The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The question of “man and woman”, which is the question of the day, must be considered from a higher point of view through theosophy and should occupy us today. However, this consideration also leads us down into the practical.

Our time wants to have overcome materialistic thinking and feeling. In a sense it has; nevertheless, a materialistic attitude still prevails in the tone of our time. It is not so much the big questions of existence that suffer from this as what is happening directly in our environment. It is only through theosophy that this question can be put into the right perspective. The women's issue of the present time is a justified trend. But we need only let such questions pass before our soul to realize how little our time is able to judge. As a test, I will mention here various judgments passed by so-called important people on the nature of women. An important naturalist, a man of public political life, tried to summarize his judgment as follows: All of a woman's qualities point to one thing, and that is gentleness. Another thinker: “The essence of a woman in all her qualities culminates in the word ‘temperance’.” An important German philosopher characterized the way a woman thinks. There are two directions of thought: firstly, analysis – dissecting thinking – and secondly, synthesis – a joining together of thoughts. Those who know how to combine both activities of thinking correctly have the right harmony. Generally speaking, one of the two approaches is more prevalent in men. This German philosopher calls women's thinking analytical and men's thinking synthetic. Another thinker says the opposite. Another sees the preserving element in everything that a woman does; another, who knows history, calls her a subverter.

Where do these contradictions, these one-sided views come from? In the outside world, everything is truly distinct from one another; for example, a tree: one person draws it from this side, another from that; both pictures will be quite different. The purpose of spiritual science is to help people overcome such one-sidedness. In our time, everything is again aimed at overcoming this one-sidedness. People who think something today no longer feel at home in materialistic thinking.

Perhaps you have heard of a book that caused quite a stir some time ago: “Sex and Character”; its author was the unfortunate Weininger, who later took his own life. The thinking in this book comes from the natural sciences and combines the ideas of man and woman in a very materialistic way. It says: If we look at the individual human being, we find a mixture; man is feminine, woman is masculine. If we look at this idea in a supersensible way, it is quite correct, but in Weininger's book it is materialistically understood and seems quite monstrous. He presents a mixture of substances. Nothing but materialistic paradoxes — apparent absurdities — can be derived from it. Weininger comes to the conclusion: Woman lacks: I, personality, individuality, character, freedom and will. — What is left then? One could also ask: If we look at a man; since he is half woman, does he also lack half of: I, personality, individuality and so on? Nevertheless, there is an inkling here of something correct. Here, the human essence is considered only in terms of its lowest link, namely, in terms of its physical body. But man is only recognized when one considers the properties of his four-part essence: the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ego.

Today, we are particularly interested in the truth, which may seem insane, namely that the physical body and the etheric body are in some ways opposed, like north and south, positive and negative. They are opposites in relation to the male and female. The etheric body is of the opposite sex of the physical body. Everyone carries these opposites within themselves. This becomes understandable to us in the qualities of women: loving devotion, compassion, which, when they can be increased, can increase to the level of male bravery. On the other hand, increased male qualities take on the qualities of the female character. A myriad of phenomena can be explained to you by taking into account the etheric body in addition to the physical body. How can our concepts be purified by such views?

Let us consider the phenomenon of sleep. It is the state where all feelings and sensations sink into the indefinite dark. When a person sleeps, the astral body escapes with the ego, leaving behind the physical body and etheric body, and upon awakening, it plunges back into the latter. Why does the astral body sink back into it with the ego? Because it receives impressions through the physical senses; for the physical eye does not see and the physical ear does not hear. Today man cannot yet perceive through the astral body, but later on it will be the case. Today the astral body is in the same position as our physical body once was, when in gray, gray prehistoric times the physical senses began to develop. So it will be one day when the astral body has developed its organs. Then the masculine and the feminine will be brought into one realm.

Just as I and the astral body submerge, so every man - and every woman - only becomes a sexual being every morning upon awakening, when he submerges. These concepts are only on the outside of man. The Bible verse: “There is no marriage in heaven” (Matt. 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35f.) becomes understandable to us through this. Man is in the heavens at night. We must not believe that there are no similar contrasts in the higher worlds. If we follow man up into sleep, we also encounter contrasts. When man leaves his physical and etheric bodies every night, he first enters the astral world.

The first contrasts we find in the astral world are those of form and life, or, let us say, death and life. These contrasts exist so that harmony can develop in the further evolution of the world.

Let us try to understand how, in our existence, death manifests itself as form and life as becoming. Observe a plant and see how the root sprouts, the stem forms, leaves and flowers sprout. In the bark of the tree you have the affiliation of death to life. Inside, the plant retains its living becoming. The bark is the enveloping death. Thus you can find the interaction between death and life everywhere, and it is here that true existence first reveals itself. It is no coincidence that the ancient initiates, the Druids, were named after the “oak”. They formed a protective shell around themselves in order to make the inner self all the more viable. Where there is increased life, there will also be increased death as a “wrapping” of life. This contrast between dying and awakening is evident everywhere. With the same sharpness as the male and the female in the physical world, the active death and the active life are expressed in the astral world.

You can also find these contrasts expressed in art. To make this point clear, I will mention the Juno Ludovisi. In its form, one immediately sees something finished. If you study the whole, look at the width of the forehead, you say to yourself, there is spirit, a lot of spirit. The spirit that lives in it and is constantly being created has become external form. You can see the source completely flowing out on the face. The life of the soul has become rigid in an instant, has died. In the Zeus head, you find the opposite in a sense. There is a narrow forehead formation, deep wrinkles in the forehead, and a beautiful form, but it is possible that life could take a different form. This is the contrast that you will learn to recognize in its fullness. One is the dying of death, the beauty of death, the other is the developing life. This contrast between the dying form and the ever-newly kindling life is expressed in the masculine and the feminine. If there were only the masculine, there would only be consuming life; the image of the form is expressed in the feminine physical form. Thus they present themselves: life and form, becoming and dying away. Life in the feminine radiates towards us, the life that wants to sustain and continue itself; in the masculine, a form that would be fully developed, eternal. Thus, in our lives, man and woman struggle with each other, and so do death and life.

Wherever there is an awareness or a presentiment of these facts, symbols and myths appear in a completely different light, for example a fact of a biblical myth, although every symbol has more than one explanation; and therein lies the power and strength of the symbol, that it is meaningful, for example the myth of the serpent. There you will find the words: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) In this we have an indication of the meaning of these words: male and female. The one from whom this myth originates wanted to point to the duality of the human being. Nature, which strives for form, must be overcome by that which is becoming eternal. The higher nature of man, which overcomes form, is Eve; man's attachment is the serpent. The higher feminine nature should overcome that which goes outwards. Goethe spoke a deeply mystical word:

The eternal feminine draws us upward!

The time behind us, the culture of man, is over. Now is the time when man and woman work together on culture, and that is the basis for the real question of women: male – physical and female – ethereal. The power of action lies in the conquest of form. The one will find itself in the other, and so, in contrast, true harmony will arise. True strength will find itself in the other, and only then will true creativity arise.

The aim of these lectures is to be an introduction to the theosophical world-conception and its connections. We shall have to deal with problems such as the cause of death, the cause of suffering, the origin of evil, and so forth. By setting out from man, from the nucleus of his being, we shall study the great law of reincarnation and karma, and also the origin of man, of the Earth and of the solar system. Moreover, of the way in which the great truths come to expression, especially in Christianity and in the different religions.

Occultism, the wisdom of the hidden beings, looks upon man in such a way that the visible part of his being, the physical body, constitutes the first member. As a material form, it is looked upon like other lifeless objects.

The second part or member is the etheric body, which is invisible and finer than the physical body. We may therefore say: in the upper parts of man's being, the etheric body is the image of the physical body, but it takes on a different form in the lower parts. A blind-born person considers the description of a seeing person for fantasies; the descriptions of those who perceive the etheric body clairvoyantly are treated in the same way. At present there are about three or four hundred people and all who have this clairvoyant capacity. But it lies dormant in every human being; for this reason things will present a very different aspect in a hundred years. In the near future there'll be a gigantic progress, also in the technical field.

Modern theosophy is only the elementary part of occultism. To-day it is not possible to teach more. The faculty of spiritual vision develops through an inner schooling. Those who are endowed with clairvoyance see the etheric body as follows: first of all, they must deviate their attention completely away from the physical body, they must—so to speak—suggest it away completely. Suggestion, hypnotism, abnormal soul-conditions, a lowered state of consciousness, positive and negative suggestion which harm the person on which it is practiced, all this has nothing to do with theosophy as it is meant here. Those who develop their higher soul-forces are able, by their will-power, to throw out of their field of vision the whole sensory reality of a human being or object of stands before them. The same space occupied by the physical body will then be occupied instead by a form resembling man, consisting of an inwardly luminous form of forces which is very much like the human being of the present time except that the etheric body slightly projects above the head. In plants, animals and children projects greatly by the physical head.

The third member or part of man is the astral body. At first, it should be studied more from the inner aspect. When a person stands before us we can touch his physical body with our hands. Let us now leave aside the etheric body. Where muscles, bones and nerves exist in the physical body, there are also a certain amount of instincts, pains, joys, ideals, and passions. They are all as real as the former. This is the astral body seen from within. Seen from the outside, the astral body does not exist at all as far as the power of vision of ordinary people is concerned. But when we pass through training of the soul we learn to know also the astral body as it appears to us as the soul-part of man. The astral body is designated as the aura.

A wild unchecked passion is like a dull red cloud that passes through the astral body; a pure ideal sends out white-gold rays. The painters of past times, who were still more closely connected with clairvoyance, used to paint this aura in many different ways. People who have a great deal of sympathy and love for their fellow-men are surrounded by a greenish aura; religious feelings, religious fervor, sends out blue rays. The aura is simply the external expression of inner instincts, passions, and so forth. The external form of the aura is quite different from that of the physical body and it surrounds man, and enwrapping him in a kind of oval form. This form of light soars around the human being and sends out rays.

In a few decades these truths will be of immense value in education, in pedagogy. Much will be gained when spiritual science will be included in our educational system. It is of immense importance in external life.

Let us now study the child in regard to these three bodies. They do not develop simultaneously in the child. From the first to the seventh year the physical body unfolds; the other two bodies are not free and they influence the physical body from within. Consequently, during this period, the only way of educating a child is to work upon his physical body, for the other two members of his being have still have to unfold. A sound education will therefore refrain from influencing the etheric body and astral body prematurely. From the first to the seventh year the child needs visible, perceptible images, examples, and so forth. The child's visible environment should therefore be a pure one, and this even applies to the thoughts of the people around him. For a child is able to feel good and evil thoughts. We should endeavor to sharpen and develop the child's senses. His fantasy should be stimulated. Consequently, a child should not be given beautifully finished things to play with. He should instead make something for himself, a form, etc. This rouses and awakens the child and develops the forces of his physical body. Therefore abolish beautiful toys! ...

A special change takes place in the child during his seventh year, for a part of the etheric body becomes free, and for this reason we should now begin to exercise an influence upon the etheric body. In what way can we exercise an influence upon the etheric body? Observe, to begin with, the process which takes place when we die. Only the physical body lies there, while the etheric body and astral body separate themselves from it and ascend. It is not the same when we are asleep. When we are asleep, the etheric body is still connected with the physical body lying on the bed, and only the astral body separates itself from them. But at the moment of death something very strange takes place in man: his whole past life lies spread out before his memory and goes past him. Sometimes this may happen in moments of great danger, for example when a person is drowning or suddenly precipitates from a great height, and afterwards regained consciousness. At such moments his whole past life rises up before his soul. What has really occurred? His etheric body was more loosely connected with the physical body. Something similar takes place when a part of the body “falls asleep”, or when we underbind, tie off extremity. When a finger is underbound a clairvoyant perceives that the finger's etheric body is hanging down, it is loosened. In a hypnotized person this condition is very dangerous, for his etheric brain is hanging down limply at both sides of his physical head. Since the etheric body is the carrier of memory, the memory-tableau rises up before us after death. When the etheric body emancipates itself from the physical body, it can follow its own movements and memory is more free than ever. Normally, the etheric body fills the physical body like a dense cloud of light. And until death, the physical body obstructs the finer influences and forces of the etheric body.

From the seventh year onward the forces of the child's etheric body are free and from the seventh to fourteenth year we should therefore work upon his memory and develop it. Since the etheric body sets forth everything in the form of images, the child should be given images in parables and we should work upon him with the aid of fairy tales and beautiful stories. During this period the child accepts everything on the authority of his parents as teachers.

The astral body emancipates itself wholly from the fourteenth to the 21st year. It begins to unfold with puberty, consequently a little sooner in girls than boys. The astral body is the carrier of reason, of the conscious judgment. During this period we shall be able to influence the astral body by developing the power of judgment. If this is attempted sooner, we sin against a child, it would be of the greatest harm to him. A time will come to which the science of the spirit will be applied in pedagogy.

Man shares his physical body with everything mineral, his of etheric body with all plants, his astral body with all the animals. But man rises above all these things through his self-consciousness, through the little word “I” which is unique in its kind. For “I” is the only name which each one can only give to himself.

This is a greatly significant fact. In the ancient Hebrew religion, the occult word “I” could only be uttered by the highest initiate, by the High priest. This was a solemn cultic moment. The whole congregation waited for the utterance of the word “Jahve” (meaning “I”), and a shudder of holy awe ran through the assembled people, who were filled with reverence. Jahve is the God who speaks within man ... and the word Jahve (Jehovah) was looked upon as the “unutterable name”. It is the voice by which God begins to speak in man. Never can this word enter into us from outside. In the word “I” the eternal touches the transient.

We have thus learned to know the four members of man's being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and man's nucleus, the “I”, or Ego. At the moment of death, the etheric body, the astral body and Ego separate from the physical body. The etheric body and astral body gradually dissolve, until the Ego enters Devachan, where it remains until it begins a new life on Earth.

Question about the work of the Ego

Work can be done on the astral body, on the etheric body, on the physical body. Every human being works on his astral body; all moral education is work on the astral body. Even when a person enters on the process of Initiation, on occult training, he has still much work to do on his astral body. Initiation leads to stronger work on the etheric body through the cultivation of aesthetic pleasure and of religion. The Initiate works consciously on his etheric body.

Astral consciousness is four-dimensional in certain connections. In order to form an approximate idea of this, the following may be said. Anything that is dead has the tendency to remain in its three dimensions. Anything living extends all the time beyond the third dimension. Anything that grows has, through its movement, the fourth dimension within its three dimensions. If something moves in a circle, and if the circle it traces goes on increasing in size, we come at last to a straight line. But the straight line will not return to its starting point, because our world is three-dimensional. In astral space, a line does return, because astral space is closed on all sides. It is quite impossible, there, to go straight on for ever. Physical space is open to the fourth dimension. Height and breadth are two dimensions; the third dimension leads out into the fourth. In astral space a different geometry prevails.

Why are Theosophists still so inadequate?

One should not allow a personal element to enter into one's judgments. An objective assessment of things should be the aim.

About conditions in Devachan

Pain and grief are external in Devachan. You do not experience your own pains there. Pain is something you look at. You see it as thunder, as lightning, as colour. That is blessedness. You are looking at pictures of happenings caused by others here below. A peaceful condition in Devachan depends on the lives of people between birth and death. Harmony here on Earth brings about peace in Devachan. A man lives continuously in the three worlds. “Rest in peace!” is not quite right.

Is there any value in reading Masses for the dead?

Good thoughts are balm for the dead. It is not selfish love that we should send them, not mourning because we no longer have them here; this harms a dead person and weighs on him like lead. But love that endures, which does not lay claim to the dead person by wanting him back again—this nourishes him and augments his happiness.

Remorse?

Remorse has no value. But one must make good for harm done; this shortens the Kamaloka period.

On communion with loved ones in Kamaloka

It is clearer, more definite, in Devachan, for in Kamaloka consciousness is clouded by the paying off of debts incurred through personal guilt.

Lotus-flowers?

The lotus-flowers are inner movements, within the human being.

If one is out of harmony with one's parents, what is the reason for it?

To be out of harmony with one's parents is generally something determined by karma.

What does the astral body look like?

When the astral body is together with the physical body, it is somewhat egg-like in shape. After death it is a wonderfully radiant, mobile formation. In accordance with individual characteristics it has various colours, radiant colours. Its three gleaming points are at first widely separated, joined together but open below. They are centres of force; they draw progressively together and then they look like a small triangle. 1. Heart; 2. Liver; 3. Brain. These three points work together at the time of a new incarnation. In Devachan they are radiant centres of force, which stream out from the three points. In the astral world these three points form a triangle; in Devachan they form a six-pointed figure—two interlaced triangles. They are bells.

A question was asked about the “permanent atom” often spoken of in theosophical circles at that time.

Atoms are a speculation. Hence we avoid speaking about them, for they are only an assumption. One should not think about things which are not facts; human beings should only look and observe.

Can one look into the future?

This is possible, but the occultist refrains from doing so, because, almost always, it behoves only a high Initiate to know the future. The Initiate's prevision does not determine what another person does; the latter will act in the future entirely out of his free will.

On family connections

Families with a strong family tradition are subject to a quite definite law, whereby the family karma is worked out. The ancestor upholds the family until he can build a new body for his own next incarnation. The continuity and cohesion of the family depends on the blood.

On Art

Art is the revelation of hidden laws of nature. Goethe says: “The beautiful is a manifestation of hidden laws of nature which would otherwise remain forever concealed.” Nature can realise her intentions only up to a certain stage; man can bring them to expression, but the artist has to leave out the blood and life.

On Group-Souls

At a later, much later, time the Group-Souls will embark on the same experiences that humanity undergoes today. They will eventually build individual bodies for themselves. They will become single individuals, each with an individual soul. Animals will never give rise to men, but human beings—of a kind quite different, certainly, from ourselves will develop out of the Group-Souls. The human stages—the Saturn stage, the Sun stage, the Moon stage, the Earth stage, and so on—can be gone through in the most varied ways.

What is your attitude to the Lord's Prayer?

The primal Christian prayer is: Lord, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. One should not pray egotistically. Prayer should be a raising up of oneself into the spiritual world, a source of strength and invigoration.

On marriage

Marriage is a duality. In the world today there is a prevailing tendency to lead everything back, quite wrongly, to the sexual. A great antithesis plays into the realm of marriage: the husband has a female etheric body and the wife a male etheric body. The spirit and soul in the man is more feminine, and vice-versa. The human soul strives towards the highest. Hence the man will equate the highest with the womanly, because his soul is feminine. The external part, the body, is only an outer symbol, only a parable. “All things transient are but a parable.” “The eternal-womanly draws us to the heights.”

On the Ego-body

The Ego-body appears to the clairvoyant as a blue hollow between the eyes, behind the forehead. When a person begins to work on it, rays stream out from this point.

On the nature of comets

A comet is an assemblage of Kama, desire-substance, without the corresponding spiritual substance. The comet gets as far only as the astral body. The visibility of comets arises from the powerful friction caused by the astral body passing through etheric substance.

How does gold arise?

We have first the four ethers:

No life can arise without Life ether, which fills out the bodies. Each ether can be cooled so that it becomes solid. In earlier times gold flowed in clefts; earlier still it was gaseous; it was Fire ether, Light ether. The rays which come to us from the Sun were formerly etheric substance. All the gold was once Sun ether, Light ether. Gold is densified Sun ether, densified sunlight; silver is densified moonlight.

Which beings inhabit the Moon?

The Moon is inhabited by those physical beings who have remained behind at an earlier stage of evolution: Luciferic beings. On the Old Moon there were beings who had fallen so far into evil that they could not take part in further evolution. They established themselves on the Moon. These malevolent beings are evident especially in the waning Moon; when the Moon is waxing they are less harmful. Some dreadful beings inhabit the Moon, but there are also favourable beings, actively concerned with growth and birth.

On the Book of Revelation

The Book with Seven Seals in the Revelation of John is written by man himself. His evolution and involution are inscribed there. The first writing in it applies to the seven sub-races. Each sub-race writes and seals a page of it. When the next sub-race emerges, the page is unsealed.

On the difference between cremation and burial

The difference exists chiefly for the etheric body. Cremation provides correctly for the dissolution of the physical body into cosmic space. “Decaying” (Verwesen) means a return to one's being (Wesen).

On the life of Jesus

The life of Jesus is at the same time a fact and a symbol. Proof of his life can be given only by Spiritual Science. You will not find any historical proofs, for the Christ was not known as a high Initiate to the writers of those days.

On the inner Word

The inner Word reveals itself after a man has already attained astral sight. Then he enters into the Devachan condition; then he hears the world-secrets sounding in himself; and then he hears the name that belongs to each thing. Later, his own name will be spoken to the Initiate, and to meditate on it is especially effective. That, then, is the inner Word. The Initiate is thereby awakened, and this inner Word is a sure guide for his later development.

[ 1 ] 1. To Chapter I-4 Paragraph 5: To speak of a vital force was still regarded a short time ago as a sign of an unscientific mind. Today there are here and there among scientists some who are not averse to the once entertained idea of a vital force. But anyone who examines the course of modern scientific development will, nevertheless, perceive the more consistent logic of those who, in view of this development, refuse to listen to anything about such a vital force. Certainly, vital force does not belong to what are called today forces of nature. Anyone who is not willing to pass from the habits of thought and the conceptions of modern science to a higher mode of thinking should not speak of vital force. Only the mode of thinking and the presuppositions of spiritual science make it possible to deal with such things without inconsistency. Further, those thinkers who seek to form their conclusions purely on the ground of modern science have abandoned the belief that obtained in the latter half of the nineteenth century, namely, that the phenomena of life could only be explained through references to the same forces that are at work in inanimate nature. The book of such a noted naturalist as Oskar Hertwig, The Development of Organisms; A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance, is a scientific phenomenon that sheds its light far and wide. It opposes the assumption that the inter-workings of mere physical and chemical laws are able to shape the living thing. It is also significant that, in so-called Neo-Vitalism, a view is becoming prevalent that also admits the activity of a special force in living things much after the manner of the older theory of vital force. In this domain, however, we shall never be able to get beyond shadowy abstract concepts unless we recognize that the only possible way of reaching what in life transcends in its activity the inorganic forces is by means of a mode of perception that rises to supersensible vision. The point is that the kind of knowledge modern science has been applying to the inorganic cannot be carried over into the region of life, but that an entirely different kind of knowledge must be acquired.

[ 2 ] 2. To Chapter I-4 Paragraph 5: When the sense of touch of the lower organisms is mentioned here, the word “sense” does not mean the same thing referred to by this term in the usual descriptions of the sense. Indeed, from the point of view of spiritual science, much can be said against the use of this word. What is meant here by sense of touch is rather the general attaining to awareness of an external impression in contrast to the special attaining to awareness that consists in seeing, hearing, and so forth.

[ 3 ] 3. To Chapter I-4 Paragraphs 5-28: It may appear as if the manner of dividing the being of man employed in this book rests upon a purely arbitrary differentiation of parts within the unitary soul life. It must be emphasized that this differentiation within the unitary soul life may be compared with the phenomenon of the seven color nuances in the rainbow, caused by light passing through a prism. What the physicist accomplishes with his explanation of the phenomenon of light through his study of this process, and the resultant seven shades of color, is accomplished by the spiritual scientist with regard to the soul being of man. The seven members in light become visible through an external contrivance, while the seven members of the soul become observable by a method consistent with the spiritual nature of the soul being of man. The soul's true nature cannot be grasped without the knowledge of this inner organization because the soul, through its three members, physical body, life body and soul body, belongs to the transitory world; through its other four members, it is rooted in the eternal. In the unitary soul the transitory and the eternal are indistinguishably united. Unless one is aware of this differentiation of the soul, it is not possible to understand its relation to the world as a whole. Another comparison may also be used. The chemist separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. Neither of these substances can be observed in the unitary water. Nevertheless, each has its own proper existence. Hydrogen and oxygen both unite with other substances. Thus at death, the three lower members of the soul unite with the transitory part of the world being; the four higher members unite with the eternal. Anyone who objects to taking this differentiation of the soul into account resembles an analytical chemist who objects to knowing anything about the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen.

[ 4 ] 4. To Chapter I-4 Paragraph 10: It is necessary that the statements of spiritual science be taken literally because only in the accurate expression of the ideas have they value. For example, take the sentence, “They (the sensations) do not, in its case (namely, that of the animal), become interwoven with independent thoughts, transcending the immediate experiences.” If the words “independent, transcending the immediate experiences” are left out of account, it would be easy to fall into the mistake of thinking that it is claimed here that the sensations and instincts of animals do not contain thoughts. The truth is, that spiritual science is based on a knowledge that says that all inner experience of animals, as well as existence in general, is interwoven with thought. Only the thoughts of the animals are not those of an independent ego living in the animal, but those of the animal group-ego, which must be regarded as a being governing the animal from without. This group-ego is not, like the human ego, present in the physical world, but works down into the animal from the soul world as described in part 1 of Chapter III. (Further details regarding this are to be found in my Occult Science, an Outline.) The point to make clear is that in man, thought attains to an independent existence; that in him, it is not experienced indirectly in sensation, but directly in the soul as thought.

[ 5 ] 5. To Chapter I-4 Paragraph 16: When it is said that little children say, “Charles is good,” “Mary want to have this,” it must be specially noted that the important point is not so much how soon children use the word “I,” but when they connect the corresponding idea with that word. When children hear adults using the word, it is easy for them to use it too, without forming the idea of the “I.” The generally late use of the word points to an important fact in evolution, namely, to the gradual unfolding of the idea “I” out of the dim “I” feeling.

[ 6 ] 6. To Chapter I-4 Paragraphs 20-21: A description of the real nature of intuition is to be found in my books, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and Occult Science, an Outline. Through lack of accurate attention, a contradiction might be detected between the use of the word in those two books, and what is said concerning it in this one (part 4 of Chapter I). To the careful observer, however this contradiction does not exist. It will be seen that what is revealed in all its fullness from the spiritual world to supersensible perception, through intuition, makes itself known in its lowest manifestation in the spirit self, just as the external physical world makes itself known in sensation.

[ 7 ] 7. To Chapter II: On Re-embodiment of the Spirit and Destiny. Concerning the statements in this section of the book, it must be borne in mind that—disregarding for the moment the facts of spiritual science already given in other parts of the book—the attempt is made, by means of thoughtful observation of the course of human life, to gain an idea of the extent to which this human life with its destiny, points to repeated earth-lives. These ideas will, of course, appear questionable to those who regard the customary belief in a single life on earth as the only well-founded one. It should also be borne in mind, however, that the intention here is to show that the ordinary way of looking at things can never lead to an understanding of the deeper foundations of life. For this reason, other conceptions must be sought that apparently contradict the generally accepted ones. This search is only hindered by the deliberate refusal to apply the same thoughtful consideration to a course of events belonging to the soul, that is applied to a series of events in the physical world. In thus refusing, no value is attached, for instance, to the fact that when a stroke of fate falls upon the “I,” the effect in the realm of feeling bears a relation to that produced when the memory meets an experience related to what is remembered. Anyone who tries to observe how a stroke of fate is really experienced will be able to differentiate between this experience and the assertions to which a point of view that is merely external must necessarily give rise, and through which, of course, every living connection between this stroke of fate and the ego is lost sight of. For such a point of view, the blow appears to be either the result of chance or to have been determined by some external cause. The fact that there are also strokes of fate that, in a certain way, break into a human life for the first time, only showing their results later on, makes the temptation all the greater to generalize on this basis without taking other possibilities into account.

People do not begin to pay heed to these other possibilities until experience of life has brought their imaginative faculty into a direction similar to the one that may be observed in Goethe's friend, Knebel, who wrote in a letter, “On close observation it will be seen that there is a plan in the lives of most people that seems traced out for them, either through their own nature or through the circumstances that affect them. The conditions of their lives may be ever so varied and changeable, but taken as a whole, a certain conformity will be apparent in the end. . . . However secretly it may operate, the hand of a definite destiny, whether moved by an outer cause or by an inner impulse, may be clearly discerned; even conflicting causes often move in its direction. However confused the course of life may be, plan and definite direction are always discernible.”

It is easy to raise objections to observations of this kind, especially for people who are not willing to consider the experiences of the soul in which such observation has its origin. The author of this book, however, believes that in what he has said about repeated earth-lives and destiny, he has accurately drawn the boundary line within which one can form conceptions about the underlying causes shaping human life. He has pointed out the fact that the view to which these ideas lead can only be defined by them in silhouette-like form, that they can only prepare the thoughts for what must be discovered by means of spiritual science. This thought-preparation is an inner work of the soul. If it does not over-estimate itself, if it does not seek to prove but aims merely at being an exercise of the soul, it makes a man impartially open to knowledge that must appear foolish, without such preparation.

[ 8 ] 8. To Chapter III-1 Paragraph 5: The subject of the spiritual organs of perception that is only alluded to briefly at the end of this book in the chapter on The Path Of Knowledge, is more fully dealt with in my books, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and Occult Science, an Outline.

[ 9 ] 9. To Chapter III-3 Paragraph 3: It would be incorrect to imagine that there is ceaseless unrest in the spiritual world because “a state of rest, a remaining in one place such as we find in the physical world,” does not exist there. It is true that where the “archetypes are creative beings,” there is nothing that can be called “rest in one place,” but there is the rest that is of a spiritual kind, and that is compatible with active mobility. It may be likened to the restful contentment and bliss of the spirit that is manifest in deeds, but not in being inactive.

[ 10 ] 10. To Chapter III-3 Paragraph 8: One is obliged to use the word “purposes” with regard to the great evolutionary powers of the world, although in so doing occasion is given to the temptation to conceive of these powers simply as one thinks of human purposes. In the case of such words, which have naturally to be taken from the sphere of the human world, this temptation can be avoided only by learning to perceive in them a new significance and meaning, from which all that they contain of the narrowly limited human element has been eliminated. In place of this a meaning may be imparted to them that is given to such words at those moments in life when a man rises to a certain extent above himself.

[ 11 ] 11. To Chapter III-3 Paragraph 8: Further particulars about the “Spiritual Word” are to be found in my Occult Science, an Outline.

[ 12 ] 12. To Chapter III-4 Paragraph 10: When it is said, here, “Out of the Eternal he can determine the direction for the future,” this is intended to point to the special way in which human soul is constituted during the time between death and a new birth. A stroke of destiny that befalls a person during life in the physical world may seem, from the point of view of that (physical) life, to contain something altogether opposed to the man's own will. In the life between death and rebirth a force, resembling will, rules in the soul that gives to the person the tendency toward experiencing this very blow of fate. The soul sees, as it were, that an imperfection has clung to it from earlier earth-lives—an imperfection that had its origin in an ugly deed or an ugly thought. Between death and re-birth, there arises in the soul a will-like impulse to make good this imperfection. The soul, therefore, becomes imbued with the tendency to plunge into a misfortune in the coming earth-life, in order, through enduring it, to bring about equilibrium. After its birth in the physical body, the soul, when met by some hard fate, has no glimmering of the fact that in the purely spiritual life before birth, the impulse that led to this hard fate has been voluntarily accepted by it. What, therefore, seems completely unwished for from the point of view of earth-life is willed by the soul itself in the supersensible. “Out of the Eternal man determines the future for himself.”

[ 13 ] 13. To Chapter III-6: The chapter in this book on Thought Forms and the Human Aura is doubtless the one that may most easily lead to misconceptions. It is precisely with regard to these descriptions that antagonistic feelings find the best opportunity for raising objections. It is, indeed, natural to demand, for instance, that the statements of the seer in this domain should be proved by experiments corresponding to the scientific mode of thinking. It may be demanded that a number of people who assert that they are able to see the spiritual of the aura should place themselves in front of other people and allow their auras to work upon them. Then these seers should be asked to say what thoughts and feelings they see as the auras of the people they are observing. If their reports coincide, and if it is found that the persons observed really have had the feelings and thoughts reported by the seers, then one could believe in the existence of the aura. That is certainly thought quite scientifically. The following, however, must be taken into account. The work that the spiritual researcher does in his own soul, through which he acquires the capacity for spiritual vision, has, as its aim, the acquisition of this capacity. Whether he is then able in any given case to perceive something in the spiritual world does not depend upon himself, nor, for that matter, does what he perceives. That flows to him as a gift from the spiritual world. He cannot take it by force, but must wait until it comes to him. His intention to bring about the perception has no bearing on the real causes of its happening, but this intention is exactly what modern science demands for the experiment. The spiritual world, however, will not allow itself to be dictated to. If the above attempt is to succeed, it would have to be instituted from the spiritual world. In that world a being would have to have the intention of revealing the thoughts of one or more persons to one or more people who are able to “see.” These seers would then have to be brought together through a spiritual impulse for their work of observation. In that case their reports would certainly coincide. Paradoxical as all this may appear to the purely scientific mind, it is, nevertheless, true.

Spiritual experiments cannot be undertaken in the same way as those of a physical nature. If the seer, for example, receives the visit of a person who is a stranger to him, he cannot at once undertake to observe the aura of this person, but he sees the aura when there is occasion in the spiritual world for it to be revealed to him. These few words are intended merely to draw attention to the misconception in the objection described above. What spiritual science has to do is to point the way by which a man may come to see the aura, by what means he may himself bring about the experiences of its reality. Thus the only reply that spiritual science can make to the would-be seer is, “The conditions have been made known; apply them to your own soul, and you will see.” It would certainly be more convenient if the above demands of the modern scientific mode of thought could be fulfilled, but whoever asks for tests of this kind shows that he has not made himself acquainted with the very first results of spiritual science.

At the present time, a modern scientist would be forgiven should be feel called upon to speak of a kind of human aura such as Prof. Dr. Moritz Benedikt describes in his book on the Rod and Pendulum Theory (Ruten und Pendellehre). “There exists, even though in small numbers, human beings who are adapted to the dark. A relatively large fraction of this minority see in the dark many objects without colors, and only relatively few see the objects colored also. . .A considerable number of learned men and physicians have been subjected to research in my dark room by my two classical `subjects' or `seers in the dark,' who see colors, see in the front the forehead and scalp blue, and see the rest of the right half likewise blue and the justify red, or some it. . .orange-yellow. To the rear, the same division is found, and the same coloring.” The spiritual researcher is not so easily forgiven when he speaks of the aura.

There is no intention here of taking up any kind of attitude toward all that Benedikt has worked out, which belongs to the most interesting modern theories of nature. Neither is it intended to take advantage of a cheap opportunity to make excuses for spiritual science through natural science, which so many enjoy doing. It is only intended to point out how, in one instance, a scientist can be brought to make assertions that are not unlike those of spiritual science. At the same time, it must be emphasized that the aura that is spoken of in this book, and that can only be grasped spiritually, is something quite different from what can be investigated by physical means and about which Benedikt speaks. We surrender ourselves to a gross illusion if we think that the spiritual aura can be one that may be subject to research by the external means of modern science. That aura is only accessible to the spiritual perception reached by the path of knowledge as described in the last chapter of this book. It would also be a mistake to suppose that the truth and reality of what is spiritually perceived can be demonstrated in the same way as can what is perceived through the senses.

It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds.

To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity.

Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science.

A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view.

Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir.

What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view.

Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life.

One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself?

One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas.

If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today.

Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism.

What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia.

It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again.

Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum.

What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this?

You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities.

It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us.

Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity.

So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.?

At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments.

That which animates the human being remains united with the physical body even during sleep. But that which dwells in the body when we are awake, but is separated from it when we are asleep, must be called our spirit-like soul. Thus, the soul can be seen to consist of two parts: one that is always united with the etheric body, and the other that is only united with it when we are consciously awake. During sleep, the ego leaves the body with the latter.

During sleep, this ego now belongs to the universe; it is united with the beings from which the human planet was originally born. — The spiritual soul belongs to the world of the planets that it has lived through before uniting with the etheric body. So it belongs to: Sun Moon.

I and the spiritual soul are united with the body in waking consciousness through desire, feeling and thought.

On Saturn, the human physical body is in preparation. The beings that are now revealing themselves as the spiritual currents on Earth are human on Saturn. They attain a physical existence only in the element of fire. But before they reach this, they pass through three other stages. On the first, they merely permeate the planet with general life-substance. On the second, they permeate it with individual differentiated substances; on the third they illuminate it, on the fourth they thus warm it; on the fifth it becomes their airy body, on the sixth a kind of watery body, and on the seventh they first shape it into solid forms. Here they then gain a kind of external view of the planet. They look down on it as on their work, which they have completed in seven great periods of creation.

The elemental forces stand above these entities. They had already reached the stage of viewing their work from the outside before Saturn was formed. They give the elemental forces a higher soul. At the end of the Saturn period, they are ready to animate the physical bodies created by the elemental forces. They then give them form of life. The elemental forces, however, form the life body. This is the solar time.

On the moon the archangels give the astral body; they give the life body [end of sentence missing].

Sun – human being: physical body + etheric body
besides: separate physical covers,
which are animated by the forces.

Moon – human being: physical body + etheric body + astral body
besides a world with physical body + etheric body – animated by powers and
physical shells: animated by dominions.

Earth-man.
Animal - physical body - ether + astral body -
animated by powers.

Mars: the aggressive soul, bravery.
Mercury: the intelligence.
Venus: love.
Jupiter: reason.
Saturn: attachment to the sensual.

Saturn –
Sun: Saturn.
Sun – Saturn – Moon –
Sun – Saturn, Moon, Earth

Plant - physical body + etheric body - animated by dominions.
Minerals - animated by thrones.
In man ruling - In sleep: the powers.
In waking:

Now that religion is so much more real, where it is reborn in the spirit of modern criticism and scientific knowledge, should it not be asked whether the formal expression of some doctrines we have inherited from the Middle Ages and even earlier times could not be appropriately and without offence modified?

In a forced sense it may be said of every saying that it contains an element of truth; especially of a saying which embodies the belief of many generations. But when the element of truth is quite different from that which has been presupposed, and when the original assertion is interpreted in a tortured way, it may be time to consider whether it can be without harm to its nature to reconsider and restore it.

Cherubine keepers of the mysteries
Jacob ~ cherubim

Ephesians. III. - 2-5.
The Messiah of Enoch is the one of the orthodox Jews.

2nd chapter. 1st epistle to Timothy

What a race: Adam
the splitting =
Man gets his essence with Abel
Man gets his essence stamped on him from the outside.

Cain. Asuras
What is the mark of Cain?

Study of religious phenomena as if one were dealing with scientific questions.

Laplace to Napoleon: he could do without the hypothesis of a god.
French naturalists: feeling of compassion. Identifying with the other.

Marie Eugenie delle Grazie (1864–1931) is a significant figure in Rudolf Steiner's life; so significant, in fact, that most of the seventh chapter of his autobiography, The Course of My Life, is devoted to a description of the circumstances surrounding this young poetess and her circle.

Born in Weisskirchen, she traced her ancestry to the Alsace on her mother's side and Venice—with strong Arabic connections—on her father's side. She had a deep relationship with her father, who died early in her life, soon after which her family moved to Vienna. Here delle Grazie received a Catholic education and began composing her first poems. At age eleven she wrote so well that her poems attracted the notice of Laurenz Mullner, a Catholic priest who became a surrogate “father,” teacher, mentor and life-long friend. By the age of sixteen delle Grazie was considered by many to be a poet of genius; by her eighteenth year she had assembled around her a group of artists, writers, composers, and above all, brilliant Catholic theologians and philosophers. It was here, especially, that there was the most profound and lively concern with the figure of St. Thomas Aquinas.

It was in the midst of this circle of delle Grazie and Mullner that Rudolf Steiner worked before his twenty-eighth year. The Middle Ages and its powerfully Roman Catholic Spirit still lived and breathed amidst this group; and this Spirit afforded Dr. Steiner some of his deepest insights at this time, especially in relation to destiny and freedom. Even the anti-Goetheanism and pessimism that predominated—the mood that Karl Julius Schroer called “the slag of burned-out spirits”—became for Rudolf Steiner a window into the world of beings, both progressive and retarding, that work into the perceptible world. He writes in The Course of My Life:

I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere which was of genuine benefit to me. For this purpose I did not need agreement in ideas; I needed earnest and striving humanity, susceptible to the spiritual.

The soul mood of delle Grazie's poem Die Natur, at once despondent and defiant, so revolutionary in its time (the 1880's) has in the course of a century become the dominant mood of world culture. In our time it is heard without end, reprinted in the most respected journals of philosophy and literature, performed on the stages of sophisticated theaters, recorded and amplified in the primitive rhythms and despairing lyrics of popular songs. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie herself stands as the prototype of the young person who reaches the summit of her intellectual and artistic powers at about age eighteen, but can sustain very little after age twenty-one—a type unusual in her time, but increasingly common today.

Rudolf Steiner perceived that delle Grazie's personality and poetry were harbingers of such a future soul state. His short essay “Nature and Our Ideals”—written as a letter to the poetess, as a direct appeal to her individuality—sketches a path of healing. For the sake of the young Rudolf Steiner, the essay provides a means of harmonizing delle Grazie's wild powers of darkness with his own methodical mode of cognition: for the sake of the world, this essay lays out an idealistic world view that finds its fullest treatment in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Delle Grazie was to write, later in life:

My writings are manifestations of an activity that has its ultimate secrets below the threshold of consciousness ... the real characteristic of my art is enigmatic even to me. It belongs to dark and elementary powers ... There is still something else—my conscious Ego!

When the “dark and elementary powers” are allowed to run rampant, the result is all that passes for modern culture, especially in painting, music and drama. When the “something else,” the Conscious Ego, is sought, it must be striven for along the lines of A Theory of Knowledge, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and the following letter, Nature and Our Ideals.

Suggestions for further Reading:

Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York.
Emil Bock, “Ephesus and the Castle of the Grail,” Golden Blade, 1967

Robert Steiser, “Von Rudolf Steiners Jahren in Wien,” Mitteilungen, Weihnachten, 1976.

When speaking of the paths and goals of spiritual man, the question will arise again and again: Why should one think of going such special ways? Why are we being pointed to the fact that we should set ourselves such goals through spiritual science? - What we have to give as an answer must be transformed into feeling and sentiment for us. It has been pointed out time and again that forces lie dormant in the human being and in nature, striving to develop, which can be unfolded. In addition to the human being who sees and hears in the physical world, every human being has a higher human being within him. This is present as a kind of seed, germinating. Spiritual science brings this to our attention more and more urgently. It is a human being of whom ordinary consciousness does not know much.

We must be clear about the following: what we can see now is our ordinary everyday human being. But the one who slumbers in us, who is in us as a seed, is a spiritual human being. Whether this seed develops or not depends on our ordinary human being. We can prepare the ground with the powers of our ordinary self, but we can also leave it uncultivated and not take care of it. Then we fail in our duty to our spiritual self. Through spiritual science itself, through what it can give us as teachings and messages, we can prepare the ground for this higher self. If we transform this insight into feeling and sentiment, it will give us the answer to the question: Is it not a higher selfishness to occupy ourselves with ourselves in this way? — As long as we have not learned anything from spiritual science, it is our karma to wait. But once we have heard about the higher human being slumbering within us, it is our duty to do what can develop its powers in order to better fulfill our tasks in the world. We cannot speak of selfishness here, but only of our obligation to our spiritual self.

This is the right point of view for a Theosophist to take in relation to the outer life. Theosophy gives us a number of communications that have been obtained through spiritual research. However, not everyone who wants to live theosophy needs to be a spiritual researcher. The more we are able to follow the path of our inner development, the better. But before we ourselves can achieve results in the field of spiritual research, we must have its contents related to us by others. When we have presented the question to ourselves long enough, the outer life will confirm the communications of the spiritual researchers. If we have grasped these communications through sound logic, we are given the opportunity to ascend to higher worlds. Reason and logic are the surest guides for this.

The question may arise: How should we use these messages? How should we relate to them? — Let us take the truth that we call the law of karma. It states that in later lives on earth we find events that point back to previous incarnations. The more we apply such a law of spiritual research in life, the more we will see how true it is. Just as we never find a triangle in the sense world whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees, so the circumstances of life must always confirm what is recognized as a law in spiritual research. And if the karmic effects do not appear to us to be consistent, this will at most correspond to the slight deviation that may occur when measuring a circle with the help of the planimeter. The result may be 361 degrees one time and 359 the next, but that does not negate the law itself. Nor is the law of gravity overthrown because a push causes the plumb line of a falling machine to swing to the side. This only proves that a different result is achieved when a new force is added.

Spiritual research also shows how we encounter repetitions of previous periods of time within our lives between birth and death. For example, what we acquire between the ages of three and seven in our first childhood will come back to us in its karmic effect in our old age. If you examine how someone was allowed to spend their first childhood, you will discover a remarkable connection with those childhood years in their old age. If, instead of being subject to the external constraints of certain rules, he has developed healthy needs, his old age will take a different shape. In many cases, however, what is considered right is implanted and crammed into the child's soul. However, it is not what is implanted that matters, but that the child must have the need to do this or that of his own free will. It turns out that people can maintain their health in old age, that they retain freshness and inner strength until the last stage of their lives.

However, there are even more significant connections. From people's writing, you can learn a lot about how their past has shaped them.

During the age of seven to fourteen years, it is necessary that man not be educated to premature use of his reason. Authority must cause truth to appear to us as such. If we can admire the people who surround us during this period of our lives, it will serve us well in the penultimate stage of our lives. Devoutly looking up at natural wonders and being in the mood for prayer are beneficial factors for later on. Happy recognition of authority comes back, transformed in a way that makes it self-evident that such a person has authority. The devotion that children are able to develop during this period results in them becoming people who, without having to do anything, merely need to be in the company of others to have a blessing effect. The hand that has never been able to fold in devotion with the other will never be able to bless. Those who have never learned to bend their knees will never be able to bless. If you have penetrated such a law, you will find it confirmed. In this way, the effect of the law of karma can be seen in the course of a single human life. Thus, life everywhere provides us with evidence of a lawfulness that is effective in all fields.

Of course, circumstances can arise that conceal the law. In physics, for example, we know the law of gravity. Imagine an object that is moving through space at any given moment without support, completely left to its own devices. According to the law of gravity, this object will approach the earth with increasing speed until it hits the earth. The object will move in the direction of the center of the earth according to very definite laws; it will fall. Let us further imagine that the falling object is suddenly hit by a horizontally directed blow. The naive observer, who expects the object, falling vertically due to the law of gravity, to arrive at the relevant point on the earth, will in this case wait in vain. The object stays away. Does that mean that the law of fall is repealed? Not at all. Through the horizontally guided blow, only a new force has been added, and the object now moves under its effect in a curve that corresponds quite lawfully to the result of gravity and the later added force, towards the earth. At the point where the object hits the ground under these circumstances, its fall will be seen by any observer as something quite random and unpredictable. But this is not the case. The lawfulness is complete and incorruptible.

The same applies in full to the law of karma, although we can rarely follow it in all its composite and intricate effects. That is why man is always inclined to doubt his karma. But however confused we may be by the outer Maja, we should only let ourselves be guided by what has become law in our soul. Many who wish to develop the powers of the spirit within themselves will not find it easy, for the physical life is always intruding. There but for the grace of something in our existence, how easily we are carried away by wrong judgment, for instance, to insults, without thinking of the consequences of our actions. We strike a blow at a person and do not know that we have raised our hand against ourselves, because this blow will strike us again in our own hour. The law of karma is at work everywhere. Everything that happens to us in life happens under the law of karma. But merely considering this law as a doctrine, as a theory, does not make us theosophists.

There are two feelings that we must acquire if we want to work on our spiritual development. On the one hand, we must say to ourselves: There is nothing about us that can be perfected, nowhere is there a limit to our ascent. At every moment, the feeling of imperfection should urge us to climb higher and higher on the ladder of perfection, which knows no highest rung. We must keep reminding ourselves of this, otherwise we will not make any progress in our work on our spiritual self. On the other hand, we should say to ourselves: a second step is necessary. In every moment we must feel that there is an infinite possibility for perfection within us. We must make our hidden self as great as possible. This is an apparent contradiction, and the human being must feel it as such. Between these two points, the feeling of one's own imperfection and the striving to make the hidden self as great as possible, development is included.

The one who strives as a mystic, who descends into his own inner being, who wants to advance through an inner deepening, must pass through the first point. He must acquire humility. The best rule a mystic can set for himself is this: to think of everything that arises within him as imperfect as possible, to detach himself completely from his own personality. For anyone who enters into his own inner being must be prepared to experience terrible things. Stories of tragic experiences take place in the inner world of the person who dares to venture into the depths of his own being. A Tauler, a Eckhart, a Paulus can tell of it. And how was the help that these sought against the dangers? Paul says: Not I, but the Christ in me wants to act. Take with you the Master, the Ideal, but feel with it that the ego must be driven out. Not from your own ego should all feeling, all willing, all thinking be done. Your unworthy ego had to be driven out. This feeling is very similar to the sense of shame in the ordinary man. Wanting to be another, wanting to organize another into your own soul, that is the way of mysticism.

And what belongs to the path of occultism? The path of the occultists leads into the outer world. If a person wants to follow the occult path, he must live in such a way that he gradually learns to bear the higher world when he has left his body during sleep. He must develop a feeling for perfecting himself in the Infinite. But here too a danger lies in wait for him, as it does for the mystic when he descends into his own inner being. We have been permitted to mention the dangers that beset the mystic; the mystic himself reports about them. The dangers that beset the occultist are not mentioned. Each one must acquaint himself with this danger.

When we look into our own inner being, it would be bad if we had not learned to feel ourselves as a unity that is poured out over our entire being. This ability to hold on to a unity is disrupted by every passion that overcomes us. Anger, envy, hatred destroy our power to focus on unity. And worst of all is when we have not learned to concentrate, when we are driven hither and thither. Firm and uninfluenced, we must learn to feel as one.

But if we, as occultists, seek the way into the outer world, we must eliminate our personality, as it has just been characterized. Here one must not seek a unity underlying the whole outer world. For when we turn to the spiritual world, we encounter an infinite variety of beings and conditions. If the occultist were to attempt to penetrate the unity that underlies the entire manifested world, he would perish. Imagine a drop of red liquid being poured into a large basin of water. Liquid as the drop is, it would immediately dissolve in the mass of water, it would melt away. This is what happens to the unstable ego when it wants to enter the world of the All-One. We dare not venture to penetrate there alone, for we will lose ourselves as the red drop loses itself in the mass of water. If we want to enter the astral realm, we are pointed to a multiplicity. We must ask about the multiplicity, from the beings who stand higher than we do, from those who have themselves gradually gone through a higher development, from the hierarchies of that world. We must not want to skip anything, for it would be presumptuous to want to go straight to the highest. We must gradually learn to study with the help of the higher beings if we want to grasp the unity. The arrogance of wanting to reach the highest level will surely lead to failure. We must not let ourselves be tempted by our monotheistic ideas into believing that when the veil that separates us from the spiritual world slides aside, we will see only a single divine oneness. It is the multiplicity that we look into, and it is on the multiplicity that we must focus our gaze.

But how are we to find our way? Pythagoras said: “Seek not the manifold with your eyes, ears and senses, seek it through number!” Equipped with number, we are to approach the manifold. Just as the mystic must pour the ideal of higher perfection into his inner being, so the occultist must appeal to number. And here one quality is absolutely essential, namely certainty. We must feel secure. For if man wavers, what is he? A will-o'-the-wisp, a flickering light, and the world is a labyrinth. We need an Ariadne's thread to find our way back. The number makes us firm, we must keep it in mind. If you want to enter the spiritual world, you have to step out of yourself, you have to enter the chaos of the many first. How do we find this factor? Where is the organizing principle? We find it through the number, through the lawfulness of the number. We have to penetrate into the essence of the number and get to know its real value. The number alone can become our guide in the labyrinth. The number can teach us a great deal, and certain numbers are based on profound secrets.

Take the number two, for example. Everything that comes into being manifests itself in twos. There is no right without left, no light without darkness. Everything that manifests itself outwardly is subject to the number two. The number two is the number of revelation, the number of manifestation.

The number three is the number of the conformity to law of the soul: thinking, feeling and willing. Insofar as something is organized and structured in the soul, it is subject to the number three. Where the number three reveals itself as a conformity to law, something soul-like underlies it. We can find the number three in countless relationships. In the three logoi we have the three fundamental powers, which point back to something divinely soul-impregnated.

In relation to all that is temporal, the number seven applies: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, which denote the seven successive states of evolution.

Where we see something interacting simultaneously, we get the number twelve: the twelve gods, the twelve apostles, and so on. The reduction of the fixed stars to the twelve signs of the zodiac is also connected with this. The number twelve teaches us yet another law. Let us think of materialism. Is materialism wrong? It does not have to be, as long as man does not carry it into the soul. If one wants to be a materialist, then one must pay homage to vitalism, then one learns to understand material life. But one must choose a different point of view for the soul and for the spiritual. If we want to understand the world in its fullness, then we must be able to place ourselves in different points of view. We must take the practical spiritual path.

Now one may well hear a person express the principle: You must make a certain system for yourself if you want to penetrate into the higher worlds. But that is the worst way to go. Instead, one should first step out of one's own personality: from the center that this personality occupies in its existence, to the horizon of our physical existence. Only here in the horizon should we place ourselves on a certain point of view, first the materialistic one, and look at it from the inside out, from the one point of view through which, as already mentioned, we get to know the material life. Only then can we walk around the horizon and choose twelve different points of view. This is the only way that can lead to real knowledge. The practical occultist must become very selfless before he can walk around the horizon in a circle. By having to forget his personal self twelve times, he maintains uniformity in both the external and the internal.

If we ask how man has developed since the earliest times up to the present day, we must first recall what has been said about the being of man. Man has seven members: the first is, so to speak, the lowest; the etheric body is higher and of finer texture; the astral body is still higher and finer; of the Ego-body only the first rudiments yet exist. It would be wrong to conclude that the highest body now possessed by man is the most perfect, and the physical body the most imperfect. Exactly the opposite is true: the physical body is the most perfect part of the human being. Later on the higher members will of course reach a higher degree of perfection, but at present the physical body is in its way the most highly developed and has been constructed with ineffable wisdom. I once described to you, as an example of this wisdom and perfection, the structure of the thigh-bone. Every single bone is so artistically structured and wisely devised as to perform the maximum work with the minimum mass, in a way no human engineer could equal.

The more deeply we penetrate to an understanding of the wonderful structure of the human frame, the more marvellous will it appear to us to be. Take, for instance, the way in which the brain and heart have been designed. The heart makes no mistakes, but the astral body makes many. The passions and desires of the astral body surge against the physical body and overpower it. If a man eats the wrong sort of food, he is following the desires of his astral body. The physical heart keeps the circulation of the blood in order; the astral body incessantly attacks the heart, because it craves for things harmful to the heart. Coffee, tea, alcohol, are poisons for the heart, yet the heart often has to cope with them every day, and in spite of everything it keeps going. It is constructed so durably that it can withstand the attacks of the astral body for seventy or eighty years. The physical body is thus in all details the most perfect in the hierarchy of human bodies.

Less perfect is the etheric body, and still less so the astral; the Ego-body is the least developed of them all. The reason is that the physical body has gone through the longest period of evolution and is the oldest part of the human being; younger is the etheric body, still younger the astral, and the Ego-body is the youngest of all.

In order to understand how these bodies have evolved, we must realise that it is not only man who goes through successive incarnations, but that the law of reincarnation applies universally. All beings, and all the planets, are subject to this law. The Earth, with everything that is on it, has passed through earlier incarnations, of which three in particular are our immediate concern.

Before the Earth became the planet we know, it was a very different one. At the beginning of time it was a planet called, in occult science, Saturn. Altogether there have been four successive incarnations of the Earth: Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. Just as there is a Kamaloka and Devachan period between a man's successive incarnations, so is there between successive incarnations of a planet a period when it is not visible and has no outward life. This period has always been called Pralaya, and the period of incorporation, Manvantara. However, the names Saturn, Sun and Moon do not signify the heavenly bodies which are called so today. Our Sun is a fixed star; the old Sun was a planet, and in the course of its incarnations it has worked itself up from the substance and being of a planet to the rank of a fixed star. In the same way the Old Moon, as we call it, is not the same as the Moon we know today; it was the third incarnation of the Earth. Similarly with Saturn, the first stage of the Earth's evolution.

Even on the planet Saturn man was present. Saturn did not shine, but it sounded and could have been heard with Devachanic ears. After existing for a certain period it gradually vanished away, was for a long time invisible, and then shone out as Sun. The planet Sun passed through the same process and reappeared as Moon. Finally, after the same sequence, the Earth appeared.

But we must not picture these four planets Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth—as four separate planets; they are four different conditions of the same planet. They are true metamorphoses of the one planet and all the beings that belong to it are metamorphosed with it. Man has never been on any other planet, but the Earth has existed in these four different conditions.

When the Earth existed as Saturn, only the first germs of the kingdom of man dwelt on it. The marvellously artistic structure of the human body was then present only in barest outline. There were no minerals, plants or animals. Man is the first-born of our creative process. But Saturn-man was very different from the man of today. He was for the most part a spiritual being; he would not have been visible to physical eyes—and of course at that time there were none. Only a being with Devachanic sight could have perceived him. The human form was like a kind of auric egg, and within it was a remarkable scaly structure, a sort of vortex, shaped like a small pear and as though made of oyster-shells. Saturn was permeated with these rudimentary physical structures—exudations, as it were, condensed out of the spiritual. From these structures, which gave only a faint indication of what they were to become, the physical body of man was gradually developed in the course of evolution. It was a kind of primal mineral, with no etheric body round it; hence we can say that man passed through the mineral kingdom; but to think of it as anything like our present-day mineral kingdom would be quite wrong. On Saturn there was no kingdom other than the human kingdom.

Now just as man passes through the various stages of his life, as child, young man or woman, old man or woman, so so does a planet. Before Saturn manifested the flaky structures deposited within it, it was an Arupa-Devachan structure, then a Rupa-Devachan structure, and finally an astral structure. Then the flakes gradually disappear, and Saturn returns through the same stages into the darkness of Pralaya. A metamorphosis such as this, from the spiritual into the physical and then back again into the spiritual, is called in Theosophy a Round, or a Life-condition. Each Round can be divided into seven phases: Arupa, Rupa, Astral, Physical and back to Arupa.³¹ These phases, called “Globes”, are Form-conditions. But we must not imagine seven successive Globes; it is always the same planet which transforms itself, and its beings are transformed with it. Saturn passed through seven such Rounds or Life-conditions. In each Round its structure was being perfected, so that only in the seventh Round was its finally perfected form attained. Each Round has its seven transformations, or Form-conditions, so that Saturn will have passed through seven times seven, or forty-nine, metamorphoses. That is true of Saturn, and then of Sun, Moon and Earth; and in the future there will be three more planets: Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

There are thus seven planets, each going through seven Rounds and each Round through seven Form-conditions, expressed as 777 in occult script. In that script, 7 in the unit position means the Globes; in the tens, the Rounds, and in the hundreds, Planets. We therefore have to multiply the figures, and so we find that our planetary system has to pass through 7 by 7 by 7, or 343 transformations.

In H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, which was in large part inspired by one of the highest spiritual individualities, we find a remarkable passage. But the great Initiates have always expressed themselves with caution and have given only hints; above all they leave some work for the human being to do. This passage, as H.P.B. knew very well, is full of riddles. There is nothing there about successive incarnations; the teacher said only, “Learn the riddle of 777.” His wish was that people should learn for themselves that this meant 343. The Secret Doctrine gives the riddle but not the solution: this has been discovered only quite recently.

The first germinal condition of man was thus to be found on Saturn in the most ancient times. Then Saturn vanished into Pralaya, and reappeared as Sun, and with it from the darkness of Pralaya came man, the ancient inhabitant of the Universe. In the meantime, however, man had gained the power to separate something from out of himself as the snail does its shell. He could separate shell-like structures as hovering forms; the finer substances he retained within himself so that he might evolve to a higher level. In this way he formed the minerals from out of himself, but these minerals were a kind of living minerals. On Sun, man evolved in such a way that the etheric body, as with planets today, could be added. Thus on Sun he passed through the plant stage, and on Sun there were thus two kingdoms, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom; and the latter was man. But these plant forms were quite different from those we know today.

Anyone who understands the deeper relationships will regard the plant as an inverted man. Below is its root; then come the stalk, leaves, stamens and pistils; the pistils contain the female reproductive organs and the stamens, the male. In all innocence the plant stretches out its reproductive organs to the Sun, for it is the Sun that kindles its reproductive power. The root is really the “head” of the plant, which stretches its reproductive organs out to the wide spaces of the world, while its head is attracted by the centre of the Earth. Man is the opposite of this: his head is at the top of his body, and below are the organs which the plant spreads out to the Sun. The animal comes in between: its body is horizontal. If you revolve a plant through 90 degrees, you get the position of the animal; turn it through 180 degrees and you get the position of man.

The old occult science gave expression to this in the ancient symbol of the Cross, saying, as Plato³³ said in the language of the old Mysteries: the World-Soul is crucified on the cross of the World-Body. The World-Soul is contained in everything, but it has to work its way up through these three stages; it makes its journey on the cross of the body of the world.

On Sun, then, man was a plant-being, upside down compared with modern man. He lived in the Sun and was himself part of its body. The Sun was a body of light, composed of light-ether; man was still plant-like, his head directed towards the centre of the Sun. When later on the Sun left the Earth, the human plant had to turn round; it remained true to the Sun.

In its first Round, Sun merely repeated the Saturn period: it was not until the second Round that the further evolution of man began. When the Sun had evolved to its limit in the seven Rounds, it disappeared into the darkness of Pralaya, and eventually reappeared as Moon.

The first Moon-Round was again only a repetition of Saturn in a rather different form. The second Round also brought nothing new; it was a recapitulation of life on the Sun. In the third Round there was something new: man acquired an astral body in addition to the two earlier bodies. In his outward form we might compare him to the animals of today, for he had three bodies. He had in fact reached the stage of the animal kingdom. He had raised himself to the plant kingdom by ejecting the mineral kingdom. Thus there were two kingdoms apart from man. Then he once more cast off a smaller part, separated himself from it, and went on to the higher level.

During this third Round of Moon an important cosmic event took place. Sun and Moon separated, so there were now two bodies. At the beginning of the second Round the Sun was still there unchanged; then a small segment in the lower part of the Sun detached itself, so that in the third Round there were two bodies side by side.

The Sun kept the finer parts, sending rays to the Moon from the outside, and providing the Moon and all the beings with what they needed. This was the advancement of the Sun; it became a fixed star, and is no longer concerned directly with the three kingdoms; it only imparts to them what it has to give. It gave a home to higher Beings who, now that the Sun had got rid of its inferior parts, could develop further. In the fourth Round all this reached its highest possible level; in the fifth the two bodies reunited and finally disappeared as one body into Pralaya.

The Old Moon had as yet no solid mineral kingdom. It was a globe which, instead of a solid earth crust, had something like a living and inwardly growing peaty mass. This living foundation was permeated with woody structures out of which grew the plant kingdom, as it then was. These plants, however, were really a sort of “plant-animal”: they were able to feel and under pressure would have experienced pain. And man in the animal kingdom of the time was not like any animal of today; he was halfway between animal and man. He was of a higher order than our present animals and could carry out his impulses in a much more systematic way. But he was lower than modern man, for he was not able to say “I” to himself. He did not yet possess an Ego-body.

These three kingdoms dwelt on the living body of the Moon. An important fact is that these Moon-men did not breathe as man does today; they breathed fire, not air. Through this breathing in of fire the warmth permeated their whole being; then they breathed out the fire and heat and became cold again. What man has nowadays as the heat of his blood, Moon-men had in the warmth of their breath. Many of the older, still clairvoyant painters symbolised this in the image of the fire-breathing dragon; they knew that in ancient times there had been these Moon-beings who breathed fire.

After disappearing into Pralaya, the Moon reappeared as Earth. In the first Round the whole Saturn-existence was repeated, in the second the Sun, and in the third the Moon-existence. During the third Round the separation of Sun and Moon was repeated, but on the returning path of this Round two bodies reunited.

In the fourth Round the Sun and Moon came forth again as one body, and now the Earth began to form itself. At this point an important event occurred: an encounter of the Earth with the planet Mars. The planets interpenetrated, the Earth going through Mars. At that time Mars possessed a substance, iron, which the Earth lacked, and Mars left this iron in the Earth in a vaporous form. But for this occurrence, the Earth would have had to remain as it was, possessing only what was already there. Man would have risen as far as the animal kingdom, as it then was; he would have breathed warmth, but he would never have acquired warm blood, for there is iron in the blood. In fact, according to occult science the Earth is indebted to Mars to such an extent that the first half of its evolution is called Mars. Mercury has equal significance for the second half; the Earth entered into a connection with Mercury and is still closely related to it. Hence in occult science the terms Mars and Mercury are used instead of Earth.

This planetary stage will be followed in the future by three others: Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. These seven stages of the Earth, as recorded in occult science, are preserved in the days of the week, though in German they are somewhat confused:

Thus do the names of the days of the week reflect the occult doctrine of the passage of the Earth through these various stages: a remarkable chronicle which makes it possible for these truths to be kept ever and again in mind.

We shall see in the course of the next few days how Theosophy enables us to understand for the first time what our early forefathers expressed quite simply in names, and how the most ordinary everyday things are linked with the most profound.

• 31. Arupa: Sanskrit, “without form”, indicating the highest realm of Devachan. Rupa: Sanskrit, “form”. The Rupa planes are the lower spheres of Devachan.
• 33. Plato, 427–347 B.C. “... as Plato puts it.” In the dialogue, Timaeus.

Because other matters have still to be discussed, I will add only a brief episode today to the subjects of which we have been hearing during the last few days. Still more specific details will have to be given tomorrow in connection with the Occult Movement in the nineteenth century and its relation to civilisation and culture. I must, however, insert into the course of our studies a subject that is very important. You will remember certain things I have said in connection with von Wrangell's brochure, Science and Theosophy, and when I repeat them you will realise that from the point of view of Spiritual Science great significance must be attached to the advent of materialism and the materialistic world-conception in the nineteenth century; simply to adopt an attitude of criticism would be quite wrong.

A critical attitude is always the easiest when something confronts one. It is therefore essential to realise that the current in the evolution of humanity which may be called the materialistic view of the world arose in the nineteenth century quite inevitably. It has already been amply characterised, but two aspects may be described which will make its whole significance doubly clear to us.

In the form in which it appeared in the nineteenth century, as an actual view of the world, materialism had never hitherto existed. True, there had been individual materialistic philosophers such as Democritus and others—you can read about them in my book Riddles of Philosophy—who were, so to speak, the forerunners of theoretical materialism. But if we compare the view of the world they actually held with what comes to expression in the materialism of the nineteenth century, it will be quite evident that materialism had never previously existed in that form. Least of all could it have existed, let us say, in the Middle Ages, or in the centuries immediately preceding the dawn of modern thought, because in those days the souls of men were still too closely connected with the impulses of the spiritual world. To conceive that the whole universe is nothing more than a sum-total of self-moving atoms in space and that these atoms, conglomerating into molecules, give rise to all the phenomena of life and of the spirit—such a conception was reserved for the nineteenth century.

Now it can be said that there is, and always will be, something that can be detected like a scarlet thread, even in the most baleful conceptions of the world. And if we follow this scarlet thread which runs through the evolution of humanity, we shall be bound to recognise at very least the inconsistency of the materialistic view of the world. This scarlet thread consists in the simple fact that human beings think. Without thinking, man could not possibly arrive even at a materialistic view of the world. After all, he has thought out such a view, only he has forgotten to practise this one particle of self-knowledge: You yourself think, and the atoms cannot think! If only this one particle of self-knowledge is practised, there is something to hold to; and by holding to it one will always find that it is not compatible with materialism.

But to discover the truth of this, materialism must be recognised as what it really is. As long as man had, as it were, a counterfeit idea of materialism, an idea in which spiritual impulses were still included, he could hold fast to the fragment of spirit he still sought to find in the phenomena of nature, and so forth. Not until he had cast out all spirit through the spirit—for thinking is possible only for the spirit—not until through the spirit he had cast out spirit from the structure of the universe could the materialistic view of the world confront him in all its barrenness. It was necessary that at some time man should be faced with the whole barrenness of materialism. But what is also essential here is to reflect about thinking. That is absolutely indispensable. As soon as we do so, we shall realise that the barren vista presented by materialism had necessarily to appear at some point in evolution in order that men might become aware of what actually confronts them there.

That is one aspect of the matter, but it cannot be rightly understood unless its other aspect is presented. Materialistic picture of the world—space—in space atoms, which are in movement—and this is the All. Fundamentally, it is an outer consequence, a mirage of one side of space and the atoms moving within it, that is to say, those minute particles of which, as we have shown in earlier lectures, genuine thinking will not admit the existence. But ever and again men come to these atoms. How are they found? How does man come to assume their existence?

Nobody can ever have seen atoms, for they are conjectures, inventions of the mind. Apart from the reality, therefore, there must be some instigation which prompts man to think out an atomistic world. Something must instigate the proclivity in him to think out an atomistic world—nature herself most assuredly does not lead him to form an atomistic picture of her! With a trained physicist—and I am not speaking hypothetically here for I have actually discussed such matters with physicists—with a trained physicist one can speak about these things because he has knowledge of external physics. He could never have hit upon atomism! He would have to say—as indeed was the conclusion reached by shrewder physicists in the eighties of last century: Atomism is an assumption, a working hypothesis which affords a basis for calculation; but let us be quite clear that we are not dealing with any reality.—Thoughtful physicists would prefer to keep to what they perceive with the senses, but again and again, like a cat falling on its feet, they come back to atomism.

Mention has often been made of these things since I gave the lectures on the Theosophy of the Rosicrucian in Munich,¹ and if you have studied what has been elaborated through the years, you will know that the rudiments of the physical body were imparted to man on Old Saturn, that he then passed through the Old Sun and Old Moon evolutions, and then, during the Old Moon period received into his organism, into what existed of his physical organism at that time, his nerve-system.

It would, however, be quite erroneous to imagine that during the Old Moon epoch the nerve-system was similar to what presents itself today to an anatomist or physiologist. In the Old Moon epoch the nerve-system was present as archetype only, as Imagination. It did not become physical, or better said, mineral in the chemical sense, until the Earth-period. The whole ramified nerve-system we now have in our body, is a product of the Earth. During the Earth's development, mineral matter was incorporated into the imaginative archetypes of our nerve-system, as well as into the other archetypes. That is how our present nerve-system came into being.

The materialist says: With this nerve-system I think, or I perceive. We know that this is nonsense. To get a correct idea of the process, let us picture the course of some nerve in the organism (see diagram). But now let us follow different nerves which run through the organism and send out ramifications, like branches. A nerve has, as it were, a stem from which branches spread out; these branches come into the neighbourhood of others and then still another filament continues on its way. (The diagram is, of course, only a very rough sketch.)

Now how does man's life of soul take its course within this nerve-system? That is the question of primary importance. We can form no true conception here if we consider the day-waking consciousness only; but if a man thinks of the moment when, together with his ego and astral body, he slips out of the body and therefore also out of the nerve-system, and especially of the moment when he slips into the body again on waking, he will have a peculiar experience. During sleep, in his ego and astral body he has been outside his nerves; he slips into the nerves again and is actually within them during his waking life; in the act of waking he feels himself streaming, as it were, from outside into the nerves.

The process of waking is much more complicated than can be conveyed in a diagram.—Through the day, together with his soul, man is within his body, filling it to the uttermost limits of the nerves. It is not as though the physical body were filled with a kind of undifferentiated mist; the organs and various organic structures are pervaded individually. As he passes into the different organs, man also slips into the sensory nerve-filaments, right to the very outermost ramifications of the nerves.

Let us try to picture it vividly.—Again I will make a sketch but can draw it only as a kind of mirrored reflection. I can draw it only from the outside, whereas in reality it ought to be drawn from within. Suppose here (diagram, p. 56) is the astral body and here the sensory “antennae” extending from it.—What I am drawing is all astral body.—It sketches certain antennae into the nerve fibres.

Now suppose the sleeves of my coat were sewn up and I were to slip my arm into the coat—suppose I had a hundred arms and were to slip them in this way into what would amount to sacks. With these hundred arms I should come up against the places where the sleeves are sewn up. In the same way I slip into the physical body, right to the ends of the nerve-fibres. As long as I am in the act of slipping in, I feel nothing; it is only when I reach the point where the sleeves are sewn up that I feel anything. It is the same with the nerves; we feel the nerve only at the point where it ends. Throughout the day we are within the nerve-substance, touching our nerve-ends all the time. Man does not realise this consciously but it expresses itself in his consciousness willy nilly. Now man thinks with his ego and astral body and we may therefore say: Thinking is an activity that is carried over by the ego and astral body to the etheric body. Something from the etheric body also plays a part—its movement at any rate. The cause of consciousness is that in acts of thinking I continually come to a point where an impact occurs. I make an impact at an infinite number of points but I am not conscious of this. It comes into consciousness only in the case of one who consciously experiences the process of waking; when he passes consciously into the mantle of his nerves he feels as if he were being pricked all over.

I once knew an interesting man who had become conscious of this in an abnormal way. He was a distinguished mathematician, conversant with the whole range of higher mathematics at that time. He was also, of course, much occupied with the differential and integral calculus. The “differential” in mathematics is the atomic, the very smallest unit that can be conceived—I cannot say more about it today. Although it was not a fully conscious experience, this man had the sensation of being pricked all over when he was engrossed in the study of the differential calculus. Now if this experience is not lifted into consciousness in the proper way, by such exercises as are given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?—very strange things may occur. This man believed that he was feeling the differentials all over him. “I am crammed full of differentials”, he said. “I have nothing integral in me.” And moreover he demonstrated in a very ingenious way that he was full of differentials!

Now try to envisage these “pricks” vividly. What does a man do with them if they do not reach his consciousness?

He projects them into space, fills space with them—and they are then the atoms. That, in truth, is the origin of atomism. If there is a mirror in front of you and you have no idea that it is a mirror, you will certainly believe that there, outside, is another collection of people. In the same way man conceives that the whole of space is filled with what he himself projects into it. This entire nerve-process is reflected back into man owing to the fact that he comes up against it (as a kind of barrier). But he is not conscious of this and so he conceives of the whole of surrounding space as being filled with atoms: the atoms are ostensibly the pricks made by his nerve-endings. Nature herself nowhere obliges us to assume the existence of atoms, but the human constitution does. At the moment of waking man dives down into his own being and becomes inwardly aware of an infinite number of spatial points within him. At this moment he is in exactly the same position as when he walks up to a mirror, knocks up against it—and realises then that he cannot get behind it. Similarly, at the moment of waking a man comes up against his nerve-endings and knows that he cannot get beyond them. The whole atomic picture is like a reflecting-screen. The moment a man realises that he cannot get behind it, he knows how things are.

And now think of a saying of Saint-Martin which I have quoted on previous occasions. What does a natural scientist say? He says: Analyse the phenomena of nature and you find the atomic world! We, however, know that the atomic world is simply not there; the truth is that our nerve-ends alone are there. What then, is there where the atomic world is conjectured to be? Nothing is there! We must remain at the mirror, at the nerve-ends. Man is there; and man is a reflecting apparatus. When this is not recognised, all kinds of things are conjectured to lie behind him. The materialistic view of the world arises, whereas in reality, it is man who must be discovered. But this cannot happen as long as it is said: Analyse the phenomena of nature—for this results in atomism. It should rather be said: Try to get beyond what is mere semblance, try to see through semblance! And then it will not be said: ... and you find the atomic world, but rather, and you find man! And now call to mind what Saint-Martin said as a kind of prophecy without fully understanding it himself: “Dissipez vos ténèbres materiels et vous trouverez l'homme.” This is exactly the same thing, but it can only be understood with the help of what we have here been considering.

Through the way in which we are bringing Spiritual Science into connection both with Natural Science and also with its errors, we are fulfilling a longing that has existed ever since there were men who had some inkling of the fallaciousness of the modern materialistic view of the world.—When we think of the intrinsic character of our own conception of the world, the fact of untold significance that strikes us is this: Spiritual Science is there because it has been longed for by those who have had a feeling for the True, for the Truth which alone can bring that of which modern humanity stands in need.

In the lecture tomorrow I shall show you why error was bound to arise when the attempt with Spiritualism was made in the nineteenth century. I have indicated to you in many ways that it was a matter of suggestions exercised by living men, whereas it was believed that influences were coming from the dead. The dead can be reached only by withdrawing into those members of man's psychic being which can be lifted out of the physical body. The life of the human being between death and a new birth can be known only through what can be experienced outside the physical body; therefore mediums—using the word in its real meaning—cannot be used for this purpose. More about this tomorrow, when what is said will also be connected with the subject of the life after death.

• 1. In 1907.