The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As we shall be able to make use of the eight hours at our disposal for this course of lectures, I need not hurry, and this will certainly be all to the good.

I want to develop the material given yesterday by speaking of the characteristic qualities of the several members of the human being. I spoke of the physical body which is to be connected with everything that has definite contours in the organism. There is also the fluid organism. This fluid organism is permeated with the forces of the etheric body, forces which are, however, united with the physical body as primary components of it. These are the peripherically working forces. So far as the astral body is concerned, conceptions of space will not help us at all; the astral body cannot be understood from the quantitative aspect, but only from the purely qualitative aspect. We must picture the astral body in a world that is not the world of space, as we know it, but lies outside this spatial world. And this is all the more true when we come to the ego organization.

The easiest way will be to start from the ego organization. What is this ego organization, in reality? In the physical world, it is to be perceived in the form of the physical body. In the physical world, of course, both the inner and the outer form must be included. Looking at the physical body of man as it stands in the physical world, we must realize that it has nothing fundamentally in common with the forces working in the physical world. For the moment a human being passes through the Gate of Death, and the ego organization leaves the physical body, this body begins to be subject to the forces of the external world. This means that the body is no longer built up but is destroyed. If you remember that the physical body is destroyed by the forces that are working in external nature, you will realize at once that the body cannot, in its form, be subject in any way to the forces of the physical world. When the ego organization is forming and shaping the physical body, therefore, this means that it removes the body from the forces that are present in man's earthly environment. In other words, the ego organization is something quite different from all that is to be found in the physical world.

This ego organization is connected with death. What happens in death, all at once, goes on continually throughout the period of earthly life, through the ego organization. The human being is really continually dying, but this process of dying is balanced out. To get a picture of this, think of a modified version of the legend of Penelope. Suppose you were occupied every day in doing away with a heap of earth near your house, and during the night, in your absence, someone were to come and shovel the earth back again. As long as the earth is put back you have to shovel it away again. Your activity only ceases when the heap of earth gradually gets smaller and smaller on account of decrease of activity on the part of the one who puts the earth back again. This, approximately, is a picture of the ego organization in its relation to the physical body. Nourishment of the physical body consists in bringing into it substances from the earthly environment. These substances have their own inner forces, a certain complex of forces which belongs to them, and when, for example, you take common salt as an adjunct to food, this salt, to begin with, because it comes from outside, has the same inner tendency of action which it has, as salt, in the external world. But you begin to take these qualities away from it even when it is in the mouth, and then more and more, so that, finally, if the ego organization is working properly, there is nothing any longer within you of the salt, as it was in the external world. The salt has become something completely different. The activity of the ego organization consists precisely in transforming the in-taken foodstuffs. When it is no longer possible for the physical body to take food, the ego has no more to do, just as you had no more to do when nobody was shoveling the earth heap back again. When the body is no longer capable of taking food, it is impossible for the ego to work from out of the warmth, in the physical body. We can say that death occurs when it is impossible for the ego organization to so transform the external substances that nothing remains of the outer characteristics instead of being totally in the service of the ego organization.

What does the ego organization do with the physical body? It destroys the body all the time. It does the same as death, only the process is continually balanced out by the physical body being able to take external substances as food. Ego organization and the process of nourishment, therefore, are polar opposites. The ego organization betokens for man exactly the same—but in a process of continuous activity—as death betokens, but, in death, the process is concentrated, it happens all at once. Through your ego organization you are dying all the time, that is to say, you are destroying your physical body inwardly, whereas when you die, external nature destroys your physical body outwardly. The physical body is capable of destruction in two different directions and the ego organization is simply the sum total of the destructive forces working inwards. It really seems, at first, as if the ego organization had no other task than to bring about continual death in the human being—a process that is only prevented because there is fresh reinforcement, so that this activity only begins to bring about death. In the qualitative sense, therefore, ego organization is identifiable with death, and the physical organism is identifiable with the process of nourishment. We will speak in greater detail later on.

Ego organization = Death

Physical organism = Nourishment

Between these two polar processes in the human being lie the etheric body and the astral body. Astral body and etheric body lie between the ego organization and the physical organism. The astral body, as you heard, only works directly in the aeriform part of the human organism, from there by way of the etheric body upon the fluid organism and the physical organism or organism of nourishment. In every single organ there is a working together of etheric organism and astral organism.

When the etheric organism works upon an organ, this organ is imbued with budding, sprouting life. The life force in any single organ, or in the organism as a whole, comes from the etheric organism. The astral organism has at every moment the tendency to paralyze this budding, sprouting life—not to kill it, but to damp it down, to lame it. The ego organization strives all the time to kill the organism and the single organs, and in opposition to this there must be the reinforcement from the foodstuffs taken from the external world whereby life is continually poured into the organs. This process is especially active in childhood and youth.

The etheric impulses are opposed by the activity of the astral body which damps down the etheric activity all the time. If there were only etheric activity, budding and sprouting life in your organism, you would never have a life of soul, you would never unfold consciousness and would have to vegetate in a plant existence. No consciousness unfolds in a process that is simply one of growing, budding, sprouting. For consciousness to develop, the etheric, budding and sprouting life must be damped down. Therefore in any organ where the etheric life is damped down or lamed, we have, even in normal human life, the perpetual beginning of illness. There can be no development of consciousness without this perpetual tendency to illness. If you wanted just to be healthy—well, that is possible, but then you would have to lead a vegetative existence. If you want to unfold a life of soul, if you want to have consciousness, the vegetative process must be present, but it must be damped down.

The polar contrast is not so marked between the etheric and astral organizations as it is between physical organism and ego organization, but it exists, nonetheless, in a modified form. The astral organism must continually damp down what is brought about by the etheric organism. In reality, therefore, what the astral organism does day by day in the life of man, amounts to a tendency to illness. The etheric organism brings about rampant healthiness. Just as in abstract language, we can say: Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization—so we can also say: Man consists of the process of nourishment, of the building, sprouting, health-bringing process, of the perpetually in-working processes of disease, and of a continuous dying that is checked until the death-bringing processes gather together as it were into an integer and death occurs.

Think of this astral organism with its perpetual tendency to make an organ, or the whole man, ill. Genuine observation will show you that this is so. For no feeling could arise in you if this astral organism were not present. Just picture it.

The etheric organism unfolds life and the astral organism damps down the life. In the waking state (I shall yet have to speak of sleep), there must be a continual swinging to and fro in a labile state of equilibrium, between etheric organism and astral organism. This enables a human being to feel. He would feel nothing if this swinging to and fro did not take place. But now suppose the astral activity is not immediately driven back by the etheric activity. When it is driven back, when the astral activity is driven back in statu nascendi by the etheric activity, normal feeling arises. We shall see how this is connected, in the physical, with the activity of the glands. But when the astral organism becomes more powerful, so that the organ cannot work with sufficient strength in its etheric activity, then this organ will be laid hold of too strongly by the astral activity and instead of a swinging to and fro there will arise a deformation of the organ. When the astral body oversteps the mark in this activity of damping down, when it goes beyond the process that is balanced out in statu nascendi—then the cause of illness is located in the astral body. And there is indeed such a close connection between illness and feeling that we can say: The life of feeling in man is simply the reflection, in the life of soul, of the life of illness. If there is a swinging to and fro, there underlies the life of feeling—but always in statu nascendi, in the moment of ‘becoming’—the same process which is a process of illness when the astral organism gets the upper hand.

Now it may also happen that the etheric organism gets the upper hand of the astral, which withdraws. Then there will be rampant growth, which is illness in the other direction. When the astral body gets the upper hand, inflammatory conditions arise; when the etheric activity gets the upper hand, swellings or growths appear. In the entirely normal life of feeling, a delicately poised balance is always maintained between growths and the inflammatory process. The normal life of man needs this possibility of becoming ill, only a continual balancing must take place.

Thus if we are able to perceive truly, we can see in the normal life of feeling a great deal of what is represented by the processes of illness. If we can observe such things truly, we can ascertain the approach of the illness a long time before it can be physically diagnosed, in a wrong functioning of the life of feeling. Illness is only an abnormal life of feeling in the human being.

The life of feeling lies in the realm of the soul, because a continual equalization or balancing takes place in the etheric. When the balancing no longer takes place, the life of feeling strikes down into the physical body, unites with the body. Illness is present, therefore, as soon as the life of feeling shoots down into the organ. If, in the normal way, a person can keep his feeling within the realm of soul, he is healthy. If he cannot do this, if feeling shoots down into some organ, illness arises.

I say this by way of introduction, because you will realize from it how necessary it is for the physician to have a quick and delicate eye for the soul life as well. There can be no aptitude for true diagnosis without a faculty of delicate perception for the life of soul. We will speak of details later on and this will become still more intelligible.

But now, what of the ego organization and the physical organism? Think, first, of the process of nourishment. This process of nourishment is all the time destroying the substances as they are in the external world; the astral organism damps down what the human being is, inwardly, through his etheric organism. An inner balance is established between astral organism and etheric organism. Between the ego and the physical organism there is also a balance—here between outer world and inner world. Salt, as we know it, is outer world. When the salt is taken hold of by the forces of nourishment and by the ego organization, the ego organization must be in a position completely to transform the salt as it is in the external world, to leave nothing of it behind in this form. If anything is left behind, this means that a foreign body is within the organism, but you must not merely think of this ‘foreign body’ in the organism as necessarily having definite contours, for this is least often the case. A foreign body in this sense may also be the external warmth. There should be no warmth in the organism that is not engendered by the ego organization. You must be able to conceive of a person being seized, somewhere or other, by a condition of external warmth upon which he himself does not work—it is just like a piece of wood being seized by some condition of outer warmth. An external condition of warmth may not be only a stimulus to the human being to work up a warmth of his own, but the external warmth (or cold) may begin to work directly, and this outer cold or warmth would also have to be regarded as a foreign body in itself. Thus we can say: The inner balance between illness and health is produced by the astral organism and etheric organism. The balance between the human being and the world is produced by the polar contrast between physical body and the ego organization.

The thing of importance is to get a true perception of the activities of these four members of the human organism. You realize now, surely, that illness is simply not to be understood from the external, physical organism. The process that constitutes illness lies entirely in the super-sensible. Before we can understand illness at all we must have a conception of the astral organism. And you will get this conception if you will consider the following state of things: pain arises in some organ. When the astral body becomes too powerful, the organ is ‘deformed’, and pain arises. If the organ immediately balances the influence of the astral body in statu nascendi, feeling arises. Pain is really feeling, but an enhanced feeling, proceeding from the deformation, so we can understand why illness is accompanied by pain. Without knowing this, it is very easy to ask: What is it that really causes pain in manifestations of illness? It is easy to understand why pain arises when we know that this illness is merely caused by such a strong expression of the life of feeling that this life of feeling is deforming the organ concerned. You will see now that all manifestations of feeling can be judged truly through a thorough and deep study of man's life of soul.

But these things can only be seen in their right light when we say to ourselves: Conditions differ according to which organ in the human being is laid hold of by excessive activity of the astral body. Suppose, for example, it is the liver which is being thus laid hold of by the astral body. The liver behaves quite differently from other organs. The astral body can cause much deformation without pain being produced, without pain arising exactly in the liver itself. The reason why liver diseases are so hidden, so treacherous, is because they do not announce themselves through pain. This is because the liver is an organ which, in its whole make-up, is an enclave in the human organism. There are processes in the liver which, of all processes which arise in the organism, most resemble the processes of the external world. The fact, therefore, is that in the liver, man is least man. In the liver he really ceases to be man. He becomes outer world; he has a piece of the outer world within him. This is very interesting. We have the external world; we have the human being; and within the human being, inside him, we have something like a piece of the external world. It is as if a kind of cavity were hollowed out in the organism and just as it would not hurt if the astral body were to press into this cavity, just as little is there pain when the astral body presses into the liver. The astral body can destroy but cannot cause pain where the liver is concerned, for the liver is an organ where a piece of the external world appears in the organism, as it were, in an enclave.

Without entering into such things, we shall never be able to understand the human organism. In ordinary textbooks of anatomy and physiology you will find all kinds of indications about the liver. You will understand them when you know that the liver is an organ within the human being which is most foreign to him. Why is this?

Think of an eye, or some other sense organ. It lies in a cavity which digs itself into the human being from the external world. There are processes in the human eye which can almost be explained by physics. It is easy for a physicist to speak rationally about the human eye. A physicist makes a sketch with some lines on it which, although it is all really nonsense, gives a picture of the process of the breaking-up of the light and the production of an image by an ordinary lens. The same kind of drawings are made of the eye. People draw a ray of light which passes through a lens, is broken up and then forms a picture in the background of the eye. People have really become physicists in regard to the eye and since the days of Helmholz the ear, too, has almost become a kind of piano. It has become common to apply to the sense organs conceptions that are applicable to external nature. In the sense organs, something is being continued from outside inwards, a piece of the external world is continuing

on into the inner world. There is even biological proof of this. In certain lower animals the eye is formed through an indentation which is then filled from outside. The eye is built into the organism, as it were; it does not grow out of the organism. The sense organs, therefore, are a piece of the external world within the organism. But they open outwards. In the sense organs the external world passes into the organism like a gulf. The liver is enclosed on all sides, but nonetheless it is a sense organ, a sense organ which, in the unconscious, shows a high degree of sensibility for the value of the different substances we take as foodstuffs. We can only understand what is going on in digestion, in the process of nourishment, when we no longer ascribe to the liver only those physical processes which are ascribed to it today. These processes are the expression of the spirit and soul. We must see the liver as an inner sense organ for the perception of the process of nourishment. For this reason the liver is much more closely related to the substances of the earth than are the familiar sense organs. With the eye we are exposed to the working of the ether, with the ear we are exposed to the air; but the liver is directly exposed to the qualities of the substances in the external world and it has to perceive these qualities.

The heart is a sense organ of a different kind. The perceptive faculty of the liver is exposed to external substances that come into the human being. The heart is a sense organ for perceiving the inner being of man. I have often said that it is nonsense to regard the heart as a kind of pump which drives the blood through the arteries. The movement of the blood is the result of the activity of the ego and astral body, and the heart is merely a sense organ which perceives the circulation, particularly the circulation from the lower to the upper man. The task of the liver is to perceive, in the digestive process, what value a carbohydrate, let us say, has for the human being. The task of the heart is to see how astral body and ego are working on the human being. Therefore the heart is an entirely spiritual sense organ, the liver a wholly material one. This distinction must be made. We must develop a qualitative knowledge of the organs.

What are the methods of the natural science upon which medicine is based today? Some tissue or other—it really does not matter very much which—is taken from some part of the organism, perhaps from the heart or the liver. The outer structure and make-up of this tissue are then examined. But this tells us nothing about the organ as it actually is, within the human organism. Suppose I have, here, a knife, and, there, a knife. I examine them. This is a knife, and that is a knife, only the one, when I examine its form, has a blunt edge on one side and a cutting edge on the other, and the blade is in a handle. The same could be said of the other knife—therefore the net result is, here, a knife; there, a knife. But to find the difference between a table knife and a razor I must go beyond this kind of examination. I must relate the knives to something that is a whole. Regarded externally, a razor might also be a table knife; therefore, merely from the form, I cannot know whether I have to do with a table knife or with a razor. Each thing must be observed in its whole nexus. Out of the kind of observation that is applied today to an organ, one cannot know anything about the significance of this organ in reality. It must always be regarded in the whole nexus of things. Mere examination of the structure and the make-up of an organ leads nowhere. The human being must be studied with quite different methods from those of chemistry which merely examines the chemical affinities and forces. In this respect, people are terribly naive today. In a certain physiological institute, experiments were made to see how mice could be nourished with milk. The result was splendid, for the mice flourished and became fat and big. At the same time, for the purpose of proving that there is something more in milk than its component parts, these components were separated and given to the mice. They perished within three or four days and could not be kept alive. And then people said: Milk does not only contain its known components, but it contains, as well, another substance—the vitamin. They were obliged to affirm the existence of yet another, very fine substance, namely, the vitamin. The point of importance is not the discovery of such a 'substance' but that to take the separate components of the milk is like taking a clock and looking at the brass, the silver, the other metals in it, the glass and so on. Yes, but the brass, the silver, the glass and all the other metals do not make a clock. The clock depends upon what the mind of the mechanic makes out of these substances. And in the case of milk and its components we are thinking with the mind of the mechanic, when we are concerned with the fact that earthly qualities are contained within these components—qualities which they get from the earth. Up to a certain point of time the peripheric forces from the etheric body are still present, as well as the earthly components. People must finally bring themselves to accept these things. It is not so much a question of things being hidden, and then ‘found’. The discovery of vitamins, for example, simply confirms what exists. Quite a different mode of observation must become current.

Suppose you are eating too many potatoes. You will never find out anything with the ordinary methods of investigation. It will be useless to try to ascertain the effect of potatoes in the human organism by computing the quantity of carbohydrates. The other carbohydrates which are present, for example, not in roots but in leaves or in fruits, are worked up in the digestive tract. There is something very remarkable about the potato. The potato passes with its forces so intensely into the human organism, that, what in the case of the bean happens while still within the digestive tract, happens in the case of the potato only in the brain. In the brain, too, processes of nourishment are continually taking place. I am only indicating these things in order to speak in greater detail later on. A person who eats too many potatoes may, under certain circumstances, overwork his brain. He transfers processes which ought to take place below the brain to the brain itself. It will only be possible to get something from medical science for hygiene and for social life in general by learning the relations of the human being to the substances around him, not from their chemical make-up but from their world connections. Whether a substance appears in leaf or in root constitutes a fundamental difference. It is much more important to know from which part of the plant a substance comes than to know whether it contains carbohydrates. Roots are more connected with the head organization of man; flowers and leaves more with the lower man. The chemical make-up really plays no outstanding part. The relations of the human being to the surrounding world must be learned from quite other things if we really want to understand the curative and the disease-producing factors, the disease itself, and its remedy. The heed that is paid to the indications given by abstract chemistry has really, little by little, buried all knowledge of the human being, because knowing the chemical make-up of a substance does not tell us anything about the real relations of man to the surrounding world.

Take another example—the point of view derived from chemistry is that oxygen is necessary in the air but that nitrogen is not necessary to the same extent. From what is commonly thought about oxygen and nitrogen, we might imagine that it does not matter so much to the breathing when there is too little nitrogen in the air, provided there is enough oxygen. But the truth is, that when air contains too little nitrogen, the human being gives off nitrogen in order to replace it in the air around him. The human being is so constituted that there must be a certain relation between his own nitrogen content and the nitrogen content of the surrounding air quite apart from the breathing process.

All these things are exceedingly important for an understanding of the nature of man. But although they are investigated and known, here and there, they remain fruitless for the modern world of science as long as there is no basis for understanding how man is membered into the world around him. We will try to find this basis in order to get insight into the healthy as well as the ill human being.

The words written by Goethe after contemplating Schiller's skull can make a deep impression on the human soul. Goethe was present when Schiller's body was removed from its provisional grave and taken to the princely vault at Weimar. Holding Schiller's skull in his hands, Goethe believed he could recognise in the form and cast of this wonderful structure the whole nature of Schiller's spiritual being, and he was inspired to write these beautiful lines:

What greater gift can life on man bestow
Than that to him God-Nature should disclose
How solid to spirit it attenuates,
How spirit's work it hardens and preserves.³⁰

Anyone who understands Goethe's feelings on this occasion will easily turn his mind to all those phenomena where something inward is working to reveal itself in material form, in plastic shapes, as drawing, and so on. We have a most eminent example of this shaping, whereby an inner being reveals itself through outward form, in what we call human character. For human character gives the most varied and manifold expression to the direction and purpose of man's life. We think of human character as having a basic consistency. Indeed, we feel that character is inseparable from a person's whole being, and that something has gone wrong if their thinking, feeling and doing do not make up in some way a harmonious unity. We speak of a split in a man's character as evidence of a real fault in his nature. If in private life a man upholds some principle or ideal, and then in public life says something contrary to it or at least discrepant, we speak of a break in his character, of his inner life falling apart. And we know very well that this can bring a man into difficult situations or may even wreck his life. The significance of a divided character is indicated by Goethe in a remarkable saying that he assigns to Faust—a saying that is often wrongly interpreted by people who believe that Goethe's innermost intentions are known to them:

Two souls, alas, are pent within my breast,
To tear themselves apart, forever striving;
One, in pursuit of passions' crude delights,
Clings close with avid senses to the world;
The other, thrusting earthly dust away,
Aspires to rise to longed-for higher realms.³¹

This divided condition of the soul is often spoken of as though it were a desirable achievement, but Goethe certainly does not say so. On the contrary, the passage shows clearly how unhappy Faust feels in that period under the pressure of these two drives, one aspiring towards ideal heights, the other striving towards the earthly. An unsatisfying state of soul which Faust has to overcome—that is what Goethe is describing. It is wrong to cite this schism in human nature as though it were justified; it is something to be abolished by the unified character that we must always strive to achieve.

If now we wish to look more deeply into human character, the facts outlined in previous lectures must be kept in mind. We must remember that the human soul, embracing the inner life of man, is not merely a chaos of intermingled feelings, instincts, concepts, passions and ideals, but has three distinct members—the Sentient Soul, the lowest; in the middle the Intellectual Soul; and finally the highest, the Consciousness Soul. These three soul-members are to be clearly distinguished, but they must not be allowed to fall apart, for the human soul must be a unity. What is it, then that holds them together? It is what we call the Ego in its true sense, the bearer of self-consciousness; the active element within our soul which plays upon its three members as a man plays upon the strings of an instrument. And the harmony or disharmony which the Ego calls forth by playing on the three soul-members is the basis of human character.

The Ego is indeed something of an inner musician, who with a powerful stroke calls one or other soul-member into activity; and the effects of their combined influence, resounding from within a human being as harmony or disharmony, make up the real foundation of his character.

However, that is no more than an abstract description. If we are to understand how character comes out in people, we must enter somewhat more deeply into human life and the being of man. We must show how the harmonious or disharmonious play of the Ego on the three soul-members sets its stamp on man's entire personality as he stands before us, and how personality is outwardly revealed.

Human life—as we all know—alternates between waking and sleeping. At night, when a man falls asleep, his feelings, his pleasure and pain, his joys and griefs, his urges, desires and passions, his perceptions and concepts, his ideas and ideals, all sink down into indefinite darkness; and his inner life passes into an unconscious or subconscious condition. What has happened?

As we have often explained, when a man goes to sleep his physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while his astral body, including the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, withdraw, as does the Ego. During sleep the astral body and Ego are in a spiritual world. Why does a man return every night to this spiritual world? Why does he have to leave behind his physical and etheric bodies? There are good reasons for it. Spiritual Science says that the astral body is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, instincts, desires and passions. Yes, but these are precisely the experiences that sink into indefinite darkness on going to sleep. Yet is it asserted that the astral body and the Ego are in spiritual worlds? Is there not a contradiction here?

Well, the contradiction is only apparent. The astral body is indeed the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of all the inner experiences that surge up and down in the soul during waking hours, but in man as he is today, the astral body cannot perceive these experiences directly. It can perceive them only when they are reflected from outside itself, and for this to be possible the Ego and astral body must come back into the etheric and physical bodies at the time of awakening from sleep. Everything that a man experiences inwardly, his pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, is reflected by the physical and etheric bodies—especially by the etheric body—as from a mirror. But we must not suppose that this active process, which goes on every day from morning to evening, requires no effort to sustain it. The inner self of man, his Ego and astral body, his Consciousness Soul, Intellectual Soul and Sentient Soul, all have to work on the physical and etheric bodies, so that through the reciprocal interaction of his inner forces and his outer bodies the surging life of the daytime is engendered.

This reciprocal interaction involves a continual using up of soul-forces. When in the evening a man feels tired, this means that he is no longer able to draw from his inner life a sufficiency of the forces which enable him to work on his physical and etheric bodies. When he is nearing sleep and the faculty that required the most intensive play of his spirit into the physical, the faculty of speech, begins to weaken; when sight, smell, taste and finally hearing, the most spiritual of the senses, gradually fade away, because he is no longer able to draw on his inner forces to sustain them—then we see how these forces are used up through the day.

What is the origin of these forces? They come from the nightly condition of sleep. During the period between going to sleep and waking up the soul absorbs to the full the forces it needs for conjuring up before us all that we live through by day. During waking hours the soul can deploy its powers, but it cannot draw on the forces necessary for recuperation. Naturally, Spiritual Science is familiar with the various theories advanced by external science to account for the replenishment of forces used up by day, but we need not go into that now. Thus we can say that when the soul passes back from sleep into waking life, it brings from its spiritual home the forces which it devotes all day long to building up the soul-life which it conjures before us.

Now let us ask: When the soul goes off to sleep in the evening, does it carry anything with it into the spiritual world? Yes; and if we want to understand what this is, we must above all closely observe man's personal development between birth and death. This development is evident when in later years a man shows himself to be riper, richer in experience and wisdom learnt from life, while he may also have acquired certain capabilities and powers that he did not possess in his younger days.

A man does indeed receive from the outer world something that he transforms inwardly, as the following consideration clearly shows. Between 1770 and 1815 certain events of great significance for the development of the world took place. They were witnessed by the most diverse contemporaries, some of whom were unaffected by them, while others were so deeply moved that they became imbued with experience and wisdom and their soul-lives progressed to a higher stage.

How did this come about? It is best illustrated by a simple event in ordinary human life. Take the process of learning to write. What really happens before the moment when we are able to put pen to paper and express our thoughts in writing? A great deal must have happened—a whole series of experiences, from the first attempt to hold the pen, then to making the first stroke, and so on through all the efforts which lead at last to a grasp of the craft of writing. If we recall everything that must have occurred during months or years, and all we went through, perhaps by way of punishments and reproofs, until at last these experiences were transformed into knowing how to write, then we must say: These experiences were recast and remoulded, so that later on they appear like the essential core of what we call the ability to write.

Spiritual Science shows how this transformation comes about. It is possible only because human beings pass repeatedly through the condition of sleep. In daily life we find that when we are at pains to absorb something, the process of imprinting and retentions is considerably aided if we sleep on it; in that way we make it our own. The experiences we go through have to be united with the soul and worked on by the soul if they are to coalesce and be transformed into faculties. This whole process is carried through by the soul during sleep, and thereby our life is enhanced.

Present-day consciousness has little inkling of these things, but in times of ancient clairvoyance they were well known. An example will show how a poet once indicated in a remarkable way his knowledge of this transforming process. Homer, who can rightly be called a seer, describes in his Odyssey³² how Penelope, during the absence of her husband, Odysseus, was besieged by a throng of suitors. She promised them that she would give her decision when she had completed a robe she was weaving; but every night she undid the work of the day. If a poet wishes to indicate how a series of experiences, such as those of Penelope with her suitors, are not to merge into a faculty—in this case the faculty of decision—he must show how these experiences have to be unwoven at night, or they would unfailingly coalesce.

To anyone imbued with a typical modern consciousness these ideas may sound like hair-splitting, or they may seem to be imposing something arbitrary on the poet; but the only really great men are those, whose work derives from the great world-secrets, and many people today who talk glibly of originality and the like have no inkling of the depths from which the truly great achievements in the arts have been born.

If now we look further at the progress of human life between birth and death, we have to recognise that it is confined within certain narrow limits. We can indeed work at and enhance our faculties; in later life we can acquire qualities of soul which were lacking earlier on; but all this is subject to the fact that we can accomplish nothing that would require us to transform our physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, with their particular aptitudes, are there at birth; we find them ready-made. For example, we can reach a certain understanding of music only if we are born with a musical ear. That is a crude example, but it shows how transformation can be frustrated; in such cases the experiences can indeed be united with the soul, but we must renounce any hope of weaving them into our bodily life.

If, then, we consider human life from a higher standpoint, the possibility of breaking free from the physical body and laying it aside must be regarded as enormously wholesome and significant for our entire human existence. Our capacity to transform experiences into faculties is limited by the fact that every morning, on returning from sleep, we find our physical and etheric bodies waiting for us. At death we lay them aside and pass through the gate of death into a spiritual world. There, unhampered by these bodies, we can carry to spiritual completion those experiences between birth and death that we could not embody because of our corporeal limitations.

When we descend once more from the spiritual world to a new life on earth, then, and only then, can we take the powers we have woven into our spiritual archetype and give them physical existence by impressing them plastically into the initially soft human body. Now for the first time we can weave into our being those fruits of experience that we had indeed garnered in our previous life but could not then carry into physical embodiment. Seen in this light, death provides for the enhancement of life.

Moreover, this comparatively crude work that a man can do on his physical body, whereby he moulds into it what he could not impress on it in his previous life, is not the only possibility open to him. He is able also to imprint on his entire being certain finer fruits of foregoing lives.

When someone is born, his Ego and astral body, including his Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, are by no means featureless; they are endowed with definite attributes and characteristics brought from previous lives. The cruder work, whereby the fruits of past experiences are impressed on the plastic physical body, is accomplished before birth, but a more delicate work—and this distinguishes man from the animals—is performed after birth. Throughout childhood and youth a man works into the finer Organisation of his inner and outer nature certain determining characteristics and motives for action, brought by his Ego from a previous life. While the Ego thus impresses itself from within on its vehicles of expression, the fact of its activity and its way of working combine to form the character which a man presents to the world. Between birth and death the Ego works on the organs of the soul, the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, in such a way that they respond to what it has made of itself. But the Ego does not stand apart from the urges, desires and passions of the Sentient Soul. No, it unites itself with these emotions as though they were its own; and equally unites itself with the cognitions and the knowledge that belong to the Consciousness Soul.

So it is, that the harmony or disharmony that a human being has wrought in his soul-members is impressed by his Ego on his exterior being in his next earthly life. Human character, therefore, although it appears to us as determined and inborn, can yet be seen to be developing gradually in the course of his life.

With animals, character is determined entirely at birth; an animal cannot work plastically on its exterior nature. Man has the advantage of appearing at birth with no definite character manifest externally, but in the depths of his being he has slumbering powers brought from previous lives; they work into his undeveloped exterior and gradually shape his character, in so far as this is determined by previous lives.

Thus we see how in a certain sense man has an inborn character, but one that gradually develops in the course of life. If we keep this in mind, we can understand how even eminent personalities can go wrong in judging character. There are philosophers who argue that character is inwardly determined and cannot change, but that is a mistake. It applies only to attributes which derive from a previous life and appear as inborn character. Man's inward centre, his Ego, sends out its influence and gives a common stamp and character to every member of his organism. This character extends into the soul and even into the external limbs of the body. We see this inner centre pouring itself forth, as it were, shaping everything in accord with itself, and we feel how this centre holds the members of the human organism together. Even in the external parts of his physical body the imprint of a man's inner being can be discerned.

In this connection, an artist once gave wonderful expression to something which generally receives only theoretical attention. The work he produced portrays human nature at the moment when the human Ego, the centre which holds the organism together as a unity, is lost, and the limbs, each going its own way, strain apart in different directions. The work I mean seizes precisely this moment, when a man loses the foundation of his character, of his being as a whole. But this work, a great and famous one, has been very often misunderstood. Do not suppose that I am about to level cheap criticism at men for whose work I have the highest respect. But the fact that even great minds can make mistakes in face of certain phenomena, just when they are most earnestly striving for truth, shows how difficult the path to truth really is.

One of the greatest German authorities on art, Winckelmann,³³ was impelled by his whole disposition to err in interpreting the work of art known as the Laocoon.³⁴ His interpretation has been widely admired. In many circles it has been thought that nothing better could be said about this portrayal of Laocoon, the Trojan priest who, with his two sons, was crushed to death by serpents. Winckelmann, filled with enthusiasm for this example of the sculptor's art, said that here we are shown how the priest, Laocoon, whose every limb bespeaks his nobility and greatness, is torn with anguish, above all the anguish of a father. He is placed between his two sons, with the serpents coiled round their bodies. Conscious of the pain inflicted on his sons, he himself, as a father, is so agonised by it that the lower part of his body is contracted, as though pressing out the full degree of pain. He forgets himself, consumed with immeasurable pity for his sons.

This is a beautiful explanation of a father's ordeal, but if—just because we honour Winckelmann as a great personality—we look repeatedly and conscientiously at the Laocoon, we are obliged finally to say that Winckelmann must be mistaken, for it is not possible for pity to be the dominating motif in the scene portrayed. The father's head is aligned at such an angle that he cannot see his sons. Winckelmann's view of the group is quite wrong. The immediate impression we get from looking at the figures is that here we are witnessing the quite definite moment when the encircling pressure of the snakes has driven the human Ego out of Laocoon's body, and the separate instincts, deprived of the Ego, make their way into the physical body. Thus we see the head, the lower body and the limbs each taking its own course, not brought into natural harmony with the figure as a whole because the Ego is absent. The Laocoon group shows us, in external bodily terms, how a man loses his unified character when bereft of the Ego, the strong central point which holds together the members of his bodily organism. And if we allow this spectacle to work on our souls, we can come to experience the unifying element which naturally expresses itself in the harmonising of the limbs, and imprints on a man what we call his character.

But now we must ask: If it is true that a man's character is to some extent inborn—if the characteristics given by birth cannot by any effort be altered beyond a certain limit, as every glance at human life will tell us—is it then possible for a man to change his character in a certain way?

Yes, in so far as character belongs to the life of the soul and is not subject to the bodily limitations we encounter every morning on waking from sleep, and so can help to harmonise and strengthen the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul. To this extent there can be a development of character during a person's life between birth and death.

Some knowledge of all this is of special importance in education.

Essential as it is to understand the temperaments and the differences between them, it is necessary also to know something about human character and what can be done to change it between birth and death, even though it is in some measure determined by the fruits of a previous life. If we are to make good use of this knowledge, we must be clear that personal life goes through four typical periods of development. In my small book,³⁵ you will find further information on these stages; here I can only sketch them in outline.

The first period runs from birth up to the beginning of the change of teeth around the age of seven. It is during this period that external influence can do most to develop the physical body. During the next period, from the seventh year up to the onset of puberty at about the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth year, the etheric body, particularly, can be developed. Then comes a third period when the lower astral body, especially, can be developed, until finally, from about the 21st year onwards, the time comes when a human being meets the world as a free, independent being and can himself work on the progress of his soul.

The years from 20 to 28 are important for developing the forces of the Sentient Soul. The next seven years up to the age of 35—these are all only average figures—are important for the development of the Intellectual Soul, especially through intercourse with the outer world.

All this may be regarded as nonsense by those who fail to observe the course of human life, but anyone who studies life with open eyes will come to know that certain elements in the human being are most open to development during particular periods. During our early twenties we are particularly well placed to bring our desires, instincts, passions and so on into relation with the impressions and influences received from our dealings with the outer world. We can feel our powers growing through the corresponding interaction between the Intellectual Soul and the world around us, and anyone who knows what true knowledge is, will realise that all earlier acquisitions of knowledge were no more than a preparation for this later stage. The ripeness of experience which enables one to survey and evaluate the knowledge one acquires is not attained, on average, before the thirty-fifth year. These laws exist. Anyone unwilling to recognise them is unwilling to observe the course of human life.

If we keep this in mind, we can see how human life between birth and death is structured. The work of the Ego in harmonising the soul-members, and its necessary endeavour to impress the fruits of its work on the physical body, will show you how important it is for an educator to know how the physical body goes through its development up to the seventh year. It is only during this period that influences from the outer world can be brought in to endow the physical body with power and strength. And here we encounter a mysterious connection between the physical body and the Consciousness Soul, a connection which exact observation can thoroughly confirm.

If the Ego is to gain strength, so that in later life, after the thirty-fifth year, it can permeate itself with the forces of the Consciousness Soul, and through this permeation can go forth to acquire knowledge of the world, it ought to encounter no boundaries in the physical body. For the physical body can set up the greatest obstacles to the Consciousness Soul and the Ego, if the Ego is not content to remain enclosed in the inner life but wishes to go out and engage in free intercourse with the world. Now since in bringing up a child during his first seven years we are able to strengthen the forces of his physical body, within certain limits, a remarkable connection between two periods of life is apparent. What can be accomplished for a child during these years by those who care for him is not a matter of indifference! People who fail to realise this have not learnt how to observe human life. Anyone who can compare the early years of childhood with the period after the thirty-fifth year will know that if a man is to go out into the world and engage in free intercourse with it, the best thing we can do for him is to bring him the right sort of influence during his early years. Anything we can do to help the child to find joy in immediate physical life, and to feel that love surrounds him, will strengthen the forces of his physical body, making it supple, pliant and open to education. The more joy, love and happiness that we can give the child during his early years, the fewer obstacles and hindrances he will encounter later on, when the work of his Ego on his Consciousness Soul should enable him to become an open character, associating in free give-and-take with the outer world. Anything in the way of unkindness pain or distressing circumstances that we allow the child to suffer up to his seventh year has a hardening effect on his physical body, and this creates obstacles for him in later life. He will tend to become a closed character, a man whose whole being is imprisoned in his soul, so that he is unable to achieve a free and open intercourse with the world and the impressions it yields.

Again, there are connections between the etheric body and the second period of life, and therefore with the Intellectual Soul. The play of the Ego on the Intellectual Soul releases forces which can either endow a man with courage and initiative or incline him to cowardice, indecision, sluggishness. Which way it goes depends on the strength of the Ego. But when a man has the best opportunity to use the Intellectual Soul for strengthening his character through intercourse with the world, between the ages of 28 and 35, he may encounter hindrances in his etheric body. If during the period from the seventh to the fourteenth year we supply the etheric body with forces that will prevent it from creating these hindrances in later life, we shall be doing something for his education that should earn his gratitude.

If during the period from seven to fourteen in a child's life we can stand towards him as an authority, and as a source of truth whom he can trust, this is particularly health-giving. Through this relationship, we, as parents or teachers, can strengthen his etheric forces so that in later life he will encounter the least possible obstacles in his etheric body. Then he will be able, if his Ego has the disposition for it, to become a man of courage and initiative. If we are aware of these hidden connections, we can have an enormously health-giving influence on human beings while they are growing up.

Our chaotic education has lost all knowledge of these connections; they were known instinctively in earlier times. It is always a pleasure to see that some old teachers knew of these things, whether by instinct or by inspiration. Rotteck's old World History, for example: it was to be found in our fathers' libraries and it may now be out of date here and there, but if we approach it with understanding we encounter a quite individual method of presentation which shows that Rotteck, who taught history in Freiburg, had a way of teaching which was the very reverse of dry or insipid. We have only to read the Foreword, which is quite out of the ordinary in spirit, to feel: here is a man who knows that in addressing young people of this age—from 14 to 21, when the astral body is developing—he must bring them into touch with the power of great, beautiful ideals. Rotteck is always at pains to show how we can be inspired by the great thoughts of the heroes and to kindle the enthusiasm that can be felt for all that men and women have striven for and suffered in the course of human evolution.

This approach is entirely justified, for the influence thus poured into the astral body during these years is of direct benefit to the Sentient Soul, when the Ego is working to develop a person's character through free intercourse with the world. All that has flowed into the soul from high ideals and enthusiasm is imprinted on the Sentient Soul and embodied accordingly in character.

Thus we see that because the physical, etheric and astral bodies are still plastic in young people, this or that influence can be impressed on them through education, and this makes it possible for a man to work on his character in later life. If education has not helped him in this way, he will find it difficult to work on his character and he will have to resort to the strongest measures. He will need to devote himself to deep meditative contemplation of certain qualities and feelings in order to impress them consciously on his soul. He must try, for example, to experience inwardly the content of those religious confessions which can speak to us as more than theories. He must devote himself again and again to contemplation of those great philosophies in the widest sense which in later life can lead through our thoughts and feelings into the great, all-embracing cosmic secrets. If we can immerse ourselves in these secrets, ever and again willingly devoting ourselves to them; if through daily prayer we make them part of ourselves, then through the play of the Ego, we can re-mould our characters in later life.

In this connection the essential thing is that the qualities acquired by and embodied in the Ego are imprinted on the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. Generally speaking, man has little power over his external body. We have seen how he encounters a boundary in his physical body, with its innate pre-dispositions. Nevertheless, observation shows that in spite of this limitation, man can do some work on his physical body between birth and death.

Who has not noticed that a man who devotes himself for a decade to knowledge of a really deep kind—knowledge that does not remain grey learning but is transformed into pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, thus becoming real knowledge and uniting itself with the Ego—who has not noticed that such a man's physiognomy, his gestures, his entire behaviour have changed, showing how the working of the Ego has penetrated right into his external physique!

However, the extent to which the outer body can be influenced by powers acquired between birth and death is very limited. For the most part man has to resign himself to keeping them for his next earthly life.

On the other hand, the various attributes brought over from previous lives can be enhanced by working on them between birth and death, if the faculty for doing so has been acquired.

Thus we see how character is not confined to the inner life of the soul, but penetrates into a man's external physique and limbs. It finds expression, first, in his gestures; second, in his physiognomy; and third, in the plastic formation of the skull, the origin of what we call phrenology.

How, then, does character achieve this outward expression in gesture, physiognomy and bone-formation? The Ego works formatively first of all in the Sentient Soul, which embraces all the instincts, desires, passions—in short, everything that belongs to the inner impulses of the will. The note sounded by the Ego on this member of the soul is manifest externally as gesture, and this play of gestures, springing from a man's inner being, can tell us a great deal about his character.

When the Ego is active chiefly in the Sentient Soul, the note it sounds there resonates in the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, and this, too, is evident in gesture. The coarser elements of the Sentient Soul come to expression in gestures connected with the lower part of the body. If, for instance, a man pats his stomach with a feeling of satisfaction, we can see how his character is bound up with his Sentient Soul, and how volitions connected with his higher soul-members come to expression hardly at all.

When, however, the activity of the Ego resonates in the intellectual Soul, we can often observe a gesture related to the organ which serves the Intellectual Soul as its chief means of outer expression. Speakers who have the so-called “breast-tone of conviction” are given to striking themselves over the heart. They are men who speak with passion and are not concerned with objective judgment. Here we have the passionate character who lives entirely in the Sentient Soul but has so strong an Ego that his emotions resonate in the Intellectual Soul; we recognise him by his expansive attitudes. For example, there are popular speakers who thrust their thumbs into their waistcoats and swell out their chests when they are facing an audience. Far from being objective, they speak directly out of the Sentient Soul, putting into words their personal egoistic feelings and reinforcing them with this gesture—thumbs in waistcoat.

When the note struck by the Ego in the Sentient Soul resonates in the Consciousness Soul, we see a gesture bearing on the organ which gives the Consciousness Soul its chief outer expression. If a person finds it particularly difficult to bring his inner feelings to the point of reaching a decision, he will lay a finger on his nose—a gesture indicating how hard it is for him to fetch up a decision from the depth of his Consciousness Soul.

When someone lives chiefly in the Intellectual Soul, this is apparent in his physiognomy and facial expression. The experience of the Intellectual Soul lies closer to man's inner life and is not subject to the outer pressure under which he might sigh like a slave. He feels it to be more his own property, and this is reflected in his face. If a man is indeed capable of living in the Intellectual Soul, but presses down its content into the Sentient Soul, if any judgment he forms gets hold of him so strongly that he glows with enthusiasm for it, we can see this expressed in his sloping forehead and projecting chin. If something is actually experienced in the Intellectual Soul and only resonates in the Sentient Soul, this is expressed in the lower part of the face. If a man achieves the special virtue of the Intellectual Soul, a harmony between inner and outer, so that he neither secludes himself in inward brooding nor depletes his inner life by complete surrender to outer impressions, and if his Ego's work in the shaping of character is accomplished chiefly through the Intellectual Soul, then all this will be manifest in the middle part of his face, the external expression of the Intellectual Soul.

Here we can see how fruitful Spiritual Science can be for the study of civilisations: we are shown how successive characteristics are imprinted on successive peoples. Thus the Intellectual Soul made its imprint particularly on the ancient Greeks, among whom we can discern the beautiful harmony between inner and outer that is the characteristic manifestation of the Intellectual Soul. And here, accordingly, we find the Greek nose in its perfection. True it is that we cannot fully understand these things unless we relate them to their spiritual background.

Again, when someone carries the content of the Intellectual Soul into the realm of cognition and experiences it in the Consciousness Soul, the outward sign of this is a projecting forehead, as though the working of the Ego in the Intellectual Soul were flowing up into the Consciousness Soul.

If, however, someone lives in close unity with his Ego, so that the character of the Ego is impressed on the Consciousness Soul, he can then carry the note sounded by the Ego in his Consciousness Soul down into his Intellectual Soul and his Sentient Soul. This goes with a higher stage of human development. Only the Consciousness Soul can be permeated by high moral and aesthetic ideals and by great, wide-ranging conceptions of the world.

All this has to come to life in the Consciousness Soul, but the forces engendered by the Ego in the Consciousness Soul on this account can penetrate down into the Sentient Soul, where they are fired with enthusiasm and passion and with what we may call the inner warmth of the Sentient Soul, This comes about when a man can glow with enthusiasm for some knowledge he has gained. Then the noblest aspiration to which man can rise at present is carried down into the Sentient Soul. And the Sentient Soul itself is enhanced when permeated by forces from the Consciousness Soul. But what the Ego can accomplish for a character—ideal through its work in the Consciousness Soul may encounter obstacles caused by inborn pre-dispositions, so that it cannot be impressed on the physical body. Then we have to practise resignation; the work of the Ego in the Consciousness Soul may give rise to a noble quality of soul, but this cannot come to expression in the physical body during that single life-time. But the ardent passion for high moral ideals that a person has experienced in the Sentient Soul can be taken through the gate of death and carried over into his next life as a most powerful formative force. We can see how this comes to expression in the contours of the skull, showing that what a man has made of himself penetrates into his very bones.

A study of the contours of the skull can indeed throw some light on character, but always in a strictly individual context. It is absurd to suppose that phrenology can lay down general schemes and typical principles that will be universally valid. Everyone has a phrenology that applies to himself alone, for his skull is shaped by forces derived from his previous life, and in every individual this must be recognised. Only abstract theorists addicted to diagrams would think of founding a phrenology on general principles. Anyone who knows about the formative forces that work into man's very bones would speak only of recognising their effects in individuals. The formation of the skull is different with everyone and can never be accounted for in terms of a single earthly life. Here we touch on what is called reincarnation, for in the contours of the skull we can discern what a man has made of himself in previous lives. Here reincarnation becomes a palpable fact. We need only know where to read the evidence for it.

Thus we see how the effects of human character have to be followed from their origin all the way into the hardest structures, and then human character stands before us as a wonderful riddle. We have begun to describe how the Ego impresses character into the forms of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. Then we saw how this work by the Ego has results which make their mark on man's external physique and are manifest in gesture and physiognomy and even in the bones. And since man is led from birth to death and on again to a new birth, we saw how his inner being works on the outer, impressing character both on the inner life and on the physical body, which is an image of the inner life. Hence we can very well understand the deep impression made on us by the Laocoon, where we see the bodily character failing asunder into the several limbs; we see, as it were, the character, which belongs to the very essence of man, vanishing in the outward gestures of this work of art. Here we have plain evidence of the working of inner forces in the material realm, and of how the dispositions brought from earlier lives are determining factors in any given life; and we see how the spirit, by breaking life asunder, brings to expression in a new life the character acquired as the outcome of a previous one.

We can now enter into Goethe's feelings when he held Schiller's skull in his hand and said: In the contours of this skull I see how the spirit sets its stamp on matter. This form, full of character, calls up for me the voice that I heard sounding through Schiller's poems and in the words of friendship he so often spoke to me. Yes, I see here how the spirit has worked in the material realm. And when I contemplate this piece of matter, its noble forms show me how previous lives prepared the radiance that shone out so powerfully for me from Schiller's mind.

So we are led to repeat as our own conviction the words written by Goethe after contemplating Schiller's skull:

What greater gift can life on man bestow
Than that to him God-Nature should disclose
How solid to spirit it attenuates,
How spirit's work it hardens and preserves.

• 30. From the poem “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel”, 1826.
• 31. Faust I, 11.1112–1117.
• 32. Cf. 19th Book, 1.137ff.
• 33. Johann Joachim Winkelmann, 1717–68. Cf. his “Geschichte der Kunst im Altertum”, part 11.
• 34. Agesander, a Rhodian sculptor, is mentioned by Pliny as the creator, together with Polydorus and Athenodorus, of the Laocoon group, which dates from the period 42–21 B.C. Now in the Vatican.
• 35. For his concept of asceticism see The World as Will and Representation, Book IV. Particularly from par. 68.

I thank you from my heart for the kind words of the General Secretary of the Swedish section, Colonel Kinell, and in reply I wish to say that it is deeply satisfying, on my journey from Helsingfors, to be able for a few days to discuss again with you in Stockholm those things and truths which touch us all so closely. I offer you a hearty greeting, as warmly felt as the kind words of the General Secretary.

On these two more intimate evenings we shall have to speak of a question, an affair of mankind, which in a double connection penetrates extraordinarily deeply into our souls. First, because the Christ question is such that, for two thousand years now, not only has it occupied countless souls on earth, but from it have flowed for countless earth-souls spiritual life-blood, strength of soul, consolation and hope in suffering, strength and sureness in action. And not only that, but when we consider all that surrounds us as external exoteric culture, created through many centuries, then through deeper knowledge we see that all this would have been impossible had not the Christ impulse taken hold of a large part of humanity. This is one consideration which shows us what strong interest the Christ question must offer if we approach it with anthroposophical knowledge. This is only one side of the interest which we bring to this problem; the other side of our interest comes out of the particular soul and spiritual conditions of our present time, our epoch. We need only look about us in the world and try to understand the yearnings, the seeking of the human soul, and we shall be able to say to ourselves: “Ever more do human souls seek after something which, through the centuries, has been connected in men's souls with the name of Christ, and ever more do they come to the conviction that a renewing of the ways, a renewing of interest, a deepening of knowledge, is necessary if the needs of human souls (which will steadily increase with regard to Christ) are to be satisfied.” If we find on the one side a thirsting for enlightenment about Christ, we find on the other side, among numerous souls of the present day, doubt and insecurity as to the means used up to this time. And therefore, because of the yearning for an answer and because of the doubt that the truth can be learned, this is one of the most burning questions of the present time.

It is thus obvious that a spiritual movement which penetrates more deeply into spiritual foundations has the task of throwing light on this question. Things are like this today, my dear friends, but in a relatively short time, truly in a very short time, they will be entirely different. If we somewhat unegotistically examine what, in relation to Christ, will be needed by those men who follow after our time, then we must say to ourselves that, although many men of the present can satisfy themselves with what there is, souls will feel themselves increasingly unsure and will thirst increasingly for enlightenment. Thus in speaking of Christ today we speak of something which we foresee as necessary for the human beings of a very near future. Anthroposophy would not fulfil its task if it did not put itself in a position to create clarity on these points by means of its knowledge, as far as this is possible today.

As my point of departure I shall indicate the three paths along which the soul, in accordance with human evolution, can attain to Christ. If we mention three paths we must briefly describe the first path, which today is no longer a path, though it once was; which today need not be an esoteric path, as just in our time the anthroposophic path is, but which was a path for millions of souls through the centuries. This is the path through the so-called Christian documents, through the Gospels. For millions and millions of people this path was, and for many it still is, the only possible one. The second path along which the human soul may seek the Christ is that which can be called the path through inner experience, which especially in the present and in the near future numerous souls, out of their particular constitution and qualities, must pursue. The third path is that which, through the anthroposophical movement, one can at least begin to understand in our time, the path through initiation. Thus there are three paths to Christ: First, the path through the Gospels; second, the path through inner experience; and third, the path through initiation.

The first path, the path through the Gospels, need be only briefly characterized here. We all know that, in the course of the centuries, the Gospels became nourishment for the hearts and souls of innumerable people. We know also that the most enlightened, the most critical natures (and these are not the irreligious), begin to have no further relation to this Christ, because it is maintained today that external knowledge cannot know what historical facts really stand behind that which the Gospels relate. Had the Gospels been read by men of past centuries as today they are read by a scholar, by a man who has gone through the current scientific education, they would never have been able to exercise the powerful influence, the life-influence, which has flowed out of them. Now, if the Gospels were not read in past centuries as the educated man of today reads them, how were they read?

To ponder a priori on what may have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, this would never have occurred to the Gospel-readers of earlier centuries, and still does not occur to many Gospel-readers of today. Those who begin to test, in the Gospels, what may have taken place before the eyes of the inhabitants of Palestine at the beginning of our era lose confidence in the historical character of the events of Palestine. The men of earlier times did not read in this way. They read in such a way that they allowed a picture to work on their souls; for instance, the picture of the Samaritan woman at the well, or of Christ imparting the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples. The question of external physical reality never occurred to them. How their hearts warmed, how their feelings swelled in the presence of these great and powerful pictures—this was to them the main thing. What formed itself in their hearts, what force, what life-meaning they gained through these pictures—this was the main thing. They felt that spiritual lifeblood and strength flowed to them from these pictures. When they let these pictures work on their souls, they felt strong; they felt that, without these pictures, they would be weak. And then they felt living, personal connections with what is recounted in the Gospels, and the question of historical reality occurred to them no further. The Gospels were themselves reality, they were present as force, and one did not need to ask whence they came; one knew that men had written them not with earthly means, but with impulses from the spiritual worlds. I do not assert that one must feel in this way today (what one must do depends on the development of mankind), but I assert that men felt in this way through centuries.

How could it be so? On this point spiritual science is now first able to instruct us. When we begin to understand the Gospels in the light of spiritual science, and try to penetrate into what flows down from spiritual worlds and is contained in the Gospels, then we stand before the Gospels in such a way that we say: “We know from spiritual science, quite apart from the Gospels, all that has taken place in human evolution in connection with the Christ-impulse, and then we find what is contained in the Gospels, quite independently of them.”

How, then, do we conceive the Gospels from the spiritual-scientific point of view? If I may use a simple comparison, let us assume that a man has attained enlightenment on some subject. With this enlightenment, he meets a second man and begins to talk with him. At first he will not suppose that the other knows anything of the subject which is so clear to him, but from the conversation he perceives that the other knows it quite as well as he. What must reasonably be assumed? The reasonable thing to assume is that the other has enlightened himself through the same or similar sources. So is it also with the Gospels. We can do this, no matter from what standpoint we approach the Gospels. A society could be formed of people who read the Gospels in the above described way; then there could also be people in this society who were determined opponents of the Gospels, and who would say that, when the Gospels were tested by the methods of science, it would be found that they were written much later than the events in Palestine could have occurred, and that their accounts contradict each other—in short, that these Gospels cannot be regarded as historical documents. Such people might be in such a society, and one could say: “Well, let us at first leave the Gospels in peace, but let us do some research in the spiritual worlds.”

Then, if we did some genuine spiritual research, if we gained genuine super-sensible knowledge, we would find that in the course of human evolution there had once entered a strong impulse, which broke into human evolution as an impulse from the spiritual worlds, from which mighty things have proceeded for humanity; and we would see that at the beginning of our era, this impulse had taken hold of a man who was especially suited thereto. All this, and many other facts which fit into this knowledge and which can be won only through super-sensible research, all this we would have; and those who wished to know nothing of the Gospels would have this as well as others. Then one could approach the Gospels and say: “Well now, at first we did not trouble ourselves at all about these Gospels; yet it is remarkable that, when we read them carefully, we see that they contain what we found in spiritual fields independently of them. Now we recognize their value from an entirely different side.”

Then we are clear that it could not be otherwise, that those who wrote the Gospels must have received their knowledge from the same source which is now opening itself to humanity through the spiritual movement. This is just what now confronts us, what will come more and more, what will make a valid basis for the valuation of the Gospel documents. If this is so, we must say that men will be able to find along other ways what can be known through these documents. And so this knowledge begins to be more and more sacred to us through the spiritual cognition of the present day. It already worked through the force of the Gospels. Because the Gospels are suffused with the holiest knowledge, with the spiritual impulses of humanity, they had an influence even where they were taken in naively. Spiritual knowledge works not only abstractly, not only in theory, but works as a life-force, as life-blood of the soul. And ever more and more will men recognize how consolation and strength flow from this knowledge.

But when we speak of the inner way to Christ, we encounter more and more things which can be understood and felt at the present time only when approached with the right spiritual-scientific understanding. We shall try to speak of the inner Christ-experience in such a way that it may be seen how, independently of all tradition, this may appear in every man. To this end we must, of course, regard the human being with the knowledge which we have found through spiritual science. If we steep ourselves in spiritual science, then we find even the most elementary knowledge becoming fruitful when we apply it to life. We find that we get away from the abstract charts of the seven members of man when we contemplate the growing and becoming of man. The physical body has its especial development in the first seven years of life. We perceive further that in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, the forces of the etheric body play in man. Then the forces of the astral body begin to play, and only later, about the 20th or 21st year, (depending on his whole organization and on the nature of the forces in him) begins what appears in man as the Ego, as the bearer of the Ego, with that force which it really has because of its organization for the whole life of man as the bearer of the Ego.

That the bearer of the Ego first becomes really capable of living in the 20th or 21st year is not often observed in our present time, because we are not yet inclined to pay attention to these things. What does it mean that the bearer of the Ego first becomes really active in the 20th or 21st year of life? Here we must observe, by occult means, the growing man and view the deeper forces of his organization. These forces continually change: from birth until the seventh year, from the seventh year until sexual maturity, from sexual maturity until the unfolding of the Ego. But they change in such a way that they cannot be tested by the methods of ordinary anatomy or physiology. By occult means, one can say that only around the 20th year does man develop his forces in such a way that a self-sufficing Ego-bearer now exists. Earlier this Ego-bearer is not yet formed; earlier the human corporeality, even the super-sensible, is not yet a proper Ego-bearer. So if we consider the members of man in the light of the great world-principle, we must say that, through the peculiarities of his organization, man is really ripe to develop an Ego out of himself only in his 20th or 21st year, not earlier.

With this fact another may be contrasted, namely that in the first years of life, in normal consciousness, we really dream ourselves, sleep ourselves into life, and that only after a certain point of time does life take such a course that our own memory begins. Of what happened before this time we may be told by our parents or elder brothers; after this point the man says “I am who I am.” From the time when he says “I have done this; I have thought that,” the man dates his own Ego; what came before that loses itself in the twilight of the soul. Our memory reaches only to the point of time so described.

What do we have when we put these two facts together; that the real bearer of the human Ego is born in the 20th or 21st year, and that in our souls we describe ourselves as an Ego from the third or fourth year on? This means that in the present cycle of man's development he has an opinion, a feeling, about himself which does not correspond to his inner organization, as this has developed; for the consciousness of the Ego appears in the third or fourth year, but the organization for the Ego first appears in the 20th or 21st year. This fact is of fundamental importance for the understanding of man. When this fact is stated abstractly as an item of spiritual-scientific knowledge, no one gets particularly excited about it; but, because this fact is true, there are numerous experiences available which we all know well, but which we do not observe in the light of this fact. All that man can experience of cleavage between external organization and inner experience, of sorrow and pain in life because (by reason of his organization) certain things are impossible for him, of disharmony between what he wishes and what he can perform; the fact that he may have ideals which lead far beyond his organization: all this leads back to the fact that the consciousness of our Ego goes an entirely different way from that followed by the bearer of our Ego. In this respect we are two men; An external man who is organized to develop his egohood in the 20th or 21st year, and an inner soul-man who already in his fourth or fifth year, as to his soul-life, emancipates himself from his outer organization. Emancipation of the Ego-consciousness from the outer organization takes place in childhood. We go through something in our soul which proceeds independently of our outer organization and which can even come into sharp contradiction with our outer organization. We are inclined, in regard to the inner consciousness of the Ego, to pay no attention to our organization, to what is below in our bodies. In our souls we develop in an entirely different way from that in which our bodies develop.

Thus the course of inner development of mankind is twofold. The development of our organization goes from the first to the seventh year, then from the seventh to the fourteenth, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first, in the above described way; but our inner development is such that we are entirely independent of the above, such that the consciousness of our Ego emancipates itself in tenderest childhood and makes its own way through life. But what is the consequence of this curious fact of human development? Only the occultist can tell us this.

If we survey all that the occultist can teach, we come to a curious fact. We come to see that sickness, frailty of the human organization, all that makes possible illness, age, and death, comes from our being really a duality. We die because we are organized in a certain way and in our organization pay no attention to our Ego-development. That with our Ego we go an independent path, not troubling ourselves about our organization, this is brought home to us when this organization, in sickness and death, places a hindrance before our Ego-development; we are reminded that our Ego-development proceeds quite separately from our organization. Whence comes really this curious fact of duality in human nature?

When we examine man in connection with reality, we see that, if at a certain time in the Earth evolution, namely in the Lemurian time, only progressive forces had intervened in human development, the youthful development of man would today proceed quite otherwise—namely so that it would keep even step with the Ego-development. At all times the soul-development would coincide exactly with the body-development. It would have been impossible for man to develop himself otherwise than in the way now set up as an ideal, for example, in my pamphlet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Anthroposophic Press, New York City) Had only progressive forces been active at that time, the singular result would have been that, in the first twenty years of life, man would have been much less self-reliant than he is now. This lack of self-reliance is not meant in a bad sense, but in such a way that each of you would approve of it completely. For example, human nature in the first seven years of life is completely disposed to imitation. Since grown people, if only progressive forces had been active in the Lemurian time, would do nothing shameful, children between one and seven would be able to imitate nothing bad. In the second seven years of life the principle of authority would reign, whereas now it has come to be a curse of the land, a curse of the world, that persons between seven and fourteen want to be independent and are even educated to form independent opinions. The grown persons would have been the natural authorities for the children. From fourteen to twenty-one, man would have looked much less into himself, upon his own self; he would have turned more toward the outside. The force of ideals, the power of living himself into his life-dreams would have become immensely significant for him. Life-dreams would have sprung from his heart, and then full Ego-consciousness would have appeared in his 20th and 21st years.

Thus there would be in the first seven years a period of imitation, then in the second seven years a looking up to authority, then in the third seven years a springing forth of ideals, which would bring man to his full Ego-consciousness. The sum of those forces also working in evolution which are called the Luciferic forces have brought about a deviation from this path of development in the course of human evolution. Since the Lemurian time they have torn the Ego-consciousness away from the foundation of the organization. The fact that we already have the Ego-consciousness in tenderest childhood is to be traced to the Luciferic forces.

How did the Luciferic forces intervene? The Luciferic powers are beings who remained behind on the Moon, and who therefore have no understanding of the mission of the Earth, for that which should develop for the first time on the Earth for the Ego after the 21st year. They took man as he was on coming over from the Moon, and laid in him the germ of self-reliant soul-development. So that in the hastening of Ego-consciousness, in this peculiar cleavage in human nature, lie the Luciferic forces. Knowledge of such a fact is given for the first time by anthroposophy. It can be sensed by every man of sound feeling, for every man can sense that there is something in him which separates him from his full humanity. All that we call unjustified egoism in our nature, all withdrawing from the activities of men, all this stems from the Ego's not going along on the right path of the organization. Thus do we see man before us, if he can feel. If he says to himself: “I could be other than I am; I have something in me which is not in harmony with myself”—then he feels the strife within him of the progressive powers with the Luciferic powers. This fact had to occur in the course of human evolution; it was necessary because man would never have become really free without the Luciferic beings; he would have been always bound to his organization. What on the one hand brings man into conflict with his organization, gives him on the other hand the first possibility of being free. One thing, however, remains out of this duality of the organization for the ordinary human life; this shows itself in our feeling that the Ego has become incapable, out of its own powers, of transforming the organization.

When we survey the broad circumference of what has constituted and created man, we find the two forces described above; there are the organic forces of our human nature, which are intended to develop in seven-year periods, and there are the Luciferic forces. If there were nothing else in nature or in the spiritual life in the course of human development, it would follow that man could never, through his emancipated Ego, come into full harmony with his nature. Were there nothing else in the field of earth-existence, man could only become ever more estranged from his organization; his organization would become ever more infirm, more dried up; the cleavage would necessarily become always greater. If man only once reaches the point of intensely feeling this as spiritual-scientific knowledge, then he comes to a great moment in his life, when he can say: “Here I stand with my human organization which is given me by the progressive forces that work from seven years to seven years (he need not express this in precise words, he need only feel it dimly). But, because this organization has an opposing force, which develops itself independently, it becomes sick and infirm and finally dies.” In the depths of his soul man feels this. Without knowing anything of anthroposophy, he need only have this feeling of a discrepancy between the inner Ego and the outer organization, and, if he steeps himself in this feeling, then—he knows not whence—there comes into his soul something of which he feels: “I myself, with the Ego which I can trace back, can do nothing against my organization, for which I am no match. But there comes something which I can take into my Ego as force, which I can take into my consciousness as conviction; directly from spiritual worlds comes something which does not reside in me, but which permeates my soul. From unknown worlds something can flow into my soul; if I take it up in my heart, if I suffuse my Ego with it, then it helps me directly from spiritual worlds.”—This which comes from spiritual worlds may be called whatever we like; that is not important; only the feeling is important.

Let us assume that a man is today at odds with life and says to himself: “I must seek through the whole world to see if somewhere a force will spring up which will give me something through which I can come out of the conflict, something which will help me out.”—In the nature of things this man could never find his way with the means of the old religious confessions; in the ancient ecclesiastical ideas he could never find anything which would give him this force that he seeks. But, in order to have a concrete example, let us assume that such a man went to one of the ancient holy religions, that he went, for example, to Buddhism and steeped himself in the extraordinary teachings of Buddhism. If the man felt, however, naturally and in its full strength the cleavage described above, he would feel—I do not say this would come out of a theory, but out of a dim feeling—he would feel that in the personality, in the individuality of Gautama Buddha, something had lived which could appear in the world only on the basis of a long development. This individuality went through many incarnations, achieved higher and higher grades of evolution, and finally came so far that in the 29th year of his life as Gautama Buddha, he was able to rise from Bodhisatva to Buddha, was able to rise in such a way that he need never more return to a physical body. How did that which flows out from this individuality come into being? Every unprejudiced mind can feel what speaks out of the Buddha, can feel all that first came about and developed through the Bodhisatva in earth evolution after developing through many incarnations. In the most beautiful and comprehensive sense all this contains the forces which are found in the periphery of the earth, in the interplay of the forces of the organization and the Luciferic forces. Therefore, because it has gone from incarnation to incarnation, because it stems from the same forces from which the human forces stem, therefore that which flows from the Bodhisatva to the Buddha has such an effect that the unprejudiced mind does not feel anything that can call forth a full harmony between the Ego of man and his organization. The soul feels that there must be something which does not go from incarnation to incarnation, but which can stream into every human soul directly from the spiritual worlds.—When the soul feels that it must have a relation to what streams down from the heavens, then it is beginning to have an inner experience of the Christ. Then the soul can understand that in Christ Jesus something had to appear which was different from everything previously existing. This is the radical, fundamental difference, the difference in principle between the life of the Christ and that of the Buddha.

Buddha rose from a Bodhisatva to a Buddha with the forces which cause man to mount from incarnation to incarnation, as is the case with other great founders of religions. Into the life of Jesus of Nazareth something entered, something worked into the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth, over a period of three years, which streamed down directly out of the spiritual worlds, which had nothing to do with human evolution, which previously was not connected with a human life. We must keep this difference clearly in mind if we wish to understand why, in what the fourth post-Atlantean epoch called the Christ, there was something which was different from all other religious impulses, and why the other religions have always pointed mankind toward this Christ.

If we, in the post-Atlantean time, look back into the ancient sacred Indian culture, we see the seven holy Rishis, in whose souls there lived something of an immediate perception of the spiritual worlds. Had one of the seven holy Rishis been asked about the fundamental mood of his soul, he would have said: “We look up to the spiritual powers from whom all human development has proceeded. This reveals itself to us in seven rays, but above this is something else, something which lies above our sphere.” Vishvakarman, this was the name later given to what the seven holy Rishis thus felt. The seven holy Rishis spoke of a power which had not developed with the earth.

Then came the Zarathustra culture. Zarathustra spoke, when he directed his gaze to the spirits of the sun, of something which should flow into human evolution directly through a streaming out of the spiritual worlds. “What we can give to men,” so spake Zarathustra, “is not that which will one day, from the sun-distances, stream directly out of the spiritual worlds into mankind.” What is spiritual in the sun, this is what the later Persian culture called Ahura-Mazdao.

In the Egyptian mysteries the Christ question was felt with a particularly tragic force. It was felt in the deepest way, if by deep we mean a form of human feeling in which there was an especially strong consciousness that humanity stems from what is spiritual. The Egyptian initiate said to himself: “Wherever we turn our gaze, we feel in what surrounds us the decline from the original spiritual. Nowhere in the outer world is the spiritual to be found in its immediacy and purity. Only when man steps through the gate of death does he descry that from which he springs. Man must first die (in relation to inner experience, not in relation to initiation); then he becomes united with the Osiris-principle (so did the ancient Egyptian name the Christ principle); in life this cannot be done, that is the discrepancy. All that is in the periphery of the earth, this does not lead to Osiris; the soul must first have passed the portal of death to be united with Osiris. Then, in death, the soul becomes a piece of Osiris, it becomes itself a sort of Osiris. The world outside has become such that it dismembers Osiris through his enemy; that is, through all that belongs to the external world.”

And the initiate of the Egyptian mysteries said: “Mankind, as it now is in our culture, is a sort of reminiscence of the old Moon-time. As the culture of the seven holy Rishis is a sort of reminiscence of the old Saturn-time, as the Zarathustra culture is a reminiscence of the old Sun-time, so is the Osiris-culture a reminiscence of the old Moon-time when the Moon and its beings first separated from the sun, on which, however, remained the beings from whom man took his origin. At that time there took place the separation of man from the good forces of his organization, from the source of his life-forces. But, through the yearning and privation for the spiritual which will endure, the time will come for men when Osiris will descend and show himself as something which must come as a new impetus which was not before on earth, because already in the old Moon-time it had separated itself from the earth.”

All that to which the seven holy Rishis and Zarathustra pointed, and of which the Egyptians said that in their time men could not attain it during life, this was the force, the impulse, which for three years revealed itself in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. All great religions spoke of it; it revealed itself in Jesus of Nazareth, to whom all religions pointed. Thus not only Christians have spoken of Christ, but also the members of all ancient religions. Thus something entered into the course of human development which man needs and which is accessible to inner experience.

Let us assume that a man grows up on a lonely island. Those who have charge of his education tell him nothing of that happens in the world in regard to the name of Christ and to the Gospels; they give him only such culture as does not make use of the Gospels or the name of Christ, culture which may have come to birth under the influence of Christ, but divested of the name of Christ. What would happen in this case? In such a man the following mood would be bound to appear. He would say to himself one day: “Something lives in me which is in accord with my universal human organization; this I cannot at once grasp. For that in which my Ego-consciousness lives presents itself to me in such a way that I need something which cannot come to me through human culture, I need an impulse from the spiritual worlds, in order to make the Ego stronger again in its organization, from which it has emancipated itself.” If such a person can only feel strongly what man needs, then something can come over him from which he will recognize that, directly from spiritual worlds, something must stream out which penetrates directly into his Ego. He does not know that this is called Christ; but he does know that in his consciousness he can suffuse himself with it, that in his Ego he can foster this which comes to him from the spiritual worlds. Then something will come to him of which he may say: “Granted, I can be ill, I can be weak, I can die; but from my own Ego I can make myself stronger, I can send into my organization something which gives me strength and force directly out of the spiritual worlds.” It is indifferent what he calls this; if the man comes to this feeling, he is gripped by the Christ-impulse. That man is not gripped by the Christ-impulse who says he can have something from a teacher who has passed from incarnation to incarnation, but he who feels that directly from the spiritual world there can come impulses of force, of strength. Men can have this inner experience; without it men cannot live, without it men will not be able to live in the future. They can have this experience, because once, for three years, there lived objectively in Jesus of Nazareth this impulse which came directly out of the spiritual worlds. As it is true that a man can lay a seed in the earth, and that many other seeds can come from this one, so it is true that the Christ-impulse was once implanted into humanity, and that since that time there is something in humanity which was not there earlier.

This is why the Egyptian life was so tragic. Men felt that in their lives they could not come to Osiris; that they must first pass through the gate of death, to be united with him in inner experience. Of initiation we have still to speak. But since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha that is possible which earlier was not possible: that of his own motion, out of his single incarnation, man seeks his connection with the spiritual world. And this is because the impulse which was given through the Mystery of Golgotha can flash up in every soul, and can enter, since that time, into every man through inner experience. Not the Christ Who was on earth—the soul does not trouble itself about Him—but the Christ Who is attainable through inner experience. Since the Mystery of Golgotha it is possible, in the single incarnations, to win a connection with the spiritual. And because this is so, there happened in the one fact of Golgotha something which can shine out into humanity, which is not given through the achievements of the successive incarnations. Therefore it is impossible that Christ should show himself in a way which is a consequence of many incarnations, as happened to Buddha from his incarnations as Bodhisatva.

Tomorrow we shall see how the path to the Christ in human evolution can be found for the future.

Today, let me speak to you about many different things that can be easily linked together and in which you will readily discover some kind of relationship.

Let me speak to you above all of man's connection with the surrounding world, of man's feelings towards this world, and how these feelings can be deepened through a theosophical world-conception. Above all, I wish to awaken in you the feeling that a man with an average modern education and an average world-view does not contemplate the world in the same way as a theosophist.

If Theosophy is to be raised from the level at which it is known by so many, from the level of a theory, or number of teachings, to something that has soul, that fills our soul, purifying and ennobling all our feelings and emotions—if it is to be raised to a life content, we must be able, as it were, to experience and really apply to our daily life what we realise through Theosophy. We have only received Theosophy in the right way, when, for instance, we understand how to regard a plant, a field, a mountain, or an animal in a different way from how we were able to look at and perceive these before we became theosophists. We shall be able to enter more deeply into the meaning of these words, if we immerse ourselves into the nature of what is called self-consciousness.

You are all familiar with the self-consciousness of man. You know that we distinguish four members of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. What we call self-consciousness arises from the fact that man grows conscious of his Ego. Self-consciousness does not only enable us to gain knowledge of the surrounding world, but also of ourselves; it enables us to know that each one of us is an independent being. When we really follow this thought to the end, we will grasp how this self-consciousness in man is to be understood.

The question now arises: How do matters stand with the animal, the plant and the mineral?—Can we speak in a certain sense of self-consciousness in the case of animal, plant and mineral? People who simply say: “Why should not every stone also have an Ego, like man, only that man does not perceive it,” such people speak without any knowledge of the matter. For on the plane which we call the physical, only man is endowed with self-consciousness, with an Ego—and the animal, the plant and the mineral have no Ego on the physical plane. Man is distinguished from animal, plant and mineral by the fact that he has an Ego here, on the physical plane, in the ordinary world.

Don’t take my words to imply that there has to be a definite alternative. You must realise clearly that certain higher animals, particularly animals that live much in the company of man, such as domestic animals, have a kind of self-consciousness, resembling that of the lower savages of today. There are differences in degree everywhere. We shall not speak about transitions, but how things are mainly, in average states. From this standpoint, we may therefore say that, generally speaking, we do not come across self-consciousness in animals, here on the physical plane.

What kind of self-consciousness do animals possess? You easily rise to an understanding if you ask yourself, “Where is the self-consciousness of each of my fingers?” There you must tell yourself, “My own consciousness is the self-consciousness of my finger.” It cannot be thought of apart from your common consciousness. Your ten fingers have their common consciousness, in your Ego; there, they have their common Ego. The same applies to the other members of your body. This constitutes your self-consciousness.

Now transfer this concept to the concept of an animal species. There you must say to yourself: Everything in the animal kingdom which has the same form, all the lions, bears, frogs, fish—all of those that are similarly shaped, these lions belonging together, and so on, really behave in the same way as my ten fingers. Distance does not count. If we were to ask each finger as to its Ego, it would have to answer: It is the Ego of the man to whom we belong. In the same way, if you were to ask a lion in a menagerie, or a lion in Africa, each would point to the common Ego of the species, to the group-Ego.

All animals of the same form have a common ego. Man differs from the animal through the fact that each human being has his own Ego, whereas the animal has an Ego common to his species, a group-Ego. You cannot find the Egos of the animals in the physical world, for they exist in a world which we call the astral plane. There, you will find one being comprising all the lions. Just as here, upon the physical plane, you may encounter an individual human being self-contained within his skin, so—if you were clairvoyant—you would encounter on the astral plane the lion-Ego, the bear-Ego, as self-contained beings like the human beings here on Earth. On the astral plane they are quite intelligent beings, it’s not that they are lagging behind man. The single lion may be inferior to man, but his Ego is a very sublime being, who must understand and accomplish with penetrating wisdom the whole task connected with the lions here on Earth. These animal-Egos are therefore highly intelligent beings.

If you were now to follow clairvoyantly all these beings who constitute the collective Egos of the animals, you would see that they exercise a very strange activity. The animals’ tasks are ruled and governed by the beings whom we call the animal-Egos. These animal-Egos constantly surround the Earth.

Let me select one example out of many, in connection with the task of these animal-Egos. If you study a well-known phenomenon, about which men have thought a great deal—the flight of the birds, you will find that the birds that live in northern regions begin to gather in the autumn; they fly from north-eastern to south-western regions, and then southwards. They gather again in the spring and return north. At the foundation of these bird migrations lies the breeding and hatching of the young, and so on. The spring migration is a kind of wedding flight. The regularity of these flights is guided by the group-Souls; they command everything. You might observe the lines of flight: One species flies in this way, another in that way, some birds fly low over the ground, others high in the sky. Everywhere, you will find a deep wisdom in all these details. We may say: Everything that constitutes the souls of the animals encircles our planet, encircles our Earth. This example shows us how the wisdom of the group-Soul rules the flight of the birds.

How do matters stand with plants? They only have a physical and an etheric body. Individually, they have no independent astral body and no independent Ego on the physical plane. If you could observe yourself during your night's sleep, you would see your physical and etheric body lying on the bed. What lies on the bed has the value of a plant; the plant always consists of this. What lives in you during the day, when you are awake, what is contained in your physical body, is outside your physical and etheric body during the night.

In the case of the plant, the astral body and the Ego, which you lift out of your physical and etheric body during the night, are always outside. But this going out is also connected with something else.

Let us suppose that you were all to go to sleep here—which would, of course, not be very desirable; in that case, all your Egos and your astral bodies would be outside. They would not be so separated, as they are now separated from one another, while they live in the physical body. They would intermingle more, they would form a more uniform mass, as if they were swaying into one another. They would dissolve, as it were, in the common astral body of the Earth, and out of this astral body of the Earth, which is mingled with that of the Sun, they would draw the strength that eliminates fatigue. This is continually the case with the plants.

In the plant you see before you a physical and an etheric body. But the plant's astral body is outside. The whole Earth has an astral body in common, and that is the astral body of the plants. And the Earth also has a common Ego, and that is the Ego of the plants. Therefore you must look for the Ego of the plants in the common Ego of the whole Earth.

And now all the plants on Earth appear to you like your own fingers. You are an organism and your fingers are growing out of it. The whole Earth is an organism, and the plants are literally its members, which share in the common consciousness. What ensues from this, is literally true. You feel pain, when someone hurts you, or cuts into your flesh. Similarly, the whole Earth may feel pain under certain conditions. But the Earth does not feel pain when you pick a flower or cut a plant; this would not cause it pain. What causes pain to the Earth can be understood if we bear in mind the following:

The whole Earth must be imagined as a unified organism and all the plants as members of this common organism. The plants growing on the Earth are related to it more or less in the same way as the milk is related to the human being, or to the animal. When the calf sucks the milk of the cow, the cow experiences a certain feeling of well-being. The whole Earth has this same feeling when you pick a flower or cut a plant. Because what the Earth sends up to the Sun, what it sends out of itself, is in a different form that which lives in the milk. But if you tear out a plant with its root, it is the same as if you were to tear away a part of your body, or cut into your flesh. The Earth experiences something quite different when we cut a plant which is firmly rooted in the ground—then the Earth experiences well-being—but when we tear it out with its root it experiences something completely different. This should not be judged morally, but in accordance with the facts, and these are the facts.

Now try to feel, and not merely to think such a truth. We can feel it in the following way: When we go out in the autumn, and see a farmer mowing down the corn with the scythe, those who know how matters stand in the astral body of the Earth, can feel the feelings of desire, of joy, of pleasure which pass over the surface of the Earth, while the corn is being cut. When the reaper cuts down the corn at harvest time, the whole Earth really experiences joy. These kinds of feelings are experienced, when we know how matters stand with the group-soul of animals, the Earth-soul of plants, the group-Ego, and the Ego of the Earth. In the migrating flock of birds we can feel the wisdom; the wise arrangements of the astral beings who make these. We can even feel the wind of wisdom, like a current of air. And if we know that in the plants we encounter the soul of the Earth, we experience feelings and sensations in everything that happens to the plants. We perceive the cosmic Spirit surrounding the Earth, when we observe the Ego of the animals; and we perceive the cosmic Soul, the feelings of nature, when we pay attention to the Ego of the plants.

This is indeed so. If we look at the teachings of Theosophy not merely theoretically, if they fill our whole soul, we can feel the presence of the God who always passes through nature. And, if this is the case, then when one man faces another, he knows—does he not?—that a feeling heart beats in the other’s breast, that he has feelings similar to his own, that he does not merely think about the other, but also empathises with him. In this way, we gradually learn to experience something resembling the beat of the pulse, the warm feeling of nature. Nature becomes for us a living knowledge of spirit and soul.

Let us now imagine what it means to spiritualise nature through this teaching. We feel as if Spiritual Science enables us to bear ourselves quite differently towards everything, as if our feelings are purified and ennobled. What an indifferent matter it is to an ordinary man when the scythe passes through the corn, and cuts it down! And what a different experience this is to a theosophist, who follows the cutting scythe with his heart, and who knows that there below, where the scythe touches, is a living being, that the astral body of the Earth experiences pleasure. Thus nature gradually becomes truly full of life for us. This means that we must allow seemingly abstract theories to transition into living feelings and sensations. Every step in daily life changes, when we thus allow theory to become feeling.

Now that we understand this, let us pass on to another subject, which we may already have considered from another aspect, but which will appear to us in a new light.

You raise your eyes to the Moon and to the Sun. You have just heard how out of the theosophical wisdom a feeling can be kindled which teaches us how to empathise with the environment. This also extends to lifeless objects, even to the stones.

It is very peculiar how we learn to judge many things in our surroundings in a different way: Man often imagines things the wrong way. We think that we go out into the world equipped with knowledge and want to see what is really taking place, when something happens in the world outside. We may, for instance, come to a quarry: There, the workmen are hammering and quarrying the stone. There we come to the Ego of the stone, which is not merely connected with our earthly planet, but with our whole planetary system. The stone has its central point in that of the planetary system. The stone also has its sensations. But you must not think that the stone feels pain when it is broken up or destroyed. No! When you break or destroy a stone, this means that a feeling of pleasure ensues. You may even notice immeasurable pleasure throbbing through the quarry, when the men are working there. But when stone is joined to stone, pain is felt. It is interesting to know this.

Once the Earth was a glowing, molten object; you could not have lived there, until it had cooled down. Everything was dissolved in this glowing mass; it had to consolidate, and this process was connected with pain, whereas the separation gives joy, pleasure. The whole inanimate nature suffers, so as to enable you to build your dwelling places. Nature sighs for those who have insight into it; it sighs!

Nature will again be dissolved into its primeval elements. Lifeless nature had to be drawn together with pain, so that man might pass through his development. But when man has become so spiritualised that he no longer needs the solid Earth as a foundation, then the Earth will be redeemed with him; lifeless nature longs for this. What the Apostle Paul said, is true: “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain.”¹ It will be saved, when man approaches a spiritualised state.

It can be noticed that children, who have a certain feeling for the astral world, because they are still differently constituted from grown-ups, can still feel something of the sensations of a lifeless object that is being destroyed. Not always—for in many cases it is just naughtiness—but sometimes children destroy things because they feel such empathy. Indeed, we can see that they do not always destroy things out of naughtiness.

Things sometimes present an entirely different aspect from a spiritual standpoint. You can see, therefore, that the whole Earth is permeated with soul and spirit and that it is filled with feeling. The wonderful part of Theosophy is that it leads us into the living nature. Now you can easily understand that those who view things from the standpoint of occultists, must also look on the Sun and the Moon as endowed with soul and spirit, like the kingdom of nature. This is how it really is.

The part of the Sun that we can see when we look at it with our physical eyes, relates to the Sun's whole being, just as what we can see of the human body with our physical eyes relates to the whole being of man. The body of the Sun is the body of the Sun's spirit, and the body of the Moon is the body of the Moon's spirit. Sun, Moon and Earth belong together in a spiritual relationship—and this, to be sure, is a very complicated matter.

A whole range of spiritual beings are united with the Sun; their bodies, and not only their spirits, are in the Sun. When an occultist looks into the Sun and perceives the Sun's rays, this is not only a physical phenomenon for him, but it is connected with something else. You can get an idea of what he thus discerns, for instance, when a woman in the street raises her hand in a giving gesture towards a child. You see the movement of her hand and perhaps also the coin falling into the child's palm. Yet this is only the physical aspect. If you were to penetrate into the process expressed by the physical action, you would perceive the compassion as the impulse that causes the hand to move. In the child, too, you would see the external process as the expression of a spiritual process, perhaps of gratitude.

He who only receives the Sun's rays with his physical eyes, has the same relation to the spiritual seer, as he who sees only the woman's or the child's physical gesture has to one who also perceives the inner processes. He whose power of vision has been trained through occultism to see the Sun's rays coming towards us, also perceives how spiritual beings in the Sun overflow with feelings, and how these feelings become deeds. Their deeds are what they send down with the Sun's rays. If you observe the astral body of the Earth, you will find in it something like gratitude which is felt by the whole plant-world, as it receives the Sun's rays.

Still more wonderful is the course of a whole year! When the plants open out, this is a heart-felt psychic expression of the Earth's inner processes, and at the same time it expresses the feelings of the creative, gift-bestowing Spirits of the Sun.

Now we should note a certain contrast, but not an opposition, between the spiritual beings of the Sun and those of the Moon. The Earth, the Sun and the Moon belong together. In a very remote past, they were one body. Then the Sun severed itself from the Earth, that is to say, from the union of the present Earth with the present Moon.

Why did this take place? This can be explained in many ways. But today we shall only give one of the many reasons. When the Sun separated itself out of the Earth, all the beings who were of higher nature than those which remained behind, left the Earth with the Sun. For the Sun can be the dwelling place of far higher spiritual beings than man. Beings who far surpass man left the Earth and became the Spirits of the Sun, and the Sun became their dwelling place.

Consequently, if we look into the Sun with trained occult vision, we can see the physical Sun as a body, as the field of action and the dwelling place of sublime spirits, of the Solar Spirits. For a while, they were able to continue their development on the same planet on which we now live, but they were obliged to separate themselves from it, and, in order to continue their development in an appropriate manner, they took the finest substances away from it.

One of these Spirits of the Sun left the others, for he had been given a special task. He remained still connected with the Earth. Later on, the Moon also went out from the Earth; the Earth became independent. This Spirit, this Spirit of the Sun, who first had been given another task, a task which was not to be done from the Sun, is Jahve, or Jehovah, as cosmic intelligence.

This individuality left with the Moon, so that since the Earth was severed from the Sun and from the Moon, certain exalted Solar Spirits live in the Sun, and Jehovah in the Moon. The soul forces and the spiritual forces of these beings shine down upon the Earth together with the light that comes down to us from the Sun and from the Moon.

Man could not have developed as he did, had he been subjected to the exclusive influence of one of these beings. Man's development had to follow the course which it actually did follow.

If the Earth had only had the Sun, and not the Moon, man would have been subjected to a constant and rapid metamorphosis, and would have developed very quickly. This would not have been good for him; he would have hurried too much and passed over certain stages of his development. The best forces for the development of man are assembled in the Sun: but a quick pace had to be avoided. For this reason, Jehovah separated from the others, thus retarding the whole pace of human development.

Thus, in the course of human development, the forces of the Sun and of the Moon work together and produce the right mean.

If only the forces of the Moon had been active, man would have withered; withered, lifeless natures, mere forms, would have lived on the Earth, instead of living human beings. If you go through a museum and look at statues, you see before you the image of what the Moon would have made of you: soulless forms, of great beauty, certainly, but without soul. The Sun's forces bring life and movement into these stiff and rigid forms, but under the influence of the Sun's forces only, man would have become spiritualised too soon.

The course of earthly development has been arranged in this wise way, and this is why the Sun and the Moon, with their forces and beings, had to separate from the Earth.

If a clairvoyant could have studied the evolution of the Earth from another planet, if he could have watched how the Earth unfolded, he would have seen a strange sight. Let us suppose that someone follows the development of our Earth from a distant heavenly body: He would, in that case, see not only the physical body of the Earth, but also its astral body. If he were to observe this astral body, he would perceive in it all kinds of light-phenomena. He would follow these through thousands of years. Then a moment arrives, when the astral body completely changes, revealing new colours and entirely new processes.

There is such a moment in the evolution of the Earth, if we consider the Earth as an organism. Before this, the astral body reveals particular colours; and afterwards it shows us other colours. These two time periods of the Earth’s astral body are completely different. And if the clairvoyant observer were to investigate this moment when the astral body of the Earth experienced this radical change, he would discover that it coincides with the moment of Christ's death on Golgotha. When the blood streamed out of the wounds of Christ-Jesus, the whole astral body of the Earth changed. This is the cosmic mystery of the significance of Christ's death.

This should not be considered merely with the intellect. No occult training would be high enough to allow us to penetrate by feeling the whole significance of this event. What occurred at that time in our world-system? What brought about the change in the astral body of the Earth?

The change was brought about through the fact that from this moment onwards one of the Spirits of the Sun united his astral body with that of the Earth. We have already explained that there are several Spirits of the Sun, six in all. One of these, whom we designate as the Spirit of Christ, united his astral body with that of the Earth in the very moment when the blood streamed out of the wounds of his physical body. Since that time, the Earth has undergone an essential transformation, because it has become united with the body of Christ.

The Christ-principle descended from heavenly heights; until the death of Christ Jesus upon the Cross it lived in the body of the Sun. Through Christ's death it became united with the body of the Earth. Since then, the Earth, as a planetary body, is the body of Christ. Since then, He became one with the Earth.

Now we can understand in a deeper sense the meaning of the words: “He that eateth my bread, treadeth me underfoot.”² Imagine that the Earth is the body of Christ, and take this expression literally. The human beings walk on the body of the Earth, and eat the bread of the body of the Earth. And when the Spirit of the Earth speaks, it cannot describe this process in any other way than with the following words, “He that eateth my bread, treadeth me underfoot.”—and certainly without a grudge.

And the Lord’s Supper itself! How infinitely deeper is its meaning, if we know that the body of the Earth is the body of Christ! What is the bread that is baked from the grains of corn? How must the Spirit of the Earth address this bread?—“This is my body,”³—words that should be taken literally. And how must the Spirit of the Earth address the sap-forces of the plants? How must he, after having united himself with the Earth-Ego, talk to the saps that stream through the plants?—“This is my blood.” Just as the blood flows through the veins of your body, so literally the blood of Christ flows in the sap of the plants through the body of Christ, through the body of the Earth!

Who would not own that this gives an infinitely deeper meaning to the Holy Supper? What do we experience when we feel how the astral body of Christ unites itself with the Earth, and when we in this moment realise the meaning of the words which have just been quoted? What does the human being experience when he penetrates into all this? How profound the meaning of a sacrament like the Mystery of the Lord's Supper will become for him!

Thus we learn to consider all life around us in a different way, particularly through an occult study of these processes. We learn to understand the religious scriptures by taking them literally. And when we learn to grasp them in the way that is explained above, we begin to realise that all external interpretations of religious scriptures must disappear. For religious scriptures are drawn out of the deepest facts and express these. Genuine religious scriptures contain nothing that does not correspond with the great truths, such as the union of Christ's Spirit with the Earth, when His blood streamed out on Golgotha. How immensely our emotional life deepens, when we gain an insight into this mystery!

The task of Theosophy is to work in such a way that man once more learns to awaken in his soul the deep emotions and feelings which once lived in his forefathers—really lived there! Through the theosophical teachings we have now tried to conjure up before our souls what the soul is able to experience through this—it was the same in the past, where the early Christians also felt in this way. They could feel it deeply! These deep feelings continued to live in them until materialism came, with its intellectual judgments. Then the spirits withdrew, as it were, for nothing exerts such an estranging influence on spiritual beings as the intellect. When the intellect dissects things and encompasses them in its caustic criticism, it also drives away the spiritual beings from the human soul.

The myth of the good goblins has a deep meaning; they really existed, when as yet the light of the intellect had not been in man. This light of reason drove away the goblins. Such feelings existed, when the critical intellect had not as yet permeated the human soul.

Theosophy is there to give man again warm empathy with the whole of nature—in spite of the intellectual forces. The development of the intellect could not be held at bay; the spiritual nature had to withdraw for a time. But the spirit will return. We shall keep our intellectual powers, and in addition gain warm and glowing feelings, enthusiasm and compassion. Knowledge and feeling are united when we penetrate to the sources of life, and a new life will spring out of religious scriptures when that for which Goethe longed comes about. For, many centuries ago, the majority of mankind could not read the Bible, although they heard something of its contents. It was not until the art of printing was invented, that they were able to read the Bible. But today, they no longer read the deep, mysterious scriptures themselves; they only read the opinions expressed about the Bible by critical spirits. Goethe longed for an age in which men would once more learn to read the Bible, and not books about it. For today, they read books about the Bible! For a few pence, one can buy books that show that the Bible is supposedly a patchwork of separate documents, like the Old Testament has come about piece by piece. A book has even been written, where every sentence, printed in different colours, shows what was written at an earlier and at a later date, the additions, and so on, the so-called “Rainbow-Bible”!

These things are the outcome of the critical intellect, which can only perceive that something was written by one or the other author on the material plane. It cannot see that the authors of the Biblical writings were all of them disciples of great initiates, who possessed a direct insight into the spiritual world. The essential thing is to recognise the true spirit in the words, to penetrate into that which lies behind them, to understand that the religious scriptures were written from the depths of the true spiritual realisation.

Thus, we have seen the way in which we must understand these things. Through this, man learns what is important. Then he will rise up to the right feeling, which means to the right life.

• 1. In Luther’s translation it literally says, “The creatures are fearfully awaiting the revelation of the children of God”, Romans 8:19.
• 2. John 13:18.
• 3. “This is my body.....This is my blood”, Matthew 26: 26, 28.

Yesterday we saw that in a certain respect the question of Christianity is the question of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. In particular, we spoke of Paul, the proclaimer of Christianity, who from his knowledge of the essential nature of the Christ-Impulse recognised immediately that after and since the Event of Golgotha, Christ lives. We saw that for Paul, after his experience on the road to Damascus, a powerful, magnificent picture of human evolution opened up.

From this point we went on to build up a picture of what Christ Jesus was directly after the Baptism in Jordan by John. Our next task will be to inquire into the course of events from the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha. But if we are to rise to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, we must clear away certain hindrances. From all that has been said concerning the Gospels in the course of years, and also from what has been said already in these few lectures, you will have been able to gather that certain theosophical ideas, which in some quarters are esteemed sufficient, are really not sufficient to answer the question with which we are here concerned.

Before everything else we must take quite seriously what has been said about the three streams of human thought: the stream which has its source in ancient Greece; the stream which comes down from ancient Hebraism, and lastly the stream which found expression in Gautama Buddha half a millennium before our era. We have seen that this Buddha stream, especially as it developed among his followers, is least of all adapted to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. To the modern man, whose consciousness is filled with the intellectual culture of the present day, the stream of thought which finds expression in Buddhism certainly offers something very pleasant. Hardly any other form of thought suits so well the concepts of the present day, in so far as they prefer to remain silent in face of the greatest question that humanity has to grasp—the question of the Resurrection. For with this question the whole evolutionary history of mankind is connected. Now in Buddhist teaching the real being of the Ego, which in the true sense we can call the fourth member of human nature, has been lost. Certainly in these matters one can employ all kinds of interpretations, one can twist them in all sorts of ways, and plenty of people will find fault with what has been said here about Buddhist teaching, but that is not the point. For such things as I have quoted from the heart of Buddhism—for example, the conversation between King Milinda and the Buddhist sage Nagasena—testify clearly that the Ego-nature cannot be spoken of in Buddhism as we must speak of it. For a genuine follower of Buddhism it would indeed be heretical to speak of the Ego-nature as we must represent it. On this very account we must ourselves be clear regarding the Ego-nature.

The human Ego, which in the case of every human being, even of the highest Adept, passes from incarnation to incarnation, is a term which (as we saw yesterday) can be applied to Jesus of Nazareth only from his birth to the Baptism in Jordan. After the baptism, we still have before us the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth; but these external human sheaths are now indwelt not by a human Ego but by a Cosmic Being, the Christ-Being. Through years of endeavour we have tried by means of words to bring the Christ-Being nearer to our understanding. As soon as one comprehends the whole nature of Christ Jesus, it is obvious that for Him one must rule out any kind of physical or bodily reincarnation. The expression employed in my mystery drama, The Soul's Probation, about Christ having been present once only in a body of flesh, must be taken seriously and quite literally. Accordingly we must first concern ourselves with the being, the nature, of the ordinary human Ego. The Christ-Jesus-Being was completely independent of the human Ego from the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In earlier lectures it was shown that the evolution of the earth was preceded by a Saturn existence, a Sun existence and a Moon existence, and these three planetary embodiments were followed by the fourth, our Earth-embodiment. You know from those lectures that only during the Earth-existence, the fourth of the planetary conditions which were necessary to bring into existence our Earth with all its creatures, could the human Ego enter into connection with human nature. Just as in the Ancient Saturn period we speak of the beginning of the physical body, so in the period of the ancient Sun we speak of the first development of the etheric body, in the Moon period of the first development of the astral body, and only in the Earth period of the unfolding of the Ego. In this way the whole matter is brought cosmically and historically into view. But how is it when we look at the history of peoples?

Through our former studies we know that although the seed-kernel of the Ego was laid down in human beings during the Lemurian time, the possibility of attaining to Ego-consciousness arose only towards the end of the Atlantean period, and that even then this Ego-consciousness was very dim and vague. Indeed, after the Atlantean time, through the various periods of civilisation which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, the Ego-consciousness was still dull, dream-like, dim. But if you turn your attention to the development of the Hebrew people, it will be clear to you that here the Ego-consciousness found expression in a very unusual way. A kind of Folk-Ego lived in each single member of the ancient Hebrew people; in fact, every member of this people traced his Ego back to his ancestor in the flesh, to Abraham. The Ego of the ancient Hebrew people was still such that we can designate it as a Group-Ego, a Folk-Group-Ego. Consciousness had not yet penetrated as far as the separate individuality in each man. Why was this so?

Each part of the four-membered human being we now regard as normal developed gradually in the course of the earth's evolution. It was only towards the end of the Atlantean Period that part of the etheric body, which until then had been external to the physical body, was gradually drawn into the body. This led towards the condition now recognised by clairvoyant consciousness as normal, namely that the physical body and the etheric body approximately coincide, and only then was it possible for man to develop his Ego-consciousness Let us slowly and gradually form an impression of the very peculiar way in which this Ego-consciousness meets us in man.

I described yesterday how people speak of the Resurrection when they approach it with all the intellectual preconceptions of the present day. If, they say, ‘I had to assent to the real Pauline teaching about the Resurrection, I would have to tear up my whole conception of the world.’ That is what they say, these up-to-date people who have at their command all the resources of modern intellectualism. To people who speak thus, what must now be said will seem very strange.

But is it not possible that such a person might reflect: ‘Yes, if I am to accept the Resurrection, I shall have to tear up all my intellectual concepts. But is that a reason for setting this question aside? Because we cannot understand the Resurrection and have to regard it as a miracle, must we assume that the only way out of this difficulty is to pass it by? Is there no other way?’

The other way is far from easy for a modern man, for he would have to admit to himself: ‘Perhaps it is not the fault of the Resurrection that I am unable to understand it. Perhaps the reason is that my intellect is unfitted to understand it.’

So little is this matter taken seriously in our day that we may say: Modern man is prevented by his pride—and just because he does not suspect that pride could come into it—from admitting that his intellect may be incompetent to fathom this question. For which is more reasonable: to say that I am setting aside something that shatters my intellectual outlook, or to admit that it may be beyond my understanding? Pride, however, forbids this admission.

Of course, an anthroposophist must have trained himself to rise above this kind of pride. It should not be far from the heart of a true anthroposophist to say: ‘Perhaps my intellect is not competent to form an opinion about the Resurrection.’ But then he has to face another difficulty: he now has to answer the question why the human mind is not adapted to comprehend the greatest fact in human evolution. To answer this question we must go somewhat more closely into the real nature of human understanding. Here I should like to remind you of my Munich lectures, Wonders of the World, of which I will now give a resume as far as we need one.

The elements that go to make up our soul life, our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, are not to be found in our present-day physical body; they penetrate only as far as the etheric body. In order to be clear about this, let us imagine our human nature, in so far as it consists of Ego, astral body and etheric body, enclosed in an ellipse:

We will take this diagram to represent schematically what we call our inward life and can experience in our souls; the diagram shows it coming to expression only in the streams and forces of the etheric body. If we experience a thought or perception, it has three lines of action in our soul-nature, as indicated in the following diagram.

Within our soul-nature there is nothing that is not present in this way. Now if a man's ordinary earthly consciousness were restricted to soul-experiences within the confines of the diagram, the experiences would occur, but he would not be conscious of them; they would remain unconscious. Our soul-experiences become conscious only through a process which an analogy will help us to understand. Imagine you are going in a certain direction, looking straight ahead. Your name is Smith. While you are going straight ahead you do not see Smith, yet you are he, you experience him, you are the person ‘Smith’. Imagine that someone puts a mirror in front of you. Now ‘Smith’ stands before you. What you had previously experienced you now see; it meets you in the mirror. So it is with the soul-life of man. A person has an experience, but he does not become conscious of it without a mirror. The mirror is the physical body. The perceptions, the thoughts, are thrown back by the sheath of the physical body. Thereby we become conscious of them. Hence in the diagram we can represent the physical body as the enclosing sheath. For us, as earthly men, the physical body is in truth a reflecting apparatus.

If in this way you go more and more deeply into the nature of the human soul and of human consciousness, it will be impossible for you to consider as in any way dangerous or significant all those things which are brought forward again and again by materialism in opposition to the spiritual conception of the world. If through any damage to the reflecting apparatus, the soul-experience is no longer perceived by the consciousness, it is absolute nonsense to conclude that the soul-experience itself is bound up with the mirror. If someone breaks a mirror in which you see yourself, he does not break you. You merely disappear from your own field of vision. So it is when the reflecting apparatus for the soul-life, the brain, is disturbed. Perception ceases, but the soul-life itself, in so far as it goes on in the etheric body and the astral body, is not in the least disturbed.

But have we not come to a point when we must consider closely the nature of the physical body? You will agree that without consciousness we could not be conscious of the Ego. In order to make Ego-consciousness our own during life on earth, our physical body, with its brain organisation, has to be a reflecting apparatus. We learn to become conscious of ourselves through our own mirrored reflection. If we had no mirror apparatus, we could not be conscious of our own selves. What is this mirror?

We are shown by occult investigations, which reach back through reading the Akashic record as far as the origin of our earth existence, that in the beginning of Earth-existence this reflecting apparatus, the external physical body, came under Luciferic influence and was changed. Yesterday we saw what this physical body has become for earthly man. It has become something that falls to pieces when he passes through the gate of death. We have said that the body which falls to pieces is not the body which Divine Spirits had prepared through four planetary evolutions so that it should become the physical body on earth. What the Divine Spirits prepared, which yesterday we called the Phantom, belongs to the physical body as a form-body which permeates, and at the same time holds together, the material parts that are woven into our physical body. If no Luciferic influence had intervened, then, at the beginning of his Earth-existence, man would have received this Phantom in full strength together with his physical body. But into the human organisation, in so far as it consists of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, the Luciferic influence penetrated, and the consequence was the disorganisation of the Phantom of the physical body. As we shall see, this is symbolically expressed in the Bible as the Fall, together with the fact, related in the Old Testament, that death followed the Fall. Death was indeed the result of the disorganisation of the Phantom of the physical body. The outcome is that, when man goes through the gate of death, he has to see the dissolution of his physical body. This crumbling physical body, lacking the strength of the Phantom, is indeed borne by man from birth to death. The crumbling away goes on all the time, and the decomposition, the death of the physical body, is only the final stage of a continuous process. For if the disintegration of the body—preceded by the disorganisation of the Phantom—is not countered by processes of reconstruction, death finally ensues.

If no Luciferic influence had come in, the destructive and reconstructive forces in the physical body would have remained in balance. But then everything in earthly human nature would have been different; there would, for example, have been no mind incapable of comprehending the Resurrection. For what kind of understanding is it that cannot grasp the Resurrection? It is the kind that is bound up with the decadence of the physical body, and is what it is because the individual has incurred, through the Luciferic influence, the progressive destruction of the Phantom of the physical body. In consequence the human understanding, the human intellect, has become so thin, so threadbare, that it cannot take in the great processes of cosmic evolution. It looks on them as miracles, or says it cannot comprehend them. If the Luciferic influence had not come, and the upbuilding forces in the human body had held the destructive forces in balance, then the human understanding, equipped with all that was intended for it, would have seen into the upbuilding forces, rather as one follows a laboratory experiment. But our understanding is now such that it remains on the surface of things and has no insight into the cosmic depths.

Anyone, therefore, who wishes to characterise these conditions correctly must say: In the beginning of our Earth-existence, the physical body was prevented by the Luciferic influence from becoming what it should have become according to the will of the Powers who worked through Saturn, Sun and Moon. Instead, it took into itself a destructive process. Since the beginning of the Earth-existence man has lived in a physical body which is subject to destruction; a body which cannot adequately counter the destructive forces with upbuilding forces.

So there is truth in something which appears to the modern man as such folly: that a hidden connection exists between what has come to pass through the working of Lucifer, and death. And now let us look at this working. What was the effect of this destruction of the real physical body? If we had the complete physical body, as was intended at the beginning of the earth-existence, our soul-powers would reflect themselves in quite another way: we should then know in truth what we are. As things are, we do not know what we are because the physical body is not given us in its completeness. We do certainly speak of the nature and being of the human Ego—but how far does man know the Ego? So problematic is the Ego that Buddhism can even deny that it goes from one incarnation to another. So problematic is it that Greece could fall into the tragic mood which found expression in those words of the Greek hero: ‘Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades.’ So it was that when a Greek saw the treasured physical body—the body shaped by the Phantom—given over to destruction, he felt a sadness in face of the darkening, the fading away, of the Ego, for he felt that it could exist only together with the Ego-consciousness. And when he saw the Form of the physical body falling into decadence, he shuddered at the thought that the Ego would grow dark and dim; this Ego which is reflected by the Form of the physical body. And when we follow human evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the process we have just indicated shows itself in an ever-increasing degree.

In earlier times, for example, no one would have preached the annihilation of the physical body in so radical a fashion as did Gautama Buddha. For such teaching to be given, it was necessary that the decadence of the physical body, its complete annulment as regards its Form, should have become more and more nearly complete, so that the human mind no longer had any idea that the entity which becomes conscious through the physical body—that is, through the Form—can pass over from one incarnation to another. The truth is that man, in the course of the Earth-evolution, lost the Form of the physical body, so that he no longer has what the Divine Beings had intended for him from the beginning of the Earth. This is something he must regain; but it had first to be imparted to him once more. And we cannot comprehend Christianity unless we understand that at the time when the Events of Palestine took place, the human race on earth had reached a stage where the decadence of the physical body was at its peak, and where, because of this, the whole evolution of humanity was threatened with the danger that the Ego-consciousness—the specific achievement of the earth-evolution—would be lost. If this process had continued unchanged, the destructive element would have penetrated ever more deeply into the human bodily organism, and men born after the time when the events of Palestine were due would have had to live with an ever-duller feeling of the Ego. Everything that depends on perfect reflection from the physical body would have become increasingly worn out.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha; it came as we have characterised it, and through it something happened which is so hard to grasp for an intellect bound up with the physical body only, a body in which the destructive forces preponderate. It came to pass that one man, who was the bearer of the Christ, had gone through such a death that after three days the specifically mortal part of the physical body had to disappear, and out of the grave there rose the body which is the force-bearer of the physical, material parts. The body that was really intended for man by the Rulers of Saturn, Sun, and Moon—the pure Phantom of the physical body with all the attributes of the physical body—this it was that rose out of the grave. So was given the possibility of that spiritual genealogy of which we have spoken.

Let us think of the body of Christ that rose out of the grave. Just as from the body of Adam the bodies of earth-men are descended, in so far as these men have the body that crumbles away, even so are the spiritual bodies, the Phantoms for all men, descended from that which rose out of the grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave of Golgotha. It is possible for man to receive into his organism those forces which then rose from the grave, just as through his physical organism at the beginning of the earth evolution, as a consequence of the Luciferic forces, he received the organism of Adam.

It is this that Paul wishes to say. Just as man, through his place in the stream of physical evolution, inherits the physical body in which the destruction of the Phantom, the force-bearer, is gradually taking place, so from the pure Phantom that rose out of the grave he can inherit what he has lost. He can inherit it, he can clothe himself with it, as he clothed himself with the first Adam; he can become one with it. Thereby he can go through a development by means of which he can climb upwards again, even as before the Mystery of Golgotha he had descended in evolution. In other words, that which had been taken from him through the Luciferic influence can be given back to him through its presence as the Risen Body of Christ. That is what Paul wishes to say.

Now, just as it is very easy, from the standpoint of modern anatomy or physiology, to refute what has been said in this lecture—apparently to refute it—so is it very easy to raise another objection. Some such question as this might be asked: If indeed Paul really believed that a spiritual body had risen, what has this spiritual body which had risen out of the grave to do with what every man now bears in himself? This is not hard to understand: we need only consider the analogy offered by the coming into existence of a human individual. As physical human being he begins from a single cell; a physical body consists entirely of cells which are all children of the original cell; all cells which compose a human body are traceable to the original cell. Now imagine that, through what we may call a mystical Christological process, man acquires a body quite other than the one he has gradually acquired in his downward evolution. Then think of each of these new bodies as having an intimate connection with the pure Phantom that rose from the grave, somewhat as the human cells of the physical body are connected with the original cell. That is, we must think of the Phantom as multiplying itself, as does the cell which gives rise to the physical body. So, in the evolution which follows the Event of Golgotha, every man can inwardly acquire something which is spiritually descended from the Phantom which rose from the grave, just as—to echo Paul—the ordinary body which falls into dissolution is descended from Adam.

Of course it is an insult to the human intellect, which thinks so arrogantly of itself at the present time, when one says that a process similar to the multiplication of the cell, which if need be can be seen, takes place in the invisible. This outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, is an occult fact. To someone who contemplates evolution with occult sight it is apparent that the spiritual cell, the body which overcame death, the body of Christ Jesus, has risen from the grave and in the course of time imparts itself to anyone who enters into the corresponding relationship with the Christ. To anyone resolved to deny supersensible happenings altogether, this statement will naturally seem absurd. But to anyone who grants the supersensible, the event with which we are here concerned must be presented in the way described. The Phantom which rose from the grave communicates itself to those who make themselves fitted for it. This, then, is a fact that everyone who grants the supersensible can understand.

If we can inscribe upon our souls what is in very truth the Pauline teaching, we come to regard the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality that took place and had to take place in the evolution of the earth; for it signifies literally the rescue of the human Ego. We have seen that if the process of evolution had continued along the path it had followed up to the time of the Events of Palestine, the Ego-consciousness could not have been developed; it would not only have failed to advance, but would have gone down ever further into darkness. But the path turned upwards, and will continue to ascend in proportion as men find their relation to the Christ-Being.

Now we can understand Buddhism very well. About five hundred years before the Events of Palestine, a truth was proclaimed: ‘Everything that envelops a man as his physical body and makes him a being incarnated in the flesh—all this must be looked upon as worthless; it is fundamentally a left over from the past and must be cast off.’ Certainly up to that time conditions were such that humanity would have had to set its course towards this philosophy of life, if nothing else had intervened. But there came the Event of Golgotha, an Event which completely restored the lost principles of human evolution. In so far as man takes into himself the incorruptible body we spoke of yesterday, and have brought before our souls in closer detail today, if he clothes himself with this incorruptible body, he will become more and more clearly aware of his Ego-consciousness, and of that part of his nature which journeys on from one incarnation to another.

That which came into the world with Christianity must therefore not be regarded merely as a new teaching—this must be specially emphasised—and not as a new theory, but as something real, something factual. Hence when people insist that everything Christ taught had been known previously, this signifies nothing for a real understanding of Christianity. The important thing is not what Christ taught, but what he gave: his Body. For the Body that rose from the grave of Golgotha had never before entered into human evolution. Never before had there been present on earth, through the death of a man, that which came to be present as the Risen Body of Christ Jesus. Previously, after men had passed through the gate of death, and had gone through the period between death and a new birth, they had brought to earth with them the defective Phantom, given over to deterioration. No one had ever caused a perfect Phantom to arise.

Here we can refer to the Initiates and Adepts. They always had to receive initiation outside their physical bodies, by overcoming their physical bodies, but this overcoming never went as far as a resuscitation of the physical Phantom. No pre-Christian initiations went farther than the outermost limits of the physical body; they did not touch the forces of the physical body, except in so far as the inner organism impinges in a general way on the outer. No one, having gone through death, had ever overcome death as a human Phantom. Similar things had certainly occurred, but never this—that a man had gone through a complete human death and that the complete Phantom had then gained victory over death. Just as it is true that only this Phantom can give rise to a complete humanity in the course of human evolution, so is it true that this Phantom took its beginning from the grave of Golgotha.

That is the important fact in Christian evolution. Hence the commentators are not at fault when they say again and again that the teaching of Christ Jesus has been transformed into a teaching about Christ Jesus. It had to be so. For the important thing is not what Christ Jesus taught, but what He gave to humanity. His Resurrection is the coming to birth of a new member of human nature—an incorruptible body. But for this to happen, this rescue of the human Phantom through death, two things were necessary. It was necessary, first, that the Being of Christ Jesus should be such as we have described it—constituted of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, and—instead of a human ego—the Christ-Being. Secondly, it was necessary that the Christ-Being should have resolved to descend into a human body, to incarnate in a human body of flesh. For if we are to contemplate the Christ-Being in the right light, we must seek Him in the time before the beginning of man on earth. The Christ-Being was of course existent at that time. He did not enter into the course of human evolution; He dwelt in the spiritual world. Humanity continued along its ever-decreasing path. At a point in time when the crisis of human evolution had been reached, the Christ-Being incorporated Himself in the body of a man. That is the greatest sacrifice that could have been brought to the earth-evolution by the Christ-Being. And the second thing we must learn to understand is wherein this sacrifice consisted. Yesterday we dealt with one part of the question concerning the nature of Christ, confining our study to the time after the Baptism by John in Jordan. We must now go on to ask: What is the significance of the fact that at the Baptism the Christ-Being descended into a body of flesh, and how did death come about in the Mystery of Golgotha?

As previously announced, I do not intend to give you a Theosophical lecture this evening, but rather a more or less purely philosophical lecture. And if any of our esteemed Theosophical listeners find that the matter is too philosophical and, shall we say, too difficult, I would ask you to bear in mind that I did not promise anything easy, but rather something philosophical for this afternoon.

The reason why I like to insert such an extraordinary lecture as this one is the following: It is not unfair to realize that in fact within our Theosophical consciousness, within our entire Theosophical worldview and the current zeitgeist, as it is practiced in the world – not as it is in its essence – there is far too little thoroughness, far too little conscientiousness, with regard to what can be called the thinking, the philosophical principle in the human soul.

Now anyone who wants to look more deeply into what Theosophy really is can see – and they will see it with every step they take into Theosophy, where it presents itself in its true form – that in the field of Theosophy nothing, absolutely nothing, is said that does not comply with philosophy, with scientific conscientiousness and intellectual thoroughness. Theosophy can be justified philosophically, scientifically, and logically in every respect. But Theosophy is not always cultivated and advocated with the necessary seriousness. Therefore, this lecture is intended as an admonition to have a sense of responsibility when speaking of the highest things that Theosophy has to say, as an admonition to have a sense of responsibility towards the intellectual, towards that which is called the scientific mind, the scientific spirit.

This is not to say that this scientific sense should be demanded of every follower of Theosophy; that would be going too far. Theosophy wants to be something that can penetrate into the hearts of the broadest masses of humanity, and with an unbiased sense of truth, it can always be received. But he who represents Theosophy under full responsibility must always be aware of the sense of scientific and intellectual conscientiousness envisaged here, in addition to all the other factors that come into play in the field of Theosophy.

From the wide range of material available to a theosophist, I would now like to give you a summarized overview of the inner principle of the development of modern philosophy, from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel. In doing so, we put ourselves in a position similar to that explained yesterday from a theosophical point of view, namely that with the philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, something significant for human spiritual development has been given, but which is not yet understood in our present time.

Those who are able to consider what was at stake in the grandiose intellectual struggle of this triumvirate of thinkers, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, are not in the least surprised. For the intellectual weapons that our present age produces and that are sufficient for the great, admirable achievements of natural science, these intellectual weapons are not sufficient to achieve what was at work in the minds of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. And why should we be surprised at this? It can be fully justified and understood in terms of the history of philosophy.

If we want to understand Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in their position within the spiritual development of humanity, we must consider this development from its starting point with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For anyone who sees into things, everything in between is of little importance for the spiritual development of humanity. If we look at the matter historically, we see how, in the Middle Ages, Catholicism assimilated philosophy in the spirit of the medieval world view. Aristotle, that great thinker of the pre-Christian era, had to be forgotten first, then remembered again and applied according to the method of medieval philosophy, the medieval world view. The compromise had to be reached: justification of spiritual revelation with the help of Aristotelianism. These two things were brought together in the Middle Ages by trying to do justice to both, by combining them in scholasticism; most decisively in Thomas Aquinas, who was called the Doctor Angelicus because he undertook the task of justifying the revelation of Christianity with the help of Aristotelianism.

The extent to which today's thinking is inadequate to the tasks of that time is best illustrated by the fact that one of the newer thinkers has completely misunderstood the matter. An understanding of Aristotelian thought is the prerequisite for understanding the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. The theosophist need not be surprised. He can say to himself: It was necessary that in Christianity the decisive philosophy should speak differently than it did in the eighteenth century.

In particular, it is difficult to understand that Aristotle, in his psychology, gives a shadowy, because merely philosophical, reflection of what we encounter again in Theosophy. We are speaking, first of all, of the physical body. Aristotle begins only with the etheric body. He speaks of these things as one had to speak three to four centuries before the Christian era. What he calls “treptikon” is nothing other than what we call the etheric body, and what he calls “aestheticon” is nothing other than what we call the sentient body or astral body. Basically, it is quite the same. It is just that for Theosophy it is something grasped from the living intuition, while for Aristotle, it is something held in the realm of the shadowy, out of the logical philosophical tradition. Then he also has the “Erektikon”, what we call the sentient soul. Then the “Kinetikon”, the mind or soul of mind.

But there is one thing that is not found in Aristotelianism: there is no adequate expression for the consciousness soul. But how can you be surprised that you do not find it? In those days, thinking had not yet progressed and developed to such an extent that one could also speak of a consciousness soul. But it is only in the consciousness soul that the I comes to an inner, thinking perception of itself. At that time, one could not yet speak of the I as in more recent philosophy. Therefore, one had to speak of something else, of that which pours into the sentient soul and the mind soul from the outside, from the spiritual outside. What rules in it, what we today call the consciousness soul, can be found in the way that Aristotle looks up to the divine, which works into the human being from the outside and spiritualizes the two soul members, the sentient soul and the mind or feeling soul. Aristotle calls this the “nous”. What Aristotle calls the Nous is what was felt at that time as an external spirit. The Nous is experienced in two ways: in the sentient soul and in the mind or feeling soul, as a stimulator of the sentient soul (Nous poietikos), and as a stimulator of the mind or feeling soul (Nous pathetikos). Here we have something from the ancient traditions of the Greek mysteries that is coming to us again today from spiritual research.

Aristotle's psychology was then used in the Middle Ages to delve into Catholic truths of revelation. However, an actual teaching of the I, as it arises from the perception of the I in the consciousness soul, is not included in Aristotle's psychology. But it would be good for our present time if it were to take up a slightly different concept of Aristotle and incorporate it into its conceptual world. Our entire conceptual world lacks a concept that Aristotle had and which, if it were understood, would be enough to simply sweep away what modern Darwinism asserts with its natural philosophy.

Philosophy has lost this concept. Aristotle is aware that, in the case of humans, we are initially dealing with what we call the animal nature of man, and Aristotle certainly speaks of this animal nature of man and its similarity to the animal nature in the animal kingdom. However, Aristotle speaks differently of the animal nature of man than of the animal nature of animals. Aristotle certainly speaks of the soul in animals, but he is clear about the fact that although this soul of animals is still present in the entire human organization, it undergoes something there that it must undergo through the penetration of the animal soul with the Nous. And this penetration of the animal soul with the Nous is what Aristotle refers to with a term that has been little understood. This is evident from the way in which it has been translated in the usual philosophical histories and translations of Aristotle. . This is a concept that is extremely difficult to convey today because it has not been further developed. If we want to describe it, we can say something like the following would convey the concept: something of the soul is horrified by something higher, so that what happens to the animal soul through the nous of Aristotle is what one could call a horror, a conquest of the violence of the animal soul by the nous. But only through this is the human soul brought forth from the animal soul in a metamorphosis. And once this concept is grasped again, then one will indeed understand the relationship between the human and the animal in a corresponding way in terms of natural philosophy.

I have presented some of the ideas that were passed down philosophically throughout the Middle Ages and preserved into modern times and used to justify the Catholic Church's revelation. I have tried to characterize this with a few terms. These are only a few selected things. I wanted to pick this out because I wanted to give you an idea of the fact that it is not so easy to grasp the meaning of the Aristotelian concepts precisely and succinctly, since today's concepts no longer coincide with Aristotle's concepts. Even in the Middle Ages, the philosophers who understood him had the greatest difficulty in saving him from misunderstandings. While the Greek word nous was correctly translated as intellectus agens, the pantheistic philosophers of Arabism made the wildest leaps with concepts that can only be correctly interpreted if one sees their full significance for human nature and which are terribly distorted if one reads into them a nebulous pantheism.

If we now turn to the second epoch of philosophical development, as indicated, it can of course only be adequately characterized if we show the whole course of philosophical development from the first wrestling of Aristotle, then show how in German philosophy, in Leibniz and Wolff, a remarkable elaboration of this struggle came about, and how, in Kantianism, a skepticism arose out of opposition to Wolffianism. It would be necessary to show this if one wants to characterize the struggle of thought of Western humanity, if one wants to understand the triumvirate of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel from the perspective of German philosophy, if one wants to have an idea of what Fichte, Schelling and Hegel attempted philosophically at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Fichte attempted to provide his philosophy of the ego out of Kantianism. However, anyone who studies the emergence of Fichteanism out of Kantianism sees that Kantianism was not the actual cause, but that the actual cause lay in Fichte's nature. Thus, I would like to characterize Fichteanism as a separate entity. In line with the now self-aware humanity, Fichte sets out to grasp the self. It is not easy to descend into this abyss. Therefore, do not think that it would ever occur to me to be harsh to those who do not understand Fichte and distort him. I understand every misunderstanding, I understand every objection, however many there may be, I understand Schopenhauer, who called Fichte a windbag and a charlatan. This can be somewhat understandable, because what one needs to understand Fichte is so infinitely deep and abysmal that one can always find it forgivable when misunderstandings arise.

Human thinking does not always behave logically towards the self, and in this regard one can sometimes encounter grandiose illogic in literature, especially in scientific literature. Even today we can see the most fantastic leaps being made where it is a matter of finding the transition from an assertion that the ego makes to the application of this assertion to the ego itself. That is the logical foundation that matters. The transition from an assertion that the ego makes to the application to the ego must be grasped. Take the old school example: a Cretan says: all Cretans are liars. — If all Cretans are liars, then it cannot be true. Therefore, what the speaker asserts can only be taken into consideration if he himself is excepted, if he is left out. The moment you apply an assertion that an ego makes to the ego itself, you can no longer even get by with formal logic. Only, all these things that are repeatedly mentioned are not understood. Where the transition is from an assertion of the ego to the ego itself, people do not realize that this is a leap.

There is a philosopher and psychologist who traces everything a person does out of desire and passion back to ordinary sensual urges, more or less. He has also written about suicides among students. He tries to show that it was not the reasons imagined by the student that drove him to suicide, but that the real reasons lie in sensual and sexual life. This philosopher and psychologist now differentiates between the motive for an action and the pretext for it in countless areas, and he says that the pretext can be something quite different from the motive, that the motive lies in the sensual life. If only this world view could realize how it appears when applied to itself, if one were to say to this psychologist: Your reasons, everything you use to prove your point, are mere pretexts. But if we look at your sensual life, at your sinful desires, we see the real motives for what you write. You have grossly characterized the transition that is not brought to consciousness.

I wanted to give you a rough example to show how people today actually have so little logic in their bodies that they do not understand the Cretan. That was an example of the lack of understanding of this sentence. I wanted to show that one enters into very special areas when one penetrates from the entire remaining sum of our world view to what is the content of our I.

But now Fichte said to himself: Within the consciousness that man has at first, nothing can actually live, there can be nothing of which man is aware without his ego being involved. Whatever objects enter this consciousness must first take hold of this ego, they must touch the ego in some way. Without the things, beings or whatever entering into a relationship with this ego, the ego cannot know anything at all of what appears in the field of vision of our consciousness. Fichte therefore said to himself: the ego must be everywhere present, therefore there is nothing that we can find within our consciousness, within our thinking organism, that can lie outside the ego. Thus, for Fichte, a thing like Kant's “thing in itself” is an un-concept. And it is easy to see that this thing in itself is an un-concept. One would have to try to imagine this thing in itself. So one should imagine that which lies outside of imagination. Can you imagine that which lies outside of your imagination? It is impossible to imagine that.

What I have said in a few words was what Fichte felt as a powerful impulse in his soul. Everything must be grasped by the tentacles of the ego, the ego is the great agent—and there can be nothing else within our experience—that must grasp everything. But then the question arises, and Fichte is aware of it: How is it that the ego constantly has things around it that it is clear it did not create itself? Nothing should enter the field of consciousness in which the ego is not involved. And yet the ego finds that there are a lot of things that it has not made. These are the fundamental points where Fichte has drawn attention to something that only modern theosophy can fully understand. He draws attention to this by saying: There is an activity of the ego that we usually overlook. In somnambulism, we have an activity that originates from the I but is not encompassed by conscious thinking. In somnambulism, we see an activity of the I that is more comprehensive, more all-encompassing than what one can initially grasp with the ordinary waking consciousness of the I. Fichte descends to an activity that is an activity of the ego but does not fall into the realm of thinking, and which can be imagined, while an 'ego in itself' cannot be imagined as it is an absurdity. But that which corresponds to the ego and is of the same nature as the ego activity is that which can also be grasped inwardly by the ego because it is of a nature more akin to the ego. Thus Fichte points to an external world of which the ego is aware that it did not make it, but in which it can still recognize itself as a comprehensive ego, as an absolute ego - in contrast to the relative ego - that it is part of this external world. In this way, Fichte points beyond the ego to the I. This is the great advance in the field of philosophy, and with this advance something has happened that goes beyond Cartesius, beyond the “cogito ergo sum”. The “cogito ergo sum” is something that proves the existence of the ego in thinking, whereas in Fichte's characterization, the existence of the ego arises from the will, and that is the essential thing. Everything that Fichte could muster of cognitive powers is compressed into the point of the ego. And that is why he was the one who could understand that everything in the world can be grasped starting from the ego.

What I have outlined here is what Fichte presented in Jena in 1793/94. If you want to understand his philosophical struggle in statu nascendi, the best way to do so is to take a look at the first version of his “Wissenschaftslehre” (Science of Knowledge), the 1794 edition, which still shows his entire philosophical struggle. Thus the philosophical horizon was established, so to speak, and the mind was raised to a certain height. The starting-point was there, the vanishing-point of the perspective was established.

The next person to stand at this point and attempt to sketch out a picture of the world was Schelling. Schelling did something that is quite understandable for anyone who can see into the essence of this matter, but which cannot be understood for our present time with the usual concepts. Schelling said to himself: Well, our great teacher Fichte — Schelling was his most brilliant student — has led us up to this point, but now the soul must be given content. Schelling had to go beyond the one-sided psychological understanding of the “I am”; he had to expand the “I am” into a world, as it were. He could only do this by showing that in the way one perceives the “I am”, one can perceive even more. He referred to the so-called “intellectual intuition”. What is this intellectual intuition? This so much misunderstood intellectual intuition is nothing more than the awareness that one can stand at the location of the “I am”, but does not have to remain there, but that one can see something that is perceived in the same way as the “I am”, and the content of this perception is present in intellectual intuition. This intellectual intuition has been very much denied.

Thus, in Schelling we have a knowledge of nature and spirit worked out in the manner of the knowledge of the ego. One must indeed have an organ for it if one wants to go into such things as those expounded by Schelling. This applies in particular to his thoughts about light. It is easy to refute everything that can be found in Schelling; it is much easier to refute him than to understand and justify him. It is the same with Hegel. It is easy to refute Hegel, but for those who want to understand Schelling and Hegel, the point is not to refute them, but to understand what they wanted. Hegel was a student of Fichte and a contemporary of Schelling. He tried, in his turn, to continue what emerged on the horizon to which Fichte had raised people, only in a different way than Schelling. Hegel did not allow for an intellectual view. He wanted to present what every person can find without an intellectual view, just by honestly and sincerely taking this point of view. It became clear to Hegel that everything that underlies a thing, a being, is given to us in the way of “I am”. Let us understand correctly what was going through Hegel's mind. He wondered why concepts and ideas should have any significance for the nature of things, correspond to any truth, if what we experience in our minds, what our minds go through in developing concepts, is not what things are originally based on, if that is not the objective way of things? So Hegel's point of view becomes one that must be characterized in such a way that one says: Man can initially approach things in such a way that he forms all kinds of opinions and thoughts about them, and then go from the opinions that he forms about external sensuality to the pure subject.

Hegel set down these thoughts in his monumental work “Phenomenology of Spirit”, published in 1807. This work was completed in 1806, at the moment when the cannon thunder of the Battle of Jena was heard around Jena. There Hegel was in Jena and wrote the last sentence. There Hegel knew how to find the way to such a point of view where everything subjective is no longer considered, where subject and object are no longer considered, but the spirit manifests itself everywhere in the objective course of things. In the ideas and concepts, the spirit has made itself identical with the inner course of things.

Those who cannot bring themselves to understand that these things must be understood in this way will not be able to understand Hegel's philosophy, Hegel's logic. For Hegel, it is a matter of excluding all “subjective reasoning”. You should not add anything to how one concept is linked to another, but rather let the concepts fit together, as they naturally grow out of one another and are linked to one another. It is a surrender to the structure of the conceptual world that Hegel's logic wants to be. How one concept develops from another is the essence of Hegelian dialectics.

To enter into Hegel's logic is to take on one of the most difficult endeavors of human thought. And that is why the usual result occurs when people tackle Hegel's logic: it is too difficult for them. And I can assure you: in the days before the critical edition of Hegel's works was published, when only the old Hegel edition was available, you could tell from the library that this edition had been read very little. The fruit of it could then be found in the lectures; the lecturers knew nothing. It is difficult to study Hegel's logic, but I would like to say a few words about what you get out of it if you study it. I can't give an overview of Hegel's philosophy today, but I can hint at what you get if you engage with it. If you have engaged with it, you have been educated to be rigorous in the application of concepts.

When you follow the steps from the abstract concept of being through the nothing, the becoming, the existence, through unity, number and measure in Hegel's logic, when you let all these concepts, which are strictly and organically structured in Hegel's logic, take effect on you, then you get into your soul that you say to yourself: Oh, how powerless much of what is said within humanity about spiritual things is. One learns to use the concept in the sense in which it really belongs in logic. That is what one gets used to through becoming acquainted with this logic. Consider how all kinds of concepts are used, picked up from our literary and scientific work. In the field of theology, something should be felt of this rigor in thinking. Here, the arbitrariness of “subjective reasoning” prevails the most, the arbitrariness of concepts that have been picked up here or there.

Hegel then moves on from the “Science of Logic” to what he calls natural philosophy. This has been much ridiculed, but little understood. If you look at things spiritually, you come from logic to natural philosophy. You should let the phenomena speak for themselves, no longer speculate, but let the phenomena express themselves as they are mirrored in the concept. Therefore, one cannot help but let nature itself speak. One must unfold the inner activity, just as one has unfolded it for logical dialectics. But this is a book with seven seals, and I can fully understand that Helmholtz – whom I admire as a natural scientist – when he read Hegel's natural philosophy, said: This is pure nonsense.

It is part of the process that one first acquires the conscientious logical-intellectual responsibility towards the spiritual facts, as one can develop it through Hegel's logic. Hegel has achieved many things that modern philosophy has no understanding for. The mechanical concepts into which one brings ordinary earthly events are to be used only for earthly processes in the sense of Hegel's natural philosophy; the finite mechanical concepts lose their meaning when we ascend to the regions of heaven. There Hegel moves from finite to absolute mechanics and shows in a thorough, astute manner how this is something completely different from what must be called Newtonian mechanics.

A great deal could be gained by wanting to understand Hegel. Of course, from the point of view of the time, his views are sometimes highly contestable, but even then one can be clear about how each individual point is meant. However, it must be clear that most of it was published from notes taken by students. I would therefore like to emphasize that from the outset one should bear in mind the principle that much of what is in it has been said differently by Hegel. Regarding what goes out into the world from notes, I can say that I myself have experienced what can come out of transcribed lectures! Nevertheless, anyone who is able to do so will recognize a great achievement in Hegel's natural philosophy.

From this outpouring of the spirit into the individual things of nature, Hegel then moves on to the spirit's return to itself. He distinguishes three areas: the “spirit in itself,” the beginning; the “spirit for itself,” the spirit that is spread out in nature and must be perceived for itself; and the “spirit in and for itself.” This is the actual philosophy of mind, the “philosophy of mind”.

From the field of political philosophy, Hegel particularly developed the philosophy of law. If you consider what has been achieved later, you can say that there is still much to be gained from this Hegelian philosophy of law. Hegel was a personality who had an intense Aristotelian sense and therefore wanted to understand everything in Aristotelian reasonability first. That is why he placed at the forefront of his philosophy of law the proposition that there is a rational starting point for all problems. It is easy to refute Hegel, even by action; someone need only do something stupid, and he has the refutation. But then you can see that Hegel is not interested in clever refutations. Hegel developed philosophy in the strictest, most disciplined thinking, and this discipline of thought can be acquired through Hegelism. It is also understandable that the height of this point of view cannot be grasped so easily. Therefore, it is understandable that the great, in many respects extraordinary poet Grillparzer, when he received Hegel's philosophy, was terribly horrified. He said:

“You may teach us the divine thinking prophetically,
but, my friend, you are surely destroying the human thinking.”

You can see that the spiritual things here are so elevated that great minds who do not understand Hegel can be excused. They need not be thought of as idiots. But it must be retorted that the greatest discipline can be found in Hegel's philosophy. The lack of this intellectual discipline can be found in all subsequent philosophers. It is painful for anyone who has a concept of this difficult thought activity to see the arbitrariness of scientific and especially philosophical literature. It is terrible what impossibilities are experienced by those who have been educated in Hegel. It is terrible what those who have studied the highest thought structures that Hegel has created must go through.

We can be sure that humanity will one day grasp what was presented yesterday in the theosophical lecture. Hegel will be forgotten, as Aristotle was. Hegel is forgotten today. What is presented today as a renewal of Hegelianism is a chapter we prefer not to talk about. Even if the intellectual struggles of the triumvirate of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are forgotten today, the mind will have to be worked through with this intellectual struggle, just as in the Middle Ages Catholic Revelation was worked through with Aristotle. Hegel's philosophy is something that must be grasped from the starting point of our present into the near future. Those who have realized this can withstand all the devastating things that can come from the present, they can see that these devastating things are only the reverse side of what is emerging today as the future and how the seed of what must come is revealed in this reverse side.

It is truly distressing to see how quickly the level of thinking has fallen. It behoves the theosophist to cast his gaze on the fields of pure thinking. I would love to give lectures of this kind everywhere to establish a firm, secure basis for Theosophy, if only there were time and I could justify it to the necessity of Theosophy progressing more quickly.

When we approach the great theosophical truths that speak to the most fundamental human feelings, as given in spiritual science, we should be aware that we must not shirk rigorous thinking. We should be aware that there must be nothing theosophical that cannot stand up to the strictest scrutiny of a philosophical consciousness. We should make it our ideal not to say anything that cannot withstand the strictest necessity of reason.

If we wish to understand what lies at the foundation of the two impulses that penetrate so deeply into human life—that of the so-called free will and of the so-called necessity—then we must add still other thoughts to the various ideas already gained as a foundation. This I will do today, in order that tomorrow we may be in a position to draw the conclusion, or inference, in regard to the concept of free will and necessity in the social, ethical-moral, and historical processes of human life. In discussing such things it becomes more and more evident that people—especially modern people—strive to embrace the highest, most important and significant things with the most primitive kinds of thoughts. It is taken for granted (I have often mentioned this) that certain things must be known in order to understand a clock; someone who has not the slightest idea of how the wheels of a clock work together, etc., will hardly attempt to explain, on the spur of the moment, the details of a clock's mechanism. Yet we wish to be competent judges of free will and necessity in all situations of life without having learned anything fundamental about these things. We prefer to remain ignorant concerning the most important and most essential things, which can only be understood if we consider their whole relationship to human nature, and we wish to know and judge everything imaginable of our own accord. This is particularly the desire of our times. When it is shown that the human being is a complicated being, organized in manifold ways, a being that penetrates deeply, on the one hand, into all that is connected with the physical plane, and on the other, into all that is connected with the spiritual world, then people often object that such things are dry and intellectual, and that the most important and essential things must be grasped in quite another way.

The world will have to learn (perhaps just the present catastrophic events may teach us something) how much lies hidden in man and in his relationship with the course of the world's evolution. For years we have emphasized that we can differentiate roughly in man what we may call his physical nature, or his physical body; his etheric body, or the body of formatives forces, as I have called it; his astral body, which is already psychic; and the actual ego.

We have emphasized recently from the most varied points of view that—in reality—man, as he lives between waking and sleeping, in his usual waking day-consciousness, has some knowledge only of the impressions given to him by his senses, and of his thoughts; but he dreams away the real contents of his life of feeling, and sleeps away the real contents of his life of the will. Dream and sleep stretch into the world of waking life; during our usual waking consciousness, our feeling life is hardly more than a dream, and the real contents of our will reach our consciousness just as little as a dreamless sleep. Through our feelings, through the contents of our will, we dive down into the world (we have pointed this out specially during these considerations) in which we live together with the dead, in the midst of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As soon as we live in a feeling—and we live constantly in feelings—all that lives in the kingdom of the dead lives with us in the sphere, or in the realm of feeling.

Now something else must be added to this. In the life of ordinary waking consciousness we speak of our ego. But in reality we can only speak of this ego in a very unreal sense as far as our usual waking consciousness is concerned. For what is the real nature and being of this ego? The usual waking consciousness cannot gain knowledge of this. When the clairvoyant dives down consciously into the true being of the ego, he will find that the true ego of man is of a will-like nature. What man possesses in his everyday consciousness is only an idea of the ego. This is why it is so easy for the scientific psychologists to do away entirely with this ego although, on the other hand, this is really nonsense. These scientists and psychologists say that the ego develops gradually and that the human being acquires this ego in the course of his individual development. In this way he does not acquire the ego itself, but only the idea of the ego. It is easy to eliminate the ego, because for the everyday consciousness it is merely a thought, a reflection of the true, genuine ego. The real ego lives in the world in which the true reality of our will also lives. And what we call our astral body, what we designate as the actual soul life, lives in the same sphere as our life of feelings. If you bear in mind the things that we have thus considered, you will see that we dive down with our ego and our astral body into the same region that we share with the dead. When we penetrate clairvoyantly into our true ego, we are also among the egos of the dead, as well as among the egos of the so-called living.

We must realize such things quite clearly, in order to grasp to what an extent man lives, with his everyday consciousness, in the so-called world of appearance, or in Maya, as it is called by a oriental term. We are consciously awake in the world of our senses, in the world of our thoughts; but the sense impulses give us only that portion of the world that is spread out as Nature. And our world of thoughts gives us only that which is in us and corresponds to our own nature between birth and death. That which is our eternal nature remains in the world that we share with the dead. When we enter the life of the physical plane through incarnation, it remains indeed in the world in which also the dead live.

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things. Today I wish to draw your attention to something that is very important for the understanding of the whole of human life.

Let us bear in mind once more the fact that—roughly speaking—we possess this four-fold nature—the physical body, the body of formative forces or etheric body, the astral body, and the ego.

Now, when someone speaks from the standpoint of the usual waking consciousness, he may ask:—How old is a person—How old is a certain person A? Someone may give his age, let us say 35, and he may believe that he has made an important statement. In stating that a certain person is 35 years old he has, in fact, said something of importance for the physical plane and for the usual waking consciousness; but for the spiritual world, in other words, for the etheric being of man, this implies only a part of the reality. When you say: I am 35 years old—you only say this in regard to your physical body. You must say: My physical body is 35 years old—then this will be correct. But these words express nothing at all as far as the etheric body, or the body of formative forces is concerned, and nothing at all as far as the other members of the human being are concerned. For it is an illusion, it is indeed quite fantastic to think that your ego, for instance, is 35 years old, when your physical body is 35 years old. You see, here we must bear in mind different speeds, different rapidities in the development of the various members.

The following figures will make you realize this. A human being is, let us say, 7 years old; this means nothing less than this:--his physical body has reached the age of 7 years. His etheric body, his body of formative forces, is not yet 7 years old, for his body of formative forces does not maintain the same speed as the physical body and has not yet reached this age. We are not aware of such things just because we imagine time as one continuous stream, and thus we cannot form the thought that different things maintain different speeds within the course of time. This physical body that is 7 years old has developed according to a certain speed. The etheric body develops more slowly, the astral body still more slowly, and slowest of all, the ego. The etheric body is only 5 years and 3 months old when the physical body is 7 years old, because it develops more slowly. The astral body is 3 years and 6 months old, and the ego, 1 year and 9 months. Thus you must say to yourself—when a child is 7 years old, its ego is only 1 year and 9 months old. This ego undergoes a slower development on the physical plane. On the physical plane this ego develops at a slower pace; it is a slower pace, the same pace that we find in our life with the dead. Why do we not grasp what takes place in the stream of the experiences of the dead? Because we do not grow accustomed to the slower pace of the dead, and do not admit this into our thoughts and especially into our feelings, in order to hold them fast.

Hence, if someone is 28 years old as far as his physical body is concerned, then his ego is only 7 years old. As far as your ego is concerned, which is the essential part of your being, you thus maintain a much slower pace in the course of development than that of the physical body. You see, the difficulty consists in the fact that, generally, we consider speed, or velocities, merely as outer velocities. When things move one beside another, we say that one thing moves more quickly and the other one more slowly because we use Time as a comparison. But here the speed within Time is different. Without this insight into the fact that the different members of the human being have different speeds in their development, it is impossible to grasp the connections with the true deeper being of man.

From this you will see how in everyday consciousness people simply throw together entirely different things contained in human nature.

Man consists of this four-fold being, and the four members of this being are so different from one another that they even have different ages. But man is under a great illusion in making everything depend on his physical body. He says something that has absolutely no meaning whatever for the spiritual world, in stating that his ego is 28 years old, when he is 28 according to his physical body. His statement would only have a meaning if he would say:—My ego is 7 years old—in the case of the ego, a year is naturally four times as long as in the case of the physical body. One might also say that the age of the four different members of the human being must be reckoned according to four entirely different measurements of time; for the ego, a year is simply four times as long as for the physical body.

Pictorially you might conceive this as a projection from the physical plane—for instance, one human being may normally become 28 years old, while another child may grow more slowly and after 28 years be like a child of 7. Thus the whole matter appears at first like an abstract truth. But it is a fundamental reality in man. Just consider that our ego is the bearer of what we call our understanding, or our thinking consciousness of self. When our understanding and our conscious thinking are within our ego, then this understanding and conscious thinking are really essentially younger than we ourselves apparently are, according to our physical body. This is indeed so.

But this will show you that when a human being of 28 gives the impression of one whose understanding has developed to the age of 28, only one fourth of this understanding is really his own. It cannot be helped; when we have a certain quantity of understanding at 28, only a quarter of this is our own; the rest belongs to the universe, to the world in which we are submerged through our astral body, through our etheric body, and through our physical body. But we only know directly something of these bodies through ideas, through sense perceptions, in other words, again within the ego. This means that during our development as human beings between birth and death we are indeed mere apparitions of a reality. We make the impression of being four times as clever as we really are. This is true. All we possess, in addition to this one fourth, we owe to what holds sway in the historical, social, and moral processes within that world we dream away and sleep away. Dream and sleep impulses, which we have in common with the universe, seethe up, above the horizon of our being and fructify this fourth part of our understanding and soul, and make it four times as strong as it really is.

You see at this point arises the illusion concerning the freedom of man. Man is a free being; he is, indeed. But only the real, true man is a free being. That fourth part, of which I have just spoken, is a free being. Other beings play into the remaining three fourths; these cannot be free. This gives rise to the delusion in regard to freedom so that we continually ask:—Is man free or is he not free? Man is free when he connects this idea of freedom with the one fourth of his being, in the sense in which I have just explained it. If the human being wishes to have this freedom as an impulse of his own, then he must develop this fourth part in a corresponding, independent way. In usual life, this fourth part cannot assert itself, for the simple reason that it is overpowered by the other three fourths. In the remaining three fourths is active all that man calls his desires, his appetites, his emotions and passions. These slay his freedom, for what is contained in the universe in the form of impulses works through these desires, emotions and passions.

Now the question arises:—What shall we do to make this one fourth of our soul-life, which is a reality within us, really free? We must place this one fourth in relationship with that which is independent of the remaining three fourths.

I have tried to answer this question philosophically in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, by attempting to show how man can only realize the impulse of freedom within himself, when he places his actions, his deeds, entirely under the influence of pure thought, when he reaches the point of transforming impulses of pure thought into impulses of action, into impulses which are not in any way dependent upon the outer world for their development. All that which is developed out of the outer world does not allow us to realize freedom. Only that which develops in our thinking, independently of the outer world, as the motive of our actions, enables us to realize freedom.

Where do such motives come from? Where does that which does not come from the outer world come from? It comes out of the spiritual world. The human being need not be clairvoyantly conscious in every situation of life of how these impulses come from the spiritual world; they may nevertheless be within him all the same. But he will necessarily conceive these impulses in a somewhat different way than they must be conceived in reality. When we rise in clairvoyant consciousness to the first stage of the spiritual world, we come to the imaginative world; the second stage is the world of inspiration, as you know; the third stage, the world of intuition. Instead of allowing the impulses of our will or of our actions to rise out of our physical body, our astral body, and etheric body, we can receive them as imaginations, behind which stand inspirations and intuitions. That is, if we receive no impulses from our bodies, but only from the spiritual world. This does not need to be the conscious clairvoyant perception: “Now I will something and behind this stand intuition, inspiration, and imagination.”—but, instead, the result appears as an idea, as a pure thought, and has the appearance of an idea created within the element of fantasy. Because this is so, because such an idea, which lies at the foundation of free actions must appear to everyday consciousness as an idea created out of the element of fantasy, I call it moral fantasy in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. (That which lies at the foundation of free actions.) What, then, is this moral fantasy? This moral fantasy is the reverse of a mirrored reflection. What lies spread out around us as the outer physical reality is a mirrored reflection; physical reality sends us reflections of things. Moral fantasy is the image, through which we do not see. For this reason, things appear to us as fantasy. Behind them, however, stand the real impulses—imagination, inspiration, intuition—which are active. When we do not know that they are active, but only receive the influences into our usual consciousness, then this appears as fantasy. And these results of moral fantasy, these incentives to action, which do not lie in desires, passions and emotions—are free. But how can we attain them?

Moral fantasy can also be developed by a human being who is not clairvoyant. Everything that implies a real progress for humanity has always been born out of moral fantasy, insofar as this progress lay within the ethical sphere. The point in question is that man first develops a feeling, and then an enhanced feeling (we shall hear immediately, what is to be understood exactly by “enhanced feeling”)—that he is not merely here on this earth in order to accomplish things which concern him personally, or individually, but in order to accomplish things through which the will of the Time Spirits can be realized.

It appears as if something quite special were implied when one says: Man must realize the will of the Time Spirits. But a time will come when people will understand this much better than now. And a time will come when the contents of human teaching will not be that of the present. At present only ideas dealing with nature can be conveyed even to the most educated people; for what is imparted to people in regard to ethical and social life is in most cases an unreal, schematic abstraction; indeed, the greatest abstraction.

In this connection we have not yet attained what earlier ages already possessed. Only with great difficulty can a modern man immerse himself in earlier times. Earlier times possessed myths—myths that were connected with the vital life of the people, myths that penetrated into poetry, into art, into all manner of things. In Greece one spoke of Oedipus, of Hercules, and of other heroes, one tried to emulate those who had done things which were exemplary deeds, and first deeds, and one wished to tread in their footprints. Everyone wished to tread in these footprints. The thread of ideas, the thread of thought and feeling, led backwards. One felt at one with those long dead. What went out as an impulse from those who had died was told in myths; and these men lived in experiencing, in becoming one with the impulses of these myths.

Something similar must again be created and will be created if the impulses of spiritual science are rightly understood. Except that, in the future, souls will gaze forward much more than backward. The contents of public teaching must be that which binds human beings together with the creative activity of the Time, and above all, with the impulses of the Time Spirit, the corresponding Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai, concerning whom I have said, in an earlier description, that the so-called dead, as well as the living, are connected with him. People will learn in the public teaching of the future the meaning of such a period of culture as the one that began in the 15th century and closed the Greco-Latin period; in this fifth post-Atlantean period people will learn to know the real intentions of the universal World-All. They will take up the impulses of this fifth post-Atlantean period and they will know:—This must be realized between the 15th century and one of the centuries in a coming millennium. They will know: We belong to our period of culture in such a way that the impulses of this coming age stream through us. In future, even the children, as they learn to name the flowers and the stars (they do this less today—but it is at least something outwardly real) will learn to take up the real, spiritual impulses of the period. First they must be educated to do this. What is told as “history” today must first cease to be called “history.” In not too distant a future, instead of speaking of all the things contained in history as it is told today, people will speak of the spiritual impulses standing behind the historical evolution, impulses which are dreamed by human beings. These are the spiritual impulses that call man to freedom, and make him free, because they raise him to the world from which intuition, inspiration, and imagination come. For what happens outwardly on the physical plane, what constitutes outer history (I have explained this even in public lectures) loses its meaning as soon as it has occurred; in reality it does not justify our saying that the former event is always the cause of the latter. There is nothing more senseless than to recount history by describing, for instance, the deeds of Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, and then assuming that the events after Napoleon's exile are the consequence of Napoleon's actions. Nothing is more senseless than this! Descriptions of Napoleon imply exactly the same, as far as reality is concerned, as the description of a human corpse three days after death, as far as the dead man's life is concerned. What is now called “history” is a “corpse-history” compared with reality, even though this “corpse-history” has a great importance in the minds of many people.

What happens outwardly becomes a reality only when it is revealed in its development from spiritual impulses. Then it will be seen clearly that a human being's deeds, let us say, in a certain decade of a certain century, are the consequence of what he experienced before entering into his incarnation on earth; they are in no sense the consequence of events that occurred in the course of decades of physical experience on the earth, and so on. Spiritual Science, in the meaning of Anthroposophy, will have to bring more depth and more life—especially in regard to historical, social, and moral life—into the sphere of history above all. When this knowledge of the spiritual impulses will have become one of the essential demands of our time—it will then correspond to the living reality of the myths in ancient times—it will permeate human beings with impulses leading them to deeds and actions that will make them free. These things must first be understood; they will indeed influence real life when this understanding spreads over an ever-wider sphere.

But these considerations will show you something else besides. You will realize that the impulses of feeling, the impulses of will, which place us within the same sphere of life as the so-called dead, are a higher and more intensive reality than the one we know through our waking consciousness, in the form of ideas and sense impressions. For this reason, what has just been brought forward as a demand of our age, as something that must become an object of public teaching, can only be truly fruitful when it is grasped not merely with the understanding, but goes over into the impulses of feeling and into the impulses of will.

This can only come about when spiritual science is really seen as a reality, and not simply as a teaching. spiritual science is easily looked upon merely as a teaching, as a theory; but spiritual science is not a mere teaching, a mere theory, spiritual science is a living Word. For what is given out as spiritual science is the revelation from the world which we share with the higher Hierarchies and with the so-called dead. This very world speaks to us through spiritual science. And he who really understands spiritual science knows that the soul music of the spiritual world continues to resound in spiritual science. What we read, not from the dead letters, but from the real happenings in the spiritual world, can indeed permeate our feeling with true life, when we grasp spiritual science in this sense, as something which speaks to our inner being from out the spiritual world. I have emphasized at different times how the matter stands, when I described how, on the one hand, since 1879, spiritual life has the opportunity of streaming down to the physical plane in an entirely new way, and how, on the other hand, it must indeed face an opponent in the Spirits of Darkness, of whom we have spoken. Everything must still be achieved, before the content of spiritual science really enters the life of our feeling and will. And this can be achieved when certain things change fundamentally, in regard to which modern man has reached a cultural blind alley.

Something else must also work its way through; namely, evolution must develop in such a way that, on the one hand, the events of history may be compared to a growing tree (I have already used this picture during these considerations): but when the leaves have grown as far as the periphery, the tree ceases to grow. Here the dying process begins. It is the same with historical events. A certain group of events takes shape—let us describe it quite schematically:—Certain historical events have their roots. A definitive group of historical events may have their roots in the last third of the 18th century. I shall speak of this more clearly tomorrow. Other influences are added to these in the course of the 19th century, and so on. But you see, these historical events expand and reach their extreme boundaries. In this case the boundary is not the same as in the case of a tree or a plant, which does not grow beyond its periphery; but here a new root of historical events must begin. For decades, already, we have been living in a time in which such new historical events must spring out of direct intuition. But in the historical life of man, illusion can easily spread also over these things. To be sure, you can watch the growth of a plant, which grows according to its inner laws until it reaches a certain periphery and cannot grow beyond it. But now you can call forth an illusion—you can take wires, hang paper leaves on them, and give yourself the illusion that the plant continues to grow up to this point.

Such wires do indeed exist where historical events are concerned. While historical events should long ago have adopted another course, such wires are there instead; except that in historical evolution these wires are human prejudices, human indolence, which continue to maintain, on dead wires, what has died long ago. Certain people place themselves at the ends of these dead wires—in other words, at the outermost ends of human prejudice—and these people are often considered historical personalities; indeed, the true historical personalities. And people do not realize to what an extent these personalities sit on the wires of human prejudice. One of the most important tasks of the present is to begin to understand how certain personalities who are looked upon as “great” are, in reality, merely hanging on the wires of human prejudice; this is indeed one of the chief tasks of the present.

Tonight I would like to add a few things to the lectures I have been giving to you in these past few days as a substitute for the scheduled lecturer. I would like to point aphoristically, as it were, to something that may still be able to clarify a principle for the fructification of medical-therapeutic study through spiritual science. Obviously for the reasons already mentioned this morning, I cannot speak too much detail here; that is due not so much to the shortness of time—that too, naturally—but more to the fact that detailed knowledge must be held for a really professional gathering of physicians, again for the reasons I presented this morning.

Nevertheless, I would still like to contribute something in this direction, something that can lead to a general understanding of the nature of medicine so that a kind of social influence can emanate from a spiritual scientific study of medicine, bringing about a certain trust between the public and physicians. The better our understanding of the nature of medicine, the more effectively will medicine be able to work.

This morning I directed your attention to the fact that the life of the human organism consists of the nerve-sense system—the head system—working oppositely to the metabolic-limb system; these two are then balanced by the rhythmic system. All breakdown processes, the completely necessary breakdown processes of the nerve-sense system, are continuously brought into harmony and exchange with the upbuilding processes of the metabolic-limb system. You can imagine (and this can be verified in detail) that because the two systems of the human organism work in a thoroughly opposite way, they also work upon one another. Thus what goes on in the details of the metabolic-limb system, for example, should not be influenced too strongly from the head system, bypassing the rhythmic system; when this happens an activity suitable only to the head system works its way into the metabolic limb system.

If we adequately penetrate what we are concerned with here, we will come to understand how such intrusions of one system upon the other can take place. It will be understood, in other words, how the head system, the nerve-sense system (in which there must also be metabolic processes, as I have explained to you), can occasionally be overcome by metabolic processes that make the head system resemble the metabolic-limb system inwardly and functionally. The reverse can also take place, because the same functional system that is normally active in the head is also active in the metabolic-limb system, though in a subordinate way Occasionally this activity can get the upper hand, can become too intense in the metabolic-limb system, where it should only reach a certain level, having its actual significance in the head.

This is possible, in other words, because the nerve-sense activity that is also present in the metabolic-limb system strongly impregnates the metabolic-limb system with head activity, which thus becomes predominant in the abdomen, for example. Said in a better way, it becomes an activity whose intensity is too great. Then what should normally take place as breakdown processes only in the nerve-sense system will take place in the abdominal organs. Of course it will take on another form in the abdominal system, but it will nevertheless cause mischief there. In fact, by looking in this way into the organization of human nature, we can see in the phenomenon I have just described the development of a serious human illness, namely, typhus abdominalis. The manifestations of typhus may certainly be studied empirically, but they can be understood and placed within the entire human organization only if one is able to penetrate the human being in this way from the standpoint of a rational medicine, if I may use this Goethean designation.

I have also shown you this morning how it is possible to make the transition from the physiological-pathological to the therapeutic by attempting not only to penetrate what goes on in human nature but at the same time to penetrate what goes on in outer nature. Processes take place in outer nature which, if penetrated in the right way, can be introduced into the human organism by administering the appropriate substances. Because outer nature—the plant nature, for example—works in a certain way by virtue of its striving upward, working in an opposite sense to what strives downward in the human being, substances from plants can restrain certain processes that are unfolding improperly among the three systems of the human organism.

It is interesting to explore how what I presented to you this morning about the plant world and its connection with the human being can be penetrated in a similar way in relation to the mineral world. In order to penetrate this matter in relation to the mineral world, however, we must first gain certain anthroposophical understandings of the human being.

The soul-spiritual, the etheric, and the physical are all active in the human being. As we will have been able to discern through the considerations in these lectures, this soul-spiritual element works in such a way that it can be penetrated by full ego-consciousness. If this is the case, the human being is organized in the normal way, as it were. On the other hand, the ego-consciousness may be weakened, may step back in some way. If the soul-spiritual element kicks up some kind of fuss, going its own way without being penetrated in the right way by the ego, then various types of the so-called mental illnesses arise.

Everything that is soul-spiritual in the human being, however, as well as what in anthroposophical terminology is called the astral—that is, the more subconscious, dreamlike, or entirely unconscious soul life—and also what is understood as ego-activity, as the fully conscious soul life, has its physical carrier by means of which it works in a certain way in physical life. We may therefore say that if we study the human being we must direct our gaze not merely to what expresses itself as ego-activity, which is a purely spiritual activity we must rather direct our gaze to the actual, carrier of this ego-activity in the organism. We find that the actual carrier of this ego-activity is essentially anchored in the blood.

I could certainly demonstrate to you in detail how, especially through the particular activity of the blood, through the working together of the metabolic activity in the blood with the rhythmic activity in the blood, the ego works with the rest of the soul element, but to go into this now would lead too far. What should interest us more right now, however, is the bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. There we find something exceptionally important. We can influence the physical scaffolding, as it were—the physical carrier—of a soul-spiritual element, of the fully conscious ego, let us say, through certain processes that we bring about in it. The physical carrier then withdraws from the ego-activity, as it were, yet continues to perform a function similar to what otherwise takes place only under the influence of the ego-activity.

Drawing 1

Let me refer to a specific case in this connection. Imagine, please—I will sketch this for you—that what is active as ego-activity builds up, through the human blood system, something like a scaffolding, a scaffolding of forces. I will designate the ego-activity itself by these colored lines next to the line of this force-scaffolding, the line that designates the soul-spiritual element of the ego-activity (see drawing, red). If one can now influence the force-organization lying at the basis of the ego-activity in a certain way, it could be possible for this force-organization to become independent, as it were, to tear itself away and as physical activity, as scaffolding of physical force-activity, to separate itself from the soul-spiritual and yet remain like an image of the soul-spiritual activity, though working merely physically. In a certain way we thus incorporate into ourselves a kind of double that works deeply in the subconscious but that work; similarly—though only in space, which means only physically—to the way it normally works when surrendering itself as an unencumbered instrument for the ego-activity.

This can be brought about by introducing too much phosphorus into the human being, by administering to someone a powerful dose of phosphorus. (This does not actually need to be done; in elementary cases one can already see this. It is always possible to find the point designated by Goethe as the one behind which nature reveals its manifest secret, if one follows the appropriate path.) It is possible to separate out the bodily carrier of this ego-activity from the ego-activity itself. Then this ego-activity is carried out in the body as in an image. What would be the result of this? The result would be that, particularly under the influence of the phosphorus forces, the blood activity would proliferate beyond its normal extent, particularly in the bony system. In the bony system a kind of hyperemia would arise. In this way, through this hyperemia, an excessive blood activity in the region of the bone cartilage would run rampant, and the calcification process of the bones would be opposed.

I have described to you what could result from treating someone with too much phosphorus, where the function that phosphorus is normally able to fulfill in the human organism is excessively enhanced. Those forces that are outside in the world, however, anchored in the different minerals, are present in the human being in another form, as it were, in a super-sensible form, and they can be active within the human being. Man is a microcosm in a certain respect. If these forces that are normally anchored in phosphorus outside in nature are active within the human being, as can occur particularly in early childhood, then the illness rickets occurs. By penetrating the connection of the human being with the surrounding world, we have been able to ascertain that the manifestation of rickets in the human organism is a process similar to the one that takes place outside in nature in the manifestation of phosphorus. I am speaking to you aphoristically and obviously in a way in which not all the parts of a sequence of proof are connected; by means of a specific case, which is actually only indicating the direction, we can see how to search in a spiritual scientific way for this connection between the human being and the rest of the world.

Drawing 2

Now, however, it is possible to proceed further. I have shown you earlier today how, with the metabolic-limb system on one side and the nerve-sense system on the other side, the balancing rhythmic system in between, these two systems work together in a way (see drawing). You see, in fact, that what serves as an irregularity in the metabolic-limb system, bringing about illness, is just what induces health in the head system. Thus in the human head system there are always certain functions that stem from phosphorus, though from a very slight quantity of phosphorus that is found in the human brain. We have already become acquainted with this phosphorus-activity from the other side, in the way I have described to you, as something that brings the proper breakdown in the calcification processes in the metabolic-limb organism. These phosphorus processes in the brain, however, must be present wherever there is to be breakdown and where, above all, this breakdown is to be continually active. In other words, because the phosphorus process is present in the brain, we continuously have a kind of manifestation of rickets in the brain in, you could say, a status nascendi.

This is precisely the basis of our brain-activity, that bone continuously wants to be formed, but this bone formation is continuously inhibited once the skull has developed to surround the human brain in the right way. In the human brain—and this reveals itself to human perception—we have a continuous striving toward bone formation, but this bone formation reaches its conclusion at a certain age, at which time this activity of bone formation ceases. We thus have here something that is really conducive to illness but that is balanced from the other side, from the other pole of the organism; we have here a continuous striving toward rickets.

It is interesting that a rhythm such as this one that can be observed in the human being is also present outside in the rest of nature, though appearing in a certain respect as the opposite. If we look at the remarkable significance of phosphorus for the human brain, we have to say to ourselves that as phosphorus is taken in it is worked through up to the head. It undergoes a transformation within the human organism itself. It follows the same direction as the growth in the human being. It incorporates itself into this direction of growth in the human being, thus reducing its own activity to a minimum, as it were, diluting it. By means of this dilution the restrained rickets of the head can become the carrier of just those soul-spiritual processes that must be undertaken by means of the human head's mediation.

It is interesting that if very small doses of phosphorus are administered to the human being in the right way, rather than the somewhat larger, ordinarily perceptible doses of phosphorus, something different is achieved even in the function of phosphorus. If these small doses are administered to the human organism, they work in the same way as phosphorus works in the human brain. They now work in the rest of the organism as small doses able to restrain the rickets process if it has begun in children. Phosphorus in small quantities, in the smallest doses, can therefore serve as a remedy against rickets. In a more comprehensive sense, phosphorus can generally be used as a remedy against everything in which this ego-scaffolding, the physical ego-scaffolding (see Drawing 1, white), which I have sketched under the red, is freed within the organism, as a result of illness, from the actual soul activity: in other words, phosphorus brings back the soul activity, returning the condition to normal.

I would have to present a very complicated exposition about human nature for you to be able to see what actually lies at the basis of the dispute between allopathy and homoeopathy. In certain areas, however, you could say that what homoeopathy reveals becomes perfectly evident, as in these cases I have indicated to you. With certain small doses of phosphorus, or also sulphur (in short, something combustible—I will return to this) rickets as well as other inflammatory conditions can be healed, illnesses that stem from a blood-activity that has been freed from the ego-being.

You see, then, that when we begin to study the human being as suggested by spiritual science, as in this case, the connection of the human being with outer, inorganic nature becomes transparent. What I have just touched on here today can definitely be extended to other inorganic substances. One need only pursue this in detail. It is precisely this attempt to bring about a union of pathology, physiology, and therapy that requires a devoted study of the world within and the world outside of the human being. We may call phosphorus and sulphur combustible substances. If this study is really extended further, combustible substances reveal themselves as working in a way thoroughly akin to what has been described of phosphorus. They work so as to re-insert the emancipated ego-scaffolding into the ego-activity.

Certain salts work in the opposite way, substances now that are not combustible but that dissolve in water and then precipitate out again when the water is cooled. These salts, carbonates and other salts, work in such a way that they call forth a too-intense union of the soul-spiritual, particularly the ego-activity, with the scaffolding; they do not loosen it from the scaffolding but rather impress the soul-spiritual too strongly into it. They can therefore be used as remedies if this connection is for some reason too loose.

We can therefore say that if we understand the actual results of introducing a substance into the organism, how it influences the entire organization, then we can see how to work against a process that is proceeding abnormally and must be countered.

For certain processes, for example the process lying at the basis of pulmonary tuberculosis, it is precisely such salt-like substances (therefore soluble substances) that are particularly effective. What pulmonary tuberculosis is demanding is something to work against a process which, in the human organism, is the opposite of what takes place when a salt dissolves into a solution. What is important here is that broadening one's knowledge about all of human nature leads into the human being's connection with all his outer, worldly environment.

In these thoroughly aphoristic considerations I can only offer examples. What I have just been speaking about could be illustrated by still other examples. We can find such examples everywhere, but let us take an example from a realm that can at the same time lead us into the whole connection of the soul-spiritual with the physical. What is transmitted through the nerve-sense system in human life constitutes the conscious life of the human being from waking to falling asleep. We are thus able to say, more or less, that the head system is the expression for the conscious life of the human being. The metabolic-limb system is not the expression for the conscious life of the human being in the same way. We go through the world with conscious head but with unconscious limbs. These limbs become conscious only when they are touched in some way, when they endure an insult of some sort. We may therefore say that the normal condition for the head system, for the nerve-sense system, is waking consciousness, whereas for the opposite system in the human being it is unconsciousness. It is possible, however, to produce artificially in the human being a kind of consciousness for this other system, for the metabolic-limb system. This happens through massage, for example, which consists of making conscious through outer measures what otherwise remains unconscious. What is important here is that through massage an improvement can be brought about of an inadequate connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical. Take the case of a person who has a tendency to illness because his soul-spiritual element is insufficiently inclined to penetrate his metabolic-limb system. Then the physical aspect of this metabolic-limb system can be supported by massaging it, by lifting it, to a certain degree, from the condition of the spiritual into the condition of consciousness; the effectiveness of the system is thus supported, thereby calling forth a stronger permeation of this system by the soul-spiritual.

If it is understood how this metabolic-limb system works, if it is known, for example, that what pulses in the arms and hands, what pulses there as the soul-spiritual element, continues inwardly and rules the inner metabolism of the human being, then it will also be known what it means to bring about a partial consciousness in the arms and hands through massage. It means that the soul-spiritual element in the metabolic system is enhanced—the metabolic system that works within the human being in a constructive way, bringing about digestion, the taking up of substance.

If one finds, therefore, that a person is suffering inwardly and organically from metabolic disturbances, metabolic disturbances that are responsible for the inability of his nourishment to integrate itself properly in the body or for the results of this nourishment to proceed further into the upbuilding processes, if one finds, therefore, that the metabolism that proceeds inward is not working properly, then it is possible in certain cases to be of some help with arm and hand massage (of course detailed knowledge is necessary to carry this out in the right way). Such assistance consists of supporting the soul-spiritual element in its activity through the degree of consciousness brought about by means of the massage.

If the legs and feet are massaged, something else occurs. The soul-spiritual element that permeates the legs and feet is connected organically with processes of elimination, with breakdown processes. One will be able to offer assistance with a massage of the legs and feet, therefore, if the digestion in the direction of the process of elimination is not being accomplished in the right way.

You can see that if the nature of medicine is illuminated in this way by spiritual science, such insights can be arrived at not simply by chance in an empirical way, should they happen to present themselves empirically; rather it becomes possible to work fully consciously to cultivate the connections among physiology, pathology, and therapy in the most varied domains. I am saying these things to you, as I have mentioned previously, only to illuminate the directions one must pursue here. I know very well how astonishing such things appear because it is not possible, of course, to bring together all the details here.

If we consider an illness like diabetes mellitus, for example, which presents doctors with so many concerns, we must again look to the connection of the soul-spiritual element and particularly the conscious soul-spiritual element, that element permeated with the ego—with the physical carrier of this ego-activity. Something different now takes place from what was described in the first case today. Let us assume that this ego-activity becomes too great within the human organism. It extends itself beyond its proper measure. Then abnormal processes of elimination take place like those we find in the diabetic. In this case we are dealing with an excessive ego-activity in the organic itself, with an excessively deep immersion of the ego into the organic, so that through this deep immersion something is driven outward in a way that manifests particularly in the diabetic.

Let us now shift our gaze again away from what goes on within the human being and direct it to what goes on in the world outside the human being. In this world outside we have plants. This morning we already became aware of how plants in a certain way develop a process from below upward, a process that develops in the human being from above downward. What takes place in diabetes as the hypertrophy of ego-activity in the organism actually proceeds in the direction opposite to that of plant growth. If we are able to discern the right function in the growing plant, then under certain circumstances we can establish a relationship between what works downward in the diabetic and upward in the plant. We must conceive of the plant in such a way, however, that we say: the plant is a being; it is also physical; it grows, it reproduces, and therefore it has an etheric body. For spiritual perception it also has an etheric body, but it does not bring it to the point of inner soul movement; therefore it has no astral body, and also no ego-activity. Nevertheless it grows toward the ego-activity, the astral activity. The same thing that the plant unfolds from below upward the human being unfolds from above downward.

If we understand that we must observe what actually goes on in the plant, seeing how it grows in the opposite direction to which the human being develops his ego, from above downward, then we find how something arises in the plant element that is able to have an inner relationship to this inner ego-activity through the fact that it also has something to do with combustibility. Earlier I drew your attention to combustible substances. Now we see a combustible, volatile substantiality, a substantiality approaching combustion that develops out of the plant in the etheric oils. If we see the etheric oils appearing in certain plants, then we can discover in a study such as the one I have been suggesting, that this formation of etheric oils is the opposite of the activity enacted by the ego-activity pressing itself into the human organism through which a person becomes diabetic. If what is present in the outer world as the opposite is introduced into the human being in the right way, it is then possible to work against diabetes mellitus.

In this case this must be done by adding these etheric oils to baths, for example, or adding the plants themselves from which these oils are developed, allowing the diabetic to bathe in them. In this way the forces that the plant unfolds in the etheric oils work from outside inward against the forces that bring about diabetes. We will be able to help the person afflicted with this illness particularly by means of such baths.

I am only introducing a few individual examples here out of the rich wealth of examples that could be presented: I offered a large number of them this spring in the course for physicians (see Note 1). I am introducing them here only to illustrate the principles involved, but you can see from these examples how medicine can gradually become rational. These are examples through which one really comes to see the process taking place within the human being and the process in outer nature; one comes to see how these two processes either support each other or work against each other and therefore how a process in the human organism can be restrained, how one can work toward healing. If we extend this way of studying into knowledge of the physical human being and its connections with the soul-spiritual human being, we will progress further and further.

You know that in modern medicine, according to the natural scientific view, the problem of heredity plays a tremendous role. This problem, however, is treated in a thoroughly abstract and external way. Through outer science it is possible to make very few connections with what is actually active in human nature. Now I would like to present something to you that can only be arrived at out of a rich anthroposophical investigation. I will present it to you as a result of such an investigation: the human being is, in fact, formed out of the whole rest of the world, which belongs to him as the earthly world and also as the extraterrestrial world. He is formed out of this in various ways. We find, for example, that the female organism is formed out of nature, out of the cosmos, in such a way that there is a predominance in the female organism of those forces that are less bound to the forces of the earth, as it were. In the female organism there is something strongly extraterrestrial. In the male organism forces are primarily developed that are connected with earthly life. In ordinary life this does not come so strongly into consideration, but it must be considered in reproduction. In reproduction what matters is that the forces active in the female organism and contributing to reproduction are actually the transference of what inserts itself as the extraterrestrial element into general human nature. What draws the human being down into the earthly world, however, is inserted into the male organism.

Now let us consider what is actually present in the human being through his earthly environment. The most noticeable thing in man through his earthly environment is the ego-activity. This ego-activity gives the earthly evolution of the human being its full meaning. We must evolve ourselves from other worlds into the earthly world in order to be able to develop the ego-activity fully in our soul-spiritual element. I have already indicated to you how this ego-activity is bound to the scaffolding of forces mediated by the blood. We must therefore say that what is primarily inserted into the blood, working in accordance with the ego-activity, is brought about by the male personality by way of reproduction. What inserts the extraterrestrial into the human being, which must first be penetrated by the ego-activity, stems more from the female side.

Thus we see male and female working together in this way in reproduction, and only through having insight into this are we able to gain correct concepts of heredity. To begin with, the female seed, the female germ, is touched by the male influence, and this female germ has a certain independence in the female organism. We must say that if we have before us a mature female organism, this extraterrestrial aspect works primarily in the rest of the female organism; in the part of the female organism giving rise to the formation of the germ, it is not active, particularly not after conception. Particularly the female germ that has undergone conception has a certain independence so that what it signifies as a transmitter of the ego-activity is transferred independently onto the descendants in a certain way.

If these things are known, they can be applied so that phenomena confronting us in the outer world illustrate what was first gained through spiritual vision. Through spiritual vision it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial is, in fact, anchored in the female organism and that the earthly, which adheres particularly to the blood-activity, is transmitted through the male organism. It becomes evident that through this transmittal the female ovum gains a certain independence, developing separately, as it were, from the rest of the extraterrestrial female organism by means of the fertilization.

A process such as this, which one comes to know soul-spiritually, can then stand in the background when one wishes to explain a remarkable phenomenon such as hemophilia. The curious fact emerges with this illness that there are people who suffer from an inadequate coagulation of the blood, so that the least injury—often even without a verifiable injury—causes them to lose a great deal of blood, tending toward hemorrhage. This illness has a most unusual characteristic: males originating from hemophiliac families do not manifest the symptoms if they are borne by women from non-hemophiliac families; women from hemophiliac families, on the other hand, do not get hemophilia through heredity, but if they have children, the males to whom they give birth will contract hemophilia. This means that hemophilia passes through the woman. This points us to the independence of the germ, about which I have just spoken. It points us to the outer phenomenon that can illustrate what we came to know through spiritual vision.

I have presented something to you in a narrative way which may be recounted as follows. I have shown you how on the one hand it is possible to look into the being of man through spiritual vision, into the concrete being of man, into his upbuilding and breakdown processes, into his processes of health and disease, which are actually in a continuous interaction and between which a balance must be sought. On the other hand, I have shown you how, through spiritual vision, it is possible to find the reciprocal relationship of the human being to his environment and thereby to build a bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. Finally I wanted to show you with a specific example (I have selected an extreme case, hemophilia and the hereditary conditions connected with it) how, if one looks in the right way at nature in the cases where nature reveals her manifest secret, it is possible everywhere to receive an illustration of what was first known by spiritual scientific means. The objection often raised in this regard therefore has no validity; this objection is that a person who cannot yet see into the spiritual world has no way of finding any proof for what spiritual science maintains. This is not the case. What is important is on the one hand to be able to receive the results of spiritual science without dogmatism and belief in authority, and on the other hand to receive them without previously acquired, prejudiced skepticism. One simply receives them. One doesn't say, “I believe them,” nor does one rashly refuse them; rather one takes them and verifies them in relation to outer reality.

When you apply what may initially appear paradoxical to you, even incredible, drawn down as it is from the spiritual world through super-sensible vision in spiritual investigation, you will see that if you apply it in life, if you ask life, it will be confirmed in the points that matter. You will receive empirical confirmation everywhere for what spiritual investigation discovers. People today who refuse knowledge of the spiritual world with the excuse that they themselves are not able to see into the spiritual world are like the person who sees a shaped piece of iron (this was sketched) and says, “I will shoe my horse with that, for it is a horseshoe.” If one were to say to him, “It would be a mistake to shoe a horse with it, because it is a magnet, it has magnetic forces,” he would reply, “I don't see any magnetic forces—to me it is a horseshoe.” The spiritual is in everything material, and we are living in an age in which this spiritual element must be sought. A person who wishes to investigate matter, who wishes to ask questions without seeking the spirit, is like the one who uses the magnet to shoe his horse, who therefore does not really know how things in the material world are to be used.

Though what I have presented to you today had to be full of gaps and aphoristic in nature, I simply wished to indicate the direction in which medical studies must proceed in the future, for these medical studies are so intimately connected with the social question. Just as the human world can be healed socially only if spiritual knowledge is carried into social judgments, so our medicine can bring health only if spiritual vision is carried into it.

We are not dream-spinners in any realm. We do not by any means want dilettantes in any realm. What is important is serious research, research that has developed the fundamental principle often applied today. If a hypothesis is dangled here or there, it is said that it is merely a comfortable tool fur the grasping of phenomena. Even in mathematics the point has been reached of hatching such hypotheses or directions of thought. Spiritual science is firmly rooted in the principle that nothing should be avoided that may be necessary for the progress of human life, that nothing should he avoided in applying forces in the direction of what is required for this. From the course of human evolution it is clearly perceptible today that the signs of the time are saying to us: it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks.

What we have here in Dornach has only been able to develop because it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks; new guidelines are to be sought for here. We are specialized enough. What is important now is to bring together the individual specialties again. Perhaps you will see from this course that the spiritual forces that will bring together these individual specialties must flow from a center. In order to do this, however, one must depart from those comfortable paths that are so frequently sought today. The fruits will lie above all in the direction of the progress of humanity. For this reason, I would have especially liked it if everything that has been said here out of spiritual science could have been said also by specialists. Therefore I was not so pleased at having to substitute for you in an important area; this is how things happened, however, and nothing else could have been done, so we must simply accept what happened.

Most important, however, whether a specialist or a general observer were to present what is necessary here, would be to show that even in this difficult area of medicine progress is possible only through fructification by spiritual investigation. This would have been revealed more clearly if someone could have stepped forward in this area who could speak both out of the tradition of the time, out of everything that the time itself is able to offer medicine, and out of an open sense for spiritual science. Such an individual could have shown that it is possible to stand at the pinnacle of contemporary medical science, of official medical science, and still to be such a good spiritual scientist that he can only believe, can only bear this medicine if it can be illuminated by spiritual science. Whether this became sufficiently evident to you, despite the fact that I had to replace the specialists in medicine, I do not know, but I do hope that there will be other occasions to show, in a way illuminated by outer circumstances, that medicine can work into the future only if the spirit penetrates it, as is intended or at least as is striven for here in this Goetheanum: only if the Goethean spirit is absorbed into medicine.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

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Dear friends,

You have seen how necessary it is to relate a state of illness in a human being to his or her spiritual life and experience. The understanding that should be brought to illness by the two groups of people who have especially to do with pastoral medicine can really only come from such a point of view. Therefore I would like once more to consider the actual state of illness in connection with a person's spiritual life, this time from a standpoint that I think will throw greatest light upon the nature of illness.

As human beings we alternate between waking and sleeping. You all know in general what can be said from our perspective about these two conditions.

Today let us hold clearly in our minds what really happens in the human being during sleep. The physical body and etheric body are by themselves; the astral body and ego are also by themselves. Turning first to the physical and etheric bodies, we know that by virtue of what these bodies are, certain processes go on that during the person's sleep are independent of the activity of the astral body and ego. In the human organism we find processes going on that are not at all suited to it in the way they must play themselves out. The physical body has to do with physical processes. Physical processes take their course outside in the mineral kingdom; they are suited to the mineral kingdom. They are not at all suited to the constitution of the human physical body. And yet while it is asleep this human body is, so to speak, subject to these physical processes in the same way that the mineral kingdom is. We must be aware of this contradiction in the human being precisely during sleep. During sleep the human being ought to be a world of physically active forces and substances, but this is something that really cannot be. That is why processes that go on in the physical body during sleep—unless they are brought into balance—cause illness.

The general assertion that sleep is healthful is correct in a certain sense, but only under certain conditions. And it must not prevent us from examining the true situation without prejudice. Physical processes in the human physical body can only be healthful when the ego and astral organization are down in the physical body, as is the normal condition during waking life. It is constantly interrupted by the sleep condition. Normally, however, even during sleep the catabolic process is still always going on in the physical body; it must be there so that the soul-life and spiritual life as a whole can really unfold. For the spiritual life is not connected with anabolic processes, only with catabolic processes. During sleep, therefore, there must be just as much of the catabolic processes as a person needs for waking life to unfold the next morning. If too many catabolic processes are there because of some unhealthy sleep condition, a residue of these processes piles up in the human organism, and then we have the inner cause for an illness.

If we extend our investigation to the etheric body, we find that during sleep only the processes can take place in the etheric body that can otherwise take place in the plant kingdom. During daytime consciousness, when the astral body and ego are in the etheric body, these processes are always raised to a higher level. But from the moment of a person's going to sleep to the moment of waking, they take their course in the same way that they do in the plant kingdom. Thus they too are not suited to the human organism; they need to be balanced by the astral body and ego. If they create a residue, this too is cause for illness. So we can say that sleep can show us how causes of illness really originate in the human organism. For they are fundamentally the normal sleep processes; at the same time they are the basis for human soul-spiritual life. And that points to a secret of this world—that whenever one penetrates to reality, one finds it has two sides! On one side, in the sleep condition of the human physical and etheric bodies we find the basis for spiritual development; on the other side, in the very same processes we find the basis for illnesses. Thereby illness is brought into direct connection with human spiritual development. Thus if we study what is active during sleep in the human physical and etheric bodies, we find the fundamental causes of illness.

Now let us consider from this point of view those who during waking life do not go down deeply enough into their physical and etheric bodies—which is what we have found to be the case in the mentally retarded or the psychopath. With such people the soul and spirit enter into processes of illness and live with them. Special value should be laid on this knowledge, that psychopaths and the so-called mentally disturbed are always closely involved in their inner lives with the causes of illness. You see, one has to look at such things carefully.

But now let us go to the outer world. Let us start from the human physical body (Plate VI, left) and consider the outer mineral world that relates to it. During sleep we have processes in the human physical body from which the ego is missing. They go on without really any inner working “motor.” But there is ego out there in the world in all those mineral processes. In them is what we can call world-ego. So we have on the one hand within the processes of the human physical body a condition of non-ego, a sum of processes that are egoless, processes that lack ego. And we have on the other hand in our outer environment a sum of mineral processes and mineral substances that are permeated by ego—that means, by all the hierarchies who are to be identified with ego. Mineral substance has ego.

Therefore let us assume that we observe in some person's physical body a process that should not be there, a sick process. It lacks ego. What can we do if we want to cure this condition? We can search outside in the mineral kingdom for that part of the ego that the person lacks, to cure what is too much asleep, to cure what is still continuing to sleep during waking life. Then we have the right remedy. If you give the substance that has an affinity to the sick organ, the ego-force that the organ lacked is brought into the organ. This is the principle underlying our search in inorganic nature around us for medicinal remedies for the physical body of the sick person. We have to find the corresponding substance that has ego-force; then it has a healing effect. Thus the transition from pathology to therapy rests upon a correct insight into the relation between the processes of the human physical body and the outer mineral world on the one hand, and the relation of the human etheric body to the plant world on the other. If we observe too exuberant a growth in the etheric body, we realize that the etheric body is lacking proper penetration by the astral body. Then we must search in the plant kingdom for the proper corresponding remedy. This is the direction our work must take.

One must recognize the spirit in nature, the spirit that is in the mineral and plant kingdoms of the world. It is the spirit, not the substance, that one must know, because in reality one heals the human being through the spirit that is in the mineral and in the plant. In its nature substance is not truly governed by spirit, but even so it has spirit in it. And those who want to heal without recognizing the spirit in stones and plants can only grope their way through traditional theory. They can try one thing or another and see whether it helps, but they will never know why it helps—because they will never know just where the spirit is in possession of some mineral or how it is in possession of it. To be a healer requires first and foremost a spiritual outlook on the world. And indeed this is the greatest anomaly of our time: that it is medicine itself that has the frightful disease of materialism. Medicine is seriously ill with materialism. It has become blind and is falling asleep, and this is creating harmful soul substances in science. It really needs to be healed. One can indeed say, the sickest entity of our time is not Turkey,¹² as was the case in nineteenth-century Europe, but the medical profession. This is a fact that physicians should know—as well as the theologians, for then perhaps the secret will remain among those to whom it has been entrusted!

Let us look at these things more closely. There are certain persons who are not psychopathic or insane in the sense in which one is justified in using those terms, but who nevertheless illustrate what I have been talking about during the last few days. They descend into their physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they acquire a certain perceptible connection to their sick condition, to sick processes. These are sleepwalkers, whose peculiar state is not make-believe; it has often been described to the general public, and every initiate knows it well. While they are in their somnambulistic condition, they describe their illnesses. They go down into their physical and etheric body. Now the normal human being in waking life has the physical and etheric bodies completely saturated by the astral body and the ego. In the case of these sick individuals, the ego and astral body do not combine with the etheric and physical body in accordance (figuratively speaking) with their exact atomic weight. Some of the ego and astral body is left out; it has not entirely sunk down. But then it is this element that is able to perceive. Only that part of the ego and astral body perceives that has not sunk down into the etheric and physical body. When some of the astral body and ego is superfluous in such a person, then there is this inner perception, and the person can describe his or her own illness.

But now there is another condition—a condition of the opposite kind, in which the normal sleep condition is disturbed. In this case, when the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric body and things happen in the ego and astral body that do not belong in this soul-spiritual entity (as the things I was just describing did not belong in that physical-etheric body), when too much spirit is experienced by the ego and astral body during sleep (as too much nature was experienced in the opposite condition by the physical-etheric body), then a clairvoyance comes about that borders on a pathological state. The individual carries into sleep a certain power to perceive spiritual things, then afterward carries back memories of spiritual perception into waking consciousness. In particular, these abnormal spiritual perceptions appear in lively dreams. And then, as every initiate knows, we observe that the dreams have the following content.

Suppose the sick person, the physically sick person, is in the former condition I was describing and dips down with the spirit and soul into the physical-etheric body and then experiences the illness in a somnambulistic condition. The sick person experiences a strong catabolic process going on in the physical-etheric body, a kind of reverse process of nature. But now suppose the person is outside the physical body with the astral body and ego. Then the person has experiences of the spiritual aspect of external nature. Suppose the person experiences a sick organ inwardly—sick because it allows some outer process to occur in an unhealthy way. This is experienced in the somnambulistic state, and the inner process is described. If the person is in the opposite condition, the somnambulism works into the ego and astral body when these are farther out of the physical and etheric body. If the spiritual, elemental life of nature comes into dreams, the person experiences what is spiritual in the minerals. And what does the person dream about? The person dreams of the medicinal remedy. Here you have the connection between many aspects of somnambulistic life. The somnambulist alternates between two conditions, as I have described. In one condition dreaming of the illness, in the other condition dreaming of the remedy. And generally speaking, that is the way pathology and therapy were explored in the old mysteries.

In those times there was not so much experimenting as there is today. The sick person was brought into the temple and put into a kind of somnambulistic condition by trained temple priests. This condition was increased to the level at which the sick person could describe the process of the illness. Then the opposite somnambulistic condition was brought about, and the temple priest was told the dream that contained the therapy. This was the manner of inquiry in the oldest mysteries; it led from disease to cure. And so it was that medical science was cultivated in olden times, by seeking knowledge of humanity through the human being itself.

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that will lead—if considered properly—to a recognition of complicated disease processes. One has only to understand how things relate to one another.

But this shows us that physicians must more and more become really practical individuals—again, the exact opposite of what recent materialistic development has made them. They have gradually become pure scientists. And that makes no sense. A physician should always be able to cope with natural laws in a living way, and not just know them abstractly. With abstract knowledge of them one has not yet even begun to work with them. That's the situation from one side.

Let us look at the other side, the side that the priest must see. We think of the priest's mission as guiding human beings in their approach to the spiritual world, in everything that will help their ego and astral body to find their way in the spiritual world. If it is the physician's task to inquire into the nature of humanity from a spiritual point of view, to explore pathological conditions from a spiritual point of view, then what must the priest look for? The priest has to find what can lead human beings toward the spiritual world; their attitude toward the spiritual world, whether they love the spiritual world, how much they are permeated by the spiritual world—insofar as these things are apparent in normal life. The priest must deal with all the normal or abnormal symptoms that the human soul manifests in this regard in everyday life. For the priest we have to point out the opposite course to that of the physician. We told the physician that if somnambulists are allowed to describe their sick organ, they will also describe the medicinal remedy for it from out of their dreams.

Let us look again at the priests in the ancient mysteries. They were not primarily interested in discovering medicinal remedies, although of course they were intensely interested in healing, for they were first and foremost a friend of humanity. But they did not stop at healing; they were interested in more than that. They were interested in the following: They saw that the somnambulist found his or her own remedy in dreams while in the spiritual world with the ego and astral body. The priests paid particular attention to this soul while it was in the spiritual world, and followed it back again into the body. And what was found? Of course they found themselves again confronting the sick organ. But now, from what they had perceived of that soul while it was out of the body, they knew how the astral body and ego would work in this organ if it were healthy. Upon returning again to the sick organ, they knew what the situation would be under healthy conditions. Now they realized how the astral body and ego out of their divine-spiritual powers take hold normally in the human organism, how they sit normally within it. The priests learned to know them in their healthy normality through the dreams in the spiritual world, and learned how they relate to the physical world when they descend into the physical body. From this, the priests learned to know the inner relation of humanity to the spiritual world.

This knowledge should influence priests as they enact the sacrament in which they are carrying back the spiritual world. For the spiritual world is present in the sacrament through the establishment of the ritual. The ritual unites spirit with physical substance by virtue of deep insight into the relation of spirit to matter. Inspirited physical substance is led back into human beings, and the relation is established in them that unites their astral body and ego within their physical and etheric bodies with the divine-spiritual being of the world. Everything in this relation depends upon the priest's celebrating the sacraments with such an attitude. Everything depends upon our permeating ourselves with such thoughts. For instance, the relation between experience in the body and experience out of the body; secrets of pathology from observing the body when it is left; secrets of therapy from observing abnormal life in the spiritual world as compared to normal perception in the spiritual world. What was established in ancient times in secret temple procedures by prominent somnambulists must now be again established by human beings developing spiritual perception in themselves and observing the connections. In this area, experiment must give way to observation.

Now it is important that the physicians and priests in the anthroposophical movement are already united in their knowledge of such facts as these. That is what really binds us together. We are permeated by a different kind of knowledge from what others have. By contrast, the idea that some sort of union or association or group should be formed is just an abstraction. What really binds us together is the possession of certain knowledge. Those who possess this knowledge obviously belong together, and should feel closely united to one another. Any external association should be an expression of the inner union created by this knowledge.

Our time suffers very much in this respect. For instance, often when I speak today to, say, a youth gathering, even though I fully appreciate their endeavor and even though I myself have the very best intentions, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience their response to the concrete truths that should be filling their souls. It is difficult when I hear them say, “The first thing we must do is to join together!” Well, indeed, everything in these last decades has been “joined together”—ad infinitum! People have gone on and on joining together, but they've never yet got anything real for a result by tacking zeros onto one another indefinitely—00000000 and so on. One empty consciousness to begin with, joined to another empty consciousness, joined to a third consciousness, again empty—that all adds up to nothing. By contrast, you only have to assume a content—a content that is, after all, the basis of all zeroes: one. Then you have something. It doesn't have to be a human being, but it has to be some genuine content. Interestingly enough, this assumes that there is something there to begin with. It doesn't even have to be a human being. It can be real, living knowledge. These are things we should think about in our time. For usually people are much too comfortable to search for the concrete; they are content simply to put abstractions together. Joining together is all right, of course, but it will come of itself if something concrete is there first.

Perhaps this is something that should be understood before anything else by those who work among modern humankind as physicians and priests. Today two conditions can be observed throughout the world. Generally speaking, our ego and astral body do not find properly our physical and etheric bodies, whatever our waking condition may be. Also, truly, for those observing the world as it evolves, materialistic views don't really worry them unduly! Let the monists and the others fight with one another. Nothing is accomplished thereby. But that is certainly not the fundamental evil in the evolution of humanity. If one is observing the evolutionary process, one is not particularly interested to participate in these discussions of worldviews. For actually, whether one thinks this or another thinks that, opinions are frightfully thin little things in the human soul! They're just bubbles in the reality of this world. If one bubble hits another, if one bursts, if another becomes a bit thicker from the bursting of another, none of it matters. What does matter, what should be clearly realized, is that one does not ever becomes a materialist if one is sitting with one's ego and astral body properly in the physical and etheric bodies. In other words, to be a materialist means in a finer sense to be ill. One must fill one's whole being with this knowledge. And it is not surprising in the least that when others, those who are sitting properly inside their physical and etheric bodies, encounter the sick materialists, they turn away to exactly the opposite pole—to all the vague mist of spiritualism.

Here we come to a difficult area, because these things do not take place in those parts of the world that still have a connection with one another; they happen where the world has been thrown into chaos and its pieces lie scattered about. One thing no longer reveals itself as a healing remedy for another, for they are falling away from each other. So long as sick people speak of what is going on in their organs, their dreams will still reveal the corresponding healing remedies in the outer world. But in our present time people who are ill from materialism will not be describing sick inner organs; they have broken free of their organism; they want to describe the external world, as a materialist naturally would. Then they find not remedial dreams but the opposite—false spiritualism, which is certainly not a remedy. On the contrary, it brings on the illness more strongly than ever.

And so we find today in our time—if I may draw an analogy between medical work for individuals and cultural pathology and therapy—we find that spiritualism does not by any means offer a remedy for materialism, but corresponds to the somnambulist's dream revealing his sick organs. Now sometimes a process that properly should have taken hold of a person's inner organism pushes through the organism to the periphery, to the outer world; there is then the pathological condition called a “rash.” This corresponds exactly to what I've been telling you about. One sees with one's own eyes that what had been inside and is now outside is nothing healthy. It is an aberration. The physician should see clearly that materialism is a rash and needs to be regarded as a medical problem.

This will build a bridge to the priest's observation on the other side. The priest sees the symptoms that rise out of sick human souls, out of their need, out of their feelings. Spiritualism is just such a symptom. One comes to realize that in the widest sense sick life wants to sink down into the world, that all the disease in the present world outlook does indeed work itself out fully—insofar as it rests on the will—by working into people and sickening their inner life.

In the present epoch of human evolution it is impossible to see something that could be seen clearly in former times, because people in those days had different characteristics. We cannot see how a false direction of the will, a false worldview, a false view of life—all of which were designated in olden times as sin—cause illness in the organism. For they do not do so immediately in the ordinary way. We are only aware of the connection in the rarest cases, cases that are an intermediate stage between the sin and what can obviously be diagnosed as the resulting illness. These intermediate stages may simply develop into morbid conditions. But in this modern epoch the sin and the real illness are so detached from each other that now they even occur in separate incarnations. In earlier epochs they were able to appear in close connection as cause and effect, but as humanity developed they became separated so that sin appeared in one incarnation, illness in a subsequent one.

Here, then, begins the domain of the priests. Priests may no longer merely continue traditions of olden times, speaking of sin as the cause of illness. But if they have knowledge of repeated earth lives, they can speak of sin from that point of view; then they will again be speaking from the standpoint of truth. Much that priests in the world today say about these things is no longer true; it no longer corresponds to fact. These teachings originated in olden times, and today no one is interested in changing the teachings to accord with what is demanded in our time.

We have to relate ourselves to all this. Then it will be possible to make our study of pastoral medicine fruitful in both directions.

My intention is to give two more lectures for this course: tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. I am announcing this now so that you can make your plans accordingly.

• 12. “The sickest entity ...” This refers to a European expression, “the sick man of Europe,” applied to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

The day before yesterday we spoke of how humanity is confronted by difficult conditions. We will be better able to understand why this is so if we consider our times in terms of the whole of human evolution, and thus bring ourselves up to date regarding many things known and unknown.

You know that one of the most significant pronouncements made as the Christ event approached was, “Change the disposition of your souls, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” These are words of the deepest meaning. They indicate that something of a most essential nature took place in man's entire soul development at that time. When these words were spoken, more than three thousand years had passed since the beginning of Kali Yuga or Age of Darkness. What is the significance of this age? It was the era in which it was normal for man to depend solely upon what was accessible to his senses, and also upon his brain-bound intellect. Only such things as were experienced by these means could be known and understood in the dark age of Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga was preceded by an age in which man was not dependent only upon his outer senses and intellect, but then he still retained a memory, more or less, of the ancient dream-like condition in which he was able to feel a connection with the spiritual world. It is of this primeval age that we wish to create a picture.

Man could see not only the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, as well as himself, within the physical realm, but he could also, in a condition between waking and sleeping, perceive a divine world. He saw himself as a member of the lowest kingdom in the hierarchical order, and above him he perceived the angels, archangels and so forth. He knew this from his own experience, so that it would have been absurd to deny the existence of the spiritual world, just as it would be absurd today to deny the existence of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. Not only did he possess a knowledge of what streamed toward him from spiritual realms, but he had the capacity to become completely permeated with those forces. Then he was in a state of ecstasy. His sense of ego was submerged, but the spiritual world with its forms flowed into him. Thus, he had not only a knowledge, an experience of the spiritual world, but could, if he were ill, for instance, derive healing and refreshment by means of this ecstatic state.

Oriental wisdom refers to the ages in which man still had a direct connection with the spiritual world as Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga and Dwaparu Yuga. In the latter age, however, it was no longer an actual seeing, but a remembering that took place, in the same way that an old man might remember his youth. Then the doors to the spiritual world closed. Man could no longer have converse with it in his normal state of consciousness, and the time came when only by means of a long and rigorous preparation in the mysteries could he turn again toward the spiritual.

During Kali Yuga, however, something did occasionally penetrate into the physical world from spiritual realms. As a rule, it did not come from the good powers, but was of demoniacal nature. All the strange illnesses described in the Gospels, where people are referred to as possessed, are attributable to demoniacal forces. In them we must recognize the work of evil spirits. This Little Kali Yuga began about the year 3,000 B.C. and is characterized by the fact that the spiritual world has gradually become completely closed to man's normal consciousness, so that all knowledge has had to be drawn from the world of the senses. If this process had continued unabated, all possible connection with the spiritual world would have been lost to him. Up until the time of Kali Yuga man remembered some things that had been retained by tradition, but in time even these connections gradually faded. Even the teacher, the preserver of tradition, could not speak to him about spiritual worlds because man no longer had the capacity to understand. His knowledge gradually became limited to the physical world.

If this process had continued, man would never again have been able to establish a connection with the spiritual world, try though he might, had not something occurred from another direction; that is, the embodiment on the physical plane of that divine Being to whom we refer as the Christ.

Formerly, man had been able to raise himself up to the spiritual beings, but now they had to descend into his realm, appear close to him, before he could recognize them with his ego consciousness. This moment had been foretold by the prophets of ancient times. It was said that man would be able to find his connection with God within, and this by means of his own ego. But when the promised time came it had to be brought forcefully to man's attention that that moment had actually arrived. The one who did this most powerfully was John the Baptist. He announced that the times had changed, that “the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.” Later, this was indicated in a similar way by Jesus Christ, but the most significant sign was given in advance through the many baptisms performed by John in the Jordan, and through his teaching.

Still, by these means alone the change would not have been possible. A number of men would have had to have a much greater experience of the spiritual world so that the conviction could be born in them that a divine being would reveal himself. This was achieved by submerging them in water. When a person is about to drown, the connection of the etheric body to the physical body is loosened, even partly withdrawn. Then he can experience a sign of the new impulse in world evolution. From this comes the powerful admonition: “Alter the disposition of your soul, for the Kingdoms of Heaven are near. The disposition of soul is come upon you through which you will enter a relationship with the descended Christ. The times have been fulfilled.”

Christ Jesus Himself expressed, in the most penetrating thoughts, the fulfillment of the times in the Sermon on the Mount, as it is called. This was by no means a sermon for the masses. The Gospels read, “When Christ saw the multitudes of people, He withdrew from them and revealed Himself to His disciples.” To them He disclosed that man, in ancient times, could become God-imbued during states of ecstasy. While outside his ego, he was blissful and had direct experience with the spiritual world from which he could draw spiritual and health-giving forces. But now—so said Christ Jesus to His disciples—a man can become God-imbued who becomes permeated within himself with the God and Christ impulse, and can unite himself as an ego with this impulse. In the past, he alone could ascend to spiritual spheres who was filled with divine streamings from them. Only he, as possessor of the spirit, could be called blessed. Such a man was a seer in the old sense and he was a rare personality. The majority of the people had become beggars in the spirit. Now, however, those who sought the Kingdom of Heaven could find it through their own egos.

What occurs in such an important epoch in world evolution always affects the whole of humanity. If only a single member of a man's being is affected, the others all respond. All the members of his being—the physical and etheric bodies, the sentient, rational and consciousness souls, the ego, and even the higher soul members—receive new life through the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. These teachings are in complete accord with the teachings of primeval wisdom.

In order for an individual to enter the spiritual world in earlier times, the etheric body had to be slightly separated from the physical body, which was thus formed in a special way. Christ Jesus therefore said in regard to the physical body, “Blessed are the beggars, the poor in spirit, for if they develop their ego-ruled bodies in the right way, they will find the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Of the etheric body He said, “Formerly, men could be healed of illnesses of the body and soul by ascending into the spiritual world in a state of ecstasy. Now those who suffer and are filled with the spirit of God can be healed and comforted by finding the source, the comfort, within themselves.”

Of the astral body He said, “In former times those whose astral bodies were beset by wild and tempestuous passions could only be subdued when equanimity, peace and purification streamed to them from divine spiritual beings.” Now men should find the strength within their own egos, through the in-dwelling Christ, to purify the astral body on earth. Thus, the new influence in the astral body had to be presented by saying, “Blessed and God-imbued in their astral bodies are those who foster calmness and equanimity within themselves; all comfort and well-being on earth shall be their reward.”

The fourth beatitude refers to the sentient soul. The ego of him who purifies himself in his sentient soul and seeks a higher development, will become permeated with the Christ. In his heart he will thirst for righteousness; he will become pervaded with godliness and his ego will become sufficient unto itself.

The next member is the rational soul. In the sentient soul the ego is in dull slumber; it only awakens in the rational soul. Because the ego sleeps in the sentient soul, we cannot find in another man the ego that truly makes him a human being. Before an individual has developed the ego within himself, he must allow his sentient soul to grow into higher worlds to be able to perceive something there. But when he has developed himself in his rational soul, he can perceive the person next to him. Where all those members previously referred to are concerned, we must bear in mind what was given them in earlier realms. It is only the rational soul that can fill itself with what flows from man to man.

In the fifth beatitude the sentence structure will have to take on a special form. The subject and the predicate must be alike, since it concerns what the ego develops within itself. The fifth beatitude says, “He who develops compassion and mercy shall find compassion in others.”

The next sentence of the Beatitudes refers to the consciousness soul. Through it the ego comes into being as pure ego and becomes capable of receiving God into itself. If man can elevate himself to such a degree, he can perceive within himself that drop of the divine, his ego; through his purified consciousness soul he can see God. The sixth sentence of the Beatitudes must, therefore, refer to God. The external physical expression for the ego and the consciousness soul is the blood, and where it brings itself most clearly to expression is in the heart, as expression of the purified ego. Christ said, therefore, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Thus, we are shown how in the most intimate sense the heart is the expression of the ego, the divine in man.

Now let us advance to what is higher than the consciousness soul, to manas, buddhi and atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. Contemporary man may well develop the three members of the soul but not until the distant future will he be able to develop the higher members, spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. These cannot as yet live in themselves in man; for this to occur he must look up to higher beings. His spirit self is not yet in him; only in the future will it suffuse him. Man is not yet sufficiently evolved to take the spirit self completely into himself. In this respect he is still at the beginning of his development and is like a vessel that is gradually receiving it. This is indicated in the seventh sentence of the Beatitudes. At first, the spirit self can only weave into man and fill him with its warmth. Only through the deed of Christ is it brought down to earth as the power of love and harmony. Therefore, Christ says, “Blessed are those who draw the spirit self down into themselves, for they shall become the children of God.” This points man upward to higher worlds.

Further on, mention is made of what will be brought about in the future, but it will encounter in ever-increasing measure the opposition of the present time and be fiercely rejected. It is said in the eighth sentence of the Beatitudes, “God-imbued or blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness sake, For they will be fulfilled in themselves with the Kingdom of Heaven, with life spirit or buddhi.” Connected with this we find references also to the special mission of Christ Himself, in the sentence that reads, “Christ's intimate disciples may consider themselves blessed if they have to suffer persecution for His sake.” This is a faint allusion to spirit man or atman, which will be imparted to us in the distant future.

Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount the great message that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand is proclaimed. In the course of these events the mystery of human evolution was fulfilled in Palestine. Man had reached a degree of maturity in all the members of his being so that he was able with his purified physical forces to receive the Christ impulse directly into himself. So it came to pass that the God-man Christ merged with the human being Jesus of Nazareth and these united forces permeated the earth for three years with their powers. This had to happen so that man would not lose completely his connection with the spiritual world during Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, however, continued until the year 1899. That was a particularly important year in human evolution, for it marked the end of the five thousand year period of Kali Yuga and the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of mankind. Onto the old faculties present during Kali Yuga man would now develop new spiritual faculties. So we approach a period in which new natural capacities and possibilities for gaining access to divine spiritual worlds will awaken in man. Before the first half of the twentieth century has passed, some people will, with full ego consciousness, experience the penetration of the divine spiritual world into the physical sense world in the same way as did Saul during his transformation into Paul before Damascus. This will then become the normal condition for many people.

Christ will not incarnate again in a physical body as he did in Jesus; now nothing would be achieved by it. It was dictated then by profound cosmic-earthly laws of evolution; otherwise, people would not have been able to recognize Him. But now men have evolved further and possess soul powers with which they can penetrate into the etheric. Thus, in future, Christ will become visible to mankind in the etheric and not in a physical body. From the middle of the twentieth century on, and continuing for the next twenty-five hundred years, this will happen more and more often. Enough people will by then have experienced the event at Damascus that it will be taken to be a common occurrence all over the world.

We study spiritual science so that these faculties, which are at first barely perceptible, may not be overlooked and lost to mankind, and that those blessed with this new power of vision may not be considered dreamers and fools, but may instead have the support and understanding of a group of people who in their common purpose may prevent these delicate soul seeds and soul qualities from being roughly trampled to death for lack of understanding. Spiritual science shall indeed prepare the conditions whereby these faculties can flourish and thrive.

Recently, I explained that these new qualities give us an insight into the Land of Shamballa, so that we may learn to know the significance and true nature of Christ, whose second coming indicates a maturing of mankind's cognition.

Generally speaking, the ages of history repeat themselves, but always in a new form. In spiritual science the beginning of Kali Yuga is seen as the closing of the portals of the spiritual world. After the first thousand years had passed there was the first compensation for it. In the individuality of Abraham, after his initiation by Melchisedek, it became possible for a human being to recognize God in the surrounding world through true insight and a proper evaluation of the external world spread out, as it were, like a carpet before his senses. In Abraham we see the first dawning of a knowledge that enables man to comprehend the true essence of an Ego-God, a God related to man's ego nature. Abraham realized that behind the phenomena of the sense world was something that made it possible for the human ego to conceive itself as a drop of the infinite, unfathomable world ego.

A second stage of God revelation was experienced at the time of Moses, when God approached man through the elements. In the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning upon Sinai, He manifested himself to man's senses and appealed to his innermost being. In the third thousand years in which a knowledge of God was breaking through there followed the age of Solomon. God revealed Himself through the symbols of the Temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem.

Thus, the divine revelation proceeded in stages. God first appeared to Abraham as Ego-God, or the Jehovah God, then to Moses in the burning bush, in thunder, and then to Solomon in the symbols of the Temple.

What is representative of a particular age repeats itself later in reverse order. The turning point is the appearance of Christ Jesus in Palestine. What immediately preceded that time is the first to reappear. Consequently, the first thousand years after Christ are again a Solomon epoch; the spirit of Solomon is active in the best men of that time so that the Mystery of Golgotha may be inculcated. In those early centuries after Christ, Solomon's symbols could be interpreted most readily by those who were most deeply affected by the event of Golgotha.

In the second thousand years after Christ we can recognize a repetition of the Moses epoch. What Moses experienced outwardly, now appears in the mysticism of men such as Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and so on. The mystics experienced in their inner beings what Moses experienced outwardly in the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning. They spoke of how the Ego-God revealed Himself to them when they withdrew into themselves. When they perceived within their souls the spark of their egos, then the Ego-God, the One-God Jehovah appeared to them. This was the case with Tauler, who was a great preacher and made powerful revelations. To him came the layman who was called, “The Friend of God, of the Mountain,” of whom it was thought that he wished to become Tauler's pupil. But he soon became his teacher instead, after which Tauler was able to speak of God with such inner force that a number of pupils and listeners were reported to have fallen prostrate, lying as if dead, as he preached. This is reminiscent of the events that occurred when Moses received the Laws on Sinai.

The centuries up to our present time have been filled by this spirit. Now, however, we are entering an era that recalls and revives the age of Abraham, in the sense that men are being led away from the world perceptible to our physical senses. The spirit of Abraham will influence our knowledge so that men will renounce the old mentality that only laid store in the physical world. But in contrast to Abraham, for whom the spirit of God was only to be found in the world of the senses, we shall now grow beyond the sense world and into the spiritual world.

Even though men knew nothing of all this in the past, we may well say that it has not interfered with our development. In the era now approaching, however, we will be placed in circumstances that will require men consciously to take their destiny into their own hands. They must know how Christ will be perceivable in the future. It is truly related that after the event of Golgotha Christ descended to the dead in the spiritual world to bring them the Word of Salvation. The Christ event is active today in the same way. Therefore, it is the same whether a person lives in the physical world here on earth or has already passed through death. If he has gained an understanding for it here on earth, he can still experience the Christ event in the spiritual world, and that will indicate that man has not lived upon this, our earth, without reason. If, however, a person fails to acquire an understanding for the Christ event here on earth, the effects of the event of Golgotha will pass him by without a trace during the period between death and a new birth. He will then have to wait until his next return to the earth, until a new birth in order then to be able to prepare himself.

Man must not believe that Christ will reappear in the flesh, as some false teachings claim, for in that case it would be impossible to believe in the progressive development of man's faculties, and we would have to say that events repeat themselves in the same way. But this is not so. They do repeat themselves, but on ever higher levels.

In the next centuries it will often be proclaimed that Christ will return and again reveal Himself. False messiahs or Christs will appear. But those armed by the above explanations, with a true understanding of Christ's real coming, will reject such manifestations. The knowledgeable ones who can see the history of the last centuries in this light will be neither surprised nor exhalted that such messiahs appear. As an example, this happened just before the Crusades and also in the seventeenth century, when a false messiah. Shabattai Tzevi, appeared in Smyrna. Pilgrims flocked to him even from France and Spain.

At that time such a deceptive belief did not do so much damage. But now, when man with his more advanced faculties should be able to recognize that it is a mistake to believe in Christ's second coming in the flesh, and that it is in accordance with truth that He will reappear in the etheric body—now it is an absolute necessity to distinguish such things plainly. A confusion of these facts will have serious consequences. We cannot believe in an alleged Christ who reappears in the flesh, but only in a Christ who appears in the etheric body. This manifestation will take the form of a natural initiation, just as at present the initiate experiences this event in a special way.

Thus, we are approaching an age in which man will not only feel himself surrounded by a physical sense world, but also, according to the degree of his development, a spiritual world. The leader in this new world of the spirit will be the etheric Christ. No matter what religious community or faith people belong to, once they have recognized these facts in themselves, they will acknowledge and accept the Christ event. The Christians who have the experience of the etheric Christ are perhaps in a more difficult situation than those who belong to other religions, yet they should endeavor to accept this Christ event in just as neutral a way as the others. It will, in fact, be man's task to develop, especially through Christianity, an understanding for the possibility of entering the spiritual world independently of any special religious confession, but simply through the power of good will.

Anthroposophy should help us above all in this. It will lead us into that spiritual land, described in ancient Tibetan writings as a remote fairyland but meant to be the spiritual world, the Land of Shamballa. Not in a dreamy way but in full consciousness should man enter this land under the guidance of Christ. Even now the initiate can and must go often to the Land of Shamballa in order to acquire new forces. In future, other men, too, will enter the Land of Shamballa. They will see its radiant light, as Paul saw above him the light that streamed from Christ. This light will stream toward them, also. The portals of this realm of light will open to them and through them they will enter the holy Land of Shamballa.