The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Illness and health are words that interest everyone and that are, to a certain extent, at the center of our thoughts and feelings; not only for selfish reasons, but because our ability to live and our life's work are connected with them. Those who enjoy good health can be of greater help to their fellow human beings than those who are weighed down by illness and suffering; they will fulfill their work, their profession and their mission in the world with more joy.

When we speak of health and illness from a spiritual scientific point of view, we must be aware that we have to take a different point of view than the materialist. We have to raise our approach to a higher level. But to justify the term “disease delusion” to some extent, I would like to present two images. From the first, you will see that disease delusion is something modern, and from the second, you will see to what extent one can speak of disease delusion.

I was traveling with a well-known personality past many ruins picturesquely situated on the hills, but among the many newer buildings built up on the hills, many sanatoriums also appeared. The fellow traveler said: “Those ruins are a reminder of the strength and power of times gone by, and all the sanatoriums, on the other hand, are a reminder of weakness and illness.” I had the need to visit a sanatorium for a short time, a quarter of an hour. At that time, I just saw all the patients passing by for lunch. I got the impression that most of them could do something better than be there.

Another picture: I traveled from Rostock to Berlin with a gentleman and a lady. They shared their ailments with each other. The lady recommended various prescriptions to the gentleman for his various ailments, but he, on the other hand, drew her attention to Lahmann's book, which he had with him and which led him to the sanatorium. The woman had a few ailments, but the man certainly lacked the will to get well. For someone who does not observe himself much, it is what is called an imaginary illness. When you hear about it, you imagine it to be something slight. Even if the man lacked the will to get well, it is not so easy to give him the will without knowing the real cause of the illness. There is a cause for the illness. He was in pain from all sorts of things, and here too one could not speak of an imaginary illness. When we speak of delusions, we must be clear about how the cause of the illness relates to the imagined illness.

Anyone who observes life, first of all the physician who has acquired the ability to see and has recognized what is mental disposition and what is physical basis, can say a great deal about the role that imagination plays. For example, if a much-read article about some disease describes all the sensations that are felt by the patient, many people will come to the doctor who feel that they have a predisposition for this disease. Without that article, this would not have been the case!

The following example shows how a doctor can act in such a case: a famous doctor was called to a family where not only the family but also the family doctor believed that the young girl was suffering from meningitis. At first he suspected that love stories were to blame; then he found out that the young girl was to leave school, although she had an urgent desire to be taught subjects that particularly interested her. He promised to see that she was, on condition that she dress immediately and be at the family table in ten minutes. There was no trace of meningitis. It was generally a matter of some combination of mental states.

Another example: a lady had suffered from a long-lasting foot ailment since the death of her husband; it was attributed to her mental state. A doctor found a large corn on the sole of her foot, and after it was removed, the nerve pain was also lifted.

A doctor experienced the following: A brother was watching his brother perform knee surgery and heard a crack that seized him so energetically that he suddenly felt pain in his knee, while the person being operated on felt nothing. — Sleeping pills often have deceptive effects. Those who cannot distinguish in such cases where the line lies will never come to clarity. Certain forms of illness originate in the soul; they are connected with the life of the present time in the broadest sense.

If we want to understand this, we must turn to spiritual science for help. We must take into account the interaction of the different parts or members in the human being. The physical body is completely permeated by the etheric body; the latter forms the physical body. If the physical body were left to its own devices, it would disintegrate. The etheric body fights every moment to hold the physical body together. When it separates, the physical body is a corpse.

I would like to touch on one thing here: one of the hopes of science is that in the future, living things could be built in the laboratory. Spiritual science is clear that this will one day be the case. What holds the chemical substances together is what we call the etheric body. The carrier of desires, of pain and joy, suffering and pleasure, is the astral body. Every being feels a push as pain; humans feel this in the same way as animals.

Now let us speak of the fourth limb of man, of which I in relation to his three bodies. Whoever visualizes this structure will clearly understand that what we call pain, joy, and displeasure presupposes an astral body. Pain is only present where an astral body is present. How do these three bodies relate to one another?

Pleasure and suffering are not just the result of what happens in the physical body; pleasure and suffering are the formers of the etheric and physical bodies. The astral body was the first and was already there long before. Why are they structured the way they are? Ultimately, the astral body did. If we go back far, far, we come to a state of man when he was only the astral body.

You ask: What did such bodies look like millions of years ago? To our modern concept they looked grotesque and comical, with their boneless, soft bodies and long tentacles that could stretch out and retract. At that time, the soul first took possession of this strange body and gradually formed it into its present shape. A faint echo of this influence can still be seen today in the blanching or the blush that comes from fright. You see how a physical change can take place through a feeling in the soul. In those days man could still work mightily upon his body because the body was still quite soft. The astral body first works upon the etheric body and this in turn upon the physical body.

Let us make it clear how this influence occurs. Let us take any pain, any pleasure in the astral body; what arises in the etheric body? An image, a form, and this form is what lives into the physical body, so that the physical body is an imprint of this image.

Where did the astral body get its joy and sorrow from in ancient times? It was not something inner. It experienced its environment. At that time it did not experience it through the eyes and ears. Body forms are the expression of the joy and sorrow of the environment. You must think of the four parts or limbs of the human being in a much more intimate connection than was the case with the previous world. Man increasingly became absorbed in his physical self. In the past, the astral body was more creative. It transformed the physical body. In essence, this transformation is now almost complete; that is why we also experience what is happening in the physical body.

Let us try to understand the nature of pain that is caused from within. What causes pain? The astral body is the agent. Let us take the following case: If a finger is cut off, it only affects the physical finger; the astral one cannot be cut. Why does it hurt? Because the connection between the two is inhibited. Inhibition of the astral body is pain. Where the activity is not inhibited, there can be no pain.

What is to be considered here? Here is a comparison. Someone was quite clear that he had a defect in his eye that made him see a kind of ghost at dusk or in certain light effects; there was a cloudiness in his eye. The same thing that happens in the physical body can also happen to the higher body, the etheric body. A person's etheric body receives an incorrect impression, a clouding. The person's own clouding inhibits the astral process. What then occurs? Pain without a physical cause. The astral body has to create images. If the ether body is not right, then distorted images appear. Pain can arise from the physical body being damaged, but it is also possible for the astral body to form its own obstacle. If the ether body produces false images, it contradicts the physical body. This creates a false sense of being in the physical world,

Without a cause of the illness, imitation can occur. This has a profound consequence for our world view. It makes us independent. But it also makes it clear to us that a physical illness can only be cured by acting on the physical body. Whether we are outwardly injured or have a stomach upset, in truth it is outward injuries that must also be healed from the physical realm. What is it different when inhibition arises in the astral body? What harm does it do? If you hold that these are not three separate parts, if you assume that the higher bodies are formers, albeit within narrower limits than before, then you must assume that it cannot be meaningless for the physical body when inhibitions occur in the astral body. If you cut into the flesh, it hurts; cutting off hair and nails does not hurt. This fact is of fundamental importance for understanding. Everything that can be injured in a living being and does not hurt will grow again. In plants, the leaf or flower is replaced because it does not feel pain. Lower animals do the same; they can be cut into pieces and the detached parts are replaced again. The astral body is the carrier of pain and desire; the etheric body is the carrier of growth.

Pain is something that has a destructive effect on the etheric and physical body. Persistent pain gradually kills the limb that it seizes. How can we achieve a healing effect? The physical doctor achieves results through physical means. But he will never be able to intervene on the astral body, which imitates the disease, through physical means. What should we do then? If you were to give medicines, no effect would be achieved, and perhaps a disease would be created. In a pharmacopoeia you can read: a poison makes the body sick, except when it can fight with another poison in the body. Therefore, one must carefully distinguish the causes of disease.

How can we treat an ailing etheric body? Here I would like to point out just one specific fact: everything that affects a person in a way that is in harmony with the harmonious laws of the world destroys all such symptoms of illness that take hold in the physical body.

Here two modes of perception are important. One is where a person is always concerned with his ego. The other mode of perception goes beyond the ego, is concerned with art, takes pleasure in the world of the stars, in nature and in others, and can become absorbed and forget itself in this. The prevalence of the first mode of perception breeds bodies that tend towards illness and produce illness. Those who forget themselves are able to forget pain or causes of pain that arise in the astral body. Just as the former mode of perception can have a negative effect, the latter can have a healing effect. Every pain that is overcome is constructive. We must overcome pain through the power developed within us. For those who are devoted to the great cosmic connections, the processes of their astral body will be creative; where they are lacking, illness is produced.

Where do the many ailments of our time come from? The real reason is that so few people turn to the great interests of the universe. Those who send their spirit up there bring healing. Those who stand before a motley of color splotches that has no deep meaning derive no benefit. But those who stand before a work of art through which the divine spiritual shines through will feel a healing effect. To the extent that the materialism of our time exerts its effect, the astral and physical bodies must become ill. Such illnesses are all nervous disorders, neurasthenia and others. Plagues and epidemics can occur as materialism increases. If people were to free themselves from their limited ego, much would be released from them. The truth is that a high world view is the only thing that can heal and restore health.

But there is also a downside to this: if you brood over something once or twice, it does no harm. But if you do it several times, it has a bad effect because then the person is too concerned with his or her own ego. But anyone who seeks to break away from their ego, who seeks to bring themselves into harmony with the laws of the world and turns to the great facts of the universe, will come to the truth about how to get well. Superstition is the disease of the present time. It is more useful to do something to get away from oneself and to turn one's gaze thoroughly to the great spiritual world connections.

Theosophy and spiritual science are not given to satisfy curiosity, but so that man may learn to get away from the ego. In this way he will found his health more firmly.

Those researchers will not be harmed by materialism, such as Haeckel, who immersed himself in it in a particular way. When thoughts indirectly affect the three bodies, their frequent recurrence has an effect on the whole human constitution. In this way, the soul affects the physical. I would always like to point out that if we can attune ourselves to the harmony of the universe, we can expect real healing. The soul has built its body, and if the soul is given healthy spiritual nourishment, it will shape the body healthily.

Answer to question

{The question has not been handed down.]

Answer: Irreligiosity has a very special significance; it can be a cause of illness. Not only the thought, but also the feeling that turns to the divine, has its importance. [Question not handed down.] Answer: If one works with the whole person, overwork is almost out of the question.

The work must, however, be of benefit. All fruitless labor is harmful.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.

Answers to Questions

Questions were asked about the nature of imagination, inspiration and intuition. The wording of the questions was not noted down by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: With regard to the question of the difficulty with such a word as “imagination”, I would like to remark the following:

When we take up a word in order to render a significant content, we should always go back to the original meaning of the word and not actually ask: “What meaning is given to the word just now in colloquial speech?”¹ because it is basically the case with all current colloquial languages that they have flattened the words. I have already had to draw attention to something this morning, but it has an inner justification. The word “intuition” is also used in, I would say, an everyday sense, but rightly so, because the highest knowledge of the spiritual life for the moral realm must come down to the simplest, even most primitive human mind. For such a word as “imagination” we cannot say the same thing, and one should therefore first of all always realize what is contained in such a word. The moment you peel off the prefix and suffix of the word and go to the middle, you immediately come to “magic”. “Magic” is in the word “imagination”: it is an internalization of the magical. If you go back to such an original meaning of the word, you will find that the linguistic usage on which it is based today is quite a flattened one.

Now I would like to know what one should actually do in anthroposophy and in spiritual deepening in general, if one does not make the requirement that all words must be brought back to their deeper meaning.

You see, you have to take something like anthroposophy so seriously that you also have to realize this thought: Can anthroposophy be represented at all in today's colloquial language in reality? Is it even possible to say anything so significant about anthroposophy in any colloquial language? - Well, all colloquial languages originally contain something deeper, and you can go back to these deeper meanings in all colloquial languages today.

When we speak of “imagination” today and also use the word for that which is incorporated into the imagination, we have simply taken the word for that which is known today solely and exclusively from an inner experience. Most people today, when speaking of inner experience, think that it is all fantastic, and they then describe the fantastic as the imaginative. From their point of view, they are quite right. But if one does not have the will to go back to the original meaning of the word “imagination”, then it will be very difficult to get anthroposophy into the language at all.

You have to realize the following: You see, there are many things in the word “magic”. First of all, there is something in the word “magic” that I would like to describe as follows: When we are scientifically curious today, we look into the microscope, and we then see that which is small in the world, that which is small in the world - be it the longed-for atom, which is also shown experimentally today, be it some germinal plant - today's materialistic science is always curious about this small thing. But the moment we go to the real causes of things, the moment we go to where the creative forces and powers of things are, we do not come to the small, but to the great. And the creation out of the great, the creation out of the mighty, the imposing, that which encompasses creative powers that surpass the small human being, to bring this into the human soul in an appropriate way, that is: to condense the magical so that it can be received and experienced by the human soul in the condensation.

And just as one should do with the word “imagination”, one should also do it with all other words that are used. Almost everyone today speaks of inspiration. I don't deny him the right - why should I deny him the right, because everyone has the right to use the word “inspiration” at the level at which he moves - but everyone speaks of “inspiration” today, even when he thinks of a joke. Now, of course, this interpretation of the word “inspiration”, when used in this way, is not appropriate for the paths of higher knowledge. But again, let us make it our principle to look at the words in the current languages of civilization in the same way as people were once looked at in general.

Just think about it: as late as the 18th century, here in England and on the continent, people everywhere were still very much occupied with so-called Martinism, with the philosophy that came from Saint-Martin, especially with his book: “Des erreurs et de la verité”. Yes, a book appeared in “Edimbourg” in 1775 that has been translated into all European languages, a book that dealt with the spiritual, so to speak, in the manner of the time, a final offshoot for the kind of spiritual contemplation that was still possible until the 18th century and into the beginning of the 19th century, but which is no longer possible today.

Now, if we take one of the main ideas of Saint-Martin's book “Des erreurs et de la verité”, then we find that man in his totality as an earthly being is seen as having fallen away from his original greatness; there the - I would like to say still complete man - is accused of the fall into sin. Man was once, in Saint Martin's sense, still a mighty being, girded with the so-called holy armor, which served him magically, made him magical in the face of all the forces and entities of the world, many of which were hostile to him. Man lived in the place described by Saint Martin as the place of the seven sacred trees, which in religious legend, or earlier for my sake in the Bible, is referred to as paradise. Man was gifted with the fiery spear, through which he exercised his corresponding power, and so on. All the things that are originally attributed to man are said to have been lost to man through his own pre-earthly guilt; even in his pre-earthly state a terrible sin is attributed to man, which even in social life today is shocking to mention. And so man is portrayed as a being who has fallen from his original greatness. And the whole of Martinism, the whole philosophy of Saint Martin, actually sets itself the task of showing what man could be if he had not fallen from his original greatness.

Now, these connections can no longer be made fully alive today; they are precisely the last offshoot of that way of looking at things which I described this morning as the old way of looking at things. Within the modern science of initiation we must proceed from the scientific way of knowing - not from natural science itself, but from the scientific way of knowing - for that alone will be able to satisfy man in the course of the near future. But with regard to special fields, if we really want to penetrate the anthroposophical content, all the content of any spiritual striving, with the necessary mood, with the necessary uplifting of the soul, with the holy enthusiasm with which we are to penetrate it in order to really understand it - if we want to do that, then we will not be allowed to take the words out of the ordinary colloquial language, but we will have to look at the words as if actually all words up to our civilization had undergone a fall from grace. Words today are no longer what they were: they have become sinful beings. They have fallen down into matter and no longer signify what they signified when they were once still close to that stage of human development in which they were used in the Mysteries. And we must, in a certain sense, take a step upwards in feeling the words. We must make an effort not to stop at what is common colloquial language; otherwise the words will also take on the color, the ‘timbre’ that these words have in colloquial language. The easiest thing to do today is to ascend from the words in the fall of man to a kind of sacred meaning of the words in the Hebrew language. For those languages that have been used more within modern life with its thoroughly unsacramental interests, it is of course difficult for these languages to move up to the sinlessness of words - if I may put it that way - it is not meant so badly, but in a certain respect we must do so. And so we have to be clear: the word “inspiration” has fallen to the point of sinfulness today, where anyone who makes a joke already says they are inspired. - So why not? Basically, the writers, even the cartoonists, of funny papers need a lot of inspiration in today's sense, but it's a profaned inspiration today.

But if we go back to the word in its more original meaning, then we are led into very deep regions of human aspiration.

There I must remind you of the way in which, for example, in India - at a decadent level - a wonderful, admirable form of knowledge has been preserved, which was once much more significant than it is today, but which did not, as it must be today, proceed directly from thinking, but which proceeded from a very specific regulation or even dysregulation of the breathing process. Within the original yoga method it was a matter of raising the breathing process, which otherwise always runs unconsciously in the human being, to consciousness. This can be achieved by changing the rhythm of inhalation, breath holding and exhalation from that which occurs unconsciously. If you give the breathing rhythm different numerical ratios than you have in ordinary everyday breathing, then you breathe differently in relation to inhaling, holding your breath and exhaling. What is called the yoga method is essentially based on such different shapes and forms of breathing. This yoga method brought the whole breathing process to consciousness. Man breathed by consciously changing the rhythm of his breathing: the flow of breath consciously entered into the circulation of the blood. The whole human being undulated and interwove with a changed breathing rhythm. And just as we receive sensory observation in the ray of sight or the ray of hearing, just as we receive knowledge of the colors of the surrounding things through sight, just as we receive knowledge of the sounds emanating from the surrounding things through the ray of hearing, so the one who made the breathing rhythm into an elevated, into a magical perception, felt the soul-spiritual, he perceived in the breathing process the soul-spiritual permeating him. At the moment when the breathing process became fully conscious, and when at the same time that disposition of soul was present which was present in South Asia about seven or eight thousand years before our era, at that moment, through this altered breathing rhythm, one not only sent the physical air into the body with this swelling and surging, but one sent soul and spirit into this flowing breath, and one experienced soul and spirit, insofar as the soul and spirit of man are in this flowing breath.

Now you can materially call the inhalation yes “inspiration” - that is the literal. If one spiritualizes the inspiration, one does what happened in ancient India: then one will experience the spiritualized inspiration, with the breath that has been inspired and spiritualized like any mental being. Then we are dealing with what the word “inspiration” actually always originally meant - even in non-Indian, European languages. So when we speak of the word “inspiration”, we also have to move up, I would say, to the sinlessness of the word. And for this reason I have always been reluctant to write so-called “popular” books on anthroposophy - even though such suggestions have always been made from all sides. Of course, that would be very easy. But even the beginner should not actually be given quite popular books on anthroposophy, but should have something in anthroposophical books that he can - I mean spiritually - break his teeth on, where he has to make a terrible effort, that is something that does not come easily! For in this effort, in the overcoming of that which one must overcome in order to understand something that is difficult to understand, there is at the same time something else. For if one is like - yes, how shall I put it? - popular anthroposophy like a popular speech, then one also has a different taste and a completely different attitude towards the meanings of the words, then one pulls the meanings of the words down into their sinfulness. But if you have to grit your teeth at the difficulty of a beginner's book, then you also acquire a taste for delving into the words. You may even be reminded of some historical events. Take a look at the wonderful way Jakob Böhme ponders the words first, ponders them deeply, before he uses them. I would say that Jakob Böhme distils entire worlds out of the words before he uses them. And so the position with regard to something like “imagination” or ‘inspiration’ or “intuition” or other words, as we use them in ordinary life, is at a lower level than we usually assume. And so I do think that one should not actually try to replace words that are rightly used - “imagination”, “inspiration” - with others, but that one should rather work to elevate these words to their sinlessness for the anthroposophical understanding, at least as long as one is dealing with anthroposophy. When one goes out into ordinary life, one can of course again fall into the sinfulness of the words, there is no harm in that. And so just such an attitude towards words could be extraordinarily beneficial to anthroposophical deepening. So, I mean, anyone who becomes aware of what is in the word “imagination” would in the end, if he is a fanatic, even cry out for a law that forbids the use of the word imagination for this “fantasy” game, so that such a word is preserved for the area where it is actually rightly used.

With regard to the question: “Who or what recognizes in man?” I would like to say the following: Unfortunately, these questions are asked faster than they can be answered, and there is a great deal to be said if one is to answer such a far-reaching, comprehensive question. When such a question is raised, it must be made clear what the content of this morning's speech was actually about. Is it not true that when we speak of the paths to supersensible knowledge, as I did this morning and also yesterday, what is it all about? It is a question of how this human soul, which is present in any human being in the present incarnation, how this spiritual-soul, which is thus present in a physical body between birth or conception and death, how it ascends to the gradual recognition, firstly, of the etheric world of formative forces in the imagination, secondly, through the stillness which I have described, through the empty consciousness, in inspiration, to the recognition of the pre-natal world. And then, through intuition, which is achieved through the special training of the ability to love, one arrives at the view of the previous, or one could also say the previous earth lives, those earth lives which - as I explained this morning - are already objectively confronting the human being, like some external object or process of nature, or for my sake I could also say like another human being is objectively confronting one. If I stand opposite another person in ordinary social life, I am related to that person through the inner kinship of the same human race, but I stand opposite him objectively. I must face my previous incarnations as objectively as another person if I want to perceive them in truth. Then one learns to recognize with the soul-spiritual, which is embodied in the present earthly body, the actual, true I, which goes through the repeated earthly lives.

Now the question seems to me to be this: Who is it actually, or what is it in man that now recognizes this true I that passes through the repeated earth lives, or which member in man is it? - This question itself, ladies and gentlemen, is not really a question that has any real, concrete content. It asks about the subject of cognition. This subject of cognition is precisely that I which is embodied in the present earthly life, which then soars up to cognition. The true I can only be attained by first embracing with one's consciousness that which is included in earthly life between birth and death; then one lives in the I on a certain level; one lives in this I, but one does not yet recognize the true I, which goes through many births and deaths. But through the methods I have described, this higher ego, which one carries in earthly life by bringing oneself to selflessness, is made capable of recognizing the true ego.

And remember: you change the subject during this path of cognition. Firstly, we are dealing with the ego that lives between birth and death; it does not yet recognize the true ego. Now this ego vibrates upwards and is initially the recognizer of the true ego, which goes through repeated earthly lives. In this way it actually identifies itself cognitively with the true I. Thus, by undergoing a metamorphosis, this higher ego is raised into the true ego. And then, when it is elevated into the true I, it can only recognize the true I.

So we cannot ask: “Who or what recognizes in man?”, but we must say: "What recognizes in man in ordinary life is in itself already made into another I, it goes through a metamorphosis, in that it rises from imagination through inspiration to intuition. But then it is a transformed ego for cognition. But the transformation is there precisely in order to reach the true self.

• 1. The word ‘imagination’ is also used in English for “phantasy”.

To gain an idea of this evolution we must have recourse not to abstractions but to pictures, for pictures have a living, creative quality that is not contained in the pure idea. The picture is a symbol in one world but corresponds to a reality in a higher world.

We know that before developing to its present stage, our Earth passed through a phase called the Old Moon period. But this Old Moon phase of evolution is not to be confused with the satellite we now see in the sky, nor to any other planet that astronomy might ever discover. The heavenly bodies visible today are bodies which have been mineralised. The human eye can only see objects which contain mineral elements and reflect the light, in other words, objects which have a physical body. When the occultist speaks of the mineral kingdom, he is not merely referring to the stones but to the milieu at the central core of which the consciousness of man unfolds. Many scholars regard living beings as mere machines and reject the idea of a vital force. This mentality is a result of the fact that our organism is unable really to behold life. The occultist, on the other hand, says that in our age man lives in the mineral world.

Think of the human eye. It is a highly complicated mechanism, a kind of ‘dark chamber,’ with the pupil as a window and the crystalline as a lens. The whole body of man is composed of a number of physical organs, equally delicate and complicated. The ear is like a harpsichord with a key-board and fibres for strings. And the same may be said of every sense-organ.

The consciousness of modern man is only awakened if connection is established with his physical or mineral body. True, it awakens first in the physical world, but it must none the less gradually light up in the other members of man's being—in the member that is constituted by the life-forces (the plant-nature of man), in the member that is chiefly dominated by the forces of feeling (the animal-nature), and finally in the Ego.

Truth to tell, man only knows what is mineral in the universe. He does not know the essential laws underlying the animal's life of instinct and feeling, and the growth of plants. He simply sees their physical expressions. Try to conceive a plant in super physical existence, having lost its mineral substance—it would be invisible to our physical eyes.

But even though man knows only the mineral, at least he has it in his power. He works it, moulds it, smelts and combines it. He fashions the face of the Earth anew. He is able to do this in our age with the help of machines. If we go back to remote historic ages when as yet no human hand had been laid on the Earth, we find it as it issued from the hands of the Gods. But ever since man began to exercise control over the mineral kingdom, the Earth has been changing, and we may foresee an age when the whole face of the Earth—which at the beginning was the work of the Gods—will have received the stamp imparted by the hand of man.

In the beginning, form was given to all created things by the Gods. This power of giving form has passed from the Gods to men, in so far as the mineral kingdom is concerned. In ancient traditions it was taught that man must accomplish the task of transforming the Earth in fulfillment of a threefold goal, namely the realisation of truth, beauty, goodness. It is for man to make the Earth into a temple of truth, beauty and goodness. And then, those who come after him will look upon his work as we now look upon the mineral world which came forth from the hands of the Gods. Neither cathedrals nor machines have been built in vain. The Gods have given form to the crystal which we extract from the Earth, just as we build our monuments and our machines. Just as in the past the Gods created the mineral world from a chaotic mass, so our cathedrals, inventions and even our institutions are the germs from which a future world will come to birth.

Having transformed the mineral world, man will learn to transform the plants. This denotes a higher power. Today, man erects buildings; in future times he will be able to create and give shape to plant-life by working upon plant-substance. At a still higher stage, he will give form not only to living beings but to conscious beings. He will have power over animal life. When he has reached the stage of being able to reproduce his like by an act of conscious will, he will accomplish, at a higher level, what he accomplishes today in the mineral world.

The germ of this sublime power of generation, cleansed of all element of sensuality, is the word. Man became a conscious being when he drew his first breath; consciousness will reach its stage of perfection when he is able to pour into the words he utters, the same creative power with which his thought is endowed today. In this age, it is only words that he communicates to the air. When he has reached the stage of higher creative consciousness, he will be able to communicate images to the air. The word will then be an Imagination—wholly permeated with life. In giving body to these images, he will be giving body to the word which bears and sustains the image. When we no longer simply embody our thoughts in objects, as for instance when we make a watch, but give body to these images, they will live.

And when man knows how to impart life to what is highest in him, these ‘images’ will lead a real and actual existence, comparable to animal existence. At the highest stage of evolution, man will thus be able, finally, to reproduce his own being. At the end of the process of the Earth's transformation, the whole atmosphere will resound with the power of the Word. Thus man must evolve to a stage where he will have the power to mould his environment in the image of his inner being. The initiate only precedes him along this path.

It is evident that the Earth today cannot produce human bodies such as will be produced at the final stage of evolution. When that final stage has come, these bodies will be a fit expression of the Logos. The one great Messenger, He alone Who manifested in a human body like our own, this power of the Logos, is Christ. He came at the central turning-point of evolution, to reveal its goal.

And now let us enquire into the form in which the Spirit of man lived before this Spirit entered into him by way of the breath. The Earth is a reincarnation of an earlier planet—of the Old Moon. In this lunar period of evolution, the pure mineral did not yet exist. The planetary body was composed of a substance somewhat akin to the nature of wood a substance midway between the mineral and the plant. Its surface was not hard like the mineral—indeed it was liken to turf. It brought forth beings by nature half-plant, half-mollusc, and was inhabited by a third kingdom of beings at a stage of existence midway between the human being and animal. These beings were endowed with a dreamlike, imaginative consciousness. We can envisage the kind of matter of which their ‘bodies’ were composed, by thinking of the nerve-substance of the crayfish. This matter densified to become the substance of which the brain is now composed. On the Old Moon, this matter remained in a more fluid state but on Earth it required a protective sheath of bone—the skull. In this sense, all the substances of which we are composed are ‘extracts’ of the macrocosm. All this preparatory activity in the universe was necessary in order that the Ego might descend into man.

We have heard that man was only ready to receive the germ of his Ego, when, on Earth, he began to breathe the air around him. Did he then breathe on the Moon?

The further we go back in the periods of evolution, the higher the temperature. Atlantis was bathed in hot vapours. In earlier times still, the air was pure warmth; before that again, fire. Fire was there in the place of air. The Lemurians breathed fire. That is why it is said in occult writings that the first Teachers of men were the Spirits of Fire. When physical man appeared on the Earth, air became his element of life. But man changes this air, in that he transforms it into carbonic acid and the breathing-process has thus caused the materialisation of our globe to descend still one degree lower. The equilibrium is restored by the plant-world.

In times to come, the physical body will disappear; man and the Earth will live as astral forms. Physical substance destroys itself by its own forces. But before this metamorphosis comes about, a cosmic night will fall, just as a previous cosmic night marked the transition of the Old Moon evolution to that of our present Earth.

The atmosphere of the Moon contained nitrogen, just as today the atmosphere of the Earth contains oxygen, and it was the predominance of nitrogen which brought about the end of the Old Moon period and the onset of a cosmic night. The cyanides on Earth are survivals from the conditions existing at the final stages of the Old Moon evolution. That is why they have a destructive effect on Earth, for the Earth is not their proper sphere. They are the poisonous remains of life in another age.

Animal-man, as he lived on the old Moon, is thus the ancestor of earthly, physical man; the Spirit within man is the offspring of the Spirits of Fire in the lunar period. The Beings who on the Old Moon were incarnate in the fire, incarnated, on Earth, in the air. But now, has anything of the action of these Spirits of Fire remained in man? On the Old Moon, living beings had no warm blood. What was it that gave rise to the warmth of the blood and, as a consequence, to the life of passions?—The fire which was inbreathed by the beings of the Old Moon and which lives again on Earth in their blood. And the Spirit of the air surrounds the body which contains the heritage of the Old Moon evolution, namely, the warmth of the blood, the brain, the spinal fluid, the nerves.

These examples serve to show that a close study of the transformation of substances is required before we can begin to understand the great processes of metamorphosis which took place during the earlier periods of the Earth's evolution. At a stage still earlier than that of the Old Moon, the planetary sphere which has now become our Earth had a body composed merely of gaseous substance; before that again, we can only speak of a body of sound. It is in this sound—the Cosmic Word—that man's evolution has its origin, proceeding thence towards light, fire, air. Only in the fourth condition does consciousness flash up in the Spirit of man. From this point onwards, the directing force bestowed by the Logos has its rise from within man's own being and his conscience becomes his rightful guide. His primordial being comes to expression in the ‘I,’ the Ego. The conscious Ego is the realisation in man of the Christ Principle.

[ 1 ] The Cosmos reveals itself to man, first of all, from the aspect of the Earth and from the aspect of what is outside the Earth, viz. the world of the stars.

[ 2 ] Man feels himself related to the Earth and its forces. Life gives him very clear instruction regarding this relationship.

[ 3 ] In the present age he does not feel himself related in the same way to the stars that are around him. But this lasts only so long as he is not conscious of his etheric body. To grasp the etheric body in Imaginations means to develop a feeling that we belong to the world of the stars, just as we have this feeling regarding the Earth through the consciousness of the physical body.

[ 4 ] The forces which place the etheric body in the world come from the Cosmos around the Earth; those for the physical body radiate from the centre of the Earth.

[ 5 ] But together with the etheric forces which stream to the Earth from the sphere of the Cosmos there come also the World-impulses which work in the astral body of man.

[ 6 ] The ether is like an ocean in which the astral forces swim from all directions of the Cosmos and approach the Earth.

[ 7 ] But in the present cosmic age only the mineral and plant kingdoms come into a direct relation to the astral, which streams down to the Earth on the waves of the ether; not the animal kingdom and not the human kingdom.

[ 8 ] Spiritual vision shows that in the animal embryo there lives, not the astral that is now streaming to the Earth, but that which streamed in during the Old Moon period.

[ 9 ] In the case of the plant kingdom we see how its manifold and wonderful forms are developed through the astral loosening itself from the ether and working over to the world of plants.

[ 10 ] In the animal kingdom we see how, from out of the Spiritual, the astral which was active in very ancient times—during the Moon evolution—has been preserved, and works as something stored up and preserved, remaining on at the present time in the spirit-world, and not coming forth into the etheric world.

[ 11 ] The activity of this astral is, moreover, mediated by the Moon-forces, which have likewise remained in the same condition, from the previous stage of the Earth.

[ 12 ] In the animal kingdom we have, therefore, the result of impulses which manifested themselves externally in Nature in a previous stage of Earth-existence, whereas in the present cosmic age they have withdrawn into the Spirit-world which actively penetrates the Earth.

[ 13 ] Now it is manifest to spiritual vision that within the animal kingdom only the astral forces which have been preserved in the present Earth from the former period are important for the permeation of the physical and etheric bodies with the astral body. But when the animal is once in possession of its astral body, the Sun-impulses appear actively in this astral body. The Sun-forces cannot give the animal anything astral; but when this is once in the animal, they must set to work and foster growth, nutrition, etc.

[ 14 ] It is different for the human kingdom. This, too, receives its astrality to begin with from the Moon-forces that have been preserved. But the Sun-forces contain astral impulses which while they remain inactive for the animal kingdom, in the human astral continue to act in the same way in which Moon-forces worked when man was first permeated with astrality.

[ 15 ] In the animal astral body we see the world of the Moon; in the human, the harmonious accord of the worlds of the Sun and Moon.

[ 16 ] The fact that man is able to receive, for the development of self-consciousness, the Spiritual which rays forth in what belongs to the Earth, depends upon this which belongs to the Sun in the human astral body. The astral streams in from the sphere of the Universe. It acts either as astrality which pours in at the present time or as astrality which streamed in, in ancient times and has been preserved. But everything that is connected with the shaping of the Ego as the vehicle of self-consciousness must radiate from the centre of a star. The astral works from the circumference; that which belongs to the Ego works from a centre. From its centre the Earth as a star gives the impulse to the human Ego. Every star radiates from its centre forces which mould or shape the Ego of some being.

[ 17 ] This shows the polarity existing between the centre of a star and the sphere of the Cosmos.

[ 18 ] From the above it may also be seen how the animal kingdom still stands there today as the result of former evolutionary forces of the Earth's being, how it uses up the astral forces which have been preserved, and how it must disappear when these have been consumed. Man, however, acquires new astral forces from that which belongs to the Sun. These enable him to carry on his evolution into the future.

[ 19 ] From all this it may be seen that the nature of man cannot be understood unless we are just as conscious of his connection with the stars as of his connection with the Earth.

[ 20 ] And that which man receives from the Earth for the unfolding of his self-consciousness depends also upon the Spirit world active within all that belongs to the Earth. The circumstance that the Sun gives to man what he needs for his astral depends upon the activities which took place during the Old Sun period. At that time the Earth received the capacity to unfold the Ego-impulses of humanity. It is the Spiritual from that period which the Earth has preserved for itself from the Sun nature; and it is preserved from dying out through the present activity of the Sun.

[ 21 ] The Earth was itself Sun at one time. Then it was spiritualised. In the present cosmic age, what belongs to the Sun works from outside. This continually rejuvenates the Spiritual which originated in ancient times and is now growing old. At the same time this which belongs to the Sun and acts in the present, preserves that which belongs to a former period from falling into what is Luciferic. For that which continues to work, without being received into the forces of the present, succumbs to Luciferic influences.

[ 23 ] We may say that man's feeling of belonging to the Cosmos beyond the Earth is in this cosmic epoch so dim that he does not notice it within his consciousness. And it is not only dim, it is drowned by his feeling of belonging to the Earth. As man is obliged to find his self-consciousness in the elements of the Earth, he so grows together with them during the early part of the age of the Spiritual Soul, that they act upon him much more strongly than is compatible with the true course of his soul-life. Man is to a certain extent stupefied by the impressions of the world of the senses, and during this condition, thought which is free and has life in itself cannot rise within man.

[ 24 ] The whole of the period since the middle of the nineteenth century has been a period of stupefaction through the impressions received by the senses. It is the great illusion of this age that the over-powerful life of the senses has been considered to be the right one—that life of the senses whose aim was to obliterate completely the life in the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

[ 25 ] In this stupefaction the Ahrimanic Powers were able to unfold their being. Lucifer was repulsed by the Sun-forces more than Ahriman, who was able to evoke, especially in scientific people, the dangerous feeling that ideas are applicable only to the impressions of the senses. Thus it is exactly in these circles that one can find so little understanding for Anthroposophy. They stand face to face with the results of spiritual knowledge and try to understand them with their ideas. But these ideas do not grasp the Spiritual because the experience of the ideas is drowned by the Ahrimanic knowledge of the senses. And so they begin to fear that if they have anything to do with the results of spiritual investigation, they may fall into a blind belief in authority.

[ 26 ] In the second half of the nineteenth century the Cosmos beyond the Earth became darker and darker for human consciousness.

[ 27 ] When man becomes able to experience ideas within himself once more, then, even when he does not support his ideas on the world of the senses, light will again meet his gaze from the Cosmos beyond the Earth. But this signifies that he will become acquainted with Michael in his own kingdom.

[ 28 ] When once the Festival of Michael in autumn becomes true and inward, then this thought will arise in all sincerity in the mind of him who celebrates the festival, and it will live in his consciousness: Filled with ideas, the soul experiences Spirit Light, when sense-appearance only echoes in man like a memory.

[ 29 ] If man is able to feel this he will also be able, after his festive mood, to plunge again in the right way into the world of the senses. And Ahriman will not be able to injure him.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing study: Man in his macrocosmic Nature)

[ 30 ] 168. In the beginning of the age of the Spiritual Soul, man's sense of community with the Cosmos beyond the Earth grew dim. On the other hand—and this was so especially in men of science—his sense of belonging to the earthly realm grew so intense in the experience of sense-impressions, as to amount to a stupefaction.

[ 31 ] 169. While he is thus stupefied, the Ahrimanic powers work upon man most dangerously. For he lives in the illusion that the over-intense, stupefying experience of sense-impressions is the right thing and represents the true progress in evolution.

[ 32 ] 170. Man must find the strength to fill his world of Ideas with light and to experience it so, even when unsupported by the stupefying world of sense. In this experience of the world of Ideas—independent and in their independence filled with light—his sense of community with the Cosmos beyond the Earth will re-awaken. Hence will arise the true foundation for festivals of Michael.

Yesterday, we were able to discuss with a somewhat larger group the paths that lead to the higher worlds. Today, we may be permitted to say a few words about the higher worlds themselves. In particular, we want to pick out one of the most important chapters from the realm of the supersensible worlds and take a look at the processes that take place in a person between death and a new rebirth. This is one of the most important chapters in the realm of higher life because it concerns the most fundamental facts and processes of human development. And since the physical existence of man is connected and interwoven with significant processes in those worlds, one must penetrate into these secrets if one wants to understand the human being at all.

I would like to start by describing the life of a person between death and a new birth, but in order to understand what happens in this interim period, we must first consider the nature of the human being. For those who have been involved in anthroposophical studies for some time, the information in the introduction should not be new. But we must nevertheless consider these things very carefully from the outset in order to prepare ourselves for a complete understanding of the subsequent descriptions.

For anthroposophical spiritual science, the essence of man is not merely that essence of a material nature, as it appears to the external senses, which we can touch with our hands and which is bound to the physical world by physical laws. Spiritual science shows that this physical body of man is only part of his entire being, and that man has this physical body in common with the mineral world. We can see for ourselves outside in nature, everything that appears to be dead, mineral nature, consists of the same materials from which the human body is built. The same physical processes occur in stone and in the human body, but there is a big difference between the processes of ordinary, inanimate physical bodies and the nature of man. An external physical body, like a stone, has a form, and it retains its form until an external process, such as smashing or some other force, destroys the form. The human physical body, on the other hand, or that of any other living being, is destroyed in death by the inherent laws of physical and chemical substances, and the human body is a corpse in this case.

Spiritual science now shows us that in the state between birth and death, that is, during our physical lifetime, a second part of the human being is present as a constant fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. We call it the etheric body or life body. It is present in all of us. If this second link were not present in the human being, the body would only follow the physical forces in every moment; it would disintegrate. The fighter against this disintegration is the etheric body or life body. Only at death does this life body separate from the physical body. Man has this life body in common with every other living being; the animal has it, and the plant also has such a continuous fighter. In them too, there must be such a continuous fighter against decay.

If the physical body has been described as a first link of living beings, and the life body as a second, then man has a third link in addition to these. We are able to see this with our intellect alone, with logic. Let us assume that a person is standing before us. Is there nothing more in this space that he occupies, in this hand that he uses, than what has been mentioned so far? Oh, there is something more in it than just bones and muscles, than all kinds of chemical components that we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands. And each one of us also knows very well that there is something more to it. This something more is the sum of his suffering and his joy; everyone knows this something, for it is everything that takes place in sensations and feelings, from morning to evening, throughout one's entire life. There is an invisible carrier of these sensations, and we refer to it as the astral body or the human being's body of sensation. This astral body, which is not perceptible to the physical eye of man, is considerably larger than the physical body. To the clairvoyant consciousness, it is recognizable as a cloud of light in which the physical body is embedded. This third link of his being man has in common with the animal, because the animal also has an astral body.

But then there is still a fourth link in the human being, the crown of the earthly kingdom, the crown of human nature. We can see this fourth link when we trace an intimate movement of the human soul. There is one thing in man that can never approach him from the outside. It is this one name, the simple name 'I'. Only from the deepest depths of the soul can this name, this designation 'I', resound. Never can another human being say 'I' to a fellow human being. Man can only speak this to himself; it can only come from within him, from his own deepest inner being, and here something completely different, something divine, begins to resound through the name “I”. All great religions also felt that there is something sacred in the I. This is also clearly recognizable in the Old Testament. There the name 'I' is equivalent to the name of God. Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the name of God on particularly solemn occasions, at particularly solemn services, and when he reverently uttered the name 'Yahweh' in the temple, the name 'Yahweh' meant nothing other than 'I' or 'I am'. It was meant to signify that the God within man expresses himself. And only that being can utter these words in the soul to its soul in whose nature the divine essence reveals itself. The revelation of God in man is a fourth link in the human being. But we should not think that we are now God ourselves. It is a spark from the ocean of divinity that flashes in man. Just as a drop from the ocean is not the ocean itself, but only a drop from it, so the human ego is not God, but a drop from the divine substance: God begins to speak in the human soul.

Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the holy name, Yahweh, on particularly solemn occasions. To make this divine being resound in the soul of man, so that man can say, “I am,” is the crowning of creation. This I-bearer, the fourth link in human nature, makes man the first among the beings that are visible in earthly creation. That is why the ancient mysteries everywhere spoke of the holy tetrad, the first link of which is the visible physical body, the second link the etheric body or life body, the third link the astral body or sentient body, and the fourth link the I. These are the four links that we want to look at first. And human life, human consciousness, depends on the way in which they are connected with each other.

Only in day consciousness, in waking, do the four aspects of human nature interpenetrate. Then we have the physical body permeated by the etheric body, only finer and somewhat larger, rising above the physical body. Then we have the astral body, the carrier of our feelings, permeating the etheric body and, like a large shiny oval, surrounding the physical body, which is connected to the etheric body. And then we have the ego body. However, the four aspects of human nature only permeate each other when we are awake. When a person sleeps, the astral body with the ego carrier emerges, while the physical body, connected to the etheric body, remains in bed. In the morning, or when the person wakes up, the former two of the four members descend again and reconnect with the other two.

What does the astral body do at night in the ordinary person? It is not inactive. To the clairvoyant's eye it appears as a spiral cloud, and currents emanate from it, connecting it to the physical body lying there. When we fall asleep tired in the evening, what is the cause of this tiredness? The fact that the astral body uses the physical body during the day when we are awake and thus wears it out appears as tiredness. But during the whole of the night, while we are asleep, the astral body is at work dispelling the fatigue. That is why we feel refreshed after a good night's sleep, and it shows how important it is for a person to have a truly healthy sleep. It properly restores what has been worn out by waking life. The astral body also repairs other damage during sleep, such as diseases of the physical and etheric bodies. You will not only have observed this in yourself and in other people from your own life experience, but you will also have learned that every sensible doctor says that in certain cases sleep is an indispensable remedy for recovery. That is the significance of the alternating state between sleeping and waking.

Now we will move on to consider an even more important alternating state, that between life and death. As we have seen, as soon as sleep sets in, the astral body with the vehicle of the ego leaves the physical body connected with the etheric body. In ordinary life, this separation of the etheric body from the physical body hardly ever occurs, except in certain exceptional cases, which will be mentioned later. It is only at death that the physical body and ether body normally separate for the first time. Now, at death, not only does the astral body leave the four-part human being with the ego, as in sleep, but the three parts, ether body, astral body and ego, leave the physical body, and we have on the one hand the physical body, which remains behind as a corpse, is immediately attacked by physical and chemical forces and falls prey to destruction; on the other hand, we have a connection between the etheric body, astral body and I-bearer.

The question now arises as to how anyone can possibly know how these conditions develop at death. Well, if you followed yesterday's public lecture, you will understand that those people who are able to see into higher spheres are also able to report on the conditions after death. And means are available and ways are offered for every human being to acquire such abilities, which is why there is also the possibility of knowing what a person experiences when he passes through the gate of death. If any facts are reported that cannot be immediately verified by anyone, then only those who really know can decide on their correctness. But if the reproach were made to the one who knows by those who know not, that he too could not know anything, then the reproach of arrogance would lie entirely with those who know not and yet claim that one can know nothing. Thus only the one who knows can decide what can be known.

When a person has passed through death, he first has a feeling that he is growing into a world in which he becomes bigger and bigger and that he is no longer outside of all entities as in this physical world, not facing all other things, but, as it were, within them, as if he were crawling into all things. At the moment immediately following death you feel not a here and there, but an everywhere; it is as if you yourself were slipping into all things. Then there is a total recollection of your entire past life, which stands before you with all its details like a large tableau. This recollection cannot be compared with any recollection, however good, of your previous life, as you know it in earthly life, but this memory tableau suddenly stands before you in all its grandeur. What is the reason for this? It is because the etheric body is in fact the carrier of memory. As long as the etheric body was still enclosed in the physical body during earthly existence, it had to function through the physical body and was bound to physical laws. There it is not free; there it forgets, for there all memory steps aside that does not directly belong to the very next thing that the person is experiencing. But in death, as explained earlier, the etheric body, the carrier of memory, becomes free. It no longer needs to function through the physical, and so memories suddenly arise in an unbound way.

In exceptional cases, this separation of the physical and etheric bodies can also occur during life. For example, in cases of mortal danger, when drowning, when falling, that is, in such cases where the consciousness receives a great shock through the horror. People who have been subjected to such a shock sometimes report that for a few moments their whole life stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences from the earliest period of their lives suddenly emerged from oblivion with full clarity. Such stories are not based on deception, but on truth; they are facts. At that moment of the flash of the memory tableau, something very special happens to the person; only, with such a shock, consciousness must not be lost. At that moment of the crash or other horror that caused the shock, something occurs that the clairvoyant can see. Not always, but sometimes, the part of the etheric body that fills the head region emerges from the head, either completely or in part, and even if this only happens for a moment, it still frees the memory, because at such a moment the etheric body is freed from the physical matter that hinders uninhibited memory.

We can also observe a partial emergence of the etheric body on other occasions. If you press or bump any part of your body, a peculiar tingling sensation may occur, and we tend to describe this feeling by saying that the limb has fallen asleep. Children who want to describe what kind of feeling they have when this happens have often been heard to say: “I feel like seltzer water in my hand.” What does that mean? The actual cause is that the corresponding part of the life body has been removed from this limb for a while. The clairvoyant person can then perceive the elevated part of the etheric body near the physical body, like a copy of it. For example, when a person falls, the corresponding part of the etheric body is pushed out of the head by the falling movement.

At death, this tableau of memories occurs immediately and with full intensity because the entire physical body is abandoned. The duration of this tableau of memories after death is also known. It is three to four days. It is not easy to give the reasons for this. This period of time is different for each person and roughly corresponds to the ability of the person concerned to stay awake without falling asleep for as long as they could have done so during their lifetime.

After that, something else happens. What happens then is that a kind of second corpse is released. The human being now also leaves the etheric body behind; but he retains a certain essence of it, and that is what the person takes with him and retains for all eternity. Now, after discarding the etheric body, the time of the Kamaloka begins for the person, the Kamaloka state. If you want to understand what kind of state this is, you have to bear in mind that after leaving the physical and etheric bodies behind, the human being still has the astral body and the ego of his four limbs, and the question now arises for us as to what the astral body, with which the ego now lives into the time of the Kamaloka, is all about. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, of enjoyment and desire, so these do not cease when the physical body is discarded; only the possibility of satisfying desires ceases, since the instrument for satisfying desires, the physical body, is no longer available. Everything that the person was as a sentient being in the physical body does not cease to be. The person retains all of this in their astral body. Let us think of an ordinary desire, and for the sake of simplicity, let us choose one of a rather banal nature, for example, the desire for a tasty dish. This desire is not based in the physical body, but in the astral body. Therefore, this desire is not discarded with the physical body; it remains. The physical body was only the instrument with which this desire could be satisfied. If you have a knife to cut with, that is the instrument, and you do not lose the ability to cut when you put the knife away. So at death only the tool for enjoyment is laid down, and therefore man is first in a state in which all his various desires are represented, which now must be laid down or rather must be learned to be laid down. The time when this happens is the Kamaloka time. It is a time of testing, and it is very good and important for the further development of man. Imagine you were suffering from thirst and you were in a region where there was no water, and of course no beer or wine, no drink of any kind at all. You would suffer from a burning thirst that cannot be quenched. In a similar way, a person experiences a certain feeling of thirst when he no longer possesses the instrument with which he was the only one able to satisfy his desires.

Kamaloka is a period of weaning for the person, since he must give up his desires in order to live in the spiritual world. This Kamaloka period lasts for a longer or shorter time for each person, depending on how well he has mastered the habit of giving up his desires. It depends on how the person has already acquired the habit of regulating his desires in life, and how he has learned to enjoy and to renounce in life. But there are pleasures and desires of a lower and a higher kind. We call those pleasures and desires, for the satisfaction of which the physical body is not the actual instrument, higher pleasures and desires, and these are not among those that a person has to get rid of after death. Only as long as a person still has something that draws him towards the physical existence - lower pleasures - does he remain in the astral life of the Kamaloka period. When nothing draws him back down after this period of disaccustoming, then he has become capable of living in the spiritual world, and then a third corpse emerges from the human being. The human being's stay in this Kamalokai period lasts approximately as long as a third of one's lifetime.

It depends on how old the person was when they died, that is, how long they had lived in the physical body. However, this time of transition is not always terrible or unpleasant. In any case, the human being becomes more independent of physical desires through it, and the more he has already made himself independent in life and acquired interests in the contemplation of spiritual things, the easier this time of the Kamaloka will be for him. It makes him freer, so that the human being becomes grateful for this time of the Kamaloka. The feeling of deprivation in physical life becomes bliss in the time of the Kamaloka. Thus opposite feelings arise, for everything one has learned in life one is glad to do without in the time of the kamaloka period. When, as already mentioned, the third corpse emerges from the human being, then everything that the person cannot use in the spiritual world floats away with this astral body. These astral corpses are visible to the clairvoyant and take twenty, thirty, even forty years to dissolve. Since such astral corpses are continually present, they occasionally pass through the bodies of the living, through our own bodies, especially during the night, when our astral bodies are separated from the physical bodies during sleep. Just as an extract, a certain essence, remains for all eternity for the actual human being after the ethereal corpse has left, so too does a certain essence remain for him for all eternity after the astral corpse has left, as the fruit of the last embodiment.

And now the time of Devachan begins for the person, the entry into the spiritual world, into the home of the gods and all spiritual beings. When a person enters this world, he experiences a feeling that can be compared to the liberation of a plant that grew in a narrow crevice and suddenly grows up into the light. For when man enters this heavenly world, he experiences complete spiritual freedom and from then on enjoys absolute bliss. What, in fact, is the time of Devachan? You can get an idea of it if you consider that man is preparing here for a new life, for a new reincarnation. In the physical world, in this lower world, man has experienced and learned so much, and he has taken these experiences with him. He has absorbed them like a fruit of life, which he can now freely process within himself. He now forms an archetype for a new life during the devachan period. This happens during a long, long time. It is a working on one's own being, and every working, every producing is connected with bliss. You can get an idea of the fact that every producing, every working is connected with bliss by observing a hen brooding an egg. Why does she do that? Because it feels like doing it. In the same way, it is a pleasure for a human being to weave the fruits of the past life into the plan for a new life in Devachan.

In the chain of reincarnations, the human being has indeed already gone through many lives, but at the end of a life he is never the same as he was at the beginning of that life. In this life, forced into the physical body, he must behave quite passively. But now that it is free, freed from the physical body, from the etheric body and from the astral body, it weaves an image into its eternal essence, and this weaving in is perceived as bliss, as a feeling that cannot be compared to anything that it can ever experience in the physical world as bliss. His life is bliss in the spiritual world. But do not think that the physical life has no significance in this spiritual world. When bonds of love and friendship have been formed from soul to soul in life, only the physical part is lost with death, but the spiritual bond remains and forms lasting, indestructible bridges from soul to soul, which condense into effects in the archetypes. These are then able to be lived out in the physical in the following re-embodiments. It is the same in the relationship that exists between mother and child. A mother's love for her child is the answer to the prenatal love of the child for the mother, who, because of the affinity of her soul with the child, felt drawn to her as a result of her longing for re-embodiment. What then takes place in the life, in the jointly experienced embodiment between mother and child, forms new, soul ties that remain. And everything that bound soul to soul is already woven into the spiritual life that you find when you enter the spiritual world after death. The life between death and a new birth is such that what was done in the previous physical life has an effect. Yes, even the favorite pastimes that a person was devoted to in life have an effect. But after death, the human being becomes freer and freer, because he becomes a preparer for the future, for his own future.

Does a person do anything else in the hereafter? Oh, he is very active in the hereafter. Someone might ask why a person is reborn and why he comes back to this earth at all if he can also be active in the hereafter. Well, this happens because re-embodiments never occur in such a way that a person is unnecessarily reborn in the course of them. He can always learn new things, and conditions on earth have always changed so that he enters completely different circumstances to gain experience for his further development. The face of the earth, the regions, the animal kingdom, the plant cover, all this is constantly changing in a relatively short time. Think back a hundred years. What a difference compared to today! It is not so long ago that every child learns to read and write by the age of six, as is the case in our society today. In ancient times, there were highly educated people who were at the head of the state and could neither read nor write. Where are the forests and animal species that populated the land five hundred years ago, which is now criss-crossed by railways? What were the localities like where our big cities are today, what were they like a thousand years ago? Only then is man reborn, only then does he enter into a new rebirth when conditions have changed so much that man can learn something new. Follow the centuries as the face of the earth is changed, torn down and built up by the intellectual powers of men. But there is also much that changes that cannot be worked on by the external intellectual powers of people. The plant cover and the animal world change before our eyes; they disappear and other species take their place. Such changes are brought about from the other world. A person walking across a meadow can see how a bridge is built over the stream, but he cannot see how the plant cover is built up. The dead do that. They are working to reshape and rework the face of the earth in order to create a different setting for themselves for a new reincarnation. After man has been busy with the preparations for the new reincarnation in this way for a long, long time, the moment approaches when it is to take place. What happens now? What does man do when he enters into his new incarnation? At that time man finds himself in his Devachan, and there he feels that he must first attach a new astral body to himself. Then, as it were, the astral substance rushes towards him from all sides, and depending on his character, it crystallizes around him, so to speak. You have to imagine it like iron filings being drawn to a magnet and grouping themselves around it. In the same way, the astral substance groups itself around the re-embodied ego. But then it is still necessary to choose suitable parents, and so the person is led to this or that pair of parents, but not merely in obedience to his own attraction. For in this process, exalted beings intervene and take action, who, in keeping with the present state of human development, have taken on the work of karmically ordering these relationships in a correct and just manner. If, therefore, parents and children occasionally appear to be out of harmony, there need be nothing wrong or unjust in that. Sometimes it is good for man to be brought into the most complicated conditions and to have to adjust himself to the strangest circumstances, in order to learn thereby.

The succession of these repeated re-embodiments is not, however, an endless one. There is a beginning and there is an end. Once, in the distant past, man did not descend to incarnations. He did not yet know birth and death. He led a kind of angelic existence, not interrupted by such drastic changes in his condition as are present today in the form of birth and death. But just as surely as man will come to a time when he has gained sufficient experience in the lower worlds to have acquired a sufficiently mature, enlightened state of consciousness to be able to work in the exalted upper worlds without being forced to descend again into the lower worlds.

After hearing the conditions presented here about repeated lives on earth, some people believe they should be afraid that the feeling of parental love could be affected by a mother learning that the child is not entirely of her flesh, because there is something about this child that is not of her, something foreign. But the bonds that span parents and children are by no means subject to chance and lawlessness. They are not new bonds. They already existed in previous lives and once existed in kinship and friendly connections. These bonds of love unite them permanently even in the higher worlds in eternal reality, and all people will one day be embraced in eternal love, even if they no longer descend into the cycle of re-embodiments.

I said yesterday that these studies are intended to lead us on to a clarification of the essential nature of the remedies we have proposed, and we will continue to pursue this theme. Today I would like to begin by mentioning something that can suggest a great deal regarding our method of working.

In approaching an illness or a complex of symptoms with imaginative observation, we frequently receive a direct, intuitive knowledge of the remedy. Then we obviously attempt to think about the matter in accordance with judgments connected with the matter by external scientific knowledge, and we find we are wrong, that it cannot be so. This is an experience frequently encountered by one who is able to make occult investigations, and it also applies to domains other than therapeutics. Only on thinking more about the matter, pursuing it still further, does one come to see how correct one actually was. What is discovered by imaginative investigation followed by intuition is always correct, provided, of course, that it is based on sound powers of cognition. But one's judgment activity must first wrestle through—if I may put it so—to what one comes to know in this way.

It must first be realized that this human organism is complicated to the highest degree, so that in fact an intellectual grasp of it presents the greatest conceivable difficulties, especially if one tries to relate this human organism to the outer world again. This is especially noticeable if we examine more closely the function of nitrogen in the human organism. Earlier in these lectures, I reported that nitrogen is found in greater quantity in exhaled air than in inhaled air and materialistic thinking can hardly help regarding the difference as unimportant. The reason for this is that the materialistic view of the human being is basically unable to discover the function of nitrogen. This is possible only if the following is considered:

You know that the most varied theories exist about nutrition and that, accordingly, investigators often hold diametrically opposed views regarding the question: ”What is the function in the human organism of protein in food? Why does the human organism need protein?” Some say that the structure of man's protein organism is constant, or at least relatively constant, and that the protein absorbed undergoes rapid disintegration and has little significance for the plastic, constructive forces of protein in the human organism. Others hold the view—regarded somewhat out of date today—that the proteinaceous body of the human being is continually disintegrating and built up again from the protein absorbed. These diametrically opposed theories are put forward in the most varied forms, but both miss the essential point, because they compare protein with protein in a one-sided way without considering the human organism as a whole.

In this human organism we have to do with an opposition between the head formation, and therefore the formation of nerves and senses, and the formation proceeding from the metabolic-limb system. This is a polar opposition within human nature, and we cannot pay enough attention to it. Without taking into account what I have just said, we cannot understand the sequence of stages in the build-up of man that are so important in therapeutic deliberations. For instance, one will not be able to understand the real relationship of the lung to the entire human organism unless one's investigations begin in the following way. If we are considering the head organism, certain forces obviously predominate there. Next we have the chest organism containing the lungs. The lung is an organ that also has forces of head formation within it, though to a lesser degree. The whole human organism has everywhere these same forces, but in varying intensities. And if we investigate how the ego, astral body, and etheric body work in the whole plastic formation and deformation of the organs, we are brought to the paradoxical statement that the lung formation is a less intensive head formation. The lung formation is a metamorphosis of the head formation, only it is arrested at an earlier stage. The head advances further with regard to the same formative forces that are present in the lung but remain there at an earlier stage.

Because the lung has remained a kind of retarded metamorphosis of the head formation it is adapted to its own function, i.e., breathing. If the same forces that remain retarded in the lung, making it suitable for breathing, develop further, they render the lung more and more head-like. A consequence of the lung becoming more and more head-like is that it takes in thought forces—the organic forces of thinking—and strives to become a thinking organ. In trying to become a thinking organ, taking up too strongly the forces properly seated in the head, the lung becomes disposed to tuberculosis.

Pulmonary tuberculosis can only be understood in this way, proceeding from the entire human being. It can certainly be understood if we realize that in a tuberculous lung breathing strives to become thinking. In the head, breathing is metamorphosed, and all functions of thinking, even the processing of perceptions, are nothing but breathing developed further in an upward direction. The head is an advanced respiratory organ, having moved beyond the lung stage, but it represses breathing and, instead of taking in air, takes in etheric forces through the senses. Sense perception is nothing but a more refined—which means extending more into the etheric—respiratory process. Thus head and lung breathe. There is something else in the human being that is also breathing, something that remains at a still lower stage in this process of metamorphosis: the liver. The liver is a lung that has not reached its final development, it is a head formation not fully developed. It also breathes, but now the other metamorphosis, the polar metamorphosis of the sense perceptions—that is, taking in food and working it through—predominates in the liver. Therefore lung and liver formations lie in the middle between the stomach and the brain and head formations.

If you lay a foundation with such thoughts, you will not be far from understanding what I have to say about certain human organs really being organs of respiration. All those organs that are shaped like the brain, lung, and liver are at the same time organs of respiration, but they have a tendency to breathe out. Thus they also excrete carbon dioxide externally. Such external excretion of carbon dioxide is the essential thing in breathing. These organs absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, and this holds good not only for the lung but for the entire organism, for every organ. It is essentially an activity of the astral body, which develops its activity in sympathy and antipathy. Sympathy as a force corresponds to inhalation; antipathy as a force corresponds to exhalation of the astral body. In the description of the astral body given in my book, Theosophy, you find that it is permeated by the forces of antipathy and sympathy. It works in the human being in the whole breathing process according to antipathy and sympathy. This must be regarded as the inner activity of the astral body.

And now we come to the final point of these considerations. The proteinaceous content present in the human being, in so far as it belongs to the organs described, is essentially for the support of breathing and manifests outwardly through breathing. But everything that manifests outwardly also expresses itself inwardly. This is how I would sketch it schematically. If you have here a human organ rich in protein and belonging to the group of organs I mentioned, it manifests outwardly by developing the activity of breathing (see drawing, red). But in breathing outward, it unfolds another activity within, the polar activity to breathing, namely, the activity liberating the soul, liberating the spirit. An activity freeing the soul: in breathing out, in unfolding the act of breathing in an outward direction, you unfold inwardly a soul-spiritual activity. This does not require space, of course; on the contrary, in space it disappears continually, passing out of three-dimensional space. This activity manifests within, however—in an inward direction—and to develop this activity within is essentially the function of human protein. What functions as an activity in the head enters from outside by way of the senses. Hence the head organs are the organs containing least of what is spiritual. They absorb the spirit from outside, acquiring it for themselves by means of the senses. The head is the least spiritual organ in the human being.

By contrast, man's spirituality—that is, the development of spirit within, the development of spirituality in the body, of real spirit, not abstract spirit—begins in the pulmonary system and works from outside inward in contrast to breathing. The most spiritual organs are those belonging to the liver system. These are the organs that develop the most spiritual activity in an inward direction. This also explains why “head men” are often materialistic, because only the external spirituality can be worked through with the head, and in this way one is wrongly led to believe that everything spiritual that is developed is received from outside, from the world of the senses. If a person is a real intellectual, then he becomes at the same time a materialist. The more one is a “head thinker,” the more one is disposed to become a materialist. On the other hand, if the whole human being struggles to attain knowledge, if a person begins to develop a consciousness of the way the entire human being thinks, including the organs situated further back, materialism ceases to be justifiable.

The activity manifesting in breathing is also revealed outwardly in the excretion of carbon in carbon dioxide. But the inward activity of spiritualization is bound up with nitrogen. The nitrogen that has been used in spiritualization is eliminated, and the degree to which nitrogen is eliminated is a measure of the inner work of the human organs in the direction of spirituality. You can conclude from this that one who does not believe in such spirituality will obviously have to remain very unclear about the absorption of nitrogen in the human organism. The role played by nutrition can be clarified only if one knows how in all protein formation there unfolds an activity directed outward and one directed inward. If you study this process, which is essentially a breathing process with its polar opposite, you will realize that nutrition and digestion border everywhere on the breathing processes, that nutrition and digestion everywhere encounter the processes of breathing and spiritualization.

In this process of spiritualization, and therefore on the other side of breathing, are found the real shaping, plastic forces in protein formation: there we find everything that shapes the human being. From this you will also be able to see that what is active here points to an interaction between the astral and etheric bodies. The astral body is active in breathing by means of sympathy and antipathy; the etheric body is active through encountering in its activity the sympathies and antipathies of the astral body. Everywhere the etheric body with its activities hits up against the breathing process in the human organism. These etheric activities have their primary point of attack in the fluid constituents in the human being. As you know, at least two-thirds of the human body consists of water, and in this water-organism the etheric body is chiefly active. The etheric forces express themselves physically in this water-organism. The forces of breathing find expression in the air organism built into the human being. Thus we may regard what takes place between the astral body and the etheric body as an interaction between water forces and air forces.

This interaction of air and water forces is continually ongoing in the human organism. Of course, neither completely suppresses the other; hence we always inhale traces of water vapor with the air. There the etheric element encroaches on the breathing. Similarly, the breathing activity encroaches on the digestive and nutritive organs. In so far as you are formed out of protein, you also breathe. Thus these activities always overlap, and we are always faced with a predominance of one activity or another in one organ or another. There is nothing here that can be described in a one-sided way. We can never describe this or that organ as being exclusively a respiratory organ. If we maintain this about the lung, we are in error. The other activity is always there, even if to a lesser degree. Nutrition takes place primarily through an activity that impresses itself on the fluid-etheric and on the solid-physical. Therefore nutritive and digestive activities occur primarily in the ethericfluid and the physical-solid, whereas the main respiratory activity is developed in the astral-airy, and the main ego activity, the actual spiritual activity, unfolds in the warmth conditions connected with the ego itself. Spiritual activity within the physical organism is a cooperation of the ego with warmth conditions, i.e., with all those organizations where warmth can work into the physical. The ego must always go hand in hand with warmth, must always operate through warmth. If we put a patient to bed and tuck him in, this is simply an appeal to the ego to make use of the warmth generated in an appropriate way.

These considerations provide insight into human nutrition in general. Nutrition is an interaction between tissue fluid—i.e., the watery constituent in which nutrition and elimination chiefly take place—and the protein organism of the human being. The latter is, relatively speaking, extraordinarily stable; it is labile in a certain respect only during the period of growth, then becomes stable and undergoes a kind of disintegration during the second half of life. In the tissue fluid there is a continual assimilation and disintegration of the protein in food. It is in this activity that attacks are made on that which wants to remain stable in protein formation: the human being's inner proteinaceous organs generally; they want to remain stable. This is because they wish to liberate soul-spiritual activity inwardly, to isolate it within. What is achieved through the process of nutrition is this continual interaction between the extraordinarily mobile play of forces, constituted by this active assimilation and disintegration of protein, and the play of forces striving towards rest that arise in this interplay of the inner protein in the human being. Hence it is partly a superstition, partly correct, to say that the human being builds up his body through the substances he absorbs from his food. It is a superstition because the constructive forces are already present in his proteinaceous body simply by virtue of the fact that a human being is a human being; on the other hand, the human being unfolds an activity from the other pole, which conducts a continual attack on this stability of his own proteinaceous formation.

We may say then that it is incorrect to believe that human life is maintained only by the consumption of food. This is simply not correct. It would be just as correct to say that life is maintained by the active interplay of forces in the tissue fluids. When you give food which stimulates this activity in the tissue fluids, you maintain life. This does not happen by merely introducing food substances into the body but by the encounter with the stable forces of its own proteinaceous constituents. This is a process that you stimulate by absorbing food, and this process is the most fundamental factor in the maintenance of life. Here, too, we find that we have to look at the process. It can be, for example, that substances we know to be effective in children do not necessarily act in the same way in an adult; for a child is developing his body and needs the introduction of substances and the unfolding of their forces in an inward direction. If you know that something is effective as substance in a child, it will not be similarly effective in the adult. In an adult, it may be much more necessary simply to maintain and stimulate the forces in his tissue fluids that are striving toward rest.

If you now study everything that takes place in the human organs with a backward orientation, as it were (the head is also such an organ), everything taking place in the lungs and liver, and then turn your attention to those more embedded in this activity of the tissue fluids, you will find the heart enclosed by the lungs as the archetypal organ. The human heart is entirely formed out of the activity of tissue fluid, and its activity is no more than the reflection of this inner activity.

The heart is not a pump! I have often said this; it is rather an apparatus for sensing or registering the activity in the tissue fluid. The heart is moved by the circulation of the blood; it is not the pumping action of the heart that moves the blood. The heart has no more to do with human circulation than a thermometer does with the production of outer heat or cold. Just as the thermometer is nothing more than an instrument for registering the degree of heat or cold, so your heart is nothing more than an apparatus for registering what takes place in the circulation and what flows into this from the metabolic system. This is a golden rule that we must heed if we wish to understand the human being. In the belief, that the heart is a pump driving the blood through the blood vessels, we can see how modern natural science reverses the truth. Anyone believing in this superstition about the heart ought to be consistent and believe that it is warmer in his room because the thermometer has risen! This is the consistent conclusion of such an approach.

You can see to what results one is led by views that simply do not take into account what is by far the most significant aspect of man's being: the soul and spirit. Such views ignore the mobile, the dynamic aspects and proceed from what is merely material, trying to draw from the substance itself those forces that are only imprinted on the substance. Such views want to attribute to the heart the forces that are only imprinted upon it by the dynamics, by the play of forces in the human body.

In the heart activity and in the heart organ we really have the most advanced organization of what is placed over against respiration and the liberation of the spirit in man. This may now be called a polar metamorphosis, in contrast to a mere transformation. In the head, lung, and liver, you have various stages of metamorphic transformations. But as soon as you study the heart in relation to the lungs, you have to speak about a polar metamorphosis, for the heart in its formation is the polar opposite of the lung.

All those organs that develop in a more forward direction—for example, the female uterus, which is the most prominent example—are then further transformations, step by step, of the heart formation. (I speak of the “female uterus,” because there is also a “male uterus,” but this is only present in the male as part of the etheric body.) The uterus is nothing other than a transformed heart. With this method of studying things, we can gain all that is necessary to understand this organization in the human being.

The fats and carbohydrates now intervene in this other activity that has its center in the heart—if I may put it so—and comes to rest in the heart's movement. The fats and carbohydrates exert their activity here. Of course, this extends over the whole body, because the whole body deposits substance and is a functional outcome of systems of forces directed toward combustion, just as the whole body breathes and develops what is spiritual.

This sheds some light on pulmonary tuberculosis and we will see how such an inner study of the human organism leads us further and further toward therapeutic matters. What was formerly called consumption—and has now been labelled tuberculosis for purely theoretical reasons—is really due to man's being cut off from the extra-terrestrial and confined to the earthly through various influences such as poor housing and so on. All descriptions of pulmonary tuberculosis can be summed up by saying that the patient is being cut off from the sun and cosmic space and is drawn toward what is cutting him off. He is drawn toward that which paralyzes his delight in the extra-terrestrial. This delight depends essentially on sense perception. The patient's soul cannot penetrate to the senses and retreats down into the lungs, so that the lungs strive to become an organ of thought, to become a head. This is, in fact, revealed clearly even in the pathological manifestations. In wanting to become a head they take on a form and one can see that the forces tending to ossify the human head then come to expression in the lungs, resulting in indurations, consolidations, tuberculomas, and the like.

How can this tendency be opposed? If you want to work against this tendency of the lung to become “head,” you must realize first of all that we have to do with a weakening of the required astral activity and with an excessive strengthening of the ego activity. This activity of the ego begins to overpower the astral activity. This must be remedied. Sense impressions from outside especially stimulate ego activity, but sense impressions from outside pass into the whole human organism by bringing about salt depositions. These are not properly regulated in a person with a tendency to pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence you must help in such a case by using rather strong salt rubbings to try to oppose, at the right moment, what the lung can no longer oppose. Salt rubbings, applied from outside, oppose the consolidating processes acting from within. Of course, one must form the whole treatment in such a way that the organism is inclined to receive what is introduced in the effects of salt from outside. The patient could also take salt baths, strong salt baths, but then the organism must be led to become disposed to work upon the salt within, i.e., to respond from inside.

Here we can be led to the following considerations, which follow partly from our discussions last year. If you wish to stimulate the organism to develop an activity from within that interacts with and regulates certain outer organizing forces, you must give mercury in small doses, i.e., in doses approaching the homeopathic. Mercury is an important remedy in this direction, an important means for regulating this. Here you will have to take into account something of general importance regarding dosages. Putting together all I have presented, you can conclude that the system most similar to outer nature is the metabolic-limb system. If something is lacking there, you must use the lowest potencies. As soon as you have to deal with the middle system, you need intermediate potencies. When you have to work with the head, when something has to do with the spiritual in the head, you have to work with the highest potencies. But in this case we are dealing with the lung activity, i.e., with a part of the middle human being, and an intermediate dosage of mercury must be used.

Whenever one intends to work primarily upon the head organization and from there back upon the entire organism, the highest potencies are required. These will be particularly beneficial in cases where one believes that something can be achieved with compounds of silica. Silica compounds require the greatest dilution by their very nature, for they always rise toward the head and the periphery of the body, which belongs to the head system. On the other hand, when you have occasion for other reasons to administer calcium compounds, you will usually do right not to use the highest potencies but lower ones. In short, the potency required will be determined by whether, in your view, you have to act on the metabolic-limb organism, the middle, rhythmic organism, or the head organism. You must bear in mind, of course, that the head organism works powerfully upon the whole organism from the other direction. For example, you may believe a patient to be suffering from a foot disease, but actually this may be a disguised head disease, having its origins in the head. In such a case you will have to effect a cure not from the metabolism but from the head. Thus one must use high—but not too high—potencies of a substance perhaps known to be valuable in lower potencies in cases that have to be treated from the metabolism. Gradually a rationale can be introduced into these deliberations, and this must be done. The details will become clear only when you consider precise observations yielded by experiments. The investigations must pursue these details in the directions I have suggested.

Only an individual who can carefully retain in his memory all that his experience has taught him will be able to speak about healing in detail. Every individual experience is obviously instructive and bears fruit for further experiences. If you consider then what I have said, it will no longer appear so puzzling that there are diseases that, for instance, attack the brain and the liver simultaneously, for the liver is only a metamorphosed brain. If you therefore find deterioration of the liver together with degeneration of the cerebral ganglia, these conditions run in the same direction, and you have a form of disease that is an intensification of what causes pulmonary tuberculosis. It is only an intensified metamorphosis of pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence internally you will have to give stronger doses of mercury. Regarding external treatment, you should not be content with salt rubbings and with baths of table salt (sodium chloride); instead you will have to use calcium salts.

You see now, however, that sources of error are everywhere, and one really finds what is right only if the human organism is studied from within. Imagine that someone can go and say, “Here is a disease that I will cure with mercury,” he may achieve some success. The disease, however, may have nothing to do with syphilis, but at some point this person got the idea that when mercury effects a cure, the disease must be connected with syphilitic processes. This is not necessarily the case at all. You will now better understand what I said last year when I spoke of "mental illnesses." Of course I meant paralytic disease when I spoke a few days ago of softening of the brain, but the description is not so vivid if one uses the word “paralysis.” One always has the feeling that one is dropping into a description of the outer complex of symptoms.

Questions now arise regarding what I said last year about the actual causes of psychological diseases. As I said then, these have to be looked for in deformations of the organs. One gets nowhere if one merely takes into account the psychological symptoms. Similar psychological complexes can even be traced back to totally different causes of illness. Especially in so-called mental illnesses we are led more and more to deformations of the organs, to an organ that is not functioning properly, and then the question arises as to why the organ is not functioning properly. It is because the stable—not the variable—forces in protein formation have become defective. Something in the patient is therefore continually striving to destroy the original plastic structure of the affected organ. Therefore it does no good to look for the cause in what is going on in the tissue fluid, which presents the other pole, the metabolism. If we proceed from the symptoms, it will not help us to study what is presented by the metabolism itself within the organism. Instead it is exceptionally important in trying to gain knowledge of mental illnesses to study the excretions. An important reference point will always be found there. It is of tremendous importance to investigate the excretions of mental patients, for—as I said last year—in certain forms of mental illness there is a compulsive tendency to form imaginations, inspirations. This is what “freeing the spiritual within” signifies.

This tendency is there because the organ has become defective. If the organ were not defective, if it were constituted normally, it would indeed form imaginations, but these would remain unconscious. When the organ has become defective, it is not able to form imaginations correctly. On the one hand, the organ is defective and the tendency to form imaginations arises; on the other hand, imaginations remain uncovered by the organ, and hallucinations arise. You could say then, that when we have an organ with imaginations developing within it (see drawing, red) which radiate through the rest of the human organism (see drawing, bright) and become perceptible, we are dealing with a deformed organ. The formation of imaginations (red) cannot unfold properly in its plasticity. As a result, because the imaginative activity is abnormal, it intrudes upon consciousness, and visions and hallucinations arise. On the other hand, the organ is damaged, and this gives rise to an urge to form correct imaginations. Only by seeing through these things from within can they be explained.

We will proceed tomorrow to answer individual questions that have been posed and to an explanation of our remedies.

Now that we have gathered together a number of elements in order to get at the essence of the Apocalypse, we will have to look more at the Apocalypse itself, and we will have to arrange things in such a way that we begin with several questions which are connected with the goal or end of what the Apocalypticer sees and what he wants to communicate to mankind; later on we will see why this particular choice of study materials is appropriate.

If we look at what he gives, one could say that it is a communication to human beings, a revelation to human beings, but a revelation which differs considerably from what arises when other communications which don't proceed from clairvoyance are brought to men. The Apocalypticer points out that it was a special event, a mighty enlightenment which enabled him to make his statement to humanity. However, thereby the Apocalypse appears as something which arises as a fact and an event which belongs to the continuation of Christian evolution.

We can say that of course the Mystery of Golgotha is the great starting point of Christian evolution upon earth which towers over everything else and which could only be anticipated and hoped for before; but then come the individual facts which must occur in order that Christian evolution continues from the Mystery of Golgotha through all the cycles of time to come. And the revelation which occurred through the Apocalypse is such an event. The author of the Apocalypse is fully aware that he's thereby not only putting what he experienced and is communicating to people into present-day evolution, but that what lies in the reception and further elaboration of the Apocalypse is a reality.

You see, the important, difference between Christianity and other religious confessions is that one has teachings in the ancient religious confessions, whereas the deed of Golgotha is the important thing in Christian evolution, and more deeds must be added to this important one. Therefore, the important thing for Christianity to do is to look for a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and it's not of primary and fundamental importance to have the gospels interpreted for one. In recent times Christianity has taken on intellectualistic forms through the influence of intellectualism. One could, say that this is why that famous statement could be made: Jesus doesn't belong in the gospels. In other words, one can take the content of the gospels as teachings, but one doesn't have to: take the teacher who stands, behind them into account; he's not important. This means that, only the Father belongs in the gospels. It's as if the main thing about the Mystery of Golgotha was that Christ Jesus has appeared and has given a teaching from the Father. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that a deed was done on Golgotha—that Christ Jesus lived on earth and did the deed on Golgotha. The teaching is an incidental, accessory thing. Christianity must struggle through to, a recognition of this again, but it must also do it.

And so the Apocalypticer is aware that he receives this revelation and that this fact has taken place and that he works on through this fact; this is the important thing for him. For what is continually happening as a result of this? You know that from a formal viewpoint present-day man is living in such a way that he wears his three garments, physical body, etheric body and astral body which is connected with a certain normality. When he is in a sleeping condition the astral body and ego are outside the physical and etheric body and are in the earthly environment, in the spiritual region of the earthly environment, which is behind sensory, physical phenomena. They are not equipped for perceptibility in people today, they only become equipped through initiation. Man lives a dull existence during sleep, and only retains a general feeling about this on awaking, or he sees things in dreams, which emerge from sleep in the way which has often been described. Now if we don't think anything else than this; we have man's astral body and ego in the spiritual world, and they stand in that world in such a way that they can receive no direct impressions of Christ and his real nature.

Thus if we would think nothing else than what I just mentioned, the ego and astral body would enter the spiritual world every night and would have no direct connection with the Christ, would come back again to this earthly, physical garment, and since the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place in the course of earth evolution, they would have an impression of Christ, for the Christ is in the earth's aura, but this impression would remain dull. Just as other nocturnal impressions remain dull for day consciousness, so this impression that the Christ dwells in the physical and etheric bodies which lie there during sleep would only be perceived in the way that the sleeping condition is perceived by someone when he is waking up, and no distinct, clear experience could be there.

Let's suppose that right after the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, human beings were there who experienced what happened and who could communicate their direct impressions of the Mystery of Golgotha to others. And in fact Christ gave his apostles an esoteric training and a number of important teachings after his resurrection. All of this was handed on and it continued in the first decades after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished. At a certain point this had to come to an end. And we can see how it gradually died down in certain circles. It's correct to say that there were tremendous esoteric teachings about Christianity in the writings which were denounced for being gnostic and in other writings of old church teachers who were apostolic students or pupils of apostolic students, which were then eradicated by the church, because the church wanted to get rid of the cosmic elements which were always connected with these teachings. The church destroyed very important things. They were destroyed; a reading of the akashic records will restore them to the last dot on the “i” when the time has come to restore them again.

Nevertheless, the great impressions which were there would have faded for outer historical evolution. The Apocalypse appeared the moment these things were in danger of dying out. And if the Apocalypse is taken in properly—and various people have made this attempt in the second epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha—if the Apocalypse is taken in, if this grand picture, this prophetic picture of evolution penetrates man's astral body and ego, then the ego and astral body bear a revelation which comes directly from the spiritual world—as I told you in the first lecture—which is really a kind of a letter, a direct verbal revelation from the spiritual world which is connected with visions. If this is taken into the astral body, and namely into the ego-organization and carried out into the sphere of the earth's aura during sleep, it means that all those who had taken in this Apocalypse; with inner understanding were gradually inscribing its content into the ether of the earth's aura. So that one can say: the presence of Christ gives the fundamental tone in the earth's aura, and he continues to work in it.

This Christ impulse has a strong influence upon man's etheric body every night when the astral body and ego are outside of the physical and etheric body, except that the average person is usually not able to find the Christ impulse which is contained in the etheric body when he returns to the physical body in the morning with his ego and astral body. But when John's pupils in the wider sense of the word take in the content of the Apocalypse, it becomes inscribed in the ether of the earth's aura. What is inscribed there then works upon the human etheric body between the times of going to sleep and waking up. It was inscribed there already through the great, significant impressions which the author of the Apocalypse, or better said, the receiver of it, got from divine, spiritual beings, so that people who have an inclination to relate themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha can expose their etheric body to the content of the Apocalypse during their sleeping condition. This is a real thing. Through the necessary Christ sentiments one can bring about such a condition of sleep that what is as it were brought about in the earth's ether by the content of the Apocalypse and what lies in the direction of Christ-evolution is inscribed in man's etheric body. This is the way it really happens. This is what was present as the deed of the Apocalypse revelation which continued to have an effect.

And in one's work as a priest one can quietly say to those souls who are entrusted to one's care: the Christ has entered earth evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. He inspired the writing of the gospels to serve as a preparation, so that their content can pass over into men's astral body and ego—one has to use suitable terminology here—and so that they are prepared to receive the Christ impulse in their etheric body when they wake up. Through the fact that the Apocalypticer is focusing on Christian evolution and is describing it through the various epochs of evolution and into the future, what is present in this evolution is incorporated into man's etheric body in a concrete way.

You see, therewith we have something in earth evolution which is quite new with respect to the ancient mystery teachings. For what did the ancient mysteries really convey to initiates? They gave them what one can see if one surveys the real spiritual nature of what was laid down an eternally long time ago, as it were, and if one finds the divine being who has been working along certain lines all the way back to eternity in outer physical activities. So that the initiates in the ancient mysteries didn't expect to get anything else into their etheric body than what gets into one's etheric body through the results of initiation.

A Christian initiate gets past this point. He wants to take what has come into earth evolution in the course of time, namely, everything which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with Christ, into his etheric body. So that in fact the revelation of the Apocalypse is the beginning of a kind of an initiation for the whole Christian world, and not for individuals; but individuals can prepare themselves to participate in it.

One could say that it's only this which opens up a path to get beyond the Father-nature principle. According to its form, all ancient initiation is basically a Father initiation. One sought nature and the spirit in nature and one could be satisfied with that. For man stood in the world. Now the Christ has been there in the earth. Now he remains there; he did his deed and he remains there now. One cannot take in what has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha through an ancient initiation. One has to raise oneself into a world of the, spirit which is not the one that streams through the ancient mysteries. What streams through the old mysteries only hoped that the Mystery of Golgotha would stream through the new mysteries at some point. However, man now connects himself with the spirit directly through the spirit and not through nature. In ancient times initiates always chose the detour, through nature. New initiates, that is, many half or partly initiated people in the later centuries after the Mystery of: Golgotha—not in the first ones—thought that they connected themselves with the spiritual nature of the world through what has flowed into it through Christ and through what has been built upon Christ. This is the way such an initiate looked upon the Apocalypse; this is the way it was looked, upon at that time. Thus he looked upon it as something, which he spoke about as follows: Nature is one way to get into the spiritual world, and the marvelous knowledge which is revealed through the Apocalypses is the other way. It is a perplexing, felicific thing when the spiritual investigator encounters people in the second to sixth centuries—but not before—who. Say: “Nature is great,”—they meant what one knew about nature in antiquity—“but what is disclosed in a supersensible way by, the Apocalypticer or other apocalypticers is just as great or greater.” For nature leads to the Father, and what is opened up by the Apocalypticer leads through the Son to the Spirit. One was looking for a path to pure, unmediated spiritual things through something like the Apocalypse.

At the: same time this pointed to a real change which must and will come about when men make themselves worthy of it. In ancient times one had the strong feeling that man comes out of the spiritual world but that he has a development which connects itself strongly with what comes to meet him in the physical, sensory world. One felt this connection with the physical sense world ' very strongly and one was of the opinion that man has become a sinful, iniquitous being because he connects himself with the matter which is present in the earth.

By contrast with this another time was to be prepared, and it was foreseen by the Apocalypticer and announced in advance. He looked for an image or the right Imagination in order to place what is behind these secrets before the soul in imaginative pictures. And so he renewed and summarized an idea which was commonplace in esoteric Hebraic teachings. But only there. One pointed out the following there. Souls come out of the spiritual world. These souls which come out of the spiritual world clothe themselves in what comes out of the earth, and when they build houses for the most external work of the spirit, cities arise. But when they ensheathe the inner activity of the human soul, the human body arises out of the earth's building blocks. Thereby the concept of the construction of outer dwelling places merged with the concept of the building of one's own body. That was a beautiful and wonderful image, because it has such a factual foundation, namely, that one looked upon a house as a sheathe for the more extensive and extended part of one's deeds, soul processes and soul functions that—one saw the sheathe for this in the outer house. However, one had the beautiful and wonderful idea: If I do an outer deed in a house which is built for me out of earthly matter, and I use the house walls and the whole house as a sheathe, this is just the hardened, scleroticized extension of what is there when I do the inner deeds of the soul. Whereas man's body is the first house which man builds for the innermost deeds of the soul.

Then when he has his body and he extends what he has, he builds himself a second house; this second house is built out of the earth's ingredients. That was a very common idea, that one really looked upon one's body as a house, and that one looked upon a house as the outermost garment which man puts on here in the physical earth world.

Therefore, one looked upon man's housebuilding activity as something which proceeds from the soul's creative activity. In past times man was very much grown together with his house and the like, namely when he could think: O.K., he certainly has this body and this skin (See drawing). And now if he would get another skin in the course of his life for the more extensive activity of his soul, it would be a tent; except that this doesn't grow, he has to make it himself.

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Now one feature of the Hebraic esoteric doctrine was that one looked upon the absorption of earthly ingredients for human development and the flowing together and control of earthly things in a quite particular way. You see, with respect to the physical, one will always admit: The earth is arranged in such a way that it has a north pole where cold accumulates, as it were. And one will describe this north pole from the nature of the earth in a physical, geographic way, and one will consider it to be an important part of the earth. Hebraic esoteric doctrine also did this with the soul activities which are contained in the earth's forces and in a way which was the opposite of the situation with the north pole on the earth it looked upon Jerusalem, the very concrete Jerusalem, as the place where cultures run together and the most perfect houses are collected. This was a pole for the concentration of outer culture around the human soul, and its culmination was Solomon's temple.

Now one felt that this was exhausted in the evolution of the earth, and the people who knew something about the Hebraic esoteric teaching looked upon the destruction of Jerusalem after the Mystery of Golgotha as something which was not an outer event that was brought about by the Romans; they thought that the Romans were the puppets of spiritual powers and that they only carried out the plan of the spiritual powers. For they thought that this method of looking for ingredients from the earth in order to build human bodies and houses was no longer usable. When Jerusalem became great all the substances and materials from the earth which were to be used in order to build human bodies and houses had become exhausted.

If one translates this Hebraic esoteric teaching into the Christian one, it means that: If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, Jerusalem would have been destroyed anyway. But what can be a new construction by men who create with the aid of the earth would not have been inserted into this destruction. A kind of a seed of a completely new structure was laid into what was destined to be destroyed in Jerusalem. Mother earth dies in Jerusalem. Daughter earth is expectant or lives in the expectation of another seed. Bodies and houses are not built from the earth here through the gathering together of ingredients as in the old Jerusalem which stands there as the culmination of what occurs on the earth, but the earth rises as a spiritual pole of the old Jerusalem. One will no longer be able to or it will be increasingly difficult to make something like the old Jerusalem from the earth's ingredients. Another time arises instead which was laid down as a seed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Men receive something from above which envelopes them, more on the outside, or more on the inside. The new city sinks down from above and pours over the earth—the new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem was made out of the earth and its substances: the new Jerusalem is made out of spiritual ingredients from heaven.

You will think that such an idea is rather strange by comparison with everything which is thought in our time and compared with what you could learn from what is thought in our time. How does one picture man's development from an anatomical, physiological viewpoint today? Man eats, stuffs food into his stomach, digests it, throws off certain substances and replaces what has to be replaced by the substances he assimilates.

However, this is not what happens, for man is a three-membered being who consists of a nerve-senses man, a rhythmic man and a metabolic limb man. None of the substances in food go into the actual metabolic limb man—they all go into the nerve-senses man. The nerve-senses man absorbs the salts and other substances which are needed and which are always finely distributed in air and light, and it guides them into the metabolic-limb man. The latter is fed entirely from above. It's not true that it gets its substances from physical foods. Diseases arise if substances from the earth, enter the metabolic limb man. All of the food which is taken in and digested only supplies the organs of the nerve-senses man. The head is formed by substances, from the earth. The organs of the metabolic-limb man are formed by things from the heavens. What is in the rhythmic man is only a coarser indication which goes in two directions. Man doesn't eat the oxygen in the air—he inhales it. This is coarser than the way that man assimilates things for the metabolic-limb man. Man takes in what he needs for the metabolic-limb man through a very much finer breathing. Respiration is something which is coarser. And what man does with oxygen to produce carbonic acid is something which is finer than what happens so that the food stuffs which go through the stomach can supply the head. This is the transition in the rhythmic man.

This is the real story about man's building and its processes. The truth of the matter is that what is created by the materialistic view and is taught by anatomy and physiology is nonsense. The moment one knows this one knows that what builds up the human body doesn't only come from below upwards from the earth's plant, mineral and animal kingdoms, and one knows that what supplies the organs which are often considered to be the coarsest ones comes from above. Then one will be able to see that there was a kind of a surplus in nourishment from below until Jerusalem was destroyed. A surplus of what comes from above gradually begins to be important after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Even though we saw that people have twisted the facts around, things are developing in such a way today that nourishment from above is becoming more important than the one from below. Thereby man is being transformed. Our head is no longer like the heads people had in ancient times. They used to have foreheads which receded more. (see drawing) Present-day foreheads protrude more; the outer brain has: become more important. This is the thing which has changed. What is becoming more important in the brain is more like digestive organs than what is at the center. The peripheral brain is more like man's digestive organs than the delicate tissues in the whiter brain, that is, in the continuation of the sensory nerves into the center of the head. And metabolic organs are nourished from above.

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One can understand these things right down to the smallest details if one has the will to speak about certain things in the way that the Apocalypticer does when he says: Here is wisdom. Except that what is in the ordinary knowledge which is living and weaving among people today is not wisdom, but darkness. What one calls “scientific results” today is definitely the result of Kali Yuga; it is a total eclipse of the human mind. One should look upon this as a secret and not blare it out in the streets. Something is esoteric if it remains in a certain circle. You see, the growing of the new Jerusalem has already begun, has begun since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When man's earth period will be completely fulfilled he will not only be able to work heavenly substances into his body through his senses but he will also extend this heavenly substance to what will then be an outer city through what one calls spiritual knowledge and art—an extension of the body in the way that I explained. The old Jerusalem was built from below upwards, the new Jerusalem will really be built from above downwards. This is the tremendous perspective which arose from a vision, a super-colossal vision of the Apocalypticer. He became aware of this mighty thing: Everything arises here which men could build out of the earth upwards, as it were, and becomes concentrated in the old Jerusalem. This came to an end. He saw this rising up and this melting away in the old Jerusalem and he saw the approach of the human-being city, the new Jerusalem from above, from the spiritual worlds.

This is the goal, the last tendency of the revelation in the Apocalypse. In this respect it really contains Christian paths of humanity and Christian goals of humanity. If we try to understand them, we arrive at a certain peculiarity concerning the Apocalypse which some people have an inkling of although they can't quite understand it. Anyone who makes a serious effort to understand the Apocalypse cannot help asking himself: How do I do this? How do I get into this, how do I get into the idea about the old and new Jerusalem, what do I have to do in order to understand it? Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Apocalypse cannot help telling himself: I have to get into its content and I can't just continue to talk about images which have no content for me. In order to get into the content one needs a cosmology and a view of humanity which can only be given by a new Anthroposophy and by a real perception of' the spiritual world. One comes to Anthroposophy through the Apocalypse because one is using the means to understand the Apocalypse and because one notices: John received the Apocalypse from regions where Anthroposophy was before it came to human beings.

This is why one needs the transition; one has to understand the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way if one wants to understand it in an honest and serious way. You notice this most of all in something like the final goal, the new Jerusalem. However, you have to know the secrets about the building up of man from above and below better than science knows them. Then you can extend these ideas to the overall activity of men on earth, which is also from below upwards and which changes into one from above downwards. The building of the old Jerusalem will change into the spiritual building of the new Jerusalem from above downwards. People should grow into what is being built in a spiritual way not just in the exegetes' symbolical, theoretical, pictorial way but in such a way that the spirit becomes just as real for us as the material and physical was for thousands of years.

To the extent that you are worthy of it you will look upon the new Jerusalem as something which hangs down from above in just as real a way as the old Jerusalem stood on its foundations from below upwards, and you won't just take this in a pictorial way or in the way that the exegetes present it. This is something which one has to remember the Apocalypse contains no symbols, but references to quite concrete facts and to what happens, and not to something which just wants to indicate the events through symbols. That is the important thing. This is the way we have to feel and find our way into the Apocalypse. We will take this up again tomorrow.

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Dear attendees!

The German nation is engaged in a tremendously serious struggle. A struggle that shakes and throbs through all of us. A struggle in which a new wave of our nation's destiny is to be formed out of blood and out of acts of arms.

It is a time when, one might say, the furthest extremes of human feeling, human emotion, and human imagination collide, flowing through our hearts. Deep sorrow, which spreads over countless losses, pain and grief, blood – all this provides a kind of foundation, but one that is surmounted by an atmosphere of enthusiasm, an atmosphere of bliss at what the members of the German nation are able to do in order to to maintain and secure, in the face of the iron necessity imposed on them, that position in the world, that position within European culture, which they have inherited as a precious legacy from their fathers, as a precious legacy from the historical development of Europe itself. In such a time, in which a new destiny is being formed out of blood and military deeds: But the most important things of the present, of such a present, are spoken about in different words than those that can be spoken in such a reflection, as it is this evening. The weapons speak, of course in the figurative sense. Courage speaks, the bravery of those who are exposed to the great historical fields of our present events.

But especially in such a time everything must be close to us that is connected with the whole attitude, with all the tasks, with the whole feeling and will of the German people. Therefore, it may well be appropriate for us to devote an hour of reflection to that which can take shape in our soul when we turn our gaze to something that has developed not within the valor of arms, not within the arena of external events, but deep within the innermost being of the soul itself. But we feel, perhaps more than usual, especially in such a time, how – just as blood flows through all parts of the human organism, a blood flows through you – so a power, such an essence flows through all the expressions of life of the people. Therefore, in tonight's meditation, I would like to present as one of the symptoms of the German character what I would call the world view of German idealism.

I would like to present it as it has been incorporated into the various world views of the European peoples. The nations that are fighting with each other in our present time have also been touched in their interrelations by what the content of their worldview, their conception of life, is. And in this struggle of worldviews and conceptions of life, what can be called the worldview of German idealism has emerged. I would not, dear ladies and gentlemen, wish to fall into the tone in which Germany's enemies today fall when they endeavor to describe German thinking and German feeling to their own people. I think it is much more in keeping with the German character to let the facts speak for themselves. Especially in this area, where the most inner and sacred goods of the human soul are at stake. The judgment about the significance of the German people in the development of mankind can only be formed from a calm, serious, objective consideration of the facts of the spiritual development of mankind itself.

If we now consider the interrelationships of those nations with which the German people have come into contact in the course of their more recent struggle for a world view, if we consider these, then a central theme emerges from precisely that point of view which has been taken for years in these lectures, also in this city, from this place, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have been allowed to lecture every winter for years in this city as well.

If one wants to look into the soul of a nation, then it is necessary to first look at the essence of the individual human soul. I cannot discuss today in detail the thoughts that I have often expressed here about this individual human soul; I will only touch on them from the point of view that should lead to our reflection today. Particulars that are to be mentioned today will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. But by pointing out some of the things I have been allowed to say here over the years, also proving them from the foundations of spiritual science, it may be said that, before the eye of spiritual research, this human soul does not present itself as the vague surge of inner life, as which it so often presents itself to today's soul teaching, which is more influenced by a positivistic - as it were - view. Spiritual science regards this mixing up of all the individual expressions and structures of the soul life, as is often found in the external soul science of today, as just as unscientific and as unfruitful for a true contemplation of life as it would regard the failure to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen in scientific observation when one wishes to consider it in its connection with world phenomena. I have often said, as here, that just as the chemist breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen in order to be able to observe it in its context in the natural world, so the spiritual observer must explore the human soul in its , which is not an arbitrary abstraction, which does not correspond to a mere external judgment, but to a real experience of that which makes up the whole extent of human soul life.

The spiritual researcher must first divide this human soul life into a sum of those processes that he designates with the term sentient soul. This sentient soul is connected with the elementary effects of the human soul, with that which, I might say, is still directly released from the physical, the bodily. The sentient soul is connected with this; with that which still lies partly in our blood; with that which breaks away from our inner feelings to become impulses of our being, without us being able to completely radiate it with the light of our consciousness. The sentient soul is spiritual, but it is the part of the human soul that is most intimately bound to the body of all the human soul parts. But it is also the soul element that causes the human being to direct his soul outwards. It is the soul element that ensouls the senses: the eyes when they look out into the world that is to be observed by the human being; the other senses when they come into contact with the surrounding world.

A soul element that then breaks away more, that is already more permeated by human consciousness, by the inner intentionality of the human soul, that is less bound to the elementary of human physical nature, is the mind or emotional soul. Of course, on the one hand, dear honored attendees, this mind or emotional soul is freer from the outer physical nature than the sentient soul, but it is also poorer for it. All the richness that is poured into our soul life through the elemental impulses of our entire human nature being poured into the sentient soul is no longer present in the intellectual or mind soul. As a mind soul, it is inward, but it is more loosely connected to the whole extent of the outer life of nature.

The soul element in which the human being can best, I would say, fulfill his present task in this life through the activity inherent in him, is then the consciousness soul. It is the soul through which the human being most comprehends himself as a personality, most becomes aware of himself as an individuality in the world. It is the faculty by which man can develop the highest degree of consciousness in himself, by which he can know himself as a self. But it is the soul element that, because it is most inward, shows least how man is connected with all the depths of outer existence. It is the soul member that is most closely connected to the human conscience, to that which is most personal to the human being, and at the same time it is most devoted to what the human being designates and must designate as his useful purposes, which are satisfied in external existence.

Precisely in the same way, to use yet another comparison that shows how spiritual science thinks entirely in terms of natural science, precisely in the same way as there are seven colors in a rainbow, but we can trace them back to three —, just as there are three color shades in a rainbow and the observation of these three nuances does not correspond to some kind of amateurism, but to real science - the reddish-yellow nuance, the greenish nuance, the blue-violet nuance - so the triad of these nuances is present in the life of the soul: the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul. And just as the unified light is expressed through the nuances of the rainbow, so it is through the nuances of the soul, through the three, I could also say modes of activity of the human soul, that which we describe as the actual I, as the reality of the human inner being. Just as light appears through the yellow-reddish, through the green, through the blue-violet, so the I appears through the sentient soul, through the mind or emotional soul, through the consciousness soul.

Now, esteemed attendees, just as we can find this very structure in the individual human soul – as I said, I can only mention this today – so we can only truly get to know the souls of nations if we illuminate them from the point of view that we gain from this view of the human soul itself. We then gain the insight that, insofar as the souls of nations express themselves in the whole of human development, these national souls themselves are nuanced in such a way that one national soul expresses more the character of the sentient soul, another more the character of the mind or emotional soul, and yet another national soul more the character of the consciousness soul. It is really not an arbitrary way of looking at it. It is not, I might say, a forced abstraction when one regards the peoples of Western Europe, the Western and South-Western European peoples, in this way, according to the character of their folk souls. On the contrary: an unbiased study of the way in which the folk soul expresses itself leads to such a conception.

Let us now consider the soul nature of the Italian people from this point of view. Of course, dear readers, the individual stands out from his people when he strives to do so. But that is why there is a national character that bears the nuance of the national soul. There is no need to construct something arbitrarily, but only to go into what – if one has just one guiding thread from the knowledge of the human soul – naturally follows from the nature of the folk soul. Then the following consideration can be described as by no means unfruitful, as it seems to me.

The nuance of human soul nature that is expressed in the Italian soul can be described as the nature of the sentient soul. And if we, esteemed attendees, turn our gaze, our soul's gaze, to the cultural development that has been poured out on the peoples of Europe since the dawn of modern cultural development, since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, we find in it the opportunity to become acquainted with the various soul nuances and their mutual relationships and their mutual forces of influence, I would say, in an unbiased way. We find that in a very special way in the sixteenth century, there emerges that which one can say It is the task that was precisely the task of the Italian national soul, by virtue of the character of its sentient soul. Yes, precisely the greatest thing that came from this side, both from this time and from what immediately preceded this time, testifies to us that it has this character.

Let us take the personality who is so often referred to when speaking of the dawn of the modern world view. Let us take Giordano Bruno; he who fell victim to the fanaticism of the opposing world view of the sixteenth century. When we let the peculiar world-view of this man take effect on us, we feel in this personality the echo of what comes to us from Dante. We feel in it, in the world-view of Giordano Bruno, the echo of what comes to us in colors and in the richness of form from the painting of Raphael or Michelangelo. What do we find in all this? Just when you delve into the way in which Giordano Bruno presents himself to the world, how he presents himself to the world - placing himself in it, surveying the whole universe, breaking through what the medieval world view still saw as an outer boundary - how he breaks through the firmament of the space and pointing out into the infinite, as he could do it through his sensory activity inspired by inner feeling, so we can say to ourselves: He has conjured up this image of the world, which is as much scientific as artistic, out of direct perception, out of the same inner soul activity through which Dante, by virtue of his feelings, conjured that which he felt for the individual members of his people into the mighty image he created of the spiritual worlds into which the soul passes through the gate of death according to his vision. The essential thing – today we can only touch on this – in Giordano Bruno's world view, and also in the world view that his predecessor – from whom he adopted much, Telesius had, and also in the world view that Galileo wove into his world view, we see everywhere that the main emphasis is on directing the human being's attention to what external perceptions [and what] the sensory world gives. To explore this sensual world in such a way that one also uses all the powers of the mind, that is, the powers of the mind or soul, the powers of the consciousness soul, in order to achieve the sensual image in perfection. We see this as a task that opens up for us in this field of the culture of the national soul.

Thus we see a world picture emerging in southwestern Europe, which owes its greatness primarily to the fact that it is focused on external sensuality, and all the other powers of the soul that are not sensuality are used to arouse this sensuality in a pure way. This world view emerges from the elementary powers of the sentient soul.

And if we ascend to the Western peoples of Europe, and consider French culture from this point of view, we find expressed in it - I can only describe these things symptomatically today, by placing individual personalities before you as the living symptoms of historical development. If we look at this culture, we find a man like Cartesius, like Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, shaping into a world picture, I might say, the very essence of this culture. And if we engage with this world view, if we ask ourselves: what forces in the human soul shape this world view, in contrast to the forces of the sentient soul, which have just been cited for the Italian world view? We find that it is the powers of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling. Just as I might say that the Italian conception of the world is supposed to present to the human soul what I might call the purely sensuous nature, so the conception of the world of the scientific intellect, or what we may here call purely rationalistic judgments about the world, is supposed to form a conception of the world. The human mind, which is so directed to the finite in the human conception of the world precisely because it is placed in the finite human being, is cultivated by Cartesius: What are the sources of your certainty? How can you say something certain about that which is true, which is truthful, real? And because he draws from the sources of thought, from the rationality of human beings, Cartesius, Descartes, develops rationalism as - I would say - the characteristic expression of the French national soul. This intellect first of all attaches itself to that which is immediately present: to the human self itself, to the inner personality. It attempts to attain certainty of life and the world from this inner personality, from that power which in turn is most intimately connected with this personality. “I think, therefore I am!” the world-famous saying of Descartes. Man assures himself of his existence by becoming aware of his mind at work within him. He cannot doubt his mind. Therefore, he can find in his mind the sources of certainty that can be given to him.

But a world picture emerges from it, dear honored attendees, over which the whole nature of the mind is poured out. The mind has the peculiarity that it is, so to speak, a self-contained entity in itself and also in its setting in the human personality. It does not go beyond the boundaries of the human personality. I would like to say: Descartes also remains in a sense in thinking. He does not stimulate in himself the other powers of the soul, those powers of the soul through which we can let the whole human being flow into nature and its secrets, in order to feel and sense this nature and to live with it. Descartes remains in thinking, remains in ratio. This characterizes his entire world view. The characterization, which is particularly characterized, dear attendees, by the fact that Cartesius, by only focusing on self-assurance - on what his own thinking assures him of as certain - comes to believe that animals are only living machines. They are not ensouled like humans. The thinking that has become fixed in one's own personality - I would like to say - does not find the way out of itself to submerge lovingly into the outer nature. It does not even reach as far as the soul for the animal world. Soul-less machines, mechanisms, moving machines are the animals. [He penetrates even less to the essence of the other nature. To arrive at certainty, realism withdraws the means by which it could penetrate to the soul of all the rest of nature. One would like to say: This world view wanted to secure human truth; and in this way it secured it, that it renounced a way of living in nature.

Thus we see a world picture over which spreads – I would like to say – that which man finds in himself through his thinking. This world picture then worked through the whole French world-view development. We find it today in a certain sense in Bergson and Boutroux. Everywhere we see how people rely on what is supposed to follow only from human thinking. We see it emerge particularly characteristically at the end of the eighteenth century, [...] where it is expressed in the materialism of French thought as a worldview, which is basically the father of all theoretical materialism, [yes] of all materialistic worldviews of the most recent times; before which Goethe once by confronting it – and thus in the personality in whom the world view of German idealism was most vividly present – faced Goethe, by saying: There the world of moving atoms is presented to us. If we could at least see some reason why these atoms move, and if we could see why our whole beautiful, diverse and magnificent world with all its wonders arises from these moving atoms.

But materialism – so Goethe believes – [...] only lives in some concepts of moving atoms, and does not show – since it has no need to show – how connected that is, which it thus assumes to be behind the phenomena, with the great diversity and beauty of the world's phenomena! We see one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, rebelling against this materialist world view. This world view expresses the entire character of the intellectual soul or mind soul.

And if we look at British culture from this perspective, we find that this British culture, as it begins in more recent times, directly channels the power of the human soul to that which is spread out before human observation. We see how Bacon von Verulam appears - a personality who demands of the human soul in the most incisive way that it purify all that [which leads it away from what it can observe by being in the world, what it can observe with its senses - with the consciousness that is peculiar to us as human beings! Bacon wanted to cleanse the world view of all that man can bring into it through his mere thinking, through a deepening into his inner self.

Just as sensualism is the world view corresponding to the Italian national character; just as rationalism is the world view corresponding to the French national character, so is so-called empiricism, the focus on external reality, which of course initially only has a meaning for the human consciousness soul, for that in which the human being wants to place himself here as an earthly being with his conscious purposes. This outer reality, what is given in empiricism, as it is said, is the object of the outer consciousness soul. That is what one wants to gain when one looks at it in terms of its characteristic properties, the British world view, that is, all the content it can contain. And from the dawn of modern spiritual life up to Darwin and Spencer, up to the present English world view, we find this basic trait everywhere. But we see that in recent times, strangely enough, it has united with that which lives so truly in the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul, as I said earlier, sets out to get to know the human being through the purposes he pursues as an external being on earth in his immediate sensory surroundings. The consciousness soul focuses on these purposes. On what is useful to man. Let us look back at the example of Darwin. And we see from the form that Darwin gave to the theory of the development of the organic how the principle of usefulness is already being considered in the becoming of the beings. The beings arise and perfect themselves in the struggle for existence. How in the struggle for existence? Because the being that is organized in such a way that it is most useful to itself displaces the others.

It is characteristic that the emergence of the so-called pragmatism – this name was coined in England and more recently in America – is the latest form of the world view prevailing there. What is this pragmatism? It asks: Yes, to what extent can a person, who wants to approach truth through thought, arrive at the truth? It was felt quite intensely that one cannot actually educate oneself with one's soul powers through mere thoughts. Yes, but what are mere thoughts? What are thoughts that a person can form when he looks at phenomena? Is there a world of thoughts that one could say are real? Man goes through the world, so they say, he looks at things. He thinks about them. Is there somehow a power that forms the truth in man? So pragmatism asks. - No, man cannot find such an external power. But man forms concepts, and he can then have them. How can he have them? In such a way that they enable him to summarize the phenomena of the world in a purposeful way. This pragmatism does not seek some background of a source of truth, but it seeks to form such a conception that is expedient for summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena, thereby summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena in the best possible way. This is a concept that can be perceived because it serves to summarize the phenomena. There is no other source of truth.

When we speak, for example, of a unity in the human soul's manifestation – we can assume this unity from what has been said – then we can summarize the individual expressions of the human soul in a purposeful way.

When we speak of gravity, we do not do so because of any inner truth. There is nothing else that prompts us to speak of gravity when we form the concept of gravity, other than the fact that it corresponds to the purpose of summarizing many phenomena that we encounter in the world under one unifying concept. Utility pours over the whole human striving for a world view within pragmatism.

I did not in any way attempt to characterize the facts from any point of view of sympathy or antipathy, but I tried to identify the guiding thread of the worldviews of the three nationalities according to the nuance of soul that expresses itself in the corresponding people, in the corresponding culture. One can see that what I have briefly characterized – and this is why it can only appear arbitrary – but precisely if one were to go deeper, all arbitrariness would disappear, it could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the worldviews of the respective peoples could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the world view of the peoples concerned – testifies to us: Italian culture has particularly developed the sentient soul character; French culture the rational mind or mind soul character; British culture the consciousness soul character.

Now let us turn our gaze to the center of Europe. Let us try to let this soul's gaze briefly roam over those phenomena that also present themselves to us within the last period of human development. This new period announces itself in a peculiar way. There we see, I might say, in a world view of beauty, Giordano Bruno creating out of a purified sensualism, in a state of drunken sensuality. But at the same time, there we see in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century in France, Montaigne creating out of the intellectual or emotional soul a world view of pure doubt. Here we see, in Montaigne, I might say, in a different way, less ingeniously, less philosophically than in Descartes, but in him, how one of the most significant signs of this culture is expressed. We see how he is confined to what man alone is capable of thinking, to what is connected with his thinking; but at the same time, he senses that this thinking is limited in its validity as truth by the fact that it dwells only within us. This gives him doubt about the external sense world. That is why Montaigne says: Yes, the external senses provide us with a certain image of the external world. But does it have to be true? We have no means of knowing, for we can only believe our reason. But we have no means in it of proving that something is not revealing itself that is something quite different from what we can suspect behind the sensory phenomena. The sensory phenomena can be deceptive. But can what we have in reason tell us the truth either? We see that we want to prove something in our reason. But soon we come to realize how deceptive this reasoning was in us. Now we have to prove what we have proved all over again. And that presents itself to us immediately, as if from this or that point of view. But it is questionable. We begin to demand a proof of the proof of the proof. The true sage, says Montaigne, is the only one who doubts everything, who goes through the world with a soul that can bear doubt.

And in the field of world view, the Italian's and the Frenchman's contemporary is precisely Bacon, who wants to refer the human soul, as I have characterized it, to that which is purely the object of external utility. This contemporary of his, regardless of what objections one might otherwise have against him, regardless of what point of view one might take: it is characteristic of the development of Central Europe, characteristic of the development of German folk culture, this personality – a contemporary of Giordano Bruno, intoxicated, as it were, with sensuality, of the doubter Montaigne, of Bacon, who referred to mere external empiricism, is Jakob Böhme, the profound German mystic. He – who, while Giordano Bruno wants to connect the drunken mind with the whole world, the outer sensual infinity of the world, who, while Montaigne wants to find man alone wise when he is able to doubt everything, the contemporary of Bacon – is Jakob Böhme, [the contemporary contemporary of just that Bacon] who, when he wants to point man to the truth, points him away from everything he might possibly imagine or develop within himself, and points him to the mere intellectual and conceptual summarization of the phenomena of the consciousness soul. The contemporary of these three, who all point man outward, is Jakob Böhme, who at the same time turned his inner path toward those realms that the human soul can enter when it becomes fully conscious of itself in its deepest inwardness.

And let us turn to this wonderful world picture of Jakob Böhme. We see how this contemporary of Montaigne, the greatest modern doubter, seeks certainties borne inwardly by the deepest soul faculties in a purely spiritual, supersensible world, in a world of human inwardness, which he knows at the same time, because it is human inwardness, to be the inwardness of that which confronts us in the external world, in outer existence. The great affinity of that which man finds when he reaches most deeply into his inner being, with that which man finds when he roams most widely through the whole extent of outer existence, that is what Jakob Böhme wants to show, out of the German soul.

The greatest seeker of certainty – a contemporary of the greatest doubters. The greatest believer in human inwardness, and at the same time the greatest denier of what human inwardness might assert with certainty about any phenomenon in the world. We see emerging at the dawn of the newer development of the world a mind that has arisen out of the culture of the German people and that wants to go to the center of the soul's being and, from the activity of this center, wants to illuminate all that lives in the lives in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul or mind, in the consciousness soul, like light in the color nuances that appear to be externally divided into reddish-yellow, greenish, and bluish-violet. A culture of the I, a culture that finds its way into the human interior, seeks because it is clear that if you dive deep enough into this human interior, you will find in these depths, in the abyss of the human interior, the gateway to what is still behind what the drunken science of Giordano Bruno finds as the exterior. Jakob Böhme knows how to find the inner core of this outer appearance for himself, in accordance with his attitude and the tenor of his world picture, by descending into his own inner being. Thus, in the heart of Europe, at the dawn of the newer evolution of humanity, we find a world picture that mysticism has sensitively characterized.

Even if we consider it imperfect from our present-day point of view, ... we find that it sets the tone for the development of world-view, showing us - as I said, it is not intended to present any dogmatic world-view, only to characterize the development - how the German worldview strives to seek the forces that it is supposed to shape in the human ego, which is aware of immersing itself in the spirit of the universe when it only delves deeply enough, in the human ego, in the intimate, in the innermost nature of the human soul itself. And we find this character, ladies and gentlemen, held throughout the more recent development.

He who stands as it were as the first cornerstone of this newer Central European, this newer spiritual world-view development is much misunderstood: Kant. It often seems to people as if Kant had wanted to put forward a world-view of doubt, a world-view of uncertainty. But in another way, what Kant wanted has also been formed from the depths of the human being's ego nature. And now something very peculiar in the newer development comes to light. As I said, I only want to emphasize the facts, let the developments be characterized by an at least striving - I don't know how far I will achieve it, but at least striving - impartiality towards the facts. One thing in particular comes to us from this German development. That which must inspire man in his innermost being, although it is not directly real, is placed in the focus of the soul: the idea, the ideal.

The most alien thing to the times in which Kant lived and the culture from which Kant emerged would be the British view of today, as expressed in the British world view: that truth should have no other source [than the expediency for which external phenomena are to be summarized]. For absolutely valuable, so that no doubt, nothing that could somehow take away certainty, should approach it, absolutely certain is that which makes human life valuable, although it is not an external sensual reality, that is the idea, that is the ideal. This world view felt that ideas and ideals reach into the human soul and give the human soul the highest value. No matter whether the human soul attains such a high value from nature or from some other source, it attains the highest value through the fact that ideas can be present in it. And now, more or less unconsciously, Kant was already living with the impulse to eliminate everything that did not want to recognize the absolute, unconditional validity of the ideas, their highest value for the human soul. He found that A science has been developed, a world view has emerged that is based on the sensory world. But man cannot, with the powers that come from his soul, grasp this sensual world view in such a way that he can get to its direct sources — if I may use the pedantic word, but it is from Kant himself —, to the “thing in itself”. So Kant tried to get to the bottom of this sensuality, this external reality, as it presents itself to the human senses, to bring clarity to it. He examines the human soul life in his own way. He finds: What presents itself as the sensory world is not the immediate reality. And the human soul is not at all able to penetrate into the immediate reality with the powers it has. Only through those forces that are the forces of the idea, the forces of the ideal, can it experience reality directly within itself. And so we see the remarkable thing about Kant: that he does not, as is often believed, want to present a world view of doubt, of groundlessness, of non-recognition, but that he was seeking a world view that would remove all doubt by making it clear that we cannot know anything about the senses, but because we cannot know anything, we can give all the more to the fact that what projects into our soul life as an idea, as an ideal, has an unconditional value. Sensuality must not disturb us in our contemplation of the absolutely valuable, the idea, the ideal, by the certainty it has. Kant does not present a world view of doubt, but a world view that seeks to eliminate doubt from the world. However, he does come to say that he must fight knowledge. Kant says it in order to make room for faith. At first, he only believes that a kind of faith can unfold for that which enters the human soul in an idealized way; but that is precisely what characterizes him: the ideal, the idea, is so valuable to him that he himself dethrones knowledge for its sake, in order to provide this ideal with the right throne, the right world standing.

And now we see how the individual heroes of the world view of German idealism follow. We see how directly the – I would say – very own national philosopher of the Germans, how directly Johann Gottlieb Fichte, embraces this Kantian world view. Let us look back at rationalism, at the purely intellectual world view of Descartes, which represents the original form of the world view of French popular culture: “I think, therefore I am”. In thinking, something is seen that can be trusted as a source of certainty. But from this thinking one must conclude – but I don't want to get involved in philosophical ravings now or have to come to it by some other means than by conclusion – that this thinking is based on a being, a first being that can be recognized by thinking, that can be looked at, because it proves that it must be there because one thinks. It is there, because one thinks, because thinking emerges from it. All this, if you look at it carefully, is so utterly alien to Fichte's remarkable, magnificent – I would even say heroic, in a world-view sense – soul. Fichte creates a completely different view of the human inner being, of the deepest soul. One that is still extremely difficult to understand today. For Fichte does not want to arrive at the soul, at the ego, by grasping it in its being. Rather, Fichte wants to grasp being [in its being generated] as an act of doing, that is, in order for me to experience my ego as me, I must continually create myself. In the moment when I lose the creative powers in me, when I cannot, out of unknown depths, place myself in a direct existence for my inner being, I am no longer an ego. With that, the thought, the “I think” is submerged in the will. And the inseparable unity of will and thought is made the basis of the human ego. At the same time, the characteristic of the self refers to something that is in a state of constant creation, of constant activity. You are only with yourself if you bring about this state of being with yourself every moment. To the extent that you can and do create yourself, in every moment of your sensual-physical and intellectual existence, you are a self.

What does Fichte, the most national of German philosophers, want? He wants to grasp the center of human existence, and he wants to grasp it in such a way that he does not develop in it a lasting, an actually lasting, [that he seeks a] unchanging being, but a continually active, a never resting. The human being, who is then his own creature. The most wonderful thing about strength, about human capacity, placed at the center of the soul's light, appears to us at the same time as the center of Fichte's world view. And here at this center, Fichte wants to grasp the self-generating I, the I that is endowed not only with the ability to think about its being, but with the ability to continually will itself. Here he wants to grasp at the same time, not in an existence that one wants to seek behind appearances, that one wants to seek here or there through some other science, but in the volition that the ego itself generates, Fichte wants to seek what lives within, in this human volition, in this human inner activity, through which the ego continually generates itself: the idea, the ideal. The I generates itself, and into this stream of self-generation the idea, the ideal, pours itself. Into this stream of self-generation the most intimate coexistence of the divinely high ideal, the divinely pure idea, with what man calls his most intimate inner experience, pours itself directly into it.

And now, I would say, Fichte advances to what is perhaps the boldest – there is, of course, much that is debatable, but still: boldest – thought that a thinking world view, a merely thinking world view, has ever conceived. Fichte looks at this self-creating I, at this I that is in the one moment because it creates itself, but does not merely sustain this being now until the next moment, but also lives through its deeds in the next moment, and in the next moment again, which never rests, always creating itself - Fichte looks at this I, and in it he now finds his reality. True reality must be measured by the standard of this reality. What, as we have just seen, intrudes into this I? As this I creates, ideas and ideals flow into its creative powers. They are the absolute valuable.

But now this I, with the help of the bodily organization, confronts the external sense world. This external sense world is permanent, it is something that cannot create itself, and is therefore less real than the I, which is constantly creating itself. Why then does the I, this absolutely creative I, enter the less real sense world? Because this I, with the ideas, the ideals, with the moral duty - which flows into the ideas, the ideals, into this I - needs a field of activity to live itself out. For Fichte, the world of the senses is not there for its own sake, but, as he says, as a sensitized material for the reception of duty, that is, of ideas and ideals. For Fichte, the world is there because duties, ideas, and ideals are paramount in spiritual life, and because these ideas and ideals need a world of the senses in order to be active. Thus the world of sense must be there as the consequence of ideas and ideals. Today we need not go into what we have on our soul, perhaps against the scope or the fundamental truth of such a world view; we only want to go into the way of the people's striving. We want to go into what strives within the soul power of the people to recognize the truth. We want to trace the character of this popular striving in the time that preceded the one in which the German people created their state, the external structure of their activity, which they must now defend with blood and arms, but which they created because they drew the strength to do so from what preceded this state, but which is rooted in the deepest peculiarity of the German national soul. And from this point of view, let us also direct our gaze to the man who has now continued Fichte in a certain way, who has worked alongside Fichte, after Fichte, the much-tried Schelling.

To focus on that which forms Fichte's basic essence, on a world view that is above all permeated by the ideas and ideals that flow into human beings and that require external sensuality to because the ideas and ideals - to fill out the world view - need an object within which they can operate, building on this Fichtean premise, Schelling also delved into this center, into the human ego. That center, where, according to Fichte's view, this thinking is linked to the soul of the world. But Schelling, he feels differently than Fichte. To him it seems prosaic, it seems abstract to name all of nature with all its diversity, with all that delights our senses, with all that promotes our welfare, our happiness, with all that the mind so gladly, so willingly immerses itself in, from which it draws so draws so much from — that which spreads out in the wide, visible nature —, that only looks at it from the point of view that it is there to give a sensualizing material to the duty, to the spiritual in the world picture, which flows into the ego; Schelling finds this impossible in view of his attitude. He has, I would say, too much German feeling in him.

Fichte's greatness is German willpower. Schelling's greatness is the German mind, which lovingly wants to engage with the smallest and the greatest phenomena of nature, with that which pours gloriously through space, that which spreads out in time. But while he wants to penetrate into every detail with a loving mind, he is also clear about one thing: certainty, security, true reality can only be found where you immerse yourself in yourself, where you can find the union of the human soul with the world soul in your own self. What you seek there and [...] find, you find because you experience it directly, because you experience it in such a way that, by being, you are at the same time with you [...] as that which, as true reality, pulses through life. What you can find in yourself, you will never find in outer nature. Therefore, fill yourself with that within you which can be a reflection of that which is most profound in this external nature as well. And so, what Schelling experienced within grew to such an extent that when he observed nature, he merged with the external existence of nature. Thus, nature itself became soul-like and spiritual to him. So Schelling looks into nature and says to himself: the essence of the human soul rests within it. But when I look out into nature, it is the same essence. I look at the stone: it has something, is connected with something, which is like the essence of the human soul; it only has it enchanted in form, in external nature; it has brought it into forms. And so the plant world in all its diversity. And so the animal world. And so also the outer physical human world. If I want to express myself figuratively: for Schelling it becomes as if - before the human soul entered this physical existence - a world spirit soul deeply related to the human soul... that which the human soul only and feels within itself, had first spread out before itself in forms, so that the human soul can see itself here twice..., and its essence poured out, magically poured out in space and in time, as it lives outside in nature.

But then Schelling says to himself, if that is so, if this nature is an enchanted soul-being, then I must find - when I experience nature by fully putting myself in the place of every single being, in every single form of life - the spirit of nature living out itself everywhere. But I do not find it by looking at nature dull. I must create it. My soul must create out of my soul that which lives most deeply in animal, plant and stone. My soul must put itself in that place and thereby create it. Hence Schelling's bold expression: to comprehend nature is to create nature.

And thirdly, we see the person who most fully developed this world view of German idealism, albeit only in abstract thoughts that are difficult for some to grasp. We see Hegel, the man from Stuttgart, the profound one, the most profound of the three. We can call Fichte the most powerful, the man of the German will, Schelling the man of the German mind, we can call Hegel the man of German reason itself. While Schelling immerses himself in nature, but only by taking the creative power of the ego with him, in order not just to comprehend nature, but to create nature out of the human soul through contemplation, Hegel wants to, as it were, from the soul, from what it is directly, from the universe that it creates for itself according to the Fichtean ego being, from which he wants to penetrate into what the soul is together with the deepest world thoughts. From the individual spirit, from the individual ego, Hegel wants to go to the world spirit, which is connected at one point with the individual spirit of man.

From the human ego to the world ego, Fichte sought a human essence that has within itself the power to continually generate and thus to develop and educate itself. Schelling seeks in the human being the power that can create in the ideal world picture that which is inherent in nature, while Hegel seeks in the human soul that which can receive the divine world spirit in itself, where it can hold a dialogue with this divine world spirit. While Schelling wants to pour the whole human soul into the soul-like nature, Hegel wants to sink all of this human soul-like nature into the essence of the world spirit, into the essence of the world soul. And he is clear about one thing: when the soul looks beyond what is outwardly spreading, when it lives completely with itself, then it communes with the world spirit. Then that which lives in it as concept, as idea, as ideal, is that which the world spirit lets flow into it. And by going from idea to idea, developing the whole organism of ideas that it can develop, the soul does not merely follow itself, no, it is aware that when it withdraws from all externality in this way, it unites with the world spirit. She does not think for herself, the world spirit itself thinks its thoughts in her. I surrender myself to the thinking of the world spirit, to the rule of world reason. As a result, the whole organism of the world idea - the world view of German idealism - spreads in the soul.

We can certainly say, esteemed attendees, that Fichte sought the human ego in its power, in its self-creative activity, but he remained - and because a greatest is boldly striven for, this greatest - I would say — itself the error of its virtue, it has its one-sidedness. Fichte stopped at this self-creative of the ego at something, so that one must say, at the point where he stopped, because the human soul actually creates itself only as a knowing being. It is therefore characteristic that Fichte calls what he has created as philosophy, as a world view, the theory of knowledge. The way Fichte grasps this self-creative I is actually only the knowing human being. But for us it is the path that matters, not a dogma, not an absolute truth, but the search for the German national soul. One would like to say: All that is spread out in this human nature, in that it experiences the whole fullness of the world of feeling, that the whole of outer nature is mirrored in it, all that is formed in the totality of the human inner soul life, with its deep pain, its high bliss and deep suffering, it is not directly explainable in the way in which the self-creative I is active in Fichte. The only thing that can be explained is – I would like to say – the knowing I. If man were to stand in the world as a knower, as a mere recognizer, if man's only task in the world were to have knowledge, then it would be as Fichte thought. But we see a wonderful development of strength in the fact that, on the one hand, all thinking, all research, all reflection is devoted to incorporating this one impulse into the world view of German idealism. Even if Fichte believed that he was answering all the riddles of the world, he did not answer them in their entirety, but he did show the one thing: How does man, as a cognizer, as a knower, as one who investigates the world, stand before himself? And how is he, as a knowing human being, connected to the sources of existence? To place this nuance in the world view of German idealism was, after all, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's task.

In Schelling, we find how the whole of external nature becomes something for him – I would like to say – that stands before his soul as a human physiognomy stands before our soul. We do not merely perceive it by describing individual lines, by characterizing its expression, but we perceive it in such a way that we perceive the soul speaking through it in it, in its inwardness, and allow ourselves to be affected by what is behind the physiognomy as the soul-like. Thus, what is spread out before man in nature, in its wonderfully deep unity, becomes the great physiognomy of the world soul that Schelling tried to decipher. But because he sets out in the strictest sense of the word to create everywhere: by enjoying nature and observing it, he can only create as much as was already revealed by nature according to the character of his time. This general character of human soul-creation, insofar as the soul-like is a reflection of nature's creation, that is what Schelling reveals. But while man stands in relation to nature in such a way that all his deepening of his soul life cannot replace for him the direct experience, the loving engagement with phenomena, insofar as one can observe them, Schelling believes that he can create more from within about nature than the mere predisposition for observation. Once again, with the error of a great spiritual virtue, he grasps a nuance of the world view of German idealism in a one-sided way!

Hegel seeks to experience the ruling world spirit itself in the human soul. He seeks to have such thoughts in the soul, such a developing reason, as if the world spirit itself were made to speak in the soul. But Hegel remains one-sided. For him, this world spirit does not appear as the one [that in all activity, at one time imparts the essence of the activity of the one being and at another time, in another activity, reveals a different essence.] In Hegel this world spirit appears as the great logician, who alone unfolds the details of the world's reason, and the world's reason becomes the only all-existing. But to present this single thing in its characteristic before the world, to incorporate this nuance into the world view of German idealism, this mistake of a great virtue, this one-sidedness, was necessary to grasp the thought in its highest degree: Man, when he plunges into his inner self, can depart from his ego to such an extent that he is so powerfully active in his ego that he extinguishes this ego itself, so that the world spirit may shine forth in him! In order to grasp this thought with the greatest intensity, it had to be grasped in this one-sided way. For in the search for truth, it is the power of comprehension that matters most to us, and not that the world spirit itself be conceived like a mere logician.

But we also see, we also know, honored attendees, how these three nuances in the world view of German idealism are intimately connected with the entire spiritual striving of the German people. For when this world-evolution of the German people was to be shaped into a personality, when the deepest, most intimate and at the same time most comprehensive and most living human and spiritual striving of this people was to be embodied in Goethe, then, I might say, he embodied in synthesis what had emerged with the greatest emphasis of one-sidedness in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But at the same time, by building up thoughts, I might say, with all the inwardness of the human soul and with all the powers of natural existence, living through them in the image of the human striving personality itself in Faust, [by characterizing him in such a way that as Goethe did] depict it, the universality of the human soul's striving for light could only emerge in modern times from [that] folk culture, which seeks the light at the center of the soul's life, while the other modern cultures seek the individual color nuances of the soul. We see, but we see the nature of the human ego as it is always creatively active, as it must intervene in every subsequent moment to create its being anew, to transform itself. We see this distinctly - only in all its broad vitality and in full abundance - I would say - the merely ideal in the human being embodied in Faust, in that Faust whose motto is: “Whoever strives, we can redeem him!” In that Faust, who is indeed presented to us as being in the concrete, in the immediately elementary, striving for what Fichte presents as theory. So that this Faust-I continually creates itself throughout the entire plot of Faust in order to successively insert its I into other spheres, other fields of world existence, in order to become related to other spheres, to other fields of world existence.

And we see how Schelling lives as a nuance, Schelling's view as a nuance in “Faust”. Schelling stands before nature, as before the great magician, and experiences: even if it is an illusion, it is an illusion to ignite a great aspiration; I say not to depict, but to ignite. Schelling stands before nature as if he could create it from within by wanting to understand it. Understanding nature means creating nature – and we see Faust transformed into the living, into the fullness of human existence. Faust, as he wants to reach “all life force and seed”. How he longs with all his might, which itself is magical power, to grasp that which creates and lives in nature, to unite with it, to unite with the spirit of nature. He wants the spirit, the spirit of life, which “swells and ebbs in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” to stand before him. He does not seek to create nature, he seeks to understand, he seeks that which creates in nature, as the world and deed genius.

Schelling sought in an abstract way in his soul the creator in nature. Faust sought the center in nature, where the essence is to be found, which, as the creator, stands in opposition to the created. Like Schelling, he wants to achieve a living force that creates as nature does. Faust, on the other hand, seeks to reveal such a being that flows and surges from one individual being to another in nature and shows us not only what has been enchanted and created, but also what lives in everything created as a creator.

And just as Hegel, as a philosopher, incorporated his nuance of reason, which is supposed to be the conversation of the world spirit itself in the individual human soul, into the world view of German idealism, so we see - and this in turn is implemented in the living so admirably in the whole striving of Faust - we see, as the goal that appears to us, what man can experience in his inmost being when he has always endeavored, when he has become akin to all the self-creative powers that the I continually creates and fathoms, but thereby continually develops, ceaselessly develops. When man has gone through this, when he has knocked at those gates through which nature unlocks its creativity, when he has found the spirit that he addresses as “Exalted Spirit, you gave me everything, everything” - in other words, the spirit that the creator stands vis-a-vis the created – he comes through all possible stages of human development to the one where he is able, when his eyes are closing, when he goes blind, when he is standing directly before death, to unite with the world spirit. Admittedly, Goethe touches here on an inner experience of the union of the human soul with the world spirit, which in its abundance and experiential content infinitely transcends the mere abstraction of Hegel's reasoning world spirit. But the attitude is the same in both cases.

We could cite many more examples, and we would see everywhere the German way of seeking the foundations and sources that underlie ideas and ideals, so as to have the world not merely as a symbol before the external senses, but as a weaving, surging world picture of ideas and ideals. And like this world picture of German idealism, such a shaping of this knowledge demands that it can say: Yes, all external sensuality is such that what stands as the most valuable for the soul life can intervene: the ideas and ideals originating from the divine sources of the world. In this way, in the sense of human striving within German culture, that which strives towards the world view of German idealism places itself within the other world views. And I believe that the German may objectively describe as his striving what has been characterized there, without his being able to believe that the slanderous accusations now made by his enemies have any value. He may say: He does not seek the individual color nuances of the soul; he seeks what - like the light shining through the individual color nuances - shines through and flows through these individual color nuances as the innermost, as the best of the human soul.

And one can indeed say, dear attendees, that when one points to this world view of German idealism, one reveals something that cannot live in every soul. Certainly, it appears that way; but two things must be emphasized. I can only hint at these two things, but they could also be explained further if one goes into the phenomena that were just pointed out. So great, so powerful was the will in this striving for the world view of German idealism, in the time of Germany, which was the most significant time of idealistic struggle – as our present time will undoubtedly appear as the most significant time of real struggle – so this world view of German idealism in Germany's most ideal time seems to present itself to our minds that we can say: What the people who have endeavored to achieve worldviews and the most diverse tasks in the nineteenth century and up to the present day within our culture have done, was to try to penetrate from different points in order to understand these individual representatives of the worldview of German idealism more precisely. Even their opponents were always somehow trying to penetrate this world view from different angles, at least to fight and struggle with it. And whatever world views and attitudes towards life have developed since then, we can feel the pulse of German idealism everywhere, even from opposing points of view. We can feel it to this day. We feel it as something that belongs to the best of the German character, to that which is realized in this German character. We feel it as one of the most characteristic expressions of the German essence. We feel it as that which symptomatically denotes the greatness and power of the German mission, and which may be so designated because there is truly in such a designation a striving that cannot make this designation appear as megalomania, but that the fullest modesty is connected with this characteristic.

Thus we see that we are still standing inside – and to what extent we are standing inside, I will have to elaborate on tomorrow in the lecture – we see how we are standing inside with all our striving in the full revelation of what was struck at that time, what was struck by individuals. That is the one thing I want to emphasize: the greatness of the world view of German idealism. Above all, it is connected with what has been done to this day by those who strove for a conception of the world and of life, and what will be done for those who follow in this sense for a long time to come.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that every impulse of a worldview that enters the worldview initially occurs in a few people. And the way it occurs is not decisive for the way it works. But if one delves into it, not intellectually, but rather in terms of feeling and emotion, not in terms of dogma, but in terms of the will, in terms of the particular orientation that underlies the world view of German idealism, then one finds that there is something in it that can still be lived out, that can still be developed, that one can say: something can arise from it that bears no resemblance to the difficult-to-understand arguments of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, something that can develop in such a way that it can be easily understood by the simplest mind.

Dear attendees! It is only through years of immersing myself in this world view of German idealism that I have come to the full conviction that there is something in it that can be implanted in human nature from childhood on, that there is a trinity to which the human being can be educated, to a feeling of self-creation in the I, which directly gives the human being - I would like to say - in all his striving a religious trait, as was the case with Fichte. Not Fichte's philosophy, but the forces that lived in Fichte's philosophy, to let them take effect on oneself, and to transfer them to general culture, to the simple man, to each individual, that will be possible one day. To become aware that something lives in the human soul that is intimately related to nature, to that which lives in the innermost part of nature, this special attitude towards nature, this life with the mind towards nature, this feeling of oneself in — The tendency of Hegel is that man can descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue there with the world soul itself. Hegel's tendency for man to be able to descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue with the world soul itself, that when he becomes free from the life in the outer natural and sensual world, he can hear his harmony with the world spirit resound spiritually within him, this attitude towards the divinely active, ruling world spirit, that will, without the Hegelian world view with the logical character perhaps even being known, be encouraged in the simplest soul by the person to whom one wants to transfer what I mean.

The world view of German idealism, not as it is dogmatic, but as it has been lived as a goal, as a spiritual impulse, can become popular. And however paradoxical and strange it may sound, the effect that this world view of German idealism can have on a human soul, what it can trigger in a human soul, how it can attune this human soul spiritually, sensually, working, creating in everyday life, is just as possible as the deeper meaning of the Grimm fairy tales becoming part of the human soul. It is no more difficult to live together intimately with the sense of the Grimm fairy tales, with the sense of the German folk tale, the German folk legends, than with the sense of that which lives in the world view of German idealism. But this points us to a development of that to which this world view of German idealism is the root, into far-off futures. And what is destined to develop will develop, however many those circling around Germany, around the German people, those who want to fight against the existence of the German people. The great trust that the German can have in his future can arise from the insight into what he has tied to his most sacred, to his national feeling.

And so, from the feeling that can be absorbed from the world view of German idealism, from what has been striven for and from the fact that these forces that could strive for such things are in the German nation, the great confidence that the German has in his further development, which he may express in the confidence that he may have in all the difficult struggles and the terrible struggles in which he is involved, and could still be involved. In this way, without resorting to sympathy or antipathy, and above all without resorting to antipathy, preconceived notions or hatred for what other national souls have to shape, one can describe the peculiar character of German national striving, as it expresses itself in one of its blossoms, in the world picture of German idealism, and one can say: Those who can understand something like that will understand whether the German people have a mission peculiar to them, to which they must cling, regardless of their nationality. Whether there is much understanding for this world view of German idealism in our time, especially among our enemies, is another question. And again: by speaking about this world view of German idealism, the German can at the same time show that he can speak differently, can speak from the spiritual facts, and that this is different from the way in which many of those who want to dispute the German's existence speak today, who have imposed on him the necessity of a fierce struggle for this existence.

I think, esteemed attendees, that the German need only emphasize in such a way what is most profound in his world view - and in nothing disintegrate those slanders that also encircle Germany, that encircle the German people. Let us see how differently one must speak in the context of the German essence. It is also a simple fact. Esteemed attendees! What, for example, did the inhabitants of Britain have to invent to justify what is expressed in their current struggle? How did the Germans merely have to point out that the necessity of their struggle for existence was imposed on them, whereas the inhabitants of Britain had to point out? They had to point to something that cannot be described as anything other than a mask. Could they point to something about which the German can say: he had to create the German state in the last decades, after the German, out of his nature, had worked towards this state until then? Could the inhabitants of Britain justify the necessity of their existence in the way they created it through the Boer War, in about the same way as the German can justify what the German does today as the consequence of the war of 1870/71? The true reasons had to be masked there. That the struggle for freedom of other nations is not the ideal there, one need only refer to the history of Britain.

The French had to – and this is again not something that arises from some kind of hatred, but from the mere characterization, from the mere objective characterization of the facts – invent a new sophistry through the minds of Bergson and Boutroux, who characterize the German world view by wanting to conclude from the innermost character – as Boutroux wanted in a lecture he gave to his French audience, based on this German world view – that, by its very character, it is a world view that wants to conquer everything in the world, that wants to clash with everything in a warlike manner.

Bergson had to invent his own philosophical sophistry to show how France's struggle against the German essence is a struggle of the spirit against matter, a struggle of civilization against barbarism. We see a completely new sophistry blossoming.

Russia has prepared herself well for what she needed to do in order to prepare in a corresponding way for what now threatens the German essence from there. Russia needs a new term for her old delusion, so as not to point to her mission as a matter of course, as the Germans do, but to point to something that lives as a delusion. Now, again, it is not the intention here to make a characterization from the outside, but because I naturally do not have the time to characterize in detail the extent to which the striving that threatens us from the East is a delusion, I would like to cite another key witness, a spirit who must know this, a spirit who is most deeply rooted in modern Russian intellectual life, the great Soloviev, who is placed in the nineteenth century and who – I would like to say – brings the whole of Russian intellectual life together as if in a philosophical focus for reflection. He speaks of how another spirit of Russia summarizes Russia's world-historical mission in the words: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Danilevsky poses this question. And he says:

“Europe fears us as the new and higher type of culture, called to replace the decrepitude of Romance-Germanic civilization.”

These words express the entire delusion of the East. It should not be denied that the seeds germinating in the East contain magnificent and powerful seeds for the future of humanity. In the way they are now living, I will characterize it by reading Solowjow's, the great Russian's, answer to this characteristic of Danilewski:

“Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions and those of his like-minded friend”

- meaning a certain Strakhov -

"Europe looks at us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but because its demands are clear and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India.

The great Russian Solowjow characterized the comprehensive Russophobia long before it had been reborn in a new form, long before it had been reborn in the form that it currently poses as a threat from the East. And then he continues:

“And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and lost, how we propose to bless humanity, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we can bring into world evolution, then we must either remain silent or spout senseless phrases.”

I do not want to say this; one of the greatest of Russian minds characterizes what appears to be a Russian delusion from the East, thus.

“And,”

he continues,

“If Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill”

written in the 80s of the nineteenth century,

"then, instead of asking ourselves why Europe does not love us, we should rather be asking ourselves a different, more important question that is closer to us: why and how did we become ill? Russia is still quite physically strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, in the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and of which we are not aware - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness."

Written in the 80s of the nineteenth century!

“As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.”

The question may arise: Is this the Russian patriot who has ignited the present war with the ideals of the madness that Soloviev rejects here, or is it Soloviev who, in this way, vigorously points out what Russia needs and what most certainly could not have led to this war?

Italy, to justify what it has developed from its world conquest plan as its current actions – it would have to be much too detailed, one would come to far too much detail if one wanted to somehow characterize the strange words of d'Annunzio, but I think one will be able to add the whole peculiarity of what sounds like a justification from there to the justification of the opposing states, if one merely points out the one thing: The Italian people were looking for a justification for their current actions, and many, many words were spoken; but one in particular was always mentioned, which indicates that The French need a new sophistry, the English need a new mask, the Russians need their old delusion, and the Italians need – a new saint. Through completely profane means, egoism has been canonized! For the word of “holy egoism” as the justifying essence of that which arises from below is repeatedly heard by us anew.

It can be left to objective judgment to decide whether this – as one may speak of the innermost part of the German, as in the sense of the world view of German idealism – whether this justifies more objectively the mission of the German people or the sophistry, the mask, the delusion there and even the new saint there.

In view of the world view of German idealism, esteemed attendees, as in one of the nuances in the essence of the German national soul, to which the German so intimately wants to and must connect today, in view of the many nuances in this national soul, also precisely on this nuance of German idealism, the world view of German idealism, one may also recognize in it that which I believe, that in all modesty – without being guilty of that which is so slanderously spoken about the German from all sides today – in all modesty the German may say that he recognizes in three ways that which is his duty today. He feels in three ways that it is his duty today. He feels justified in this threefold way before the innermost part of his conscience, his conscience as a human being and as a part of history, knowing that he has no right to speak in a sophistical way about other inferior national spirits, about their barbaric habits. He need only call to mind the most sacred part of his own striving and recognize this most sacred part of his own inner striving as the precious, holy legacy of German prehistory. Then he can feel that the one thing by which he knows how to position himself powerfully in the German present and in the right way - is the love of the German past and of all that German past has been handed down to the German of the present, which he must adhere to, for which he stands up in love because he recognizes it in his innermost being, which makes him happy, which inspires him, which lifts him above pain and suffering. It is the love for the past.

And what sustains him through the difficult duties of the present is his faith in the present of the German spirit, in the power that flows from this German spirit into the present and that must bring about what will maintain the German spirit in its position as firmly as it has been handed down from the bright past. Love for the past and faith in the present join the third, which flows from the other two, and which pours into the soul strength and confidence, which follow from the other two in a living way. They join, the first two, love and faith, to the well-founded hope, flowing from the innermost nature of Germanness - to use this Fichte word - for the future fulfillment of that which the past has inspired for the German, for which the German present strives. Love for the past, faith in the present, hope for the future: these are what hold us together in our hard, but also blissful present, in body, soul, and spirit.

In order to get ahead in our esoteric life we must become more attentive to things that usually escape our everyday consciousness. We must also revise our ideas about what we'll experience. For instance we complain that thoughts storm into our meditation that bother and disturb us. If we would think about it we would see that it's progress that we've become more sensitive, because we notice that these thoughts are stronger than we are. They induce us to use more strength in our meditation, for it's luciferic beings who bring up our own thoughts in us. Luciferic beings are always in us, but they're drowned out by the surging of everyday life. When we walk through a quiet woods at night we'll hear the leaves falling, animals flitting by and distant footsteps, but in a city's bustle such quiet noises will be imperceptible.

That's how things are with our meditation also. The quiet that we create let's us notice what submerges in the everyday hubbub. All kinds of things can enter our consciousness, such as physical pains that we don't feel otherwise. We can concentrate on our body—although this is only a good idea in special cases—and look for all of its pains. One begins somewhat over the head, excludes all other thoughts and concentrates on this one point. Then one goes further down, focuses on one part of the brain, and so on. Here one will notice that one can have pains in various parts of the body. The more egotistical a man is the more distinctly he'll feel pains here and there. But we shouldn't get hypochondriacal or scared about this—we should stay cool. We also have to do this with other things, for strange and surprising things can happen to us, but we have to get to the bottom of them. The relation between members of our being changes through meditation. Even when we do it ever so badly and awkwardly we nevertheless pull the ego, astral body and part of the etheric body out of the physical body, and so we can have strange experiences in our etheric body in the moments after meditation. This body is a faithful preserver of everything we encountered in life, consciously or not. For instance as a child we may have experienced that a dog was run over by a train. Over the years we have overcome the horrible scene. But the etheric body preserved it and through our development 30 or 40 years later we can suddenly perceive the yelping and whimpering out of us, or it can even be the case that the person concerned can make yelping sounds himself and then of course is rather scared about this. This happens when the etheric body is loosened in development, appears suddenly with especially strong force and works on the physical body.

Another example: An esoteric can have pains from an inflammation of the middle ear that lead to visions of a gruesome scene, and he can't explain its origin. This comes about as follows. Pains are seated in the astral body and not in the physical body. We know that the astral body can experience great pain in kamaloca. These pains in the astral body are reflected in the etheric body. The esoteric experiences the vibrations that are generated in the etheric body thereby, but also vibrations of a similar kind that were generated in it during childhood through soul pains, when he experienced the horrible scene. He had forgotten the latter long ago, but the experience emerges from the etheric body through his esoteric training and the outer earache.

Something even stranger is possible. Say we live on the other side of a house's wall with a family that liked to read and tell tall tales. Our physical ear didn't hear them, but our etheric body took them in. And in spiritual development it can happen that we experience them in our etheric body. Such things can scare us if we don't understand them. Say that someone goes to sleep in a public lecture through lack of interest. His ego and astral body are nevertheless there. Then when he wakes up it may happen that the physical body does not want to adapt itself to what the ego and astral body took in. Thereby the person is dissatisfied with himself, reproaches himself severely or even feels pain from his physical body. Or it may happen that someone takes in esoteric teachings with great attentiveness and does his exercises well, but he has to be among people who reject theosophy and esotericism either silently or openly. This has an effect on the esoteric, and it can happen after meditation that voices within him say: “That's all nonsense” or much more terrible things that give him great pain. It's the thoughts of his environment that he may not have heard with physical ears but with which he's obsessed. When we lift out the ego we take all of our good qualities with us and refine them more and more; the bad qualities we push down and they acquire a kind of independent life. Then it may happen that we begin to scold and to use expressions that we're too well trained to use in ordinary life. This then fills us with amazement and horror, and we may tell ourselves: I'm not like that at all, I'm too decent a person for that. But we should, admit that we are like that, for such things only disappear when we finally put them aside. And yet all of these experiences are steps forward, and it's just a matter of knowing their significance. It's especially important to realize that it's our own fault that it's so hard for us to press into spiritual worlds. But when we get up there we meet the one who took our sins upon him through the Mystery of Golgotha. He took our weaknesses upon him; that's a true word in the Bible, as everything in the Bible is true. And one who refuses to have his sins expiated by the Christ hasn't pressed to the depth of this truth, just as little as one who believes in it as a “good Christian” but who thinks that the matter is very simple. World evolution is very complicated and hides riddles in every little thing, and every little thing can become a whole world. The example of otitis media can teach us this. What is experienced there in the etheric body arose like a world out of a small thing.

Inspirations for the material world can also come from higher worlds. A thing that's noted too little, that many people read over when they read the life of Darwin's friend Wallace is that a thought that led to one of the most important discoveries in connection with physical heredity came to him in a feverish dream. That this thought came to him in a condition in which his physical brain was unsuited for thinking should give the materialists who consider thinking to be a function of the brain much to think about. Darwin also travelled a lot in the tropics and it's quite possible that he made some discoveries about physical conditions in a fever.

One will only notice such things when things are found in such abnormal states, as if through inspiration that can be used materialistically, when for instance someone discovers something that can make him rich. Up till then one will consider all such things to be figments of a sick fantasy. Let's continue our meditation with industry, perseverance and energy, for the help of the one who brought his impulse into earth evolution will always come to meet us. This help is always there.

The etheric body is the creator of the physical body, while it itself is created by the astral body. The physical body can be seen as the manifestation and condensation of the creative part of the etheric body; whereas the receptive parts of it remain open to the influence of the astral body. The etheric body of a man is female, that of a woman is male. Originally, however, the etheric body is of both sexes. And this bisexuality is nothing other than the condensation of a part of the completely sexless astral body. The external physical sex arises only from the fact that one side of the bisexual etheric body condenses physically. The man arises through the condensation of the male side; the woman through the condensation of the female side. In the former, an ethereal-female remains, in the latter an ethereal-male.

These remaining parts of the etheric body are again divided into two parts, one of which retains its sexual characteristics, while the other takes on an asexual nature. That which remains sexual permeates itself with desire and becomes the basis for human physical reproduction. While the physical organs of reproduction are the expression of the lowest part of the etheric body, the organs of affection, the heart, are the creatures of the second part of the etheric body. The woman has a male heart, the man a female heart. The male heart expresses itself in active love, in compassionate devotion; the female heart of the man finds expression in courage and bravery. At this stage, one should no longer interpret the expressions male and female here as having exactly the same meanings as they have for physical corporeality. Although love and courage first reveal themselves to the opposite sex, they nevertheless take on a more general character that relates to more general life circumstances.

The third part of the etheric body contains the forces that produce the sense organs. The entire sensory apparatus is produced by this etheric body. But these sense organs would be without effect if the etheric body did not imbibe with the astral body. The eye and the etheric forces that produce it would bring forth something that is also present in the photographic apparatus, if these emanations were not transformed by the astral body into sensations of color.

What the astral body produces in connection with this third highest link of the etheric body and the physical organs it generates forms the basis of the soul's life. These are the perceptions.

When observing the eye, for example, one has to consider three things: firstly, the ether eye, which is the creator of the eye. Secondly, the creature, namely the physical eye itself. And thirdly, the astral limb that extends into this eye and in which, for example, the color “red” is formed.

The astral body also breaks down into three parts. The lowest is the one that fills the sense organs in the manner indicated. It is of a creative nature, for it has given the uppermost part of the etheric body the ability to form sense organs. The second, middle link of the astral body, on the other hand, is less creative. It has a character that finds expression in the preservation of what it has received, in pleasure and pain. It is connected to the heart in the same way that the first link is connected to the objects of the external world through the sense organs. It experiences the impressions that are conveyed through the heart.

The third limb of the astral body is essentially independent of the external world of the senses as well as of the internal world of the heart. It finds its expression in the “I”. But this limb can let etheric forces flow into it. These etheric forces at play in the I are initially thoughts. With these thoughts, the I enters into contact with the universal ether. The thoughts of things embodied in the ether flow into the ego, and so the ego first forms the third, uppermost limb of its astral body. With the help of this “ego work”, the astral body becomes an organized entity, whereas before it was a chaotic, virgin being. This astral body now in turn has an effect on the lower limbs of the astral body. First of all, on the second limb. The forms of the consciousness soul are imprinted on the desire soul. The heart undergoes a process of ennoblement and spiritualization. It is directed towards the spirit. Initially, this can only happen when the externally stimulated experiences are silent. In the quiet hours of life. Above all, during sleep, when the soul is disconnected from the body, the spiritualized astral part imprints its character on the intellectual and sensual part. Therefore, time must be given to the person to consolidate what the malleable astral soul absorbs. Forces must develop in the middle part of the soul that can then act on the heart. Then the heart will release its powers again, so that the physical parts for the spirit can also be formed. These are then clairvoyant organs.

When the uppermost part of the astral soul can no longer evoke mere thoughts but actual images, the next step can begin on the lowest part of the astral body. Before, it was only able to build sensory organs that reflected external things. Now it becomes capable of making these sensory organs the realization of internal things. The human perceptions are then no longer mere images of the external, but they radiate the things of the inner world outwards. Man becomes the bearer of causes, whereas before he could only receive effects.

In the waking state, the astral body works through the third part of the ether body in the senses.

In the dream state, the astral body withdraws into itself; the astral body transforms into images what the ether body has received from the senses. In the actual state of sleep, the astral body frees itself even from these perceptions of the senses. It lives only in the ether, which is not changed by the human being himself. He lives the general life of the world.

This latter state is connected with the waking life only through the ego-concept. It is pure will, creating out of nothing.

The dream state is connected to waking life through the desires and feelings. They only have an existence in the soul. You experience them, but you do not look at them. Clairvoyance consists of looking at this world. It then becomes images, just as the external world is represented by the sense organs in images. This is astral vision.

But when the will itself becomes pictorial, then mental seeing occurs. Man then sees thoughts as he sees trees.

If this state increases to such an extent that the thoughts of his seeing prove to be independent beings, spirit beings, then will perceives the will. And through the will perceived [a part of the manuscript is missing here]

In this state, the human being transforms the third and uppermost part of his etheric body himself. This becomes more and more his own creation.

Finally, this transformed highest part of the etheric body then influences the second. It makes it creative too. This has previously been stimulated to its productive achievements by the outside world. The most prominent stimulus came from the perception of sexual desire. Now the stimulus comes from within. The one-sidedness of the masculine or feminine disappears completely. A non-sexual generative power of this etheric body begins: Budhi. It again affects the physical organism, which now develops the organ of will in the highest sense.