the Consciousness Soul, because the Ego is then able to transform its inner experiences into conscious knowledge of the outer world. When we give form to the feelings we experience, so that they enlighten us concerning the outer world, our thoughts, judgments and feelings become knowledge of the outer world. Through the Consciousness Soul we explore the secrets of the outer world as human beings endowed with knowledge and cognition.

So does the Ego work continually in the Sentient Soul, in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and in the Consciousness Soul, releasing the forces inwardly bound up there and enabling man to advance in his evolution by enriching his capacities. The Ego is the actor, the active being through whose agency man himself takes control of his evolution and progresses from life to life, remedying the defects of former lives and widening the faculties of his soul. Such is human evolution from life to life; it consists first of all in the Ego's work on the soul in its threefold aspect.

We must, however, recognise clearly that in its work the Ego has the character of a “two-edged sword”. Yes, this human Ego is, on the one hand, the element in man's being through which alone he can be truly man. If we lacked this central point, we should be merged passively with the outer world. Our concepts and ideas have to be taken hold of in this centre; more and more of them must be experienced; and our inner life must be increasingly enriched by impressions from the outer world. Man is truly man to the degree in which his Ego becomes richer and more comprehensive. Hence the Ego must seek to enrich itself in the course of succeeding lives; it must become a centre whereby man is not simply part of the outer world but acts as a stimulating force upon it. The richer the fund of his impulses, the more he has absorbed and the more he radiates from the centre of his individual self, the nearer he approaches to being truly man.

That is one aspect of the Ego; and we are in duty bound to endeavour to make the Ego as rich and as many-sided as we can. But the reverse side of this progress is manifest in what we call selfishness or egoism. If these words were taken as catchwords and it were said that human beings must become selfless, that of course would be bad, as any use of catchwords always is. It is indeed man's task to enrich himself inwardly, but this does not imply a selfish hardening of the Ego and a shutting off of itself with its riches from the world. In that event a man would indeed become richer and richer, but he would lose his connection with the world. His enrichment would signify that the world had no more to give him, nor he the world. In the course of time he would perish, for while striving to enrich his Ego he would keep it all for himself and would become isolated from the world. This caricature of development would impoverish a man's Ego to an increasing extent, for selfishness lays a man inwardly waste. So is it that the Ego, as it works in the three members of the soul, acts as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it must work to become always richer, a powerful centre from which much can stream forth; but on the other hand it must bring everything it absorbs back into harmony with the outer world. To the same degree that it develops its own resources, it must go out from itself and relate itself to the whole of existence. It must become simultaneously an independent being and a selfless one. Only when the Ego works in these two apparently contradictory directions—when on one side it enriches itself increasingly and on the other side becomes selfless—can human evolution go forward so as to be satisfying for man and health-giving for the whole of existence. The Ego has to work on each of three soul-members in such a way that both sides of human development are kept in balance.

Now the work of the Ego in the soul leads to its own gradual awakening. Development occurs in all forms of life, and we find that the three members of the human soul are today at very different stages of evolution. The Sentient Soul, the bearer of our emotions and impulses and of all the feelings that are aroused by direct stimuli from the outer world, is the most strongly developed of the three. But at certain lower stages of evolution the content of the Sentient Soul is experienced in a dull, dim way, for the Ego is not yet fully awake. When a man works inwardly on himself and his soul-life progresses, the Ego becomes more and more clearly conscious of itself. But as far as the Sentient Soul is awake, the Ego is hardly more than a brooding presence within it. The Ego gains in clarity when man advances to a richer life in the Intellectual Soul, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul. Man then comes to be aware of himself as an individual who stands apart from his environment and is active in gaining objective knowledge of it. This is possible only when the Ego is awake in the Consciousness Soul.

Thus we have the Ego only dimly awake in the Sentient Soul. It is swept along by waves of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and can scarcely be perceived as an entity. In the Intellectual Soul, when clearly defined ideas and judgments are developed, the Ego first gains clarity, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul.

Hence we can say: Man has a duty to educate himself through his Ego and so to further his own inner progress. But at the time of its awakening the Ego is still given over to the waves of emotion that surge through the Sentient Soul. Is there anything in the Sentient Soul which can contribute to the education of the Ego at a time when the Ego is still incapable of educating itself?

We shall see how in the Intellectual Soul there is something which enables the Ego to take its own education in hand. In the Sentient Soul this is not yet possible; the Ego must be guided by something which arises independently within the Sentient Soul. We will single out this one element in the Sentient Soul and consider its two-sided mission for educating the Ego, This element is one to which the strongest objection may perhaps be taken—the emotion we call anger. Anger arises in the Sentient Soul when the Ego is still dormant there. Or can it be said that we stand in a self-conscious relation to anyone if their behaviour causes us to flare up in anger?

Let us picture the difference between two persons: two teachers, let us say. One of them has achieved the clarity which makes for enlightened inner judgments. He sees what his pupil is doing wrong but is not perturbed by it, because his Intellectual Soul is mature. With his Consciousness Soul, also, he is calmly aware of the child's error, and if necessary he can prescribe an appropriate penalty, not impelled by any emotional reaction but in accordance with ethical and pedagogical judgment. It will be otherwise with a teacher whose Ego has not reached the stage that would enable him to remain calm and discerning. Not knowing what to do, he flares up in anger at the child's misdemeanour.

Is such anger always inappropriate to the event that calls it forth? No, not always. And this is something we must keep in mind. Before we are capable of judging an event in the light of the Intellectual Soul or the Consciousness Soul, the wisdom of evolution has provided for us to be overcome by emotion because of that event. Something in our Sentient Soul is activated by an event in the outer world. We are not yet capable of making the right response as an act of judgment, but we can react from the emotional centre of the Sentient Soul. Of all things that the Sentient Soul experiences, let us therefore consider anger.

It points to what will come about in the future. To begin with, anger expresses a judgment of some event in the outer world; then, having learnt unconsciously through anger to react to something wrong, we advance gradually to enlightened judgments in our higher souls. So in certain respects anger is an educator. It arises in us as an inner experience before we are mature enough to form an enlightened judgment of right and wrong. This is how we should look on the anger which can flare up in a young man, before he is capable of a considered judgment, at the sight of injustice or folly which violates his ideals; and then we can properly speak of a righteous anger. No-one does better at acquiring an inner capacity for sound judgment than a man who has started from a state of soul in which he could be moved to righteous anger by anything ignoble, immoral or crazy. That is how anger has the mission of raising the Ego to higher levels. On the other hand, since man is to become a free being, everything human can degenerate. Anger can degenerate into rage and serve to gratify the worst kind of egoism. This must be so, if man is to advance towards freedom. But we must not fail to realise that the very thing which can lapse into evil may, when it manifests in its true significance, have the mission of furthering the progress of man. It is because man can change good into evil, that good qualities, when they are developed in the right way, can become a possession of the Ego. So is anger to be understood as the harbinger of that which can raise man to calm self-possession.

But although anger is on the one hand an educator of the Ego, it also serves strangely enough, to engender selflessness. What is the Ego's response when anger overcomes it at the sight of injustice or folly? Something within us speaks out against the spectacle confronting us. Our anger illustrates the fact that we are up against something in the outer world. The Ego then makes its presence felt and seeks to safeguard itself against this outer event. The whole content of the Ego is involved. If the sight of injustice or folly were not to kindle a noble anger in us, the events in the outer world would carry us along with them as an easy-going spectator; we would not feel the sting of the Ego and we would have no concern for its development. Anger enriches the Ego and summons it to confront the outer world, yet at the same time it induces selflessness. For if anger is such that it can be called noble and does not lapse into blind rage, its effect is to damp down Ego-feeling and to produce something like powerlessness in the soul. If the soul is suffused with anger, its own activity becomes increasingly suppressed.

This experience of anger is wonderfully well brought out in the vernacular use of sich giften, to poison oneself, as a phrase meaning “to get angry”. This is an example of how popular imagination arrives at a truth which may often elude the learned.

Anger which eats into the soul is a poison; it damps down the Ego's self-awareness and so promotes selflessness. Thus we see how anger serves to teach both independence and selflessness; that is its dual mission as an educator of humanity, before the Ego is ripe to undertake its own education. If we were not enabled by anger to take an independent stand, in cases where the outer world offends our inner feeling, we would not be selfless, but dependent and Ego-less in the worst sense.

For the spiritual scientist, anger is also the harbinger of something quite different. Life shows us that a person who is unable to flare up with anger at injustice or folly will never develop true kindness and love. Equally, a person who educates himself through noble anger will have a heart abounding in love, and through love he will do good. Love and kindness are the obverse of noble anger. Anger that is overcome and purified will be transformed into the love that is its counterpart. A loving hand is seldom one that has never been clenched in response to injustice or folly. Anger and love are complementary.

A superficial Theosophy might say: Yes, a man must overcome his passions; he must cleanse and purify them. But overcoming something does not mean shirking or shunning it. It is a strange sort of sacrifice that is made by someone who proposes to cast off his passionate self by evading it. We cannot sacrifice something unless we have first possessed it. Anger can be overcome only by someone who has experienced it first within himself. Instead of trying to evade such emotions, we must transmute them in ourselves. By transmuting anger, we rise from the Sentient Soul, where noble anger can flame out, to the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, where love and the power to give blessing are born.

Transmuted anger is love in action. That is what we learn from reality. Anger in moderation has the mission of leading human beings to love; we can call it the teacher of love. And not in vain do we call the undefined power that flows from the wisdom of the world and shows itself in the righting of wrongs the “wrath of God”, in contrast to God's love. But we know that these two things belong together; without the other, neither can exist. In life they require and determine each other.

Now let us see how in art and poetry, when they are great, the primal wisdom of the world is revealed.

When we come to speak of the mission of truth, we shall see how Goethe's thoughts on this subject are clearly expressed in his Pandora, one of his finest poems, though small in scale. And in a powerful poem of universal significance, the Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, we are brought to see, though perhaps less clearly, the role of anger as a phenomenon in world history.

Probably you know the legend on which Aeschylus based his drama. Prometheus is a descendant of the ancient race of Titans, who had succeeded the first generation of gods in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. Ouranus and Gaia belong to the first generation of gods. Ouranus is succeeded by Kronos (Saturn). Then the Titans are overthrown by the third generation of gods, led by Zeus. Prometheus, though a descendant of the Titans, was on the side of Zeus in the battle against the Titans and so could be called a friend of Zeus, but he was only half a friend. When Zeus took over the rulership of the earth—so the legend continues—humanity had advanced far enough to enter on a new phase, while the old faculties possessed by men in ancient times were dying out. Zeus wanted to exterminate mankind and install a new race on earth, but Prometheus resolved to give men the means of further progress. He brought them speech and writing, knowledge of the outer world, and, finally, fire, in order that by learning to master these tools humanity might raise itself from the low level to which it had sunk.

If we look more deeply into the story, we find that everything bestowed by Prometheus on mankind is connected with the human Ego, while Zeus is portrayed as a divine power which inspires and ensouls men in whom the Ego has not yet come to full expression. If we look back over the evolution of the earth, we find in the far past a humanity in which the Ego was no more than an obscurely brooding presence. It had to acquire certain definite faculties with which to educate itself. The gifts that Zeus could bestow were not adapted to furthering the progress of mankind. In respect of the astral body, and of everything in man apart from his Ego, Zeus is the giver. Because Zeus was not capable of promoting the development of the Ego, he resolved to wipe out mankind. All the gifts brought by Prometheus, on the other hand, enabled the Ego to educate itself. Such is the deeper meaning of the legend.

Prometheus, accordingly, is the one who enables the Ego to set to work on enriching and enlarging itself; and that is exactly how the gifts bestowed by Prometheus were understood in ancient Greece.

Now we have seen that if the Ego concentrates on this single aim, it finally impoverishes itself, for it will be shutting itself off from the outer world. Enriching itself is one side only of the Ego's task. It has to go out and bring its inner wealth into harmony with the world around it, if it is not to be impoverished in the long run. Prometheus could bestow on men only the gifts whereby the Ego could enrich itself. Thus, inevitably, he challenged the powers which act from out of the entire cosmos to subdue the Ego in the right way, so that it may become self less and thus develop its other aspect. The independence of the Ego, achieved under the sting of anger on the one hand, and on the other the damping down of the Ego when a man consumes his anger, as it were, and his Ego is deadened—this whole process is presented in the historic pictures of the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus.

Prometheus endows the Ego with faculties which enable it to become richer and richer. What Zeus has to do is to produce the same effect that anger has in the individual. Thus the wrath of Zeus falls on Prometheus and extinguishes the power of the Ego in him. The legend tells us how Prometheus is punished by Zeus for the untimely stimulus he had given to the advancement of the human Ego. He is chained to a rock.

The suffering thus endured by the human Ego and its inner rebellion are magnificently expressed by Aeschylus in this poetic drama.

So we see the representative of the human Ego subdued by the wrath of Zeus. Just as the individual human Ego is checked and driven back on itself when it has to swallow its anger, so is Prometheus chained by the wrath of Zeus, meaning that his activity is reduced to its proper level. When a flood of anger sweeps through the soul of an individual, his Ego, striving for self-expression, finds itself enchained; so was the Promethean Ego chained to a rock.

That is the peculiar merit of this legend: it presents in powerful pictures far-reaching truths which are valid both for individuals and for humanity at large. People could see in these pictures what had to be experienced in the individual soul. Thus in Prometheus chained to the Caucasian rock we can see a representative of the human Ego at a time when the Ego, striving to advance from its brooding somnolence in the Sentient Soul, is restrained by its fetters from indulging in wild extravagance.

We are then told how Prometheus knows that the wrath of Zeus will be silenced when he is overthrown by the son of a mortal. He will be succeeded in his rulership by someone born of mortal man. The Ego is released by the mission of anger on a lower plane, and the immortal Ego, the immortal human soul, will be born from mortal man on a higher plane. Prometheus looks forward to the time when Zeus will be succeeded by Christ Jesus, and the individual Ego will itself be transformed into the loving Ego when the noble anger that fettered it is transformed into love. We behold the birth from the Ego enchained by anger of that other Ego, whose action in the outer world will be that of love and blessing. So, too, we behold the birth of a God of love who tends and cherishes the Ego; the very Ego that in earlier times was fettered by the anger of Zeus, so that it should not transgress its proper bounds.

Hence we see in the continuation of this legend an external picture of human evolution. We must ourselves take hold of this myth in such a way that it gives us a living picture, universally relevant, of how the individual experiences the transformation of the Ego, educated by the mission of anger, into the liberated Ego imbued with love. Then we understand what the legend does and what Aeschylus made of his material. We feel the soul's life-blood pulsing through us; we feel it in the continuation of the legend and in the dramatic form given to it by Aeschylus. So we find in this Greek drama something like a practical application of processes we can experience in our own souls. This is true of all great poems and other works of art: they spring from typical great experiences of the human soul.

We have seen today how the Ego is educated through the purification of a passion. In the next lecture we shall see how the Ego becomes ripe to educate itself in the Intellectual Soul by learning to grasp the mission of truth on a higher plane. We have seen also how in our considerations today the saying of Heraclitus is borne out: “You will never find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so wide and deep is the being of the soul.”

Yes, it is true that the soul's being is so far-reaching that we cannot directly sound its depths. But Spiritual Science, with the opened eye of the seer, leads into the substance of the soul, and we can progress further and further into fathoming the mysterious being that the human soul is when we contemplate it through the eyes of the spiritual scientist. On the one hand we can truly say: The soul has unfathomable depths, but if we take this saying in full earnest we can add: The boundaries of the soul are indeed so wide that we have to search for them by all possible paths, but we can hope that by extending these boundaries ourselves, we shall progress further and further in our knowledge of the soul.

This ray of hope will illumine our search for knowledge if we accept the true words of Heraclitus not with resignation but with confidence: The boundaries of the soul are so wide that you may search along every path and not reach them, so comprehensive is the being of the soul.

Let us try to grasp this comprehensive being; it will lead us on further and further towards a solution of the riddles of existence.

• 16. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Herakleitos aus Ephesus, Nr. 45. Also: The art and thought of Heraclitus.
• 17. An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary by Charles H. Kahn. CUP, Cambridge, 1979, No. XXXV.
• 18. Francesco Redi, 1626–98. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agfi animafi viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 19. Giordano Bruno, born 1548, was burnt in 1600 in Rome as a heretic.
• 20. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860. Cf. his work The World as Will and Representation, Book 1, par. 1.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

1. Fichte's “Theory of Science”

Introduction.

I.

When a person's consciousness awakens, he finds himself transported into a world whose objects are given to him through perception. How and in what way we will see in a later investigation. But the human mind does not stop at the given; it goes further and wants to understand and grasp what is given. It strives for knowledge. So here we are dealing with two things: with a given, which is the first; but not satisfied with that, man still needs a second, knowledge. This is something sought after, something striven for. But one must not think that the sought-after thing is somehow known, because otherwise one would not seek it, but it is something completely unknown, something to be acquired, which one has never possessed. This striving of the human spirit characterizes its nature. The satisfaction that man seeks depends on the attainment of this striving. Open world and cultural history at any page, and you will find this striving for a certain goal on every page. Things are perceived and one strives to unravel their nature, one strives to recognize “what holds the world together at its core”. Look at the ancient Indians. The world was given to them, but they could not stop at that; they sought for another, one that was not given to them directly, but indirectly through the given. They came up with Brahma and all that is associated with him. We see, then, that the character of the striving of the human spirit consists in going beyond the given objects and fathoming their nature.

II.

Now knowledge is to be true knowledge, i.e., knowledge and cognition are to bear the character of validity, or in other words: knowledge is to convince. The question now is; how can knowledge convince, how can cognitions have validity? This question is not discussed in the individual sciences, because they deal with knowledge in so far as it is knowledge of objects, without examining the foundations of knowledge itself. Since none of the individual sciences can prove the latter by their means, there must be a separate science for this, a science in which the reasons for conviction are dealt with. We can call such a doctrine the science of knowledge itself or the theory of science. The first question is whether such a science is needed. Various facts indicate that it is. For one thing, ever since man began to think, this need has been felt. The fact that this need has always existed would be enough to make clear the necessity, first, that such a need is not feigned or contrived, and then, however, also that it requires satisfaction. A second fact is that there have indeed been people who have doubted the possibility of any knowledge. Now, first of all, we have to decide whether a science of science is possible, whether the above-mentioned need can be satisfied. But this possibility is a necessary postulate of human reason. If one denies the possibility of a theory of science, one can do nothing but fully embrace the skeptical point of view indicated above. Something must be certain because something is given, and it is only a matter of identifying what is actually certain. For if we assume the opposite and say that nothing is certain, then, if the proposition is to be universally valid, it must, by its very nature, be applicable to itself, i.e., it is not certain itself. It thus cancels itself out, but only insofar as it is valid itself; it is therefore a complete contradiction and we can do nothing with it. We must therefore admit both the possibility and the necessity of a philosophy of science as a postulate of reason. This establishes the task of knowledge in general and at the same time the task of the philosophy of science.

III.

Knowledge has the peculiarity of first having to arise and develop. This gives rise to various difficulties, especially when we consider that the knowledge of different people at different times is different, and when we further consider that world history gives us very different views of people in different eras, who at the time of their appearance always claim to be valid. What are we to do now? Are we to regard our present views as the only correct ones and all earlier ones as errors? Or are we to despair of the validity of our views altogether? It would be impossible to accept either of these; neither can ever stand the test of reason. The latter has already been dealt with above, the former leaves the question open: yes, if all previous views were wrong, why should ours be the right ones? There seems to be no other way out than to assume that all these views are valid. But then you have admitted at the same time that everything is right, there is no error. Now, the dubious nature of this assumption is strikingly obvious. Only one hypothesis remains, which can be formulated as follows: there is something true and valid about all these views, that is, the truth is capable of modification. So far, this is only presented as a hypothesis, and nothing is inferred from it.

IV.

Neither the views of the individual human being nor those of entire circles stand, when they occur one after the other, out of context; they develop from one another and are conditioned by one another. This can be observed always and everywhere. The individual ways of looking at things form levels, with each following one growing out of the one before. This close relationship between ways of looking at things allows us to surmise that they may all have something in common, which is only modified over time. It could well be that the core is unchanging, but that it takes on different forms, which are determined by the narrower or broader perspective of each individual or entire peoples, so that what changes is valid for an earlier perspective, but no longer for a later one. Indeed, experience shows that our assumption is a perfectly valid one. This is one side of the relationship between the views of different times, people and entire nations. We now move on to the presentation of a second.

V.

A view is only valid to the extent that it applies to a person, i.e., to the extent that it is formed by that person. Person is now something very specific, which cannot be any other, and whose specificity consists precisely in the fact that it forms its views in a certain way. It cannot form them this way today, that way tomorrow, not this way with this group of perceptions and that way with that, but it must form them in a way that is peculiar to it, and in this way they take on a very specific character; they are precisely views of the person and are subject to its laws of formation. What they become through these laws, that they are as views, and they cannot be anything else. These laws of formation thus imprint the stamp on them, they first make them what they are, and in this respect they are and must also be related. They are related because they have arisen in the same way. The business of the science of science is to explore this path, on which all views have arisen and are still arising. It is therefore clear from the outset that the science of science will have to take its starting point from the person. But we want to shed light on the matter from another side in order to gain insights into the source of the science of science.

VI.

Experience cannot be the source. After all, experience cannot determine for us what power of persuasion it has for us. All the means that the individual sciences apply are not sufficient to explain the least thing in the theory of science. It is supposed to prove the validity of the individual sciences, and yet one must not use that which one doubts to escape doubt. The theory of knowledge must therefore have a substantially different source than all other sciences. If we want to get to the bottom of this source, we have to ask ourselves what is actually needed to arrive at a realization.

This includes: 1. Apparently an object to be recognized; however, as we have already seen, we cannot start from this. 2. The act of recognition itself. But since the point is to examine what the foundations of the validity of truths are, we cannot start from the act of recognition, and so what remains is:

3. only the knower. In this, we must seek the foundations of knowledge, insofar as they are to be regarded as certain. The source of certainty and thus also of the science is the knowing person.

These words characterize the point of view adopted here. We do not consider it our task to deal with positive truths in the sense in which the individual sciences do so, but to show how such truths are possible, how they can arise and what significance they have.

Most philosophical systems have the fundamental flaw that they attempt to derive truths before they have even examined how truth itself arises, just as they attempt to determine what is good or beautiful before they have posed the question of how a good or a beautiful thing is. The theory of knowledge is not concerned with the “what” of knowledge; it deals only with the “how” of knowledge. All the individual sciences, except the theory of knowledge, have the peculiarity that they can only arise when the knower seemingly goes out of himself, when he seemingly disappears in the face of the objects; for the theory of knowledge, on the other hand, it is characteristic that the knower does not go out of himself. We see, then, that in the diversity of views, the own I of the cognizing personality forms a calm pole from which we must start.

I. Chapter.

VII. The Doctrine of the Person or the “I”—

Our striving must first go to the understanding of the essence of this I. Man says of himself: I think, I comprehend, I look at, I feel, I will, and so forth; in all this he refers to a certain point, which he calls his “I”. This ego is always one and the same, no matter how often it asserts itself: I think, I act, etc. We cannot even assume that a split occurs in the ego if the ego is to remain an ego. If we assume that the I that thinks is different from the one that wills, then we have to imagine the matter as follows: Let the first I that thinks be A, its action a, the second I that wills be 2, its action b. If b is to have any meaning at all for A, then it must also be something for A , i.e., it must be included in the laws of formation of A, e.g., in the manner £; and if a is to be something for B, then it must enter into its laws of formation, for example in the manner a. We can now visualize the whole process using the following scheme.

We see that for the one ego \(A\) that is to be distinct from B, the actions of \( \)B are significant only if they become its own actions. If we call the ego that is the subject of this discussion the pure ego, we arrive at the proposition: The pure ego is a unique entity. This ego is to be distinguished from the empirical ego, which we will discuss later. What is meant here is the qualitative and numerical identity of the I with itself, apart from all temporal conditions, which of course is out of the question here. It would be a duality of the I, for example, if I were to make the history of the ancient world according to completely different laws from those of the middle and modern times. This cannot be, but everything must be related to a common point, to a unified I. In all the diversity of views, cognitions, etc., the I is that focal point which it is impossible to grasp, since it always slips backwards when we want to focus on it.

VIII.

The I meant here is essentially different from the empirical or psychological I. The latter already presupposes the former. The psychological ego arises from the fact that I relate all my ideas to a common center, in which they intersect. This relatedness of the ideas to a common center is the psychological ego. But relatedness is preceded by the act of relating, and cannot take place without it. This psychological ego is therefore no longer the original pure ego, but an ego that has come into being through reflection, through the activity of the pure ego. The pure ego is neither this nor that in the strictest sense of the word. Its entire tangible essence is given by its activity; we cannot know what it is, only what it does. When Fichte said that the pure essence of the ego is the positing of itself, this is a very arbitrary statement, for the ego not only posits itself, but posits also something else, as Fichte himself would have to admit. But in all cases it is always active; its whole essence consists, therefore, in its activity, which can be expressed in the proposition: The ego is active. Everything that is not active like the ego would not be an ego. That one cannot know more about the ego than this can be seen from the following. What we indicated above, we can now express clearly. If the ego wants to know, it must include an object in its activity of knowing; in the above, it is now required that it include itself as this object. In order to recognize itself, it must rise to a higher level, but in order to recognize itself, it would have to descend a level, which is obviously impossible. However, nothing is more suitable for getting to the bottom of the most important thing than the above remark. It shows with complete clarity that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself. Since we have seen that the ego is not something that can be experienced or recognized, it can only be that which it makes of itself. Without making itself into something, the ego is nothing at all; it is as good as non-existent. It is a mistake of some philosophical systems that they have not properly clarified this essence of the ego. Rather, they have presented the ego as something other than an ego, and they further assume that the ego is something other than what it makes of itself; whatever this other may be, it is not an ego. If the ego is to be a willing one, then it must make itself a willing one, and so with all its activity. Its “what” is its own product. One could figuratively say that the ego gives itself its character. Fichte came very close to what has been said, but he thought he could and had to specify a very specific what, a specific essence of the ego, which is neither necessary nor possible. Instead, as is done here, one can completely dispense with this what, only one must state that such a what of the ego must be produced by the ego itself.

To illustrate Fichte's train of thought, we can choose the following pictorial representation: Let \(A\) be the I, this is active and posits itself \( = A\), this is the What, and the action is represented by \(A = A\); the essence of \(A\) should consist precisely in the positing of \(A\). Our train of thought can be depicted as follows:

The ego is represented by \(A\), it is active in the modes \(\alpha\), \(\beta\), \(\gamma\),... and thereby always takes on a very specific character \(a\), \(b\), \(c\),...; which gives the overall character A. We now assert that if \(A\) and also \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc. are really to have a meaning for the ego, then the ego itself must make itself into \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., respectively A, without deciding what \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., \(A\) is.

IX.

It is very easy to get confused here if one does not strictly distinguish between philosophical reflection and common reflection. The philosopher seeks only to become aware of what both he and the non-philosopher do, just as the naturalist wants to explain only what he and the non-naturalist perceive. The philosopher does not do something different from the non-philosopher, but he is only aware of what both do, while the latter is not. But there is a very important difference between the natural scientist and the philosopher. While the former can only take possession of his objects indirectly, namely, as we shall later fully realize, by incorporating them into his activity, the philosopher is in a position to assert what he himself does, and since his cognitions are nothing other than those made by the ego, that makes them and is only now becoming aware that it makes them, he can claim that what he says must be so because he is the one who makes it so, whereas the naturalist can only say that what he asserts appears to him to be so, is so included in his activity. This is why the philosopher can be critical and dogmatic at the same time. A critical procedure is that which determines how something can be recognized. A dogmatic procedure is that which itself makes assertions. As soon as we have understood this, scientific theory as criticism immediately appears to us as an impossibility. For in order to say how knowledge is possible, one must oneself make dogmatic assertions. Now, these dogmatic assertions must not precede the investigation, but the investigation is impossible without them. Just as dogmatic philosophy fails because one asserts something that one must not assert, because it is perhaps impossible to assert such things, critical philosophy fails because it must itself be dogmatic. A purely critical philosophy is therefore just as impossible as a purely dogmatic one.

X.

If, then, philosophy can be neither critical nor dogmatic, only one thing is left possible if one does not want to fall back into skepticism, which has already been shown above to be completely absurd: a philosophy that is critical and dogmatic at the same time, and so it

with the philosophy of science; let us examine how this can be. In asserting that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself, the philosophy of science is dogmatic, i.e., actually the self is dogmatic; in asserting that it is only that and cannot be anything other than what it makes of itself, it is critical. By seizing a principle and making it into what it can be, it is critical and dogmatic at the same time; it is the only middle way possible. True philosophy is thus the doctrine of science, i.e., critical dogmatic philosophy.

II. Chapter.

XI. The Doctrine of the “Not-I”. —

We have seen so far that everything we want to regard as belonging to the I must be designated as its activity. But activity as such is quite empty and without content; it must first take up a certain something within itself. The pure character of the ego would be that of activity, but this only comes to light in individual activities. However, an action that does nothing would be a “pure act,” a “mere ability,” a “dead force,” an action outside of action, an inaction. This reproach by no means applies to the activity of the ego that appears in empirical activities. But as soon as the activity of the ego comes to light, an alien element, one that is completely alien and opposed to the ego, seems to enter into it. The question now is: how can such an alien element enter into the ego? This seems completely incomprehensible and quite contrary to our above discussions. For when something alien enters, the ego is no longer what it is through itself, but through something else. Let us now consider this relationship in the case of imagining in the narrower sense. Every act of imagining involves two things: a cognizing subject and an object to be cognized. The first is the active one, the second the suffering one. By the one presenting, the other is presented. That an object is presented is the business of the subject, that an object is presented is the business of the object. If I am the presenter and I present a rose, then the presentation of the rose is my product, the presentation of the rose, on the other hand, is the product of the rose.

Let us choose another example. When I say, “I feel,” I am active, but I must feel something specific, I must have an object of my feeling. This object can never be given to me by the mere “I”. The question arises again and again: How can something completely alien enter into the activity of the ego.

Here only the ego itself can decide how to remedy the situation, and it is immediately clear that it is impossible for an alien element to enter the ego without the ego's intervention. It must therefore enter through the ego, it must be transformed by the ego into its own essence, so that the ego can remain what it makes itself. This happens in the determining. In the act of determining, these two completely opposed elements are united. Here, a precise distinction must be made: 1. the act of determining, 2. the determining elements. There are always two determining elements: an “I” and a “not-I”. The I is always the active element. We must distinguish here, above all, between two things. This is probably best made clear by means of a diagram.

Let us assume that the determining thing is the I, as the active determining thing. Let the external object be A; A is therefore a non-ego, it has come into being through determination, and through determination by the ego, in that it has come into being through the activity of the ego, and in its entirety as A, that is, it has come into being through determination by something other than the ego and apart from the ego, in that it has become A through the activity of the ego. Let us call the first kind of determination the active and the second the suffering, in order to have words for them. In fact, both kinds of determination are essentially different and must not be confused with each other.

Above, we spoke of another by which the ego is to determine itself, and this still requires discussion.

Continuing the study of man's various illnesses and health that we made a week ago, in the course of this winter we will take up in more and more detail those things with which they are connected. Our studies will then culminate in a generally more exact recognition of human nature than has previously been possible through anthroposophy. Today, because we will need it later, we will have to include a discussion of the nature and meaning of the Ten Commandments of Moses. Then we will have to say something about the deep significance of such concepts as original sin, redemption and so on, and we will see how these concepts gain new meaning in the light of our latest achievements, including those of science. To that end we must first examine more closely the fundamental nature of this remarkable document, which, projecting from out [of] the prehistory of the Israelites, appears to us as one of the most important stones in the building of the temple that was erected as a kind of anteroom of Christianity.

It can become increasingly evident in such a document as the Ten Commandments how little the form in which men know the Bible today corresponds to this document itself. From the details given in the last two lectures on “The Bible and Wisdom,” you will have felt how wrong it would be to say that we are simply finding fault with details in the translation and that there is no need to be so exact. It would be superficial to treat these things in such a way. Recall that we pointed out how the correct translation of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis should actually read, “The following will recount the generations, or what proceeds from heaven and earth,” and that in Genesis the same word is used for “the descendants of heaven and earth” as later on where it reads, “This is the book of the generations—or descendants—of Adam.” The same word is used in both instances. It is of great significance that in the description of man's proceeding out of heaven and earth the same word is used as later where the descendants of Adam are spoken of. Such things are not merely pedantic quibbling that would put right the translation, but rather they touch the nerve not only of the translation but of the understanding of this early document of man as well. We actually speak out of the living sources of our anthroposophic world view when we say that to restore the Bible to man in a true form is one of the most important tasks of this world view, indeed, of anthroposophy itself. Above all, we are here interested in what is generally said regarding the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are interpreted by the great majority of men today as if they were legal ordinances, that is, like the laws of any modern state. It is conceded, of course, that the laws of the Ten Commandments are more extensive and general, and have a validity independent of their time and place. They are thus held to be more universal, but men are still conscious of them as having the same effect or objective as any modern legislation. So seen, however, they do not contain the actual vital nerve that lives in them. This is borne out by the fact that all translations presently available have unconsciously incorporated an essentially superficial explanation that is not at all in the spirit of their original meaning. When we enter into this spirit, you will see how the interpretation of them forms part of the studies we have just begun, even though it may appear that in discussing them we are creating an inappropriate diversion.

By way of introduction, let us make at least an approximate attempt to render the Ten Commandments into our language, and then try to approach the subject more closely. It will be found that many things in this translation—if we want to call it such—will have to be elaborated, but as we shall soon see, we want above all to touch the vital nerve, the real sense, of them in the idiom of our language. If one translates according to the sense of the text without referring to the dictionary word for word—in such a translation only the worst can result, naturally, for it is the word and soul value that the whole thing had in its own time that is important—if the sense is captured, then these Ten Commandments would run as follows.

First Commandment. I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who show you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, nor that works out of the earth, nor between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and hence affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth. If you do not recognize Me in you, I shall pass away as your divine nature in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you to the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.

Second Commandment. You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the “I” in you will corrupt your body.

Third Commandment. You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as “I” created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughter's doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.

Fourth Commandment. Continue to work in the ways of your Father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.

Fifth Commandment. Do not slay.

Sixth Commandment. Do not commit adultery.

Seventh Commandment. Do not steal.

Eighth Commandment. Do not disparage the worth of your fellowman by speaking false of him.

Ninth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon what your fellowman holds as possessions.

Tenth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon the wife of your fellowman, nor upon his servants, nor upon the other creatures by which he prospers.

Now let us ask ourselves what these Ten Commandments really show us and we shall see that, not only in the first part but in a seemingly hidden way also in the last part, they show us that the Jewish people were told through Moses that the force that had proclaimed itself in the burning bush to Moses, using the words, “I am the I AM!”—Ehjeh asher Ehjeh—as its name, was to be henceforth with the Jewish people. What is referred to is the fact that the other peoples in the evolution of our earth were not able to recognize the “I am,” the actual original ground of the fourth part of man's being, so intensively and dearly as the Jewish people. The God Who poured a drop of His Being into man so that his fourth member became the bearer of this drop—the ego bearer—this God became known to His people for the first time through Moses.

Therefore we can interpret the Ten Commandments as follows. The Jehovah God had indeed worked in mankind's evolution until that time, but the effect of the work of spiritual beings can only become manifest after it has taken place. Though there was much that was working into the ancient peoples, it was through Moses that it came into being as concept, as idea, and as actual soul force. It was essential that he should make clear to his people how their egohood was going to effect their lives. With these people Jehovah is to be seen as a kind of transition being who pours the drop into the individuality of man but who is at the same time a national God. The individual Jew still felt with a part of himself a connection with the ego of Abraham's incarnation that streamed through the entire Jewish race. This was to change only with the advent of Christianity. But what was to occur on earth through Christ was foretold in the Old Testament—especially through what Moses had to say to his people.

So we see the full power of ego recognition slowly permeating the Jewish people in the account of the Old Testament. The Jewish people were to be made fully conscious of the effect it would have upon man, to feel the ego within himself, to experience God's Name, “I am the I AM!” and its effect upon his innermost soul.

These things are experienced abstractly today. The ego and what is connected with it are spoken of and they remain just words. But when the ego was first given to the Jewish people in the form of the old Jehovah God it was experienced as a new force that entered man and completely changed the structure of his astral, etheric and physical bodies. His people had to be told that the conditions of their lives, of health and sickness, were different before they had an ego that they were aware of than they would be henceforth. That is why it became necessary to tell them that they were no longer to look up merely to heaven or down merely to the earth when they spoke of the gods, but into their own souls. Looking into one's soul with devotion to the truth brings right living—right down into one's health. This consciousness is at the basis of the Ten Commandments—whereas a wrong conception of what entered the human soul as ego causes man to wither in body and soul, destroys him. One need only be objective to observe how these Ten Commandments are not meant to be merely external laws, how they are actually meant to be just what has been discussed, that is, something that is of utmost significance for the health and well-being of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. But where does one read books correctly and accurately these days? One needs only turn a few more pages to find, in a further discussion of the Ten Commandments, what the Jewish people are told about their effect upon the whole person. There it says, “I remove every sickness from out your midst; there will be no miscarriage nor barrenness in your land, and I will let the number of your days become full.”

That means that when the ego has become permeated with the essence of the Ten Commandments, one of the results will be that you cannot die in the prime of life, but rather, through the properly understood ego, something can stream into the three bodies, the astral, etheric and physical, that will cause the number of your days to become full, that allows you to live in good health until old age. This is clearly stated. But it is necessary to penetrate quite deeply into these things, and modern theologians cannot, of course, do this so easily. A popular little book, of a most irritating sort, especially because it can be had for a few pennies, includes in its remarks about the Ten Commandments the sentence, “One can readily see that in the Ten Commandments the basic laws for humanity are laid down. The one half is the Commandments that have to do with God and the other half the Commandments in regard to people.” Not wanting to be too far off the mark, the author adds that the fourth Commandment must still be included with the first half, which concerns God. How he manages to attribute four to one half, and six to the other half is just a small example of how people go about their work these days. Everything else in this book is commensurate with the interesting equation: four equals six.

We are concerning ourselves here with the explanation given to the Jewish people of how the ego must properly indwell the three bodies of man. It is important, above all, that it be said—and we encounter this in the very first Commandment: When you become aware of this ego as a spark of the divine, then you must feel that within your ego there is a spark, an emission of the highest, the most exhalted divinity who is involved with the creation of the earth!

Let us recall what we have been able to say about the history of man's evolution. His physical body was developed on ancient Saturn; gods then worked upon it. Then his ether body was joined with it on the sun. How both bodies were developed further is again the work of divine spiritual beings. Then on the moon the astral body was incorporated—all the work of divine spiritual beings. What made man into man as we now know him was the incorporation on earth of his ego. The highest divinity took part in this. As long as man was unable to be fully conscious of this fourth member of his being, he could have no notion of the highest divinity who helped create him and lives within him. Man must say to himself, “Divine beings have worked upon my physical body, but they are less exhalted than the Divinity who has now bestowed my ego upon me.” The same is true of the etheric and the astral bodies. Thus, the Jewish people, to whom the ego was first prophesied, had to be told, “Make yourselves aware that all about you are peoples who worship gods who, in their present stage of development, can be effective in their astral, etheric and physical bodies, but they cannot function in the ego. This God who works in the ego was indeed always there. He proclaimed his presence through his working and creating, but his name he proclaims to you now.”

Through his acceptance of the other gods man is not a free being, but rather a being that worships the gods of his lower members. When, however, he consciously recognizes the god, a part of whom he carries within his ego, then he is a free being—one who confronts his fellowmen as a free being. Today, man does not stand in the same relation to his astral, etheric and physical bodies as he does to his ego. He is within his ego. He is immediately connected with it. He will only experience his astral body in this way when he has changed it into manas, and his ether body when he has transformed it to buddhi, when by means of his ego, he has evolved it to a divine being. Though the ego was the last to emerge, it is still that within which man lives. When he has a conscious awareness of his egohood, he is aware of that in which he is directly confronted with the divine, whereas the form of his astral, etheric and physical bodies that he currently possesses, were created by gods who came before.

The nations surrounding the Israelites worshiped those divinities who worked upon the lower members of man's being. When they made an image of those lower divinities, it had the form of something that was on the earth, in heaven or between heaven and earth, because everything that man has within himself is to be found in all the rest of nature. If he makes images out of the mineral kingdom, they can only represent for him the gods who worked on the physical body. If he makes images from the plant kingdom, they can represent only the divinities that worked on his ether body because man has his ether body in common with the plant world. Images from the animal world can symbolize for him only those divinities who worked on his astral body. But man is made the crown of earth's creation by what he perceives in his ego. No external image can express it. So it had to be clearly and strongly emphasized to the Jewish nation, “You bear within you what flows into you from the now highest of Gods. It cannot be symbolized with an image from the mineral, plant or animal kingdom, were it ever so sublime; all gods who are served by this means are lower gods than the God who lives in your ego. If you would worship this God in you the others must withdraw; then you have the true, healthy strength of your ego within you.” Thus what we are told right at the start, in the first of the Ten Commandments, is connected with the deepest mysteries of the development of man, “I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. The power that I put into your ego became the impulse, the force that enabled you to flee from the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you.”

Moses, on the instruction of Jehovah, led his people out of Egypt. In order to make this quite clear to us it is especially indicated that Jehovah wanted to make his people a nation of priests. The peoples of the other nations had the free priest-wisemen among them who were apart from themselves. They were the free ones who knew about the great mystery of the ego, who also knew the ego-god of whom there was no image. Thus there were in these lands the few ego conscious priest-wisemen on the one side, and on the other, the great unfree masses who could only listen to what they, under the strictest authority, let flow to them from the mysteries. It was not the single individual who had this direct relationship, but the priest-wiseman, who mediated for him. Therefore, the health and prosperity of the people depended upon these priest-wisemen; their health and prosperity depended on how they organized things and established institutions.

I would have to tell you a great deal to portray for you the deeper meaning of the Egyptian temple sleep and how it affected the health of the people, if I were to describe what emanated from such a cult—the Apis cult, for example—in the way of popular medicines for their general well-being. The direction and guidance of the people depended upon the initiates in these cult centers to provide the elixirs of health. But now that was to change. The Jews were to become a nation of priests. Everyone should feel a spark of the Jehovah God within himself, should have a direct relationship to Him. No longer was the priest to be the sole mediator. That is why the people had to be so instructed. They had to be made aware that the false images, the lowlier images of the highest god are also destructive to health.

Now we arrive at something that will not come easily to the consciousness of present-day man. Quite terrible wrongs are being committed in this connection. Only those who can penetrate into spiritual science know the subtle ways in which health and sickness develop. If you go through the streets of a big city and take into your soul the ugly things that are on display in windows and signs, it has a devastating effect. Materialistic science has no conception of the extent to which the seeds of illness lie in this kind of hideousness. They seek the causes of illness in bacilli, and do not realize in what a round about way illness has its origin in the soul. Only people familiar with spiritual science will know what it means to take various images into himself.

Above all, the first Commandment says that man must henceforth be able to imagine that beyond all that can be spiritually expressed by means of an image there can be an impulse that cannot be made into an image; this connects the ego to the super-sensible.

“Feel this ego strongly within yourself, feel it so that through this ego there weaves and flows a divine essence that is more exhalted than anything that you can portray through an image. Then you will have in such feeling a healthy force that will make your physical body, your ether body and your astral body healthy.”

A strong ego impulse that creates good health was to be given the Jewish nation. If this ego was properly recognized, the astral, etheric and physical bodies would be well-formed and would produce a strong life force in each individual, and this, in turn, would permeate the entire folk.

Since a folk was reckoned as having a thousand generations, the Jehovah God spoke the word saying, “Through a proper inculcating of the ego, man will of himself become a source of radiating health, so that the whole nation will become a healthy people ‘unto the thousandth generation’.” If, however, the ego is not understood in the right way, the body withers, becomes weak and sickly. If the father does not place the ego into his soul in the right way, his body becomes weak and sickly, the ego slowly withdraws itself, the son becomes sicklier, the grandson more sickly and finally there is nothing more than a shell from which the Jehovah God has retreated. That which does not permit the ego to thrive causes the body to gradually wither right up to its fourth member.

So we see that it is the proper functioning of the ego that is set before the people of Moses in the first of the Commandments.

“I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not experience Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who present to you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, or that works out of the earth, or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and thus affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth—not ‘I am a zealous God!’; that says nothing here. If you do not recognize Me as your God, I shall pass away as your ego in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you unto the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.”

We see that what is meant is not merely an abstraction, but something living and vital that is to work into the very health of the people. The external character of health is traced back to the spiritual, which is at its source, and which is made known to the people, step by step. This is particularly expressed in the second Commandment that says, “You shall not create any false impressions of my name, of what lives in you as ego, for a true impression makes you healthy and strong, whereby you will prosper, whereas a false impression will cause your body to become wasted!” Thus it was inculcated into every member of the Mosaic nation that whenever he uttered the name of God he should let it be as a warning to himself: “I shall acknowledge the name of what has entered into me, as it lives in me, in that it fosters good health.”

“You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the ‘I’ in you will corrupt your body.”

Then in the third Commandment there is the strong and specific reference to how man, when he is a working and creating ego, is a true microcosm, just as the Jehovah God created for six days and rested on the seventh, and man in his creating should follow. In the third Commandment it is expressly indicated: “You, man, in that you are a true ego, shall also be an image of your highest God, and in your deeds work as would your God.” It is an admonition to become more and more like the God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush.

“You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as ‘I’ created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughters doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.”

Now the Ten Commandments go more and more into detail. But always in the background is the thought that the evolutionary force is at work as Jehovah. In the fourth Commandment man is led from the super-sensible to the outwardly sensible. Something important is referred to in the fourth Commandment that must be understood. When man emerges as one conscious of his ego, he requires certain outer means to foster his existence. He develops what we refer to as personal property and possessions. If we were to go back to ancient Egypt, we would not yet find this individual property among the masses. We would find that those who presided over property were also the priest-initiates. But now as each individual ego develops, it becomes necessary for man to take hold of what is outside and around him, and provide a proper setting for himself. For that reason it is stated in the fourth Commandment that he who lets the individual ego work in himself acquires possessions, that these possessions remain bound to the power of the ego that lives in the Jewish nation from father to son to grandson, and that the father's property would not have the security of the strong ego power if the son did not continue his father's work with the strength received from his father. It is therefore said: “Let the ego become so strong in you that it continues on, and that the son can inherit, along with his father's property, the means with which to become integrated into the external environment.” That is how consciously the spirit of the conservation of property was inculcated into Moses's people, and it is strongly emphasized in all the following laws that occult powers stand behind everything that happens in the world. While the right of inheritance is received today externally and abstractly, those who have understood the fourth Commandment have been aware that spiritual forces extend themselves through property from generation to generation, live from one generation to the next, that they heighten the ego power, and that the ego force of the single individual thereby derives something that is brought to it from the ego force of the father.

The fourth Commandment is usually translated in the most grotesque possible manner, but its true meaning is as follows. “The strong ego force is to be developed in you that lives beyond you, and this shall be passed on to your son so that what will live on in him through the property of his ancestors will accrue to his ego force.

“Continue to work in the ways of your father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.” In addition, it lies at the basis of all the other laws that man's ego power is heightened by the proper application of the ego impulse but that it is destroyed by its improper use.

The fifth Commandment says something that is to be understood in its correct sense only by means of spiritual science. Everything connected with killing, with the extermination of another's life, weakens the self-conscious ego power in man. One can heighten thereby the powers of black magic in man but it is then only the astral forces that are heightened while the ego power is by-passed. What is divine in man is annihilated through every killing. Therefore, this law alludes not only to something abstract, but also to something by which occult power streams to man's ego impulse when he fosters life, making it flourish when he does not destroy life. This is presented as an ideal for the strengthening of the individual ego power.

The same is given in the sixth and seventh Commandments, with somewhat less emphasis, regarding other aspects of life. Through marriage a center for ego strength is created. Whoever destroys marriage thus weakens the strength that should flow into his ego. Likewise does he, who takes something away from another's ego, thereby seeking to increase his own possessions by stealing, etc., weaken his own ego power. Here, too, the guiding thought throughout is that the ego shall not be weakened.

Now it is even indicated in the last three Commandments how man weakens his ego through the false direction of his desires. The life of desire has great significance for ego power. Love heightens the power of the ego; envy and hate cause it to wither. If a man hates his fellowman, if he disparages his worth by speaking falsely of him, he weakens thereby his ego power; he diminishes all that surrounds him of health and vitality. The same is true when he envies another's possessions. The desire for someone else's goods makes his ego power weak. It is the same in the tenth Commandment should a man look with envy at the manner in which another tries to increase his fortune rather than striving after love for the other, whereby he can expand his soul and allow his ego strength to flourish. Only when we have understood the special power of the Jehovah God and hold before us the manner of His revelation to Moses will we comprehend the special nature of the consciousness that should flow into the people. Underlying everything is the fact that it is not abstract laws but healthy and, in the widest sense, healing precepts for body, soul and spirit that are given. He who holds to these Commandments not in an abstract, but in a living way, affects the overall welfare and the entire progress of life. It was not possible at that time to present this without including regulations as to how the Commandments were to be followed. Since the other nations lived in an entirely different way from the Jewish people they did not require such laws with their special significance.

When our scholars today take the Ten Commandments, translate them by dictionary and compare them with the other laws, with the law of Hammurabi, for instance, it signifies that they have no comprehension of the impulse behind the Commandments. It is not the “Do not steal” or “Keep holy this or that holiday” that is important. What is important is the spirit that is streaming through these Ten Commandments and the way in which this spirit is connected with the spirit of this nation out of which Christianity was created. Thus, if one is to understand the Ten Commandments, one would have to feel and experience along with each individual in this nation what he felt as he attained independence. Today is hardly the time in which to feel so concretely what the people of that nation were able to experience. That is why everything in the dictionary is currently being used in translations of them except what the spirit calls for. One can, of course, always read that the people of Moses came from a Bedouin race, and that consequently they could not be given the same laws as a people engaged in agriculture. That is why—so conclude the scholars—the Ten Commandments had to be given later and were then antedated. If the Ten Commandments were what these gentlemen conclude them to be they would be right, but they happen not to understand them. Certainly, the Jews were a kind of Bedouin people, but these Commandments were given them so that they should become capable with their ego strength of moving toward a whole new age. That nations are built out of the spirit is best proved by this. There is hardly a stronger prejudice than that expressed by saying that during Moses's time the Jewish people were still a wandering Bedouin people, but what sense would it have made to give them the Ten Commandments? It made sense to give the Jewish people these laws so that the ego impulse could be impressed into them with the greatest might. They received them because by means of these Commandments their external life was to take on an entirely new form, because an entirely new life was being created, originating in the spirit.

The Ten Commandments have continued to have this effect, and those who understood them in early Christian times spoke of the Laws of Moses in this way. Therefore they came to know that through the Mystery of Golgotha the ego impulse became something different from what it was during the time of Moses. They told themselves that the ego impulse had become infused with the Ten Commandments, and that people became strong by following the Ten Commandments. Now something else is there. Now the form is there that is at the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now the ego can gaze upon what lay hidden through the ages. It can see the greatest that it is capable of attaining—that that makes it powerful and strong through the example of Him who suffered at Golgotha, Who is the greatest archetype of developing man in the future. In this way the Christ took the place, for those who truly understood Christianity, of the impulses that served as a preparation in the Old Testament.

Thus we see that there is, in fact, a deeper interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

[ 1 ] Throughout all its members, the human organism unfolds activities which can only have their origin in the organism itself. Whatsoever is received from outside, must either merely provide the occasion for the organism to unfold its own activities, or else its activity in the body must be such that the foreign activity cannot be distinguished from an inner activity of the body once it has penetrated it.

[ 2 ] Man's essential food contains carbohydrates for example. To a degree these are similar to starch. As such they are substances which unfold their activity in the plant. They enter into the human body in the state which they can achieve in the plant. In this state starch is a foreign body. The human organism does not develop any activity which lies in the direction of what starch can unfold as activity in the state in which it enters the body. For example, what develops in the human liver as a substance similar to starch (glycogen), is something different from plant starch. On the other hand grape-sugar is a substance which stimulates activities that are of a nature similar to the activities of the human body. To develop an effect that plays any real part in the body, it must first be transformed. It is transformed into sugar by the activity of ptyalin in the mouth.

Protein and fats are not altered by ptyalin. To begin with they enter into the stomach as foreign substances. Here the proteins are so transformed by the secreted gastric pepsin that breakdown products as far as peptides arise. The peptides are substances whose impulses of action coincide with those of the body. Fat, on the other hand, also remains unchanged in the stomach. It is only changed when it comes in contact with the pancreatic secretion, where it gives rise to substances that appear on examination of the dead organism as glycerine and fatty acids.

[ 3 ] Now the transformation of starch into sugar continues through the whole process of digestion. Transformation of starch also takes place through the gastric juice if it has not already been accomplished by the ptyalin.

[ 4 ] Where the transformation of starch is achieved by ptyalin, the process stands at the boundary of that which takes place, in man, in the domain referred to in the second chapter as the organization of the ego. It is in this domain that the first transformation of the materials received into the human body from the outer world takes place. Glucose is a substance that can work in the sphere of the ego-organization. Corresponding to it is the taste of sweetness, which has its being in the ego-organization.

[ 5 ] If sugar is produced from starch through the gastric juice, this shows that the ego-organization penetrates into the region of the digestive system. For conscious experience, the sensation of sweet taste is absent in this case; nevertheless, the same thing that goes on in consciousness- in the domain of the ego-organization—while the sensation “sweet” is experienced, now penetrates into the unconscious regions of the human body, where the ego-organization becomes active.

[ 6 ] Now, in the regions of which we are unconscious, the astral body, in the sense explained in Chapter II, comes into play. The astral body is active when starch is transformed into sugar in the stomach.

Man can only be conscious through that which works in his ego-organization in such a way that this is not overwhelmed or disturbed by anything, but able to unfold itself to the full. This is the case in the domain where the ptyalin influences lie. In the realm of the pepsin influences, the astral body overwhelms the ego-organization. The ego-activity becomes submerged in the astral. Thus, in the sphere of material substance, we can trace the ego-organization by the presence of sugar. Where there is sugar, there is the ego organization; the ego-organization emerges where sugar arises in order to direct the sub-human (vegetative and animal) material towards the human.

[ 7 ] Now sugar occurs as a product of excretion in diabetes mellitus. Here the ego-organization appears in the human body in such a form that it works destructively. If we observe it in any other region of its activity, we find that the ego organization dives down into the astral. Sugar, directly consumed, is in the ego-organization. There it induces the sweet taste. Starch, consumed and transformed into sugar by ptyalin or in the gastric juice, reveals the action in the mouth or in the stomach, of the astral body working with the ego-organization and submerging the latter.

[ 8 ] However, sugar is present in the blood as well. The blood, as it circulates with its sugar content, carries the ego-organization through the whole body. But there through the working of the human organism the ego-organization is everywhere held in equilibrium. We saw in Chapter II how the human being contains, besides the ego-organization and astral body, the etheric body and the physical. These also take up the ego-organization and retain it in themselves. As long as this is the case, sugar is not secreted in the urine. How the ego-organization carrying sugar is able to live, is shown by processes in the organism bound up with sugar.

[ 9 ] In a healthy man sugar can only appear in the urine if consumed too copiously as sugar, or if too much alcohol is consumed. Alcohol enters directly into the processes of the body without intermediate products of transformation. In both these cases the sugar-process appears independently as such, alongside the other activities in the human being.

[ 10 ] In diabetes mellitus the case is as follows: the ego-organization, as it submerges in the astral and etheric realm, is so weakened that it can no longer effectively accomplish its action upon the sugar-substance. The sugar then undergoes the processes in the astral and etheric realms which should take place in the ego-organization

[ 11 ] Diabetes is aggravated by everything that draws the ego organization away and impairs its effective penetration into the bodily activities: over-excitement occurring not once but repeatedly; intellectual over-exertion; hereditary predispositions hindering the normal co-ordination of the ego-organization with the body as a whole. At the same time and in connection with these things, processes take place in the head system which ought properly to be parallel to the processes accompanying activity of the soul and spirit; they fall out of their true parallelism because the latter activity takes place either too slowly or too quickly. It is as though the nervous system were thinking independently alongside of the thinking human being. Now this is an activity which the nervous system should only carry out during sleep. In the diabetic, a form of sleep in the depths of the organism runs parallel to the waking state. Hence in the further course of the disease a morbid degeneration of nervous substance takes place. It is a consequence of the deficient penetration of the ego-organization.

[ 12 ] The formation of boils is another collateral symptom in diabetes. Boils arise through an excessive activity in the domain of the etheric. The ego-organization fails where it should be working. The astral activity cannot unfold itself because at such a place it only has power when in harmony with the ego-organization. The result is an excess of etheric activity revealing itself in the formation of boils.

[ 13 ] From all this we see that a real healing process for diabetes mellitus can only be initiated if we are in a position to strengthen the ego-organization of the patient.

A more intimate understanding of what was said yesterday and what still remains to be said will be brought about by endeavoring to compare the youthful Goethe's poem you just heard¹ with that of Hegel, recited yesterday. This comparison will be enlightening as emphasizing the difference in the souls of the two personalities in question. Try to sense the profound difference between the two poems. Lack of time restricts us to a mere mention of certain aspects, but we shall be able to understand each other.

The poem you heard yesterday (Eleusis) was written by a philosopher who reached tremendous heights of pure thought. We saw that thought itself become poetically creative, as it were, in Hegel. We felt mighty thoughts bearing upon the Mysteries, the enigmas of the world. At the same time we sensed a certain awkwardness in the poetical treatment of the material; poetry is not this man's chief mission. He wrestles with the poetic form, and we have the impression that the thought had to struggle to reach that realm where poetic form becomes possible. Clearly, not many such poems could have been written by Hegel.

Let us compare this poem with the other from a definite point of view. In the first lecture an altered version of a youthful poem by Goethe was read to you, showing how two souls lived in his breast. Today, you heard another poem by the young Goethe that needed no alterations. The form in which it was written, with its mighty images, would have been worthy of the mature Goethe as well. In this poem we see working in Goethe a soul force totally different from the one activating Hegel. Unfailingly, a wealth of compelling imagery flowed into the young Goethe. His innate genius was such that an abundance of teeming images streamed into his soul life. We become aware that when the grandeur of the subject overwhelms him, much of what remained in his other poem to mar it has here been overcome by a powerful soul life that seeks to express itself in telling images.

We find three points of interest in the poems recited. In Hegel, the thought is the motive force. It achieves images only with a struggle, and the intensity of this struggle is still discernible even in the pale images. In Goethe, on the other hand, a totally different soul force is at work, thundering along in mighty images. We perceive how this soul force can be impaired in another way, as in The Wandering Jew that has remained a fragment because of the conflict between the two soul forces. This points to the manifold nature of the soul life. In Hegel we find a thought force that penetrates with difficulty into that other soul force that was the stronger one in Goethe. On the other hand, we see how the best force in Goethe's soul bores its way into something opposed to it. Let us keep that in mind.

Now we will resume our psychosophic studies. Remember what we found at work in the soul life: reasoning, and the experiences of love and hate that originate in the capacity for desire, but we could group this differently. By the power of reasoning we mean mental activity, the faculty that desires to understand the truth. We encounter an entirely different soul force when we think of the soul as being interested in the outer world, in one way or another. The soul is interested in the outer world in so far as love and hate take an active part in the latter.

Even so, the phenomena of love and hate have nothing to do with the power of reasoning. Interest and the power of reasoning are two forces acting quite differently in the soul. For example, were you to seek will in the soul, imagining it to be a function by itself, you would discover interest in what is willed. In short, interest awakened by love and hate, and reasoning. Aside from these experiences you would find nothing in the inner region of the soul. They exhaust the content of the soul life.

In the foregoing, however, one of the most important features of the soul life, one that we encounter at once, has been left out of account. It is what we designate with the word consciousness. Consciousness is an integral part of the soul life. When we search the content of the soul life from every aspect, we encounter the power of reasoning, and interest, but in dealing with the inner peculiarities of the two soul forces we may count them among the elements of the soul life only in so far as we can ascribe consciousness to the soul.

Now, what is consciousness? I shall not proceed to define the word but will merely characterize. If you approach the concept “consciousness” in the light of what we have already studied, you will see that in view of the continuous stream of visualizations the condition of consciousness in the soul does not, after all, coincide with the soul life. Why is that? We have seen, you know, that the soul life differs from the condition of consciousness through the fact that a visualization can live on in the soul without entering consciousness. A conception out of the past lives on in our soul life. We can recall it, but if we do so only after a day or so, not immediately, it was not in our consciousness in the interim, it was only in our memory. Memory is not always conscious. The conception, then, existed in the soul but was momentarily not in our consciousness. Consciousness is not the same thing as the continuous stream of the soul life. We must put it this way. Representing the visualizations, which we may possibly remember some time, by an arrow pointing in the direction taken by the stream of visualizations in time, we thereby include all the visualizations flowing out of the past into the future. In order to be conscious of them we must first call them up out of the unconscious life of the soul by an act of will.

When the soul is awake, the condition of consciousness is something that pertains to the soul life, but not in the sense that everything pertaining to it must pertain to the condition of consciousness as well. On the contrary, consciousness illuminates but a part of the soul life. If you ask the reason, someone could answer, “Well, what you designate ‘the continuous stream of visualizations’ is nothing but the established and permanent arrangement of nerves and brain, and all that is needed is that at a certain moment the brain arrangement should be illuminated by consciousness.” That would, indeed, be the case if the perception had not been robbed of something in becoming a visualization. In that case the perception would not have to be transformed into a visualization. The latter, however, is a response, a perception from within, that has robbed the outer perception of something that was not always linked with consciousness, but, rather, that must be illuminated by it.

Next we ask how it is possible to throw light upon this continuous stream that embraces unconscious visualizations, to illuminate it in such a way that its content can become visible in memory. A certain fact of the soul life such as can occur on the physical plane will serve to illustrate. It is a fact totally ignored by physiology, but we are concerned with facts, not prejudices. We have many kinds of feelings, for example, longing, impatience, hope, doubt, and finally such feelings as apprehension, fear, etc. What do they tell us? Examination shows them to have something strangely in common. They all refer to the future, to something that may eventuate and that is hoped for. Our soul life, then, is so constituted that in our feelings we take an interest not only in the present but in the future as well, and a lively one at that. It is even stronger in the case of pronounced desires. Just try watching the upheaval in your soul when you desire something that is to materialize in the future! You can go farther; try to hunt up in your memory what you experienced as joy or sorrow in your youth, and compare it with similar feelings you have had recently. Try it, and you will see how pale such memories remain when you try to freshen them up. In the present, such memories are fresh and strong, but the farther we are removed from them, the paler they become.

I should like to ask how many people bemoan something that happened to them ten years before, provided the cause has ceased to exist? There is a tremendous difference in the way we look at the future and the past. Only one possible explanation of this fact exists. What we call desire simply does not flow in the same direction as the stream of visualizations, but the latter comes to meet it. A powerful light will be thrown upon your soul life if you will take this one fact for granted. Desire, love, hate, wishes, interest, and so forth, form a current flowing from the future into the past, that is, toward you.

It would take days to elaborate that in detail, but the riddles of consciousness will be solved and the whole peculiar nature of the soul life clarified if you start with the premise that the current of desire, love and hate comes to meet you out of the future, and meets the current of visualizations flowing out of the past into the future. At every moment you are actually in the midst of this encounter of the two streams, and considering that the present moment of your soul life consists of such a meeting, you will readily understand that these two currents overlap in your soul. This overlapping is consciousness.

If at any moment of the present you search your conscious soul life, you will find there something that acts out of the past into the future and something that runs from the future into the past. Consciousness can be explained in no other way than by the overlapping of these two streams, and if you will visualize all the damming up that comes about here, you will see that the soul takes part in all that flows out of the past and in what streams to meet that current out of the future. Observing the conscious soul life at any given moment, you will see a certain interpenetration of these two streams. Here are all the conceptions you have brought along, there is everything that flows out of the future into the past, meeting the current of visualizations as interest, wishes, desire, and so forth.

Since these two currents can be distinguished quite clearly, we will designate the soul life by two names, though the names themselves are immaterial. If I were giving a public lecture, I should choose curious names, as is customary. For example, I could call one current A and the other B; then you could get right to work on an equation, where A and B would be useful. The names are not what matters, yet I should here like to select names that will recall to your mind what you must already know from another angle, so that you can contemplate it from two aspects. First, from that of the pure empiricist who can choose any names he likes for the proven results of his researches, that is, where the name is immaterial, and second, from the point of view of one who selects such names because he observes the facts clairvoyantly. Thus, we will designate the current of visualizations, flowing from the past into the future, “the etheric body of the soul,” and the other, the current of desires, running from the future into the past, “the astral body of the soul.”

Consciousness is the meeting of the astral and etheric bodies. You can test this. Try to recall all that you have learned from the research of clairvoyant consciousness about the etheric and astral bodies, and to apply it here. You only need ask yourselves what brings about the damming up, the intersection of the two streams. The answer lies in the fact that the two currents meet in the physical body. Assume for the moment that the physical and etheric bodies were removed. What would happen? The current from the past to the future would be missing, and the other, the astral current, would have an unobstructed course. Now, that is exactly what occurs immediately after death, with the result that during the period of kamaloka consciousness runs backwards. Thus in following our psychosophic paths we rediscover what we learned by way of exact theosophy.

Many of the results of clairvoyant research will at first contradict observations made on the physical plane because the latter must first be properly arranged but, when this is done, the results of clairvoyant research can invariably be verified. The results of the two methods will coincide.

Now we will examine another phenomenon of the soul life, in common parlance called “surprise,” “amazement.” What exactly is this? When can we be surprised by something we encounter? Only when, at the moment of encountering it, we are not at once in a position to reason when our judgment is not immediately equal to coping with the impressions made upon our soul life. The moment our reasoning becomes equal to the task, amazement ceases. Something our reasoning can at once cope with causes us no surprise at all, surprise doesn't enter. In encountering a phenomenon and experiencing surprise, amazement—perhaps even fear—that is, in receiving a conscious impression without our reasoning having time to intervene, feelings arise, but not at first reasoning. In seeking the reason for this we must realize that our state of interest, our capacity for desire, cannot flow in the same direction as the power of reasoning, otherwise the two would coincide; therefore, reasoning must be something different from ordinary interest.

Neither can reasoning be identical and flow together with the soul current from the past to the future. Otherwise, reasoning would continuously coincide with the current of visualizations and the entire soul life would have to take part whenever we reason. Visualizations would have to have ceased at this moment. Reasoning, however, is conscious; yet at the moment of reasoning, how far we are from facing all the visualizations our soul embraces! Reasoning is not able instantaneously to grasp the continuous stream of the soul life, hence these two cannot coincide either. Nor can reasoning coincide with the current from the future to the past, otherwise, fear, anxiety, amazement, surprise would not be possible. Reasoning, therefore, coincides with none of these currents.

Keeping this fact in mind, let us now examine the continuous stream of the etheric body that flows from the past to the future. It discloses, indeed, something highly peculiar, namely, that it not only can flow along in the soul unconsciously, so to speak, but can become conscious. Let us keep clearly in view that unconscious conceptions passing through the soul life can become conscious. They are always present, but not always conscious. Let us try by a simple example to focus our attention upon the moment at which such unconscious visualizations become conscious. You are walking through a picture gallery and stop to look at a picture. At this moment the same picture bobs up in your consciousness; you have seen it before. What was it that called up this memory? Well, it was the impression of the new picture that magically and visibly conjured up before your mind's eye the old visualization of the picture. If you had not encountered the picture, the old visualization would not have been stimulated to come to the surface. You can understand this process by explaining it as follows. What I term my ego has entered anew upon an interrelationship with the picture by confronting it.

The circumstance that your ego receives something new into itself acts upon something that is contained in the continuous stream of the soul life and thereby becomes visible again. Let us try to get a picture of this by means of which we can describe the process. Think of all the objects that are at the moment behind you, but without turning around; you cannot see them. Under what conditions can you see them without turning around? When you hold up a mirror. Something similar must take place between the visualizations that live along unconsciously in the soul and the process produced by a new impression. The latter mixes with your old visualizations in such a way as to render these visible to the mind's eye.

Then, what is it that blots out the view of the old visualization, rendering it invisible? It is your ego that stands in the way and, when a new process provides the impulse for a reflection, the result is the process of memory, of the becoming conscious of the old visualization. The stream of memory runs backward to the old visualization, just as the light rays run backward to the mirror, thence to be reflected forward.

Enquiring next into the cause of such a reflection, let us recall the highly significant fact that man's retrogressive memory stops at a certain point. From that time back to birth he remembers nothing. Where does memory of past events commence? In fact, which processes of human life are the only ones that return to memory at all? Only those in which the ego participated, which the ego had really assimilated because it is at about the same time, according to the demands of a certain law, that the child can start to develop his ego visualization. Only such visualizations are remembered at all in our physical life as were received while the ego took part as an active force, conscious of itself.

What about this ego during the first three years of a child's life? At first it receives all impressions unconsciously, so to speak; it is not itself present. Then it begins to unite with all visualizations received from without. That is the moment at which the human ego begins to stand in front of its visualizations, placing these behind it. Up to that time the whole life of ego visualizations was lived purely in the life of the present; now it emerges, faces the future in freedom, and is equipped to receive whatever comes to meet it out of the future, but past visualizations it places behind itself.

What must take place at the moment when the ego begins to assimilate all visualizations, when it becomes conscious? The ego must join the continuous current we have called the etheric body. At the moment when the child begins to develop an ego consciousness the stream of life has made an impression on the etheric body, and therewith the capacity for ego consciousness comes into being. Ego perception can never come to you from without; the visualizations relating to the physical world are what is given from without. Previous to the moment at which the child begins to sense his own ego, he cannot feel his own etheric body, but from then on the ego reflects back into itself the current of the etheric body. This gives you the mirror as well. To sum up: While all other visualizations—those that relate to physical space—are received by the physical human being, the ego consciousness, the ego visualization, arises when the ego fills out the etheric body and is reflected, as it were, from its inner walls. The essential feature of ego consciousness is that it is the etheric body being reflected inward.

What can bring about this inner reflection? The inner delimitation of the etheric body. Only through this does the ego become conscious as the result of inner reflection. We learned, you remember, that the astral body comes to meet the etheric body. It is the ego that fills out the etheric body and, through inner reflection, becomes conscious of it as such. This ego consciousness is powerfully gripped by all interest, all desires, for these implant themselves firmly in the ego. Nevertheless, even though this takes place to such a degree that we characterize it as egotism, there is something peculiar about this ego perception, something in a certain way independent of desires. There is a certain demand that the human soul makes upon itself, readily attested by the soul; every soul knows that mere desire cannot possibly call forth the ego. However much you want to do it, it cannot be done. Ego consciousness does not consist of the stream of desires any more than it does of the stream of visualizations. It is an element fundamentally different from either, but one that assimilates both streams. We can represent this state of affairs graphically by drawing the ego current at right angles to the stream of time. That gives a correct picture.

That is the only way to account for all the psychic phenomena involved. You will always be able to cope with these if you assume a current running at right angles to the other two, to the one from the past to the future, and to the one from the future to the past. That is the current corresponding to the human ego element itself.

There is something else, something in the nature of a human-psychic experience, that is connected with the ego. It is the power of reasoning. This enters with the ego. If you visualize this picture, you will really be able to understand only the phenomenon of surprise, of interest, not the reasoning activity of the ego. The latter cannot possibly enter the process from the direction of the past, and unless the ego can enter simultaneously with desire, it is impossible for reasoning to meet the future-past current. What is indispensable if reasoning activity is to enter with the ego current? A reflection, and this must come about in such a way that the ego has the unconsciously flowing visualizations positively behind itself.

That would be the case if the ego current entered from the direction indicated by the arrow in the diagram, but were then to change its course within the body to that shown by the other arrow, toward the future. Now the ego has joined the current of the etheric body, has entered the etheric body—has itself, so to speak, become a mirror. This tallies strikingly with the facts. If the ego has the unconsciously onward-flowing visualizations behind itself, what does it encounter in front, toward the future? Imagine you are looking into a mirror. If nothing is behind you, you see nothing but an endless void, and at first that is man's view of the future. When do you see something there? Only when something out of the past appears. You see the past, not the future; the mirror shows you the objects that are behind you. Now, if the ego is reflected inwardly at the moment when the child arrives at self-consciousness, the entire soul life from then on signifies that experiences and impressions of the past are reflected as well. That is why you can remember nothing that occurred before the ego became a means of reflection. If something out of the past is to be seen in the mirror, you naturally see nothing of the future, just as you see nothing behind the quicksilver that lines the mirror.

It should be noted here that the child, when it is reflected in the etheric body at the inception of the ego, remembers nothing that happened previously. Everything is explained by the one essential fact that the human ego, in so far as it enters the etheric body and receives visualizations out of the past, itself becomes a reflecting apparatus impressionable to everything it receives from that time on.

Now let us recall the fact, already mentioned, that there are two kinds of memories, the one resulting from the external repetition of a perception, the other called up out of the soul by the power of the ego, without external repetition. What must occur if the ego is to reflect past events? We can say that, if you receive an outer impression through a picture you have seen before and which you encounter for the second or third time, the raying of the reflection from the other side is thereby held back in such a manner as to make it strike the inner soul mirror. What if no repetition of the outer impression occurs? In that case the ego itself must gather what is to be reflected from within, that is, it must create a substitute for what is otherwise effected by the outer impression.

What is this ego primarily as it appears in physical human life? It is the inner fulfillment of the etheric body. It must therefore itself be transformed into a mirror within the etheric body, and this is accomplished through the delimitation of the etheric body. With regard to your outer sense impressions you are sequestered by reason of being in a physical body, and it is due to this fact that what lives in the etheric body can be reflected. There must be, however, another force to account for what you remember freely. The etheric body must have a foil, like a mirror, and this is provided for the memories, which are called forth by the new impression, by the sense organs, the physical body.

In the absence of anything acting from without, we must seek the foil elsewhere. The only alternative is to employ as an auxiliary force what approaches the ego at right angles, that is, desire, or the current flowing toward us. This we use as a foil for the mirror. Only by appropriately strengthening the astral body can we call in the force of desire and develop out of the ego a force capable of recalling to our memory those visualizations that otherwise refuse to appear. Only by strengthening the ego, as it expresses itself in the physical world, are we able actually to use the current flowing out of the future and to make a mirror-foil of it. Solely by strengthening the ego, by making it master of what comes to us out of the future (astral body), can we do anything about the visualizations that refuse to be mirrored, refuse to surrender to us. If we cannot recall the visualization, it is because our desire lacks the requisite strength. We must take out a loan in order to be able to reflect it.

A strengthening of the ego can be brought about in two ways. In everyday life, for example, you experience things simply by following the continuous stream of experience. When a bell tolls you hear the first tone, the second, third, and so forth, in order; in a play you hear the various parts one after another, then you've finished. With your ego you live along in the continuous stream of etheric life but, if you systematically set about to experience the opposite stream of life, you follow the astral current. For instance, in the evening recall the events of the day in reverse order, or recite the Lord's Prayer backwards. You are then not following the usual ego current, which lives because the ego fills the etheric body, but the opposite one, and the consequence is that you incorporate forces out of the astral current. That is an extraordinarily good exercise for strengthening the memory.

There is another exercise for the same purpose. If someone suffers from a particularly poor memory, he can combat the condition by trying with all his might to take up some occupation of his youth. Supposing he is forty, and he tackles a book that had entranced him at the age of fifteen. If he keeps on trying religiously to become absorbed in it with the feeling of that earlier time, he draws strength from the backward-flowing current. You recall the same facts you did in the past, then the current out of the future comes to your aid. Why, for example, does an old man like to recall the occupations of his youth?

Such considerations can show you that actually your ego must fortify itself from the astral current that flows to meet the etheric current if it would strengthen the memory. If one were to pay careful attention to such matters in teaching, the effect would be highly beneficial. For example, seven school classes could be so arranged as to comprise a middle class, the fourth. In the fifth would be repeated in modified form what was studied in the third, in the sixth the subjects of the second, in the seventh, of the first. That would be an excellent way of strengthening the memory, and if people would put such things into practice they would see that ideas of that sort derive from the laws governing life.

From all this we perceive that in our ego visualization, our ego perception, we have something that must first come into being. . It arises in early childhood through the inward reflection of the etheric body. No wonder there is no ego visualization in the night, for when the ego is out in space during sleep, it naturally cannot be reflected in the etheric body. That is why it must submerge in unconsciousness at night. The etheric body is the current continuously flowing in time, and in the course of time it receives the ego visualization through the circumstance that what flows forward in the etheric body is illuminated from the other side by the astral body.

All that we have in the way of ego visualization is exclusively in the etheric body; it is merely the entire etheric body seen from within, reflecting itself within itself. Only the ego visualization is active in the etheric body, not the ego itself. What is the ego? It is the power of reasoning striking in at an angle. If you would comprehend the ego you must not turn to the ego perception but to reasoning. In relation to all else, reasoning is independent, and we must clearly distinguish between visualizing and reasoning. “Red” is not a verdict; reasoning stops at the sense perception. The moment, however, the verdict “red is” is pronounced—when the “red” is endowed with “being”—the ego stirs, the reasoning that is directed toward the spiritual. When the ego passes judgment based upon outer impressions, the latter are objects of judgment.

Now, if the ego is a being apart from all its visualizations and perceptions, as well as from self-perception (just as a reflected image is not identical with the object reflected), and if, further, it is the impetus of self-perception, a verdict must be possible in relation to which the ego, as in all reasoning, feels itself master, and not dependent upon outer perception. This occurs at the moment, not when you have the ego visualization, but when you pronounce the judgment “I is.” Thereby you have filled out with reasoning capacity what otherwise lives in the “I” without achieving consciousness. What was previously an empty bubble is now filled with the power of reasoning, and when the ego thus fills itself out the spirit is encompassed by reasoning.

Let us recall that reasoning is an activity of the soul, an inner activity; that soul activities arise within, in the inner soul life; that they lead to visualizations. Among the visualizations that appear, the ego visualization is one. True, we found that the ego visualization leads to a conception of the ego, but aside from that we could learn nothing about the ego. What we did learn, however, is that the ego visualization, though having the same character as other visualizations entering from the physical world, cannot originate in the outer world, the physical world. This being the case, and since reasoning, which is one of the elements of the soul life, must be applied to the ego, it follows that the ego must enter the soul life from the other side. This is conclusive evidence that just as the conception “red” enters the soul life from without and is then encompassed by a verdict, so something in the ego appears from the other side and acts in the same way.

When we say “I is,” we receive an impression out of the spiritual world and encompass it with a verdict. “Red” corresponds to physical conditions of existence. The verdict “red is” can, as such, come about only within the soul life through the agency of the physical world. “I is” comes from the other direction; so we say that this impression comes from the spiritual world. “I is” is a fact of the spiritual life, just as “red is” is a fact of the physical life. The usage of speech expresses this coming from the other side by exchanging “is” for “am”: I am. The ego can be admitted to have being² only when it can be encompassed by a judgment; when, just as in the case of “red,” something approaches the soul that can be encompassed by a verdict in the same way as can something coming from the physical world.

When I now draw a line indicating the fourth direction, upward from below, you will not be surprised that this represents a physical force. Graphically represented, the impressions of the physical world proceed upward from below and manifest themselves in the soul as sense impressions. In one plane the ego and its bodily-physical sense organs are opposed, in the other, the currents of the etheric and of the astral bodies. When the ego makes contact with the physical body through the eye, the ear, etc., it receives impressions of the physical world. These are then carried on in the soul by reason of the latter's possessing consciousness, which in turn arises through the impact of the etheric and astral bodies upon each other. The whole picture shows that a comparatively good diagram of the co-operation of the various worlds in the human soul can be had by opposing the ego and the physical body in one plane, and at right angles, the etheric and astral bodies.

Innumerable riddles will be solved for you if you will thoroughly work your way through this diagram. You will see that precisely this cross, intersected by a circle, gives you a good picture of the soul life as it borders below on the physical, above on the spiritual world. Now you must imagine the stream of time, and you must rise to a visualization of it, not as something flowing along smoothly, but as meeting the life of the senses. You must see that the life of the ego can be comprehended only when thought of as striking at right angles into the stream of time. With this in mind you will readily understand that quite different forces meet in our soul. Our soul is the stage, so to speak, where these forces encounter each other from many directions.

As an example, take someone in whom the reasoning ego preponderates. He will find it difficult to endow abstract concepts with sufficient body to make them appeal directly to feeling; that is, a man like Hegel, who is strong in reasoning, will not easily give in full measure of what speaks to the feelings. On the other hand, one whose every tendency tells of a rich astral life, who is full of interests that flow against the continuous current of the physical life, will bring with him into the world the gift for living

concepts, because he is open to the stream coming out of the future. He will not appear on the physical plane as a man of thought, but rather, he will prove how readily he can clothe his inner experiences in words that speak powerfully to men. Such a one was Goethe.

If you think of a man as bringing over from a former incarnation a tendency toward the one current or the other, you must imagine in Goethe's soul a predisposition for the stream out of the future. When he yields himself to it, he quite naturally gathers ideas of the future as vital concepts. Once Goethe permits all this to come into conflict with what has only been acquired in this incarnation, with the visualizations of the recently acquired etheric body, the result is something like what we designated worthless in his Wandering Jew.

On the other hand, when a Hegel brings with him the gift for extracting mighty conceptions from his reasoning, he struggles with the current that streams from the future into the past. The fact is, we incessantly place our ego in such a position as to cover up the continuous stream. The ego covers it and lets the endless current of desire come to meet it, and into this focal point we peer as into a mirror.

I have been able to evoke for you but little out of the infinite realm of psychosophy, but you will find the answers to many riddles of life by taking into account the presence of the unconscious visualizations of the etheric body. The physical body is in constant communication with the etheric body, and just because the visualizations are unconscious they can develop their lively activity in the other direction toward the physical side. Furthermore, precisely those visualizations that our consciousness is unable to call up out of our unconscious soul life are in this way immeasurably destructive; they develop destructive forces that penetrate our corporeality. It is a fact that something a person has experienced at the age of ten or twelve, and totally forgotten—something he is incapable of raising into consciousness because the ego lacks sufficient strength—continues to act in his etheric body and can impair his health. That means that in the etheric body there live visualizations that can cause sickness.

If you know that, you also know that there is a remedy. It consists in robbing these visualizations of their power by deflecting them in another direction. You can help the sufferer, if he is not strong enough to do so himself, by providing him with associations that will bring these visualizations to consciousness. That accomplishes a great deal. It is really possible to bring a person's conceptions to his consciousness and thus call forth health-giving forces.

Some of you will say that that sort of thing is being tried at the present time and, indeed, there are psychiatric cures that consist in calling forth visualizations. I cannot here mention the name of the school I have in mind because its aim is to unearth only visualizations of the sexual life—visualizations to which the matter here under discussion does not apply. In such cases it is of no avail, and for that reason the Freudian School in Vienna is such as to produce results that are the exact opposite of what is aimed at.

You will have gathered that, if one goes to work conscientiously and intelligently in observing life on the physical plane, the knowledge acquired on the psychosophic path verifies what reaches us through clairvoyant research, but the latter does not seek the facts in order to see whether they tally with conditions on the physical plane. On the contrary, the clairvoyant seeker is often surprised himself to find the results of his research so beautifully borne out on the physical plane. If reversed, the process would hardly yield accurate information. Research practised on the physical plane alone tends to group things in a wrong way and to meet facts with a slap in the face. The fundamental impression I hope you have gleaned from these lectures is one of justified confidence in clairvoyant research.

That is why, in addition to all that I tell you from clairvoyant sources, I am at pains to draw your attention from time to time in a matter-of-fact way to the laws of the physical plane because we are placed on this plane in order that we may learn to know it. We have a twofold duty. On the one hand, we must study the physical plane upon which the great world powers have not placed us fortuitously, and we must really identify ourselves with it by renunciative thinking. On the other hand, we have already arrived at the stage of human development at which we are aware that we can no longer cope with the physical plane without the aid of occult research. Science must inevitably err without occult science as a guide to point the lines of approach to all that can be learned through physical research. After the establishment of physical research at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this necessarily remained the center of interest; now the time is ripe for another sort of research to intervene and indicate the lines of approach. If the occultist will not only learn this but count it among his duties, he will have fulfilled the demands of our time, namely, to spread the conviction that we base firmly on the physical plane. Certainly anyone who has grasped the idea of the astral current flowing in from the future can be depended upon in this matter. That this is true I have already proved to you by a fact.

Only one of the many psychologists of the present has, with no knowledge of occultism whatever, approached the study of the soul with a fine schooling. He is Franz Brentano. He took up psychology in the eighteen-sixties and, although what he did amounted to no more than scholastic speculating, it was like a child's first steps in the doctrine of desire, feeling, and reasoning. What he says is all askew, but the tendency is significant. It could have been right had it not been for his complete ignorance of every occult context. The first volume of his work appeared in the spring of 1874 and the second was due in the fall of the same year, but to this day (1910) it has not appeared. He was bound to become mired, and from these lectures you will understand why. He had already defined and indicated what the second volume was to contain; he had planned to deal with the ego, with immortality. The stream of occult research, however, failed to enter from the other side; the fructifying element was not forthcoming. Franz Brentano lived as a child of our time, that is, he began to arrange facts into groups, so he could not get on. He is now living in Florence, an old man.

Wundt also wrote a psychology, but it is nothing but a tangle of concepts. It contains nothing about the real soul life, nothing but the author's preconceived opinions. Such people thrash empty straw, even when dealing with the psychologies of peoples and of languages. All sciences would come to a similar impasse unless something came to meet them from the spiritual side.

My dear friends, you have identified yourselves with a movement in which your store of knowledge can increase if you think of your present knowledge as a karmic fact. In that way you will have arrived at a crossroads, a vantage point from which vigorous co-operation in this work is clearly discernible as a task enabling you now or in a future incarnation to serve humanity. Do not think of that as an abstract ideal, but keep constantly returning to it in a practical way. This work must be made to bear fruit.

• 1. The title of the poem that was recited at the beginning of this lecture is Poetic Thoughts on Jesus Christ's Descent into Hell. Like The Wandering Jew it is here omitted, but again, a little imagination on the part of the reader will adequately fill the gap.
• 2. Sein, the infinitive “to be,” used here as a noun. Ordinarily it could be translated with “existence,” but here that would be a half-truth. The linguistic connection with “I is,” “I am,” etc., must be retained.

It has to be emphasized repeatedly that Theosophy must be lived, that, by way of Theosophy, the human being not only learns this or that, but that he learns to think differently, to feel, to perceive emotionally in regard to his whole environment. This will become a reality for someone who accepts the theosophical impulses in the right spirit. He has to learn to feel empathy, to experience living with all beings, but mostly this needs to apply in relation to other human beings. However, we learn best to empathise with human beings when we first learn to do this with the rest of the world.

Slowly man learns to know the whole world that surrounds him. He slowly learns, that he is surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings, that he walks through spiritual beings everywhere. He learns to understand this in regard to feeling and in regard to sensation. He learns to know what surrounds us in the three realms of nature. He learns to know the beings in the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal kingdom. He strides differently through the meadows and forests, over the fields and open country from someone who has not gone through theosophical training.

When looking at the other beings, one could at first believe that the animal beings do not have a soul like human beings. The Ego of man, man’s soul, is certainly different from an animal’s Ego, in that the Ego of man lives on the physical plane. When we look at an animal as such, then each individual animal has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. Human beings have in addition to these three bodies an Ego. During his waking state man’s Ego is contained in him. The animal, however, does not have an Ego on the physical plane. For this, we have to go a bit deeper into the so called astral world. On the astral plane we will find a population of animal Egos, just like we have a human population here on the physical plane. Just as one man meets another here, a clairvoyant is able to meet self-contained personalities on the astral plane—these are the animal Egos.

One has to imagine it thus—imagine the ten fingers of a human being stretched through a wall. They are moving. We can see the ten fingers moving, but not the human being himself. He is hidden behind the wall. We are not able to explain to ourselves how the ten fingers can get through the wall and move. We have to assume that there is some being to which they belong. It is the same with animals in the physical world. All animals of similar shape have one group-Ego. Here in the physical world we see the animals roam about, and what we are seeing has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. If we see here in the physical world, for example, lions, then these lions are externalized organs of those lion-Egos that live in the astral world. The lion-Ego, the group-Ego of physical lions, is a similarly self-contained being on the astral plane as we are self-contained beings here. Thus each group of animals has an Ego on the astral plane: a lion-Ego, a tiger-Ego, a vulture-Ego are on the astral plane. The single animals exist here in the physical world like fingers stretched through a wall.

When we observe the individual animals here, many of them appear to be extraordinarily smart. These animals are being managed from the astral plane where the animal-Egos, the group-Egos, are located. The population of the astral plane is much more clever than human beings. The animal group-Egos on the astral plane are very wise beings. Observe the bird-migration, whereby the birds migrate through the various regions, how their flight is arranged, how during autumn they move to warmer regions and how they gather together again in spring. If we deeply look into these wise arrangements, we have to ask ourselves: who is hidden behind the wall, who arranges all of this?—These are the group-Egos. When we watch a beaver building, then we will see that the beaver built more wisely than the greatest engineering art.

One has observed the intelligence of bees at work by giving sugar instead of honey to them. Then they were watched. They cannot take along the sugar, so they go and fetch other bees. First they fly to a source of water, from which each bee carries a drop of water, drenches the sugar with it and transforms it into a kind of syrup. This is then carried to the hive. The spirit of the beehive is behind the work of the bees. The individual bees belong to a single bee personality, just like our limbs belong to us. Only it is the case that each bee is more separate from the others, and our individuals limbs are closer together, more compact. We walk everywhere through entities invisible for us, through the animal group-Egos, who evade physical observation.

As we begin to empathise with beings of which man has not the slightest idea, we can also empathise with the plant souls. The plant-Egos live in an even higher world than the animal-Egos. The plant-Egos, those self-contained group-Egos, to each of which a series of plant belongs, are on the so-called Devachan plane. We can also tell the place where these plant-Egos actually are—all plant-Egos are at the centre of the Earth. The animal Group-Egos are circumventing the Earth like the trade-winds, while the plant-Ego’s are in the centre of the Earth. They are beings that all penetrate each other. In the spiritual world the law of permeability holds sway—one being passes through another. We see the animal group-Egos pass across the Earth like the trade-winds and observe how they, out of their wisdom, perform what we consider to be the deeds of the animals. When we observe the plants, then we see the head of the plant, the root, is extended to the centre of the Earth, because there, at the centre of the Earth, is their Group-Ego.

The Earth itself is an expression of soul-spiritual entities. The plants appear to us, from a spiritual viewpoint, to be something like the nails on our fingers. The plants belong to the Earth. One who observes the individual plants, can never see them completely. Each plant belongs to the sum of entities, that make up the plant-Egos. Thus we can immerse ourselves into the feelings and emotion of the plants themselves. The part of the plant that grows out of the earth, that strives from within the earth to the surface, has a different nature from what grows under the earth. If you cut off the bloom, stalk and leaves of a plant, then that is something different from pulling out the root. If you cut off a plant this will create a certain type of well-being, like a pleasure for the plant soul. This pleasure it similar to what is felt, for example, by a cow whose young calf suckles at its udder. The plant part that grows out of the earth really is something similar to the milk of animals.

When we walk through the fields in autumns and the stalks are falling under the scythe of the reaper, when the scythe strikes the sheaves, then feelings of well-being, akin to ecstasy, breathe across the fields. It is something immensely significant when the reaper goes through the field with his scythe, and we not only can watch the falling sheaves with our physical eyes, but we can see feelings of pleasure stroking the Earth.

However, when you rip out a plant by its root, this causes pain for the plant soul. The laws that apply in the physical world are not the same as those in the higher worlds. We will gain different insights when we ascend to the spiritual worlds. Sometimes also here in the physical world the principle of beauty contradicts the principle of pain or joy. It is possible that someone, driven by beauty concepts, rips out a few white hairs, although it will hurt him. This applies to plants too. It might look more tidy to rip out a plant by its root, it might be more beautiful, but it will still hurt the plant.

The stones are also lifeless only in the physical world—in the higher worlds they too have their group-Egos. In the upper areas of Devachan, the group-Egos of the minerals exist. They too experience joy and pain. We will not find out anything about this by way of speculation, but only through the Science of the Spirit.

If we observe a worker in a quarry breaking up stone by stone, we could believe that this would cause pain to the stone soul. But this is not so. Just when a stone is blasted, then feelings of pleasure burst forth from the stone in all directions. Out of the quarry, where rock is blasted apart, strong feelings of well-being stream out on all sides. When we have a glass of water and add salt to it, and the salt dissolves, then feelings of desire and pleasure will stream through the water. Joy streams through the water when the dissolution of salt is being observed from a spiritual viewpoint. But if we allow the dissolved salt to settle and harden again, then this happens under pain. Likewise, it would cause pain to the stone soul if we could amalgamate the rock again that was blasted apart.

In their secret writings, in their religious scriptures, the seers have always shared their secret knowledge with human beings. But the people have lost the ability to understand these secret scriptures. Let’s imagine ourselves back into the ancient periods of time of our earthly evolution. We see the stones of our solid mountain ranges, that are built up from various clay strata, basaltic stones and so on. When we go even further back, we find that things on Earth become more and more soft. Then we come back to a time, where the Earth was filled with mighty masses of fiery warmth, where the iron, where all metals, all minerals, were dissolved in the spiritual. The human being was also a spiritual being at that time. To allow man to develop further, to receive his current shape, those soft masses needed to solidify. The mountain ranges emerged, the mineral masses dissolved out of the soft substance, and the Earth became the dwelling place of today’s human beings. The lifeless rock masses crystallised themselves out of the fiery liquid Earth like the salt out of the salt solution. Everything shaped itself so that the firm masses were formed out of the liquid state. This did not happen without pain. The whole hardening process of the globe was connected with the pain of the stone soul.

In the future Earth will become spiritualised again. The Earth will again fragment, as is already indicated by radium today. The process of dissolution of the Earth will begin, a spiritualisation, a deification, an adoption in the place of children will happen. Let us hear what the Apostle Paul says, “The whole Earth, all beings, are sighing under pain, waiting to be adopted as children”.¹

What we have got here is a representation of what happens on Earth, where the stone soul suffers under pain until the condition occurs when the stone soul will be adopted in place of a child. One could feel pain within one’s soul when those, who are announcing the religious scriptures to man, dream all sorts of things into them, because they do not want to make an effort to penetrate deeply into these records. Those people who are leading mankind are really violating their duty if they do not want to penetrate deeply into the religious scriptures.

The apostle Paul knew what the processes on Earth meant. Theosophy must lead mankind in our modern time into the depth of religious scriptures. It is sad if those who are called upon to be the representatives of the scriptures, make no effort to immerse themselves in them—they do not even have the will to understand them. All the arrogance of the present that says, “we’ve finally made such magnificent progress”,² must disappear. There are so many who believe that our ancestors knew nothing! Then people come and interpret the scriptures of Paul—religious scriptures—as they want to, but filled with arrogance they feel that they know more than our ancestors. But how do these words affect us, “All creatures are sighing under pain, awaiting to be adopted as children”? when we allow the insight of the feeling stone soul to affect us, how it awaits in pain to be adopted in place of a child? Human beings with a materialist mindset believe that when they walk outside they walk through air, wind and fog, through oxygen and nitrogen. But a person who has spiritual knowledge, knows that he is walking through spiritual beings everywhere, that with every breath he takes in spiritual beings and absorbs them.

So we have seen, how the animal-Egos circumvent the Earth like the trade-winds, how the plant-Egos are gathered together in the centre of the Earth, how the Earth itself feels something when we rip out plants, and how the Earth itself is alive and ensouled and has feelings. Everything outside is ensouled and imbued with life.

In the same way as the physical body is born out of the physical substances and powers, our spiritual limbs are born out of the vast cosmos. Then we begin to see a small world within us that rests inside the vast world. This creates a blissful feeling in us. Only when we learn to empathise with the minerals, plants and animals, will we learn to feel how our Ego rests within the whole cosmos.

Thus we can see how Theosophy leads us into the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something that transforms our sense of life, our life impulses in such a way that through it we become different human beings. The theosophical concepts are seeds, will-impulses for real experiences.

• 1. St Paul says, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain.” In Luther’s translation it literally says: “The creatures are fearfully awaiting the revelation of the children of God”, Letter to the Romans, VIII,19
• 2. Goethe, Faust I, Scene 1, night; “Excuse me, but it is a great delight, On the spirit of the ages to set our sight, To see how wise men have thought before us, and we’ve finally made such magnificent progress.”