The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Since our departure has been deferred for a few days more, I shall be able to speak to you here today, tomorrow, and the next day. This affords me special satisfaction, because a number of friends have arrived from England, and in this way I shall be able to address them also before leaving.

These friends will have seen that our Goetheanum Building has progressed during the difficult war years. Up to the present time it could not be completed, it is true, and even now we can hardly predict definitely when it will be finished. But what already exists will show you from what spiritual foundations this building has grown, and how it is connected with the spiritual movement represented here. Hence, on this occasion, when after a long interval I am able to speak again to quite a large number of our English friends, it will be permissible to take our building itself as the starting point of our considerations. Then in the two succeeding days we shall be able to link to what can be said regarding the building a few other things whose presentation at this time may be considered important.

To anyone who observes our building—whose idea at least can now be grasped—the peculiar relation of this building to our spiritual movement will at once occur; and he will get an impression—perhaps just from the building itself, this representation of our spiritual movement—of the purpose of this movement. Suppose that any kind of sectarian movement, no matter how extensive, had felt it necessary to build such a house for its gatherings, what would have happened? Well, according to the needs of this society or association, a more or less large building would have been erected in this or that style of architecture; and perhaps you would have found from some more or less symbolical figures in the interior an indication of what was to take place in it. And perhaps you would have found also a picture here or there indicating what was to be taught or otherwise presented in this building. You will have noticed that nothing of this sort has been done for this Goetheanum. This building has not only been put here externally for the use of the Anthroposophical Movement, or of the Anthroposophical Society, but just as it stands there, in all its details, it is born out of that which our movement purposes to represent before the world, spiritually and otherwise. This movement could not be satisfied to erect a house in just any style of architecture, but as soon as the possibility arose of building such a home of our own, the movement felt impelled to find a style of its own, growing out of the principles of our spiritual science, a style in whose every detail is expressed that which flows through this our movement as spiritual substance. It would have been unthinkable, for example, to have placed here for this movement of ours just any sort of building, in any style of architecture. From this one should at once conclude how remote is the aim of this movement from any kind of sectarian or similar movement, however widespread. It was our task not merely to build a house, but to find a style of architecture which expresses the very same things that are uttered in every word and sentence of our anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.¹

Indeed, I am convinced that if anyone will sufficiently enter into what can be felt in the forms of this building (observe that I say “can be felt,” not can be speculated about),—he who can feel this will be able to read from his experience of the forms what is otherwise expressed by the word.

This is no externality; it is something which is most inwardly connected with the entire conception of this spiritual movement. This movement purposes to be something different from those spiritual movements, in particular, which have gradually arisen in humanity since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period—let us say, since the middle of the 15th century.

And there is an underlying conviction that now, in this present time, it is necessary to introduce into the evolution of humanity something different from anything that has thus far entered into it since the middle of the 15th century. The most characteristic phenomenon in all that has occurred in civilized humanity in the last three or four centuries seems to me to be the following: The external practical life, which of course has become largely mechanized, constitutes today, almost universally, a kingdom in itself,—a kingdom which is claimed as a sort of monopoly by those who imagine themselves to be the practical people of life. Side by side with this external procedure, which has appeared in all realms of the so-called practical life, we have a number of spiritual views, world conceptions, philosophies, or whatever you wish to call them, which in reality have gradually become unrelated to life, but especially so during the last three or four centuries. These views in what they give to man of feelings, sensations, hover above the real activities of life, so to speak. And so crass is the difference between these two currents that we can say: In our day the time has come when they no longer understand each other at all, or perhaps it is better to say, when they find no points of contact for reciprocal influence. Today we maintain our factories, we make our trains run on the tracks, we send our steamboats over the seas, we keep our telegraphs and telephones busy—and we do it all by allowing the mechanism of life to take its course automatically, so to speak, and by letting ourselves become harnessed to this mechanism. And at the same time we preach. We really preach a great deal. The old church denominations preach in the churches, the politicians preach in the parliaments, the various agencies in different fields speak of the claims of the proletariat, of the claims of women. Much, much preaching is done; and the substance of this preaching, in the sense of the present-day human consciousness, is certainly something with distinct purpose. But if we were to ask ourselves where the bridge is between what we preach and what our external life produces in practice, and if we wished to answer honestly and truthfully, we should find that the trend of the present time does not yield a correct answer.

I mention the following phenomenon only because what I wish to call to your attention appears most clearly through this phenomenon: You know, of course, that besides all the rest of the opportunities to preach, there are in our day all kinds of secret societies. Suppose we take from among these societies—let us say—the ordinary Freemasons' Lodges, whether those with the lowest degrees or with the highest. There we find a symbolism, a symbolism of triangle, circle, square, and the like. We even find an expression frequently used in such connections: The Master-Builder of all worlds.

What is all this? Well, if we go back to the 9th, 10th, 11th centuries and look at the civilized world within which these secret societies, these Masonic Lodges, were spread out as the cream of civilization, we find that all the instruments, which today lie as symbols upon the altars of these Masonic Lodges, were employed for house-building and church-building. There were squares, circles, compasses, levels and plummets, and these were employed in external life. In the Masonic Lodges today speeches are delivered concerning these things that have completely lost their connection with practical life; all kinds of beautiful things are said about them, which are without question very beautiful, but which are completely foreign to external life, to life as it is lived. We have come to have ideas, thought-forms, which lack the impulsive force to lay hold upon life. It has gradually become the custom to work from Monday to Saturday and to listen to a sermon on Sunday, but these two things have nothing to do with each other. And when we preach, we often use as symbols for the beautiful, the true, even the virtuous, things which in olden times were intimately connected with the external life, but which now have no relation to it. Indeed we have gone so far as to believe that the more remote from life our sermons are the higher they will rise into the spiritual worlds. The ordinary secular world is considered something inferior. And today we encounter all kinds of demands which rise up from the depths of humanity, but we do not really understand the nature of these demands. For what connection is there between these society sermons, delivered in more or less beautiful rooms, about the goodness of man, about—well, let us say—about loving all men without distinction of race, nationality, etc., even color—what connection is there between these sermons and what occurs externally, what we take part in and further when we clip our coupons and have our dividends paid to us by the banks, which in that way provide for the external life? Indeed, in so doing we use entirely different principles from those of which we speak in our rooms as the principles of good men. For example, we found Theosophical Societies in which we speak emphatically of the brotherhood of all men, but in what we say there is not the slightest impulsive force to control in any way what also occurs through us when we clip our coupons; for when we clip coupons we set in motion a whole series of political-economic events. Our life is completely divided into these two separate streams.

Thus, it may occur—I will give you, not a classroom illustration, but an example from life—it may occur—it even has occurred—that a lady seeks me out and says: “Do you know, somebody came here and demanded a contribution from me, which would then be used to aid people who drink alcohol. As a Theosophist I cannot do that, can I?” That is what the lady said, and I could only reply: “You see, you live from your investments; that being the case, do you know how many breweries are established and maintained with your money?” Concerning what is really involved here the important point is not that on the one hand we preach to the sensuous gratification of our souls, and on the other conduct ourselves according to the inevitable demands of the life-routine that has developed through the last three or four centuries. And few people are particularly inclined to go into this fundamental problem of the present time. Why is this? It is because this dualism between the external life and our so-called spiritual strivings has really invaded life, and it has become very strong in the last three or four centuries. Most people today when speaking of the spirit mean something entirely abstract, foreign to the world, not something which has the power to lay hold of daily life.

The question, the problem, which is indicated here must be attacked at its roots. If we here on this hill had acted in the spirit of these tendencies of the last three or four hundred years, then we would have employed any kind of architect, perhaps a celebrated architect, and have had a beautiful building erected here, which certainly could have been very beautiful in any architectural style. But that was entirely out of the question; for then, when we entered this building, we should have been surrounded by all kinds of beauty of this style or that, and we should have said in it things corresponding to the building—indeed, in about the same way that all the beautiful speeches made today correspond with the external life which people lead. That could not be, because the spiritual science which intends to be anthroposophically orientated had no such purpose. From the beginning its aim was different. It intended to avoid setting up the old false contrast between spirit and matter, whereby spirit is treated in the abstract, and has no possibility of penetrating into the essence and activity of matter. When do we speak legitimately of the spirit? When do we speak truly of the spirit? We speak truly of the spirit, we are justified in speaking of the spirit, only when we mean the spirit as creator of the material. The worst kind of talk about the spirit—even though this talk is often looked upon today as very beautiful—is that which treats the spirit as though it dwelt in Utopia, as if this spirit should not be touched at all by the material. No; when we speak of the spirit, we must mean the spirit that has the power to plunge down directly into the material. And when we speak of spiritual science, this must he conceived not only as merely rising above nature, but as being at the same time valid natural science. When we speak of the spirit, we must mean the spirit with which the human being can so unite himself as to enable this spirit, through man's mediation, to weave itself even into the social life. A spirit of which one speaks only in the drawing room, which one would like to please by goodness and brotherly love, but a spirit that has no intention of immersing itself in our everyday life—such a spirit is not the true spirit, but a human abstraction; and worship of such a spirit is not worship of the real spirit, but is precisely the final emanation of materialism.

Hence we had to erect a building which, in all its details, is conceived, is envisioned, as arising out of that which lives in other ways as well in our anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science. And with this is also connected the fact that in this difficult time a treatment of the social question has arisen from this spiritual science, which does not intend to linger in Utopia, but which from the beginning of its activity intended to be concerned with life; which intended to be the very opposite of every kind of sectarianism; which intended to decipher that which lies in the great demands of the time and to serve these demands.

Certainly in this building much has not succeeded, but today the matter of importance is really not that everything shall be immediately successful, but that in certain things a beginning, a necessary beginning be made; and at least this essential beginning seems to me to have been made with this building. And so, when it shall some day be finished, we shall accomplish what we shall have to accomplish, not within something which would surround us like strange walls; but just as the nutshell belongs to the nut-fruit and is entirely adapted in its form to this nut-fruit, so will each single line, each single form and color of this building be adapted to that which flows through our spiritual movement.

It is necessary that at the present time at least a few people should comprehend what is intended here, for this act of will is the important matter.

I must go back once more to various characteristics which have become evident in the evolution of civilized humanity in the last three or four centuries. We have in this evolution of civilized humanity phenomena which express for us most characteristically the deeper foundations of that which leads ad absurdum in the life of our present humanity; for it is a case of leading ad absurdum. It is a fact that today a large proportion of human souls are actually asleep, are really sleeping. If one is in a place where certain things which today play their role—I might say, as actual counterparts of all civilized life—if one is in a place where these counterparts do not actually appear before one's eyes but still play a part, as they do in numerous regions of the present civilized world, and are significant and symptomatic of that which must spread more and more—then one will find that the souls of the people are outside of, beyond, the most important events of the time; people live along in their everyday lives without keeping clearly in mind what is actually going on in our time, so long as they are not directly touched by these events. It is also true, however, that the real impulses of these events be in the depths of the subconscious or unconscious soul-life of man.

Underlying the dualism I have mentioned there is today another, the dualism which is expressed—I would cite a characteristic example—in Milton's Paradise Lost. But that is only an external symptom of something that permeates all modern thinking, sensibility, feeling, and willing. We have in the modern human consciousness the feeling of a contrast between heaven and hell; others call it spirit and matter. Fundamentally there are only differences of degree between the heaven and hell of the peasant on the land, and the matter and spirit of the so-called enlightened philosopher of our day; the real underlying thought-impulses are exactly the same. The actual contrast is between God and devil, between paradise and hell. People are certain that paradise is good, and it is dreadful that men have left it; paradise is something that is lost; it must be sought again—and the devil is a terrible adversary, who opposes all those powers connected with the concept of paradise. People who have no inkling of the soul-contrasts to be found even in the outermost fringes of our social extremes and social demands cannot possibly imagine what range there is in this dualism between heaven and hell, or between the lost paradise and the earth. For—we must really say very paradoxical things today, if we wish to speak the truth (actually about many things we can scarcely speak the truth today without its often appearing to our contemporaries as madness—but just as in the Pauline sense the wisdom of man may be foolishness before God, so might the wisdom of the men of today, or their madness, also be madness in the opinion of future humanity)—people have gradually dreamed themselves into this contrast between the earth and paradise, and they connect the latter with what is to be striven for as the actual human-divine, not knowing that striving toward this condition of paradise is just as bad for a man, if he intends to have it forthwith, as striving for the opposite would be. For if our concept of the structure of the world resembles that which underlies Milton's Paradise Lost, then we change the name of a power harmful to humanity when it is sought one-sidedly, to that of a divinely good power, and we oppose to it a contrast which is not a true contrast: namely, the devil, that in human nature which resists the good.

The protest against this view is to be expressed in that group which is to be erected in the east part of our building, a group of wood, 9 ½ meters high, in which, or by means of which, instead of the Luciferic contrast between God and the devil, is placed what must form the basis of the human consciousness of the future: the trinity consisting of the Luciferic, of what pertains to the Christ, and of the Ahrimanic.

Modern civilization has so little consciousness of the mystery which underlies this, that we may say the following: For certain reasons, about which I shall perhaps speak here again, we have called this building Goetheanum, as resting upon the Goethean views of art and knowledge. But at the same time it must be said just here that in the contrast which Goethe has set up in his Faust between the good powers and Mephistopheles there exists the same error as in Milton's Paradise Lost: namely, on the one side the good powers, on the other the evil power, Mephistopheles. In this Mephistopheles Goethe has thrown together in disordered confusion the Luciferic on the one hand and the Ahrimanic on the other; so that in the Goethean figure, Mephistopheles, for him who sees through the matter, two spiritual individualities are commingled, inorganically mixed up. Man must recognize that his true nature can lie expressed only by the picture of equilibrium,—that on the one side he is tempted to soar beyond his head, as it were, to soar into the fantastic, the ecstatic, the falsely mystical, into all that is fanciful: that is the one power. The other is that which draws man down, as it were, into the materialistic, into the prosaic, the arid, and so on, We understand man only when we perceive him in accordance with his nature, as striving for balance between the Ahrimanic, on one arm of the scales, let us say, and on the other the Luciferic. Man has constantly to strive for the state of balance between these two powers: the one which would like to lead him out beyond himself, and the other tending to drag him down beneath himself. Now modern spiritual civilization has confused the fantastic, the ecstatic quality of the Luciferic with the divine; so that in what is described as paradise, actually the description of the Luciferic is presented, and the frightful error is committed of confusing the Luciferic and the divine—because it is not understood that the thing of importance is to preserve the state of balance between two powers pulling man toward the one side or toward the other.

This fact had first to be brought to light. If man is to strive toward what is called Christian—by which, however, many strange things are often understood today—then he must know clearly that this effort can be made only at the point of balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic; and that especially the last three or four centuries have so largely eliminated the knowledge of the real human being that little is known of equilibrium; the Luciferic has been renamed the divine in Paradise Lost, and a contrast is made between it and the Ahrimanic, which is no longer Ahriman, but which has become the modern devil, or modern matter, or something of the kind. This dualism, which in reality is a dualism between Lucifer and Ahriman, haunts the consciousness of modern humanity as the contrast between God and the devil; and Paradise Lost would really have to be conceived as a description of the lost Luciferic kingdom—it is just renamed.

Thus emphatically must we call attention to the spirit of modern civilization, because it is necessary for humanity to understand clearly how it has come upon a declivitous path (it is a historical necessity, but necessities exist, among other things, to be comprehended), and, as I have said, that it can again begin to ascend only through the most radical corrective. In our time people often take a description of the spiritual world to be a representation of something super-sensible but not existing here on our earth. They would like to escape from the earth environment by means of a spiritual view. They do not know that when man flees into an abstract spiritual kingdom, he does not find the spirit at all, but the Luciferic region. And much that today calls itself Mysticism or Theosophy is a quest for the Luciferic region; for mere knowledge of the spirit cannot form the basis of man's present-day spiritual striving, because it is in keeping with the spiritual endeavor of our time to perceive the relation between the spiritual worlds and the world into which we are born and in which we must live between birth and death.

Especially when we direct our gaze toward spiritual worlds should this question concern us: Why are we born out of the spiritual worlds into this physical world? Well, we are born into this physical world (tomorrow and next day I will develop in greater detail what I shall sketch today)—we are born into this physical world because here on this earth there are things to be learned, things to be experienced, which cannot be experienced in the spiritual worlds; but in order to experience these things we must descend into this physical world, and from this world we must carry up into the spiritual worlds the results of this experience. In order to attain that, however, we must really plunge down into this physical world; our very spirit in its quest for knowledge must dive down into this physical world. For the sake of the spiritual world, we must immerse ourselves in this physical world.

In order to say what I wish to express, let us take—well, suppose we say a normal man of the present time, an average man, who sleeps his requisite number of hours, eats three meals a day, and so on, and who also has spiritual interests, even lofty spiritual interests. Because he has spiritual interests he becomes a member, let us say, of a Theosophical Society, and there does everything possible to learn what takes place in the spiritual worlds. Let us consider such a man, one who has at his fingertips, so to speak, all that is written in the theosophical literature of the day, but who otherwise lives according to the usual customs. Observe this man. What does all the knowledge signify which he acquires with his higher spiritual interests? It signifies something which here upon earth can offer him some inner soul gratification, a sort of real Luciferic orgy, even though it is a sophisticated, a refined soul-orgy. Nothing of this is carried through the gate of death, nothing of it whatever is carried through the gate of death; for among such people—and they are very numerous—there may be some who, in spite of having at their finger-tips what an astral body is, an etheric body, and so on, have no inkling of what takes place when a candle burns; they have no idea what magic acts are performed to run the tramway outside; they travel on it but they know nothing about it. But still more: they do indeed have at their finger-tips what the astral body is, the etheric body, karma, reincarnation,—but they have no notion of what is said today in the gatherings of the proletarians, for example, or what their aims are; it does not interest them. They are interested only in the appearance of the etheric body or astral body—they are not interested in the course pursued by capital since the beginning of the 19th century, when it became the actual ruling power. Knowing about the etheric body, the astral body, is of no use when people are dead! From an actual knowledge of the spiritual world just that must be said. This spiritual knowledge has value only when it becomes the instrument for plunging down into the material life, and for absorbing in the material life what cannot be obtained in the spiritual worlds themselves, but must he carried there.

Today we have a physical science which is taught in its most diversified branches in our universities. Experiments are made, research is carried on, and so forth, and physical science comes into being. With this modern science we develop our technical arts; we even heal people with it today—we do everything imaginable. Side by side with this physical science there are the religions denominations. But I ask you, have you ever taken cognizance of the content of the usual Sunday sermons in which, for example, the Kingdom of Christ is spoken of, and so on? What relation is there between modern science and what is said in these sermons? For the most part, none whatever; the two things go on separate paths. The people one group believe themselves capable of speaking about God and the Holy Spirit and all kinds of things—in abstract forms. Even though they claim to feel these things, still they present abstract views about them. The others speak of a nature devoid of spirit; and no bridge is being built between them, Then we have in modern times even all kinds of theosophical views, mystical views. Well, these mystical views tell of everything imaginable which is remote from life, but they say nothing of human life, because they have not the force to dive down into human life. I should just like to ask whether a Creator of Worlds would be spoken of in the right sense if one thought of him as a very interesting and lovely spirit, to be sure, but as being quite incapable of creating worlds? The spiritual powers that are frequently talked about today never could have been world-creators; for the thoughts we develop about them are not even capable of entering into our knowledge of nature or our knowledge of man's social life.

Perhaps I may without being immodest illustrate what I mean with an example. In one of my recent books, Riddles of the Soul, I have brought to your attention—and I have often mentioned it in oral lectures—what nonsense is taught in the present-day physiology,—that is, one of our physical sciences: the nonsense that there are two kinds of nerves in man, the motor nerves, which underlie the will, and the sensory nerves, which underlie perceptions and sensations. Since telegraphy has become known we have this illustration from it: from the eye the nerve goes to the central organ, then from the central organ it goes out to one of the members; we see something make a movement, as a limb—there goes the telegraph wire from this organ, the eye, to the central organ; that causes activity in the motor nerve, then the movement is carried out. We permit science to teach this nonsense. We must permit it to be taught, because in our abstract spiritual view we speak of every sort of thing, but do not develop such thoughts as are able

positively to gear into the machinery of nature. We have not the strength in our spiritual views to develop a knowledge about nature itself. The fact is, there is no difference between motor nerves and sensory nerves, but what we call voluntary nerves are also sensory nerves. The only reason for their existence is that we may be aware of our own members when movements are to be executed. The hackneyed illustration of tubes proves exactly the opposite of what is intended to be proved. I will not go into it further because you have not the requisite knowledge of physiology. I should very much like some time to discuss these things in a group of people versed in physiology and biology; but here I wish only to call your attention to the fact that we have on the one hand a science of the physical world, and on the other a discoursing and preaching about spiritual worlds which does not penetrate any of the real worlds of nature that lie before us. But we need a knowledge of the spirit strong enough to become at the same time a physical science. We shall attain that only when we take account of the intention which I wished to bring to your notice today. If we had intended to found a sectarian movement which, like others, has merely some kind of dogmatic opinion about the divine and the spiritual, and which needs a building, we should have erected any kind of a building, or had it erected. Since we did not wish that, but wished rather to indicate, even in this external action, that we intend to plunge down into life, we had to erect this building entirely out of the will of spiritual science itself. [Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum (with 104 illustrations), Not the yet translated.] And in the details of this building it will some day be seen that actually important principles—which today are placed in a very false light under the influence of the two dualisms mentioned—can be established on their sound foundation.

I should like to call your attention today to just one more thing. Observe the seven successive columns which stand on each side of our main building. There you have capitals above, pedestals below. They are not alike, but each is developed from the one preceding it; so that you get a perception of the second capital when you immerse yourself deeply in the first and its forms, when you cause the idea of metamorphosis to become alive, as something organic, and really have such a living thought that it is not abstract, but follows the laws of growth. Then you can see the second capital develop out of the first, the third out of the second, the fourth out of the third, and so on to the seventh. Thus the effort has been made to develop in living metamorphosis one capital, one part of an architrave, and so on, from another, to imitate that creative activity that exists as spiritual creative activity in nature itself, when nature causes one form to come forth from another. I have the feeling that not a single capital could be other than it now is.

But here something very strange has resulted. When people speak today of evolution, they often say: development, development, evolution, first the imperfect, then the more nearly perfect, the more differentiated, and so on; and the more nearly perfect things always become at the same time more complicated. This I could not bear out when I let the seven capitals originate one from another according to metamorphosis, for when I came to the fourth capital, and had then to develop the next, the fifth, which should be more nearly perfect than the fourth, this fourth revealed itself to me as the most complicated. That is to say, when I did not merely pursue abstract things in thought, like a Haeckel or a Darwin, but when I had to make the forms so that each one came forth from the preceding—just as in nature itself one form after another emerges from the vital forces—then I was compelled to make the fifth form more elaborate in its surfaces, it is true, than the fourth, but the entire form became simpler, not more complicated. And the sixth became simpler yet, and the seventh still more so. Thus I realized that evolution is not a progression to ever greater and greater differentiation, but that evolution is first an ascent to a higher point, and after having reached this point is then a descent to more and more simple forms.

That resulted entirely from the work itself; and I could see that this principle of evolution manifested in artistic work is the same as the principle of evolution in nature. For if you consider the human eye, it is certainly more nearly perfect than the eyes of some animals; but the eyes of some animals are more complicated than the human eye. They have, for example, enclosed within them certain blood-filled organs—the metasternum, the fan—which do not exist in human beings; they have dissolved, as it were. The human eye is simplified in comparison with the forms of some animal eyes. If we study the development of the eye, we find that it is at first primitive, simple, then it becomes more and more complicated; but then it is again simplified, and the most nearly perfect is not the most complicated, but is, rather, a simpler form than the one to be found midway.

And it was essential to do likewise when developing artistically something which an inner necessity enjoined. The aim here was not research, but union with the vital forces themselves. And here in this building we strove to fashion the forms in such a way that in this fashioning dwell the same forces which underlie nature as the spirit of nature. A spirit is sought which is actually creative, a spirit which lives in what is produced in the world, and does not merely preach. That is the essential thing. That is also the reason why many a member here had to be severely rebuked for wanting our building fitted out with all sorts of symbols and the like. There is not a single symbol in the building, but all are forms which imitate the creative activity of the spirit in nature itself.

Thus there has been the beginning of an act of will which must find its continuation; and it is desirable that this very phase of the matter be understood—that it be understood how the springs of human intention, of human creativeness, which are necessary for modern humanity in all realms, are really to be sought. We live today in the midst of demands; but they are all individual demands springing from the various spheres of life; and we need also coordination. This cannot come from something which merely hovers in the environment of external visible existence; for something super-perceptible underlies all that is visible, and in our time this must be comprehended. I would say that close attention should be given to the things that are happening today, and the idea that the old is collapsing will by no means be found so absurd—but then there must be something to take its place! To be reconciled to this thought there is nevertheless needed a certain courage, which is not acquired in external life, but must be achieved in the innermost self.

I would not define this courage, but would characterize it. The sleeping souls of our time will certainly be overjoyed if someone appears somewhere who can paint as Raphael or Leonardo did. That is comprehensible. But today we must have the courage to say that only he has a right to admire Raphael and Leonardo who knows that in our day one cannot and must not create as Raphael and Leonardo did. Finally, to make this clear, we can say something very philistine: that only he has a right today to appreciate the spiritual range of the Pythagorean theorem who does not believe that this theorem is to be discovered today for the first time. Everything has its time, and things must be comprehended by means of the concrete time in which they occur.

As a matter of fact, more is needed today than many people are willing to bring forth, even when they join some kind of spiritual movement. We need today the knowledge that we have to face a renewal of the life of human evolution. It is cheap to say that our age is a time of transition. Any age is a time of transition; only it is important to know what is in transition. So I would not voice the triviality that one age is a time of transition, but I want to say something else: It is continually being said that nature and life make no leaps. A man considers himself very wise when he says: “Successive development; leaps never!” Well, nature is continually making leaps: it fashions step by step the green leaf, it transforms this to the calyx-leaf, which is of another kind, to the colored petal, to the stamen, and to the pistil. Nature makes frequent leaps when it fashions a single creation—the larger life makes constant revolutions. We see how in human life entirely new conditions appear with the change of teeth, how entirely new conditions appear with puberty; and if man's present capacity for observation were not so crude a third epoch in human life could be perceived about the twentieth year, and so on, and so on.

But history itself is also an organism, and such leaps take place in it; only they are not observed. People of today have no conception what a significant leap occurred at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, or more properly, in the middle of the 15th century. And what was introduced at that time is pressing toward fulfilment in the middle of our century. And it is truly no weaving of idle fancies but exact truth when we say that the events which so agitate humanity, and which recently have reached such a culmination, disclose themselves as a trend toward something in preparation, which is about to break violently into human evolution in the middle of this century. Anyone must understand these things who does not wish, out of some kind of arbitrariness, to set up ideals for human evolution, but who wills to find, among the creating—forces of the world, spiritual science, which can then enter into life.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Ways to a New Style in Architecture, and Der Dornacher Bau als Wahrzeichen kunstlerischer Umwandlungs-Impulse (not yet translated).

On the occasion of his hundred and fiftieth birthday: August 28, 1899

[ 1 ] When Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent Goethe the work in which bold intellectual power and the highest ethical seriousness found an incomparable expression, the "Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre", he enclosed a letter containing the words: "I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns: your feeling is the same touchstone." These sentences were written in 1794. Like the great philosopher, the bearers of the most diverse intellectual currents could have written to Goethe at that time. The poet and thinker Goethe was at the height of his life at this time. Albert Bielschowski, the biographer who most lovingly immerses himself in this personality and provides us with the most intimate picture of him, already felt the same way about Goethe's contemporaries in the 1990s: "Goethe had received a dose of everything human and was therefore the 'most human of all men'. His figure had a great typical character. It was a potentized image of humanity itself. Accordingly, everyone who approached him had the impression that they had never seen such a complete human being before."

[ 2 ] This was Goethe's relationship to his spiritual environment when he entered his fiftieth year one hundred years ago. He stood there as an accomplished man. The study of antiquity had given his artistic work the degree of perfection that was demanded by the innermost essence of his personality and beyond which there was no further progress for him; his insight into the workings of nature had come to an end. From then on, all that remained for him was to carry out the ideas of nature that had taken root in his mind. At that time, the "most human of all men" had a completely mature effect on those around him.

[ 3 ] Schiller expressed this in eloquent words in the letter he addressed to Goethe on August 23, 1794: "I have long watched the course of your mind, although from quite a distance, and have noticed the path you have marked out for yourself with ever renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which any weaker force would be wary. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual... If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within, as it were, and in a rational way." Goethe replied on the 27th: "For my birthday, which comes this week, no more pleasant gift could have been given to me than your letter, in which you, with a friendly hand, draw the sum of my existence and encourage me through your participation to a more diligent and lively use of my powers."

[ 4 ] We can expand on this sentence and say: Goethe could not have received a more meaningful gift in the time of his maturity than Schiller's devoted friendship. The latter's philosophical sense led Goethe's pure spirituality of feeling into new spiritual regions.

[ 5 ] The beautiful similarity between the two spirits that developed is characterized by Schiller in a letter to Körner: "Each could give the other something that he lacked and receive something in return. Goethe now feels the need to join me in order to continue on the path that he had previously taken alone and without encouragement, in community with me."

[ 6 ] Around the time his friendship with Goethe began, Schiller was preoccupied with the ideas expressed in his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". He reworked these letters, originally written for the Duke of Augustenburg, for the "Horen" in 1794. What Goethe and Schiller discussed orally at the time and what they wrote to each other was always linked to the ideas in these letters. Schiller's reflections concerned the question: What state of the soul's powers corresponds in the highest sense of the word to an existence worthy of man? "Every individual human being, one can say, carries within himself a pure, ideal human being by disposition and destiny, with whose unchanging unity in all his variations it is the great task of his existence to agree," it says in the fourth letter. A bridge is to be built from the man of everyday reality to the ideal man. There are two instincts that hold man back from ideal perfection if they are developed in a one-sided way: the sensual and the rational instinct. If the sensual instinct has the upper hand, man is subject to his instincts and passions. His actions are the result of a lower compulsion. If the rational instinct predominates, man endeavors to suppress instincts and passions and to pursue a purely spiritual virtue. In both cases, man is subject to compulsion. In the former, his sensual nature forces his spiritual nature into submission, in the latter, his spiritual nature forces his sensual nature into submission. Neither the one nor the other can justify a truly humane existence. Rather, this presupposes a perfect harmony of both basic drives. Sensuality should not be suppressed, but ennobled; instincts and passions should be raised to such a high level that they work in the direction prescribed by reason, the highest morality. And moral reason should not rule like a higher law in man, to which one submits reluctantly, but one should feel its commandments like an unconstrained need. "If we embrace with passion someone who is worthy of our contempt, we feel embarrassed by the compulsion of nature. If we are hostile to another who compels our respect, we feel the compulsion of reason. But as soon as he interests our affections and earns our respect, both the compulsion of feeling and the compulsion of reason disappear, and we begin to love him" (Letter 14). A person who experiences no coercion from either sensuality or reason, who acts out of passion in the spirit of the purest morality, is a free personality. And a society of people in which the natural instinct of the individual is so ennobled that it does not need to be restrained by the power of the whole in order to make harmonious coexistence possible is the ideal state towards which the state of power and coercion must strive. Outer freedom in living together presupposes inner freedom of the individual personalities. In this way, Schiller sought to solve the problem of freedom in human coexistence, which was on everyone's mind at the time and which sought a violent solution in the French Revolution. "To give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law" of a humane empire (27th letter).

[ 7 ] Goethe found himself deeply satisfied by these ideas. He wrote to Schiller about the "Aesthetic Letters" on October 26, 1794: "I immediately read the manuscript sent to me with great pleasure; I slurped it down in one go. Just as a delicious drink, analogous to our nature, slips down willingly and shows its healing effect on the tongue through the good mood of the nervous system, so these letters were pleasant and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, since I found what I had long recognized as right, what I partly lived and partly wished to live, presented in such a coherent and noble way."

[ 8 ] This is the nature of the circle of ideas that Schiller stimulated in Goethe. Out of it has now grown a poem by the former, which, because of its mysterious character, has experienced the most varied interpretations, but which only becomes completely clear and transparent if one understands it from within the circle of imagination described: the enigmatic fairy tale with which Goethe concluded his story "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten", which appeared in the "Horen" in 1795. -- What Schiller expressed in philosophical form in his "Aesthetic Letters", Goethe portrayed in a lively fairy tale filled with rich poetic content. The humane state that man achieves when he has attained the full possession of freedom is symbolized in this fairy tale by the marriage of a young man to the beautiful lily, the representative of the realm of freedom, the ideal man that the man of everyday life carries within himself as his goal.

[ 9 ] The largest number of attempts at interpretation undertaken to date can be found in the book "Goethes Märchendichtungen" by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck (Heidelberg 1879, Carl Wintersche Universitätsbuchhandlung). I have found that these attempts at interpretation give nice suggestions and are in many respects correct, but that none of them is completely satisfactory. I have now sought the roots of the explanation in the soil from which Schiller's "Aesthetic Letters" also grew. Although my interpretation has had a convincing effect on many listeners in several oral lectures - the first time on November 27, 1891 at the Goethe-Verein in Vienna - I have so far hesitated to submit it to print. Nor have I yet added it to my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung", published in 1897. I felt the need to allow the conviction of its correctness to mature in me over a longer period of time. It has only strengthened to this day. The following cannot follow the course of the fairy-tale plot, but must be arranged in such a way that the meaning of the poem is revealed most comfortably.¹

[ 10 ] One person who plays an outstanding role in the development of the events in the "fairy tale" is the "old man with the lamp". When he comes into the crevices with his lamp, he is asked which is the most important of the secrets he knows. He replies: "The revealed one." And when asked if he would not reveal this secret, he says: "If he knows the fourth. But the serpent knows this fourth secret and says it in the old man's ear. There can be no doubt that this secret refers to the state that all the characters in the fairy tale long for. This state is described to us at the end of the poem. We must assume that the old man knows this secret, for he is the only person who always stands above the circumstances, who directs and guides everything. So what can the serpent tell the old man? He is the most important being in the whole process. By sacrificing himself, he achieves what ultimately satisfies everyone. The old man obviously knows that he must sacrifice himself in order to bring about this satisfaction. What he does not know is when she will be ready. Because that depends on her. She must come to the realization of her own accord that her sacrifice is necessary for the common good. That she is ready for this sacrifice is the most important secret, and she tells the old man this in his ear. And now he can utter the great word: "It's time!""

[ 11 ] The desired goal is brought about by the revival of the youth, by his union with the beautiful lily and by the fact that both realms, the one on this side and the one on the other side of the river, are connected by the magnificent bridge formed from the sacrificed body of the serpent. Even if the serpent is the author of the happy state, he alone could not bestow on the youth the gifts by which he rules the newly founded kingdom. He receives them from the three kings. From the bronze king he receives the sword with the order: "The sword on the left, the right free!" The silver king gives him the sceptre, saying: "Feed the sheep!" The golden one presses the oak wreath on his head with the words: "Recognize the highest! " The three kings are the symbols for the three basic powers of the human soul, and the words they speak indicate how these three basic powers should be expressed in the perfect human being. The sword denotes will, physical strength and power. Man should not hold it in his right hand, where it signifies readiness for conflict and war, but in his left hand for protection and to ward off evil. The right hand should be free for acts of noble humanity. The handing over of the sceptre is accompanied by the words: "Feed the sheep!" They are reminiscent of Christ's words: "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep!" This king is therefore the symbol of piety, of the noble heart. The golden king imparts the gift of knowledge to the young man with the oak wreath. The will, which expresses itself in power, in violence, piety and wisdom in their most perfect form are bestowed on the youth, the representative of a humane existence. These three powers of the soul are symbolized by the three kings. Therefore, when the old man speaks the words: "There are three that reign on earth, Wisdom, Appearance and Violence", the three kings rise up, each at the mention of the soul power of which he is the symbol. There seems to be an ambiguity in the fact that the silver king is presented as the ruler in the realm of appearances, while according to his words he is to signify piety. This contradiction is immediately resolved when one considers the close relationship Goethe establishes between aesthetic feelings - which the beautiful appearance of artistic works creates - and religious feelings. Just think of sentences from him like this: "There are only two true religions: the one that recognizes and worships the sacred that dwells in and around us, completely formless, the other that recognizes and worships it in the most beautiful form." Goethe sees art as just another form of religion. When he was struck by the beauty of Greek works of art, he uttered the sentence: "There is necessity, there is God."

[ 12 ] From the meaning of the kings, we can infer other things in the fairy tale. The king of wisdom is made of gold. Where we usually encounter gold in fairy tales, we will therefore see in it the symbol of wisdom, of knowledge. This is the case with the will-o'-the-wisps and the snake. The former know how to acquire this metal easily and then throw it away lavishly and arrogantly. The serpent comes to it with difficulty, but absorbs it organically, processes it in its body and permeates itself completely with it. In the will-o'-the-wisps we undoubtedly have before us a pictorial representation of personalities who gather their wisdom from all sides and then give it away proudly and carelessly without having sufficiently imbued themselves with it. Unproductive spirits are the will-o'-the-wisps who spread undigested knowledge. If their words fall on fertile ground, they can bring about the very best. A person can impart teachings that he himself has no deep understanding of to another, and this other person can recognize a deep meaning in them. The serpent represents the solid human endeavor, the honest striding along the path of knowledge. For her, the gold squandered by the will-o'-the-wisps becomes a precious commodity that she keeps within herself. For Goethe, the thought of someone giving away the wisdom he had absorbed as a teacher was an uncomfortable one. In his opinion, teaching easily leads to appropriating science in order to be able to spend it again. He therefore considers himself fortunate that he can devote himself to research without having to hold a professorship at the same time. Only those who are in the latter position - apart from exceptions, of course - will truly immerse themselves selflessly in things and serve true humanity. Those who acquire wisdom for the sake of teaching easily become false prophets or sophists. The false lights are reminiscent of these. But only selfless knowledge, which is completely absorbed in things and which is visualized in the serpent, can come to the insight that the highest can only be reached through selfless devotion. The man who lets his everyday personality die in order to awaken the ideal man within himself reaches this highest. What a mystic like Jakob Böhme expressed with the words: death is the root of all life, Goethe expressed with the sacrificing snake. In Goethe's view, those who cannot free themselves from their small ego, who are unable to develop the higher ego within themselves, cannot reach perfection. Man must die as an individual in order to revive as a higher personality. The new life is then only the most humane, the same life that, to use Schiller's words, feels no coercion from either reason or sensuality. In "Divan" we read Goethe's beautiful words: "And as long as you do not have this, this: Die and become! You are but a dreary guest on the dark earth." And one of the "Proverbs in Prose" reads: "One must give up one's existence in order to exist." The snake gives up its existence in order to form the bridge that connects the two realms, that of sensuality and that of spirituality. The temple, with its colorful bustle, is the serpent's higher life, which it has purchased through the death of its lower nature. Her words that she wants to sacrifice herself voluntarily in order not to be sacrificed are just another expression of Jakob Böhme's sentence: "He who does not die before he dies, corrupts when he dies"; in other words, he who lives without killing off the lower nature within him, dies in the end without having any idea of the ideal man within him.

[ 13 ] The youth is driven by an indomitable desire for the realm of the beautiful lily. Consider the characteristics of this realm. Although people have the deepest longing for the realm of the lily, they can only enter it at certain times. At midday, when the serpent forms a bridge over the river; then in the evening and morning, when the giant's shadow spreads across the river. Anyone who approaches the ruler of this realm, the beautiful lily, without having the inner aptitude for it, can damage his life in the most serious way. Furthermore, the lily itself has a desire for the other realm. Finally, the ferryman can take anyone across, but no one across. So what does the realm of the beautiful lily mean? Goethe says in "Proverbs in Prose": "Everything that liberates our spirit without giving us dominion over ourselves is pernicious." Only those people who are allowed to abandon themselves unreservedly to their inclinations have mastery over themselves, because these are only effective in a moral sense. "Duty, where one loves what one commands oneself", is a saying by Goethe. Those who seize freedom without having control over themselves are like the young man who was paralyzed by the touch of the lily. The realm of the one-sidedly acting instinct of reason, of purely spiritual morality, is that of the lily. That of one-sided sensuality is on the other side of the river. In the still imperfect human being the harmony between sensual instinct and rational instinct is generally not established. Only at certain moments does he act out of passion in such a way that this action is also moral in itself. This is symbolized by the fact that the snake can only form a bridge over the river at certain moments, at midday. The fact that the lily longs for the other realm expresses the fact that the rational instinct only fulfills its nature when it does not act like a strict legislator beyond the desires and instincts and restrains them, but when it penetrates them, connects with them. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but no one across. Men come from the realm of reason without having done anything themselves, but they do not return from the realm of the passions to their true homeland without their intervention. Except in those moments when man reaches the ideal state of life by balancing reason and sensuality, he also seeks to attain it by force, by arbitrariness, which finds expression in political revolutions. Goethe brings the giant and his shadow for this kind of combination of both realms. In revolutions, the urge for the ideal state lives itself out dully, just as the shadow of the giant lies across the river at dusk. There is also historical evidence that this interpretation of the giant is correct. On October 16, 1795, Schiller wrote to Goethe, who was on a journey that was to extend to Frankfurt a. M.: "It is indeed dear to me to know that you are still far away from the Main River. The shadow of the giant could easily touch you a little roughly." What the arbitrariness, the lawless course of historical events has in its wake is thus meant by the shadow of the giant.

[ 14 ] Reason and sensuality interpose themselves so that the still imperfect human being is prevented from destroying morality through his passions: Custom, all that is social order of the present. This order finds its symbol in the river. In the third of the "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" Schiller says of the state: "The compulsion of needs threw man into it before he could choose this state in his freedom; necessity arranged him according to mere natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason." The river separates the two realms until the serpent sacrifices itself. The ferryman wants to be rewarded by every wanderer with the fruits of the earth; the state and society impose real duties on man; they can no more use the phrase-like chatter of false prophets and people who merely pay with words than the ferryman can use the gold pieces of the will-o'-the-wisps. The old woman confesses herself a debtor to the river and clings to it with her body; her form disappears because she is a debtor. Thus the individual confesses himself a debtor to the state; he is absorbed in the state, surrenders a part of his self to it. As long as man is not at such a height that he acts freely out of himself morally, he must renounce to determine a part of his self of his own accord; he must commit himself to the state.

[ 15 ] The lamp of the old has the property of shining only where another light is already present. We must remember the saying of an old mystic repeated by Goethe: "If the eye were not sunny, how could we see the light? If God's own power did not live in us, how could the divine delight us?" Just as the lamp does not shine in the dark, so the light of truth and knowledge does not shine for those who do not have the appropriate organs, the inner light, to meet it. But it is this light of wisdom that leads man to his goal; it brings him to establish the harmony of his instincts. This light allows him to recognize the laws of things. What for him is dead matter is transformed through knowledge into a living thing that is transparent to our spirit. The world stands differently before him who has recognized it than before him who lives without knowledge. The transformation that all things undergo for our spirit when they are illuminated by the light of knowledge is symbolized by the transformation that things undergo through the light of the lamp. This light transforms stones into gold, wood into silver and dead animals into precious stones.

[ 16 ] Through the sacrifice of the serpent, the realm of the fourth king, who chaotically carried gold, silver and ore, comes to an end. The harmonious interaction of the three metals that make up the other three kings begins. Through the awakening of the ideal man, the forces of the soul cease to work chaotically and one-sidedly, they achieve perfect harmony. The will-o'-the-wisps lick up the gold of the fourth king. Once the humane state has been reached, the unproductive spirits have the business of scientifically processing the past, in which the imperfect still prevailed, as history. The figure of the pug also sheds light on the nature of the will-o'-the-wisps. They throw him their gold and he dies from eating it. Thus perishes he to whom false prophets and sophists teach their indigestible doctrines.

[ 17 ] The temple is erected on the river in which the marriage of the young man with the beautiful lily takes place. The free society will grow out of the coercive state, in which everyone can abandon himself to his inclinations, because they only work in the sense that noble coexistence of people is possible. Then man will no longer experience the satisfying state only in moments, he will no longer seek to attain it by revolutionary force, it will be present for him in every moment. At the end of the fairy tale we find the poetic image for this truth: "The bridge is built; all the people continually cross over and over, to this day the bridge teems with wanderers, and the temple is the most visited on the whole earth."

[ 18 ] If one accepts this basis of interpretation, then every event, every person in the fairy tale is self-explanatory. Take the hawk, for example. It catches the sun's rays in order to reflect them back to the earth before the sun itself is able to send its light directly onto the earth. In this way, human intuition can also predict the events of a not-too-distant future. In the servants of the beautiful lily one can see representatives of those happily inclined human beings to whom the harmony of sensuality and reason is given by their nature. They will live on into the new realm without noticing the transition, just as the servants slumber during the moment of transformation. - The fact that the symbol of brute force, the giant, finally plays a role as an hour hand, I would like to interpret as meaning that unreason can also fill its place in the workings of the world, if it is not used for activities that befit the free human spirit, but is brought to unfold its power within strict natural regularity.

[ 19 ] So Goethe was inspired by Schiller to express his ethical creed in his own poetic way, as Schiller himself did in a different way in the "Aesthetic Letters". In the letter in which he announces the receipt of the manuscript, Schiller refers to the discussions that took place about these ideas in the period in question: "The "fairy tale" is colorful and funny enough, and I find the idea you once mentioned: "the mutual assistance of forces and the rejection of each other, quite well executed."

• 1. In my lectures I have often been asked by listeners whether the "Fairy Tale" is included in the Goethe editions. I therefore expressly note that it is included in every Goethe edition and that it forms the conclusion of the stories "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten".

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln—not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

I have tried to show how various domains of scientific thought originated in modern times. Now I will try to throw light from a certain standpoint on what was actually happening in the development of these scientific concepts. Then we shall better understand what these concepts signify in the whole evolutionary process of mankind. We must clearly understand that the phenomena of external culture are inwardly permeated by a kind of pulse beat that originates from deeper insights. Such insights need not always be ones that are commonly taught, but still they are at the bottom of the development. Now, I would only like to say that we can better understand what we are dealing with in this direction if we include in our considerations what in certain epochs was practiced as initiation science, a science of the deeper foundations of life and history.

We know that the farther we go back in history,⁶⁹ the more we discover an instinctive spiritual knowledge, an instinctive clairvoyant perception of what goes on behind the scenes. Moreover, we know that it is possible in our time to attain to a deeper knowledge, because since the last third of the Nineteenth Century, after the high tide of materialistic concepts and feelings, simply through the relationship of the spiritual world to the physical, the possibility arose to draw spiritual knowledge once again directly from the super-sensible world. Since the last third of the Nineteenth Century, it has been possible to deepen human knowledge to the point where it can behold the foundations of what takes place in the external processes of nature.

So we can say that an ancient instinctive initiation science made way for an exoteric civilization in which little was felt of any direct spirit knowledge, but now it is fully conscious rather than instinctive.

We stand at the beginning of this development of a new spirit knowledge. It will unfold further in the future. If we have a certain insight into what man regarded as knowledge during the age of the old instinctive science of initiation, we can discover that until the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, opinions prevailed in the civilized world that cannot be directly compared with any of our modern conceptions about nature. They were ideas of quite a different kind. Still less can they be compared with what today's science calls psychology. There too, we would have to say that it is of quite a different kind. The soul and spirit of man as well as the physical realm of nature were grasped in concepts and ideas that today are understood only by men who specifically study initiation science. The whole manner of thinking and feeling was quite different in former times.

If we examine the ancient initiation science, we find that, in spite of the fragmentary ways in which it has been handed down, it had profound insights, deep conceptions, concerning man and his relation to the world.

People today do not greatly esteem a work like De Divisione Naturae (Concerning the Division of Nature) by John Scotus Erigena⁷⁰ in the Ninth Century. They do not bother with it because such a work is not regarded as an historical document since it comes from a time when men thought differently from the way they think today, so differently that we can no longer understand such a book. When ordinary philosophers describe such topics in their historical writings, one is offered mere empty words. Scholars no longer enter into the fundamental spirit of a work such as that of John Scotus Erigena on the division of nature, where even the term nature signifies something other than in modern science. If, with the insight of spiritual science, we do enter into the spirit of such a text, we must come to the following rather odd conclusion: This Scotus Erigena developed ideas that give the impression of extraordinary penetration into the essence of the world, but he presented these ideas in an inadequate and ineffective form. At the risk of speaking disrespectfully of a work that is after all very valuable, one has to say that Erigena himself no longer fully understood what he was writing about. One can see that in his description. Even for him, though not to the same extent as with modern historians of philosophy, the words that he had gleaned from tradition were more or less words only, and he could no longer enter into their deeper meaning. Reading his works, we find ourselves increasingly obliged to go farther back in history. Erigena's writings lead us directly back to those of the so-called pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.⁷¹ I will now leave aside the historical problem of when Dionysius lived, and so forth. But again from Dionysius the Areopagite one is led still farther back. To continue the search one must be equipped with spiritual science. But finally, going back to the second and third millennia before Christ, one comes upon very deep insights that have been lost to mankind. Only as a faint echo are they present in writings such as those of Erigena.

Even if we go no further back than the Scholastics, we can find, hidden under their pedantic style, profound ideas concerning the way in which man apprehends the outer world, and how there lives the super-sensible on one side and on the other side the sense perceptible, and so on. If we take the stream of tradition founded on Aristotle who, in his logical but pedantic way, had in turn gathered together the ancient knowledge that had been handed down to him, we find the same thing—deep insights that were well understood in ancient times and survived feebly into the Middle Ages, being repeated in the successive epochs, and were always less and less understood. That is the characteristic process. At last in the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Century, the understanding disappears almost entirely, and a new spirit emerges, the spirit of Copernicus and Galileo, which I have described in the previous lectures.

In all studies, such as those I have just outlines, it is found that this ancient knowledge is handed down through the ages until the Fourteenth Century, though less and less understood. This ancient knowledge amounted essentially to an inner experience of what goes on in man himself. The explanations of the last few lectures should make this comprehensible: It is the experiencing of the mathematical-mechanical element in human movement, the experiencing of a certain chemical principle, as we would say today, in the circulation of man's bodily fluids, which are permeated by the etheric body. Hence, we can even look at the table that I put on the blackboard yesterday from an historical standpoint. If we look at the being of man with our initiation science today, we have the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body (the inner life of the soul,) and the ego organization. As I pointed out yesterday, there existed (arising out of the ancient initiation science) an inner experience of the physical body, an inward experience of movement, an inner experience of the dimensionality of space, as well as experiences of other physical and mechanical processes. We can call this inner experience the experiencing of physics in man. But this experience of physics in man is at the same time the cognition of the very laws of physics and mechanics. There was a physics of man directed toward the physical body. It would not have occurred to anyone in those times to search for physics other than through the experience in man. Now, in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, together with the mathematics that was thenceforth applied in physics, what was inwardly experienced is cast out of man and grasped abstractly. It can be said that physics sunders itself from man, whereas formerly it was contained in man himself.

Something similar was experienced with the fluid processes, the bodily fluids of the human organism. These too were inwardly experienced. Yesterday I referred to the Galen who, in the first Christian centuries, described the following fluids in man: black gall, blood, phlegm, and the ordinary means of the intermingling of these fluids by the way they influence each other. Galen did not arrive at these statements by anything resembling today's physiological methods. They were based mainly on inward experiences. For Galen too these were largely a tradition, but what he thus took from tradition we once experienced inwardly in the fluid part of the human organism, which in turn was permeated by the etheric body.

For this reason, in the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy,⁷² I did not describe the Greek philosophers in the customary way. Read any ordinary history of philosophy and you will find this subject presented more or less as follows: Thales⁷³ pondered on the origin of our sense world and sought for it in water. Heraclitus looked for it in fire. Others looked for it in air. Still others in solid matter, for example in something like atoms. It is amazing that this can be recounted without questions being raised. People today do not notice that it basically defies explanation why Thales happened to designate water while Heraclitus⁷⁴ chose fire as the source of all things. Read my book Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that the viewpoint of Thales, expressed in the sentence “All things have originated from water,” is based on an inner experience. He inwardly felt the activity of what in his day was termed the watery element. He sensed that the basis of the external process in nature was related to this inner activity; thus he described the external out of inner experiences. It was the same with Heraclitus who, as we would say today, was of a different temperament. Thales, as a phlegmatic, was sensitive to the inward “water” or “phlegm.” Therefore he described the world from the phlegmatic's viewpoint: everything has come from water. Heraclitus, as a choleric, experienced the inner “fire.” He described the world the way he experienced it. Besides them, there were other thinkers, who are no longer mentioned by external tradition, who knew still more concerning these matters. Their knowledge was handed down and still existed as tradition in the first Christian centuries; hence Galen could speak of the four components of man's inner fluidic system.

What was then known concerning the inner fluids, namely, how these four fluids—yellow gall, black gall, blood, and phlegm—influence and mix with one another really amounts to an inner human chemistry, though it is of course considered childish today. No other form of chemistry existed in those days. The external phenomena that today belong to the field of chemistry were then evaluated according to these inward experiences. We can therefore speak of an inner chemistry based on experiences of the fluid man who is permeated by the ether body. Chemistry was tied to man in former ages. Later it emerged, as did mathematics and physics, and became external chemistry (see Figure 1.) Try to imagine how the physics and chemistry of ancient times were felt by men. They were experienced as something that was, as it were, a part of themselves, not as something that is mere description of an external nature and its processes. The main point was: it was experienced physics, experienced chemistry.

In those ages when men felt external nature in their physical and etheric bodies, the contents of the astral body and the ego organization were also experienced differently than in later times.

Today was have a psychology, but it is only an inventory of abstractions, though no one admits this. You will find in it thinking, feeling, willing, as well as memory, imagination, and so forth, but treated as mere abstractions. This gradually arose from what was still considered as one's own soul contents. One had cast out chemistry and physics; thinking, feeling and willing were retained. But what was left eventually became so diluted that it turned into no more than an inventory of lifeless empty abstractions, and it can be readily proved that this is so. Take, for example, the people who still spoke of thinking or willing as late as the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century.⁷⁵ If you study the older texts on these subjects you will see that people expressed themselves concerning these matters in a concrete way. You have the feeling, when such a person speaks about thinking, that he speaks as if this thinking were actually a series of inner processes within him, as if the thoughts were colliding with each other or supporting each other. This is still an experiencing of thoughts. It is not yet as abstract a matter as it became later on. During and towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, it was an easy thing for the philosophers to deny all reality to these abstractions. They saw thoughts as inner mirror pictures, as was done in an especially brilliant way by Richard Wahle, who declared that the ego, thinking, feeling, and willing were only illusions. Instead of abstractions, the inner soul contents become illusions.

In the age when man felt that his walking was a process that took place simultaneously in him and the world, and when he still sensed the circulating fluids within him, he knew, for instance, that when he moved about in the heat of the sun (when external influences were present) that the blood and phlegm circulated differently in him than was the case in winter. Such a man experienced the blood and phlegm circulation within himself, but he experienced it together with the sunshine or the lack thereof. And just as he experienced physical and chemical aspects in union with the outside world, so he also experienced thinking, feeling, and willing together with the world. He did not think they were occurring only within himself as was done in later ages when they gradually evaporated into complete abstractions. Instead he experienced what occurred in him in thinking, feeling, and willing, or in the circulation of the fluids as part of the realm of the astral, the soul being of man, which in that age was the subject of a psychology.

Psychology now became tightly tied to man. With the dawn of the scientific age, man drove physics and chemistry out into the external world; psychology, on the other hand, he drove into himself. This process can be traced in Francis Bacon and John Locke. All that is experienced of the external world, such as tone, color, and warmth, is pressed into man's interior.

This process is even more pronounced in regard to the ego organization. This gradually became a very meager experience. The way man looked into himself, the ego became by degrees something like a mere point. For that reason it became easy to philosophers to dispute its very existence. Not ego consciousness, but the experience of the ego was for men of former ages something rich in content and fully real. This ego experience expressed itself in something that was a loftier science than psychology, a science that can be called pneumatology. In later times this was also pressed into the interior and thinned out into our present quite diluted ego feeling.

When man had the inward experience of his physical body, he had the experience of physics; simultaneously, he experienced what corresponds in outer nature to the processes in his physical body. It is similar in the case of the etheric body. Not only the etheric, was experienced inwardly, but also the physical fluid system, which is controlled by the etheric. Now, what is inwardly experienced when man perceives the psychological, the processes of his astral body? The “air man”—if I may put it this way—is inwardly experienced. We are not only solid organic formations, not only fluids or water formations, we are always gaseous-airy as well. We breathe in the air and breathe it out again. We experienced the substance of psychology in intimate union with the inner assimilation of air. This is why psychology was more concrete. When the living experience of air (which can also be outwardly traced) was cast out of the thought contents, these thought contents became increasingly abstract, became mere thought. Just think how an old Indian philosopher strove in his exercises to become conscious of the fact that in the breathing process something akin to the thought process was taking place. He regulated his breathing process in order to progress his thinking. He knew that thinking, feeling and willing are not as flimsy as we today make them out to be. He knew that through breathing they were related to both outer and inner nature, hence with air. As we can say that man expelled the physical and chemical aspects from his organization, we can also say that he sucked in the psychological aspect, but in doing so he rejected the external element, the air-breath experience. He withdrew his own being from the physical and chemical elements and merely observed the outer world with physics and chemistry; whereas he squeezed external nature (air) out of the psychological. Likewise, he squeezed the warmth element out of the pneumatological realm, thus reducing it to the rarity of the ego.

If I call the physical and etheric bodies, the “lower man,” and call the astral body and ego-organization the “upper man,” I can say that in the transition from an older epoch to the scientific age, man lost the inner physical and chemical experience, and came to grasp external nature only with his concepts of physics and chemistry. In psychology and pneumatology, on the other hand, man developed conceptions from which he eliminated outer nature and came to experience only so much of nature as remained in his concepts. In psychology, this was enough so that he at least still had words for what went on in his soul. As to the ego, however, this was so little that pneumatology (partially because theological dogmatism had prepared this development) completely faded out. It shrank down to the mere dot of the ego.

All this took the place of what had been experienced as a unity, when men of old said: We have four elements, earth, water, air and fire. Earth we experience in ourselves when we experience the physical body. Water we experience in ourselves when we experience the etheric body as the agent that moves, mixes, and separates the fluids. Air is experienced when the astral body is experienced in thinking, feeling, and willing, because these three are experienced as surging with the inner breathing process. Finally, warmth, or fire as it was then called, was experienced in the sensation of the ego.

So we may say that the modern scientific view developed by way of a transformation of man's whole relation to himself. If you follow historical evolution with these insights, you will find what I told you earlier—that in each new epoch we see new descriptions of the old traditions, but these are always less and less understood. The worlds of men like Paracelsus, van Helmont, or Jacob Boehme,⁷⁶ bear witness to such ancient traditions.

One who has insight into these matters gets the impression that in Jacob Boehme's case a very simple man is speaking out of sources that would lead too far today to discuss. He is difficult to comprehend because of his clumsiness. But Jacob Boehme shows profound insight in his awkward descriptions, insights that have been handed down through the generations. What was the situation of a person like Jacob Boehme? Giordano Bruno, his contemporary, stood among the most advanced men of his time, whereas we see in Jacob Boehme's case that he obviously read all kinds of books that are naturally forgotten today. These were full of rubbish. But Boehme was able to find a meaning in them. Awkwardly and with great difficulty Boehme presents the primeval wisdom that he had gleaned from his still more awkward and inadequate sources. His inward enlightenment enabled him to return to an earlier stage.

If we now look at the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and especially the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, and if we leave aside isolated people like Paracelsus and Boehme (who appear like monuments to a bygone age,) and if we look at the exoteric stream of human development in the light of initiation science, we gain the impression that nobody knows anything at all anymore about the deeper foundations of things. Physics and chemistry have been eliminated from man, and alchemy has become the subject of derision. Of course, people were justified in scoffing at it, because what still remained of the ancient traditions in medieval alchemy could well be made fun of. All that is left is psychology, which has become confined to man's inner being, and a very meager pneumatology. People have broken with everything that was formerly known of human nature., On one hand, they experience what has been separated from man; and on the other, what has been chaotically relegated into his interior. And in all our search for knowledge, we see what I have just described.

In the Seventeenth Century, a theory arose that remains quite unintelligible if considered by itself, although if it is viewed in the context of history it becomes comprehensible. The theory was that those processes in the human body that have to do with the intake of food, are based on a kind of fermentation. The foods man eats are permeated with saliva and then with digestive fluids such as those in the pancreas, and thus various degrees of fermentation processes, as they were called, are achieved. If one looks at these ideas from today's viewpoint (which naturally will also be outgrown in the future) one can only make fun of them. But if we enter into these ideas and examine them closely, we discover the source of these apparently foolish ideas. The ancient traditions, which in a man like Galen were based on inward experiences and were thus well justified, were now on the verge of extinction. At the same time, what was to become external objective chemistry was only in its beginnings. Men had lost the inner knowledge, and the external had not yet developed. Therefore, they found themselves able to speak about digestion only in quite feeble neo-chemical terms, such as the vague idea of fermentation. Such men were the late followers of Galen's teachings. They still felt that in order to comprehend man, one must start from the movements of man's fluids, his fluid nature. But at the same time, they were beginning to view chemical aspects only by means of the external processes. Therefore they seized the idea of fermentation, which could be observed externally, and applied it to man. Man had become an empty bag because he no longer experienced anything within himself. What had grown to be external science was poured into this bag. In the Seventeenth Century, of course, there was not much science to pour. People had the vague idea about fermentation and similar processes, and these were rashly applied to man. Thus arose the so-called iatrochemical school⁷⁷ of medicine.

In considering these iatrochemists, we must realize that they still had some inkling of the ancient doctrine of fluids, which was based on inner experience. Others, who were more or less contemporaries of the iatrochemists, no longer had any such inkling, so they began to view man the way he appears to us today when we open an anatomy book. In such books we find descriptions of the bones, the stomach, the liver, etc. and we are apt to get the impression that this is all there is to know about man and that he consists of more or less solid organs with sharply defined contours. Of course, from a certain aspect, they do exist. But the solid aspect—the earth element, to use the ancient terminology—comprises at most one tenth of man's organization. It is more accurate to say that man is a column of fluids. The mistake is not in what is actually said, but in the whole method of presentation. It is gradually forgotten that man is a column of fluids in which the clearly contoured organs swim. Laymen see the pictures and have the impression that this is all they need to understand the body. But this is misleading. It is only one tenth of man. The remainder ought to be described by drawing a continuous stream of fluids (see Figure 2) interacting in the most manifold ways in the stomach, liver and so forth. Quite erroneous conceptions arise as to how man's organism actually functions, because only the sharply outlined organs are observed. This is why in the Nineteenth Century, people were astonished to see that if one drinks a glass of water, it appears to completely penetrate the body and be assimilated by his organs. But when a second or third glass of water is consumed, it no longer gives the impression that it is digested in the same manner. These matters were noticed but could no longer be explained, because a completely false view was held concerning the fluid organization of man. Here etheric body is the driving agent that mixes or separates the fluids, and brings about the processes of organic chemistry in man.

In the Seventeenth Century, people really began to totally ignore this “fluid man” and to focus only on the solidly contoured parts. In this realm of clearly outlined parts, everything takes place in a mechanical way. One part pushes another; the other moves; things get pumped; it all works like suction or pressure pumps. The body is viewed from a mechanical standpoint, as existing only through the interplay of solidly contoured organs. Out of the iatrochemical theory or alongside it, there arose iatromechanics and even iatromathematics.⁷⁸

Naturally, people began to think that the heart is really a pump that mechanically pumps the blood through the body, because they no longer knew that our inner fluids have their own life and therefore move on their own. They never dreamed that the heart is only a sense organ that checks on the circulation of the fluids in its own way. The whole matter was inverted. One no longer saw the movement and inner vitality of the fluids, or the etheric body active therein. The heart became a mechanical apparatus and has remained so to this day for the majority of physiologists and medical men.

The iatrochemists still had some faint knowledge concerning the etheric body. There was full awareness of it in what Galen described. In van Helmont or Paracelsus there was still an inkling of the etheric body, more than survived in the official iatrochemists who conducted the schools of that time. In the iatromechanists no trace whatsoever remained of this ether body; all conception of it had vanished into tin air. Man was seen only as a physical body, and that only to the extent that he consists of solid parts. These were now dealt with by means of physics, which had in the meantime also been cast out of the human being. Physics was now applied externally to man, whom one no longer understood. Man had been turned into an empty bag, and physics had been established in an abstract manner. Now this same physics was reapplied to man. Thus one no longer had the living being of man, only an empty bag stuffed with theories.

It is still this way today. What modern physiology or anatomy tells us of man is not man at all, it is physics that was cast out of man and is now changed around to be fitted back into man. The more intimately we study this development, the better we see destiny at work. The iatrochemists had a shadowy consciousness of the etheric body, the iatromechanists had none. Then came a man by the name of Stahl⁷⁹ who, considering his time, was an unusually clever man. He had studied iatrochemistry, but the concepts of the “inner fermentation processes” seemed inadequate to him because they only transplanted externalized chemistry back into the human bag. With the iatromechanists he was still more dissatisfied because they only placed external mechanical physics back into the empty bag. No knowledge, no tradition existed concerning the etheric body as the driving force of the moving fluids. It was not possible to gain information about it. So what did Stahl do? He invented something, because there was nothing left in tradition. He told himself: the physical and chemical processes that go on in the human body cannot be based on the physics and chemistry that are discovered in the external world. But he had nothing else to put into man Therefore he invented what he called the “life force,” the “vital force,” With it he founded the dynamic school. Stahl was gifted with a certain instinct. He felt the lack of something that he needed; so he invented this “vital force.” The Nineteenth Century had great difficulty in getting rid of this concept. It was really only an invention, but it was very hard to rid science of this “life force.”

Great efforts were made to find something that would fit into this empty bag that was man. This is why men came to think of the world of machines. They knew how a machine moves and responds. So the machine was stuffed into the empty bag in the form of L'homme machine by La Mettrie.⁸⁰ Man is a machine. The materialism, or rather the mechanics, of the Eighteenth Century, such as we see in Holbach's Systeme de la nature,⁸¹ which Goethe so detested in his youth, reflects the total inability to grasp the being of man with the ideas that prevailed at that time in outer nature. The whole Nineteenth Century suffered from the inability to take hold of man himself.

But there was a strong desire somehow or other to work out a conception of man. This led to the idea of picturing him s a more highly evolved animal. Of course, the animal was not really understood either, since physics, chemistry, and psychology, all in the old sense, are needed for this purpose even if pneumatology is unnecessary. But nobody realized that all this is also required in order to understand the animal. One had to start somewhere, so in the Eighteenth Century man was compared to the machine and in the Nineteenth Century he was traced back to the beast. All this is quite understandable from the historical standpoint. It makes good sense considering the whole course of human evolution. It was, after all, this ignorance concerning the being of man that produced our modern opinions about man. The development towards freedom, for example, would never have occurred had the ancient experience of physics, chemistry, psychology, and pneumatology survived. Man had to lose himself as an elemental being in order to find himself as a free being. He could only do this by withdrawing from himself for a while and paying no attention to himself any longer. Instead, he occupied himself with the external world, and if he wanted theories concerning his own nature, he applied to himself what was well suited for a comprehension of the outer world. During this interim, when man took the time to develop something like the feeling of freedom, he worked out the concepts of science; these concepts that are, in a manner of speaking, so robust that they can grasp outer nature. Unfortunately, however, they are too coarse for the being of man, since people do not go to the trouble of refining these ideas to the point where they ca also grasp the nature of man. Thus modern science arose, which is well applicable to nature and has achieved great triumphs. But it is useless when it comes to the essential being of man.

You can see that I am not criticizing science. I am only describing it. Man attains his consciousness of freedom only because he is no longer burdened with the insights that he carried within himself and that weighed him down. The experience of freedom came about when man constructed a science that in its robustness was only suited to outer nature. Since it does not offer the whole picture and is not applicable to man's being, this science can naturally be criticized in turn. It is most useful in physics; in chemistry, weak points begin to show up; and psychology becomes completely abstract. Nevertheless, mankind had to pass through an age that took its course in this way in order to attain to an individually modulated moral conception of the world and to the consciousness of freedom. We cannot understand the origin of science if we look at it only from one side. It must be regarded as a phenomenon parallel to the consciousness of freedom that is arising during the same period, along with all the moral and religious implications connected with this awareness.

This is why people like Hobbes⁸² and Bacon, who were establishing the ideas of science, found it impossible to connect man to the spirit and soul of the universe. In Hobbes' case, the result was that, on the one hand, he cultivated the germinal scientific concepts in the most radical way, while, on the other hand, he cast all spiritual elements out of social life and decreed “the war of all against all.” He recognized no binding principle that might flow into social life from a super-sensible source, and therefore he was able, though in a somewhat caricatured form, to discuss the consciousness of freedom in a theoretical way for the first time.

The evolution of mankind does not proceed in a straight line. We must study the various streams that run side by side. Only then can we understand the significance of man's historical development.

• 69. Steiner, The Boundaries of Natural Science, pp. 59–87. Chapters 5 and 6, as well as 7 and 8.
• 70. Johannes Scotus Erigena: also Eriugena, Ireland 810–877 France. Pre-Scholastic philosopher, theologian with extensive comprehension of language. Came from Britain to France. Led the Emperor's Academy in Paris 845–877. Finished his translation of Dionysius the Areopagite in 858. His main work was De Divisione Naturae (Division of Nature), 867. He taught out of a Platonic comprehension. He stood up for the introduction of the hierarchical order in the worldly administration of the church. See also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 71. The copy in Greek originated in the fifteenth century. Dionysius was a member of the Areopag in Athens and a student of the Apostle Paul (Acts 17:34). The setting up of the 3 times 3 hierarchies by Dionysius was adapted as dogma by the Catholic church. His writings in Latin translation were taken up enthusiastically, and were still taken as authentic in the seventeenth century. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Redemption of Thinking, Die Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), GA Bibl. Nr. 96, and Otto Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, Volume II, paragraph 59.
• 72. See Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy.
• 73. Thales of Milet: About 650–560 B.C.
• 74. Heraclitus of Ephesus: About 550–480 B.C.
• 75. See also the personalities spoken of in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 76. Jacob Boehme: Altseidenberg, Goerlitz 1575–1624 Goerlitz. Mystic. His profession was shoemaker. First writing Aurora, 1612. Further writings from 1619 onwards, despite the prohibition. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 77. Iatrochemistry: Name from the Greek “Iatro,” physician. Work with homeopathic remedies in continuation of Paracelsus' (1493–1541) method of healing, in the beginning with retention of his opinion about sulfur, mercury, and salt. The Iatrochemical School was established during Paracelsus' last years of life. It degenerated in the middle of the seventeenth century. In its place stepped Robert Boyle's chemistry (1627–1691), for which iatrochemistry had done good preparation. J.B. van Helmont (1577–1644) was one of the main contributors to Iatrochemical literature.
• 78. Iatromechanics and Iatromathematics. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the proponents of these teachings were nearly all university professors, while iatrochemistry was represented by a union of practicing physicians. But that was true only in the Romantic countries and England. In Italy the main universities were Padua, Pisa, and Rome. There the teachings were rejected on philosophic grounds, because they were based on experience. Germany, where both branches worked hand in hand, was an exception and in a special position.
• 79. Georg Ernst Stahl: Ansbach 1650–1734, Berlin. Physician and chemist, Professor of Medicine. Exponent of Animism and Vitalism and the hypothesis of the “life forces” in his major work Theoria Medico Vera, 1707.
• 80. Offray de la Mettrie: Malo 1709–1751 Berlin. Physician and writer. Main work is L'Homme Machine, published in Leyden 1748.
• 81. Baron Dietrich von Hollenbach: Heidesheim, Rheinpfalz 1723–1789 Paris. His main work Systeme de la Nature ou des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral appeared 1770 under the pseudonym Mira-baud. He only recognized mobile, material atoms, even in regard to thinking, and he based morals on self love.
• 82. Thomas Hobbes: Malmesbury 1588–1679 Hardwicke. English natural philosopher and humanist. Opera Philosophica, 1688. All phenomena in nature and humanity, even the psychological ones, are result of mobility of bodies. The social processes are traced back to mechanical processes. The leading force in this process is the egoism of the single human being. The state which is “crushing everything underfoot,” he called “Leviathan” and said: “The natural social condition is the war of all against all.”

IT WILL be my task today to proceed in our spiritual observations from the foundations which we laid here the last time to such spiritual processes which lie immediately behind the events our age that speak so seriously to our souls.

If we live, in the sense of our spiritual science, with the forces that stream from the so-called dead into the realm in which we dwell during our incarnation, it is possible to observe with great vividness what it is spiritually that under-lies such a difficult time. To be sure, people of the present age have little longing to know the spiritual background of existence. Such lack of interest is closely connected with the fact that his great catastrophe has befallen mankind in the present age. I have drawn your attention to the fact that in the last third of the nineteenth century, in contrast to earlier periods of time, great changes took place in human evolution. I have repeatedly pointed to the end of the seventies of last century and have shown that the end of the seventies was an incisive moment in the evolution of mankind. Very few people of the present time are aware of the fundamental difference in the spiritual life since the end of the seventies as compared to the spiritual life that preceded it. Human beings lack the perspective to see this; for such a thing only becomes apparent if one is able to observe the differences from a certain distance. If mankind is not to expect still greater misery, this perspective must be gained as soon as possible. For, my dear friends, our present age is governed by a strange and very vivid contradiction. I shall describe this contradiction to you, and you will find it very grotesque: There is no time within historical human evolution that is so spiritual as the time in which we live, the time since the end of the 70's. From a historical point of view, we live in the most spiritual of times. Still, it is an undeniable fact that people who consider themselves spiritually developed believe that our time is completely materialistic! As far as life is concerned, our time is not materialistic; but as far as the belief of many people and its results are concerned, our time is certainly materialistic. What do we really mean if we say: “ours is a spiritual time”?

Well, my dear friends, consider the natural-scientific world conception of the present day; compared to it, the natural-scientific world conception of the past is materialistic. Today we have a natural-scientific world conception which rises to the most subtle, the most spiritualized concepts. We see this if we observe existence beyond the immediate physical present.

Most spiritual conceptions today, although well-meant, mean very little to the so-called dead. But the natural scientific conceptions of the present age, if reflected upon without prejudice, mean extraordinarily much to them. It is an interesting fact that so-called materialistic Darwinism is conceived of and employed in a completely spiritual fashion in the realm of the dead. In full life things appear quite different from the way they appear in the frequently erroneous belief produced by what people experience in the body. What do I really mean by pointing to the natural-scientific spiritual? Well, in order to be able to form these concepts, to rise to such thoughts as are developed today in regard to evolution, and so forth, a spirituality is needed which did not exist in previous ages. It is much easier to see ghosts and to take them for something spiritual than to form sharply defined concepts for that which seems to be only material. This has brought about the fact that human beings develop in their soul life the most spiritualized concepts, and then proceed to deny them. These spiritualized concepts are mistakenly believed to relate only to material things. The materialistic interpretation of the present natural-scientific world conception is nothing but a denial of its true character. It has sprung from a tendency to cowardice, pure cowardice! One cannot bring oneself to live with one's feelings in these spiritualized concepts and to grasp this spirituality in the rarefaction needed for the forming of clear-cut concepts about nature. One does not dare to acknowledge that one lives in the spirit when one develops these rarefied, spiritualized concepts. One deceives oneself by saying: these concepts relate merely to material things; for this is not true, it is mere self-deception.

The same holds good for other spheres of life. As I pointed out to you the day before yesterday, {Rudolf Steiner, Das Sinnlich-Uebersinnliche in seiner Verwirklichung durch die Kunst. Not yet translated. Anthroposophic Press, New York.} many artistic creations of the present time show values through this spiritualized, refined feeling which did not exist in the art development of earlier epochs. This change in the spiritual life has been brought about through a quite definite spiritual event which I should like to characterize today from a certain point of view.

At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century, when the middle of that century had not quite been reached, the Archangel Michael gradually rose from the rank of an Archangel to that of a Time Spirit. He began at that time to undergo an evolution which enabled him to work into human life not merely from the super-earthly standpoint, but directly from the standpoint of the earthly. He had to prepare himself to descend to the earth itself, to emulate, as it were, the great procedure of the Christ Jesus Himself, to take his starting point here upon the earth and to be active henceforth from the point of view of the earth. From the forties to the end of the seventies of the last century this spiritual being prepared himself for this task. Thus it may be observed that the period between the forties and the year 1879 presents a significant battle in that super-earthly sphere which borders immediately on the earthly sphere. {See Rudolf Steiner, Geistige Wesen und ihre Wirkungen, Vol. II: Der Sturz der Geister der Finsternis. (Not yet translated) Anthroposophic Press, New York.} This spiritual being whom we call the Archangel Michael had to fight a hard battle against certain opposing spirits. If we wish to understand what actually happened there, we must consider these opposing spirits.

These spiritual beings who had to be fought by the Archangel Michael becoming a time spirit have always affected the life and evolution of mankind; during the past millennia, prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, their task in the spiritual world was to create differentiation among human beings. Those spiritual beings who are the direct followers of the Archangels strive to lead human beings back to the group soul, to spread uniformity over the whole of mankind. If these beings alone had been active, mankind would have become one indistinguishable species, similar to the animal species, but on a somewhat higher level. These spiritual beings, however, against whom the Michaelic principle had to fight had the task of spreading differentiation among mankind, to split humanity into races and peoples; to bring about all those differences that are connected with the blood and with the nerved temperament. This had to happen. They may be called Ahrimanic beings, and we must realize that the Ahrimanic principle was a necessity in the course of mankind's evolution.

Now at time of great significance arrived in the evolution of mankind, beginning with the forties of the nineteenth century. The time arrived when the old differentiations had to vanish, when the divided human race had to be formed into a unity.

You see, the cosmopolitan views which, to be sure, sometimes turned into cosmopolitan slogans in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century are simply a reflection of what occurred in the spiritual world. The tendency exists in mankind to wipe out the various differences which were fostered by the blood and the nerve temperament. It is not a tendency of the spiritual worlds to create further differences among mankind, but it is a tendency of the spiritual worlds to pour a cosmopolitan element over mankind. Although, under the impressions of our catastrophic times, people have little understanding for this, still it has to be stated as a true fact. If this fact, mirrored in the earthly events, is observed in its spiritual background, clairvoyant vision shows that it was the spirit who was to become the time spirit of the modern age that from the forties onward fought against the race spirits, the folk spirits that produced the difference between peoples. What has always been represented by a significant symbol took place here, although at a different stage. The symbol refers also to other stages of evolution, for matters repeat themselves at various stages, and what I am telling you now is only a repetition at a certain stage of a spiritual event that took place at other stages. It is the event that is represented by the symbol of the conquering of the dragon by the Archangel Michael. This conquering of the dragon by the Archangel Michael, which means that the counter-striving powers have been cast out of the realm in which the Archangel Michael rules, took place in a certain sphere, beginning with the forties of the last century. Certain spiritual beings whose task in the spiritual world it was to divide mankind into races and peoples were cast out of heaven down upon the earth. These spiritual beings who up to the forties produced these differentiations among mankind have no longer any power in the region bordering the earthly world. They have been cast down among men upon the earth with everything they could bring with them.

This is what spiritual science designates as the victory of the Archangel Michael over the counter-striving spirits, which took place at the end of the seventies; the pushing down upon the earth of certain spirits resisting him.

Thus, since the end of the seventies, since 1879, we have two things: we have on earth for those who may be said to be of good will—if we understand the expression in a qualified sense—the rulership of the Time Spirit Michael who enables us to acquire spiritualized concepts, a spiritualized intellectual life. We also have on earth the counter-striving spirits who deceive us into denying the spirituality of the present time. If we fight against the materialism of our time, we should be constantly aware of the fact that we must not fight against what is good in our age but against the lies of our age. For the spirits that have been pushed out of heaven down upon the earth are chiefly spirits of falsehood who, as spirits of hindrance, prevent us from looking for the spiritual in our grasp of natural existence.

If one learns to know those human beings who descended to earthly incarnation from the spiritual world after the year 1841 and who have died since, one can indeed see how these things are considered from the other side, as it were. One is then in a position to correct much of that which here in the physical world, is very difficult to see through.

You see, at the beginning of the twentieth century it gradually became apparent how necessary it is to point again to the most varied fields of spirit in life; and those who drew attention to this fact were the human beings who, after the year 1848—more precisely, after 1840—had participated in the hard battle which was carried on by the Archangel Michael in the spiritual world and which ended in 1879 with the casting down of the counter-striving spirits into the life of the earth, where they now are among human beings. One participates in the battle of the Archangel Michael if one rises against these spirits and tries to drive them from the field. {See: Rudolf Steiner, Goethestudien und goetheanistische Denkmethoden. (Not yet translated) Anthroposophic Press, New York.}

Now, there exists a certain law which states that from every point in world history evolution may be traced in two directions: backward as well as forward. If we focus our attention on any point in the historical development of mankind, we may say: At this point of time this or that happened. Now, as time goes on, the events may be observed; but time may also be observed retrospectively. We may go back from 1879 to 1878, 77, 60, 50, and so on, and may then observe the spiritual world in retrospect. The following then presents itself: In the deeper structure of events as they proceed we may discover a repetition of what preceded them. If one expresses something great in a simple way, it may easily sound trivial. But I shall speak simply. If we consider the year 1879, we can proceed to 1880, or we can go back to 1878. If we proceed to 1880, we shall observe in the deeper spiritual structure of that year that what has happened in 1878 is still active within it; behind the events of 1880, there stand, as active forces, the events of 1878, and behind the events of 1881 there stand, as active forces, the events of 1877. As we go back, it is as if the line of time reversed itself, and the events which lie back of a certain point of time placed themselves behind the events which lie ahead of that point of time. Much can be understood if we grasp these things.

Now I beg you to remember that I have for many years spoken about the year 1879, and not only since 1914, which would be cheap. This is important, my dear friends, and I ask you now to make a simple calculation with me. Count back from the year 1879, count back to the year which I have often designated as the other boundary. I have always stated that the battle of which I am now speaking started at the beginning of the forties, around 1840, 1941, count back: 1879, 1868, 1858, 1848, and 8 or 9 years more; this is 38 or 39 years. Now count forward: 1879, 1889, 1899, 1909, 1914, and right up into our days (1918), and you also have 38 or 39 years. If you observe the year 1917, you will find a surprising result. You will realized the deep significance of the occultist's statement that, in starting from an incisive historical event, you will find the preceding spiritual event repeated in the subsequent one. Behind the earthly events of our days there stand the spiritual events that began in the forties and which we designate as the Archangel Michael's battle against the counter-striving spirits. These events stand behind present-day events. We have a repetition today of what took place at the beginning of the forties. You can imagine how differently one looks at the events of our time if one pays attention to this law. One will develop a deeper understanding of events that now pass unnoticed, that do not penetrate into one's soul. One will realize that the battle of the Archangel Michael against the counter-striving powers has, to a certain degree, returned to its starting point.

It is, in general, very difficult to speak to human beings of the present day about these deeper relationships, because they violently reject that which would help them to understand the present time and enable them to act in the proper manner. It is necessary today to rid ourselves of old prejudices and consciously to understand the facts.
For things happen here on the physical plane which are of a much more spiritual nature than events in general. This is connected with the descent of the Archangel Michael into our earth region. Many people speak of this descent. But if they are seriously called upon to take this fact on its true background, then they do not follow, they do not want to follow. Yet it is extremely necessary that a spiritual understanding of the most important impulses of our age lay hold of ever more extended circles of our contemporaries. Therefore it was very important, during all these years of our group meetings, to draw attention to the necessity of not sleeping away the stream of events which in our time is so strongly influenced by the spirit. For to sleep away events is a characteristic trait of our time. People pass by the events as though asleep, and it can be said that the more incisive, the more significant an event is that enters the physical plane, the more human beings sleep through it.

The events of March, 1917—if I may indicate a concrete fact {Outbreak of the Russian Revolution. Abdication of the Czar. (Editor)}—were of tremendous significance and will produce results of such great importance of which mankind does not even dream today; and it is really unbelievable how little understanding exists among people for the necessity of a complete revision of their judgments, of a complete revision of all that people have believed prior to 1914.

On this occasion, I may perhaps be permitted to point to the fact that in 1910 I delivered a number of lectures in Kristiania (Oslo) about the European folk souls. In the first of these lectures you may read that human beings will soon be called upon to understand something about the relations of the European folk souls. {Rudolf Steiner, the Mission of Folk Souls in Connection with Germanic-Scandinavian Mythology. Anthroposophic Press, New York.} The following has been repeatedly emphasized in our lectures: turn your gaze toward the immediate East; what happens there is important for human evolution. How often has this been said! Every one of my listeners has heard it. And in the spring of 1914, in my Vienna lecture cycle about the life between death and a new birth, {Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth. Anthroposophic Press, New York.} I dared to make the emphatic statement that the social life of our time may be compared with a special form of disease, namely, with a carcinoma; I stated that a creeping cancerous disease permeates social life. Naturally, my dear friends, under our present conditions these things cannot be stated in another form; but they must be understood.

We must not think of world events following one another in continuous progression, as historians imagine. They believe that the later event develops out of the preceding one, which has in turn developed out of the one preceding it, and so forth. The prejudice which maintains that the later must develop in the most tranquil fashion out of what preceded it we may leave to those who do not have the sense for reality which is expected of the anthroposophist. We may leave this prejudice to the politicians. Reality, however, is quite different. We must think of the course of events as of a pair of scales in full motion, the scale-beam descending first on the right side, and then on the left. Therefore, the time since the beginning of the forties may be characterized as follows: Great possibilities existed if only the attempt had been made during the period from 1840 to 1914—the year 1879 divides this period into two parts—to prepare in an adequate manner the spiritualization of mankind which is striven for by the Archangel Michael; if the attempt had been made on a larger scale to imbue mankind with spiritual concepts, spiritual ideas. Mankind, however, must depend in our age on its own free will; and if, out of its own free volition, mankind fails to grasp such possibilities, then the scale-beam sinks to the other side. What could have been reached on the spiritual path is now discharged through the blood. What we experience in our catastrophic times is an equalization of the scales. Mankind who has rejected spiritualization must be forced to accept it. This can happen through a physical catastrophe.

This idea may be verified if we place ourselves upon the following firm foundation: We live here in this physical world; but we are awake in this physical world only through our perceptions and our concepts, as I described the day before yesterday. We dream with our feelings and sleep with our will impulses. This is a matter of course for man. But if we familiarize ourselves, through imagination, inspiration and intuition with the spiritual world which is always around us like the air, and in which the so-called dead exist, together with us, in which their impulses are active, then we perceive how life, here in the physical world, is connected with the life of the so-called dead. The dead are able to receive from human hearts only spiritual thoughts.

Recall what I told you the day before yesterday. I said: If a human being dies in his youth, he has, in a spiritual sense, not actually left his family; he has, in reality, remained here. Something of great importance to the dead is connected with this and I beg you to take this very seriously. For the departed one it is not merely a question of being here. For him it is a question of being able to bear this existence. If the dead person is present in a materialistically inclined family which does not cultivate spiritual thoughts, he is constantly oppressed and distressed; the family constitutes a nightmare for him, comparable to the nightmare we experience when we inhale too great an amount of air. Only spiritual thoughts among those with whom he has remained can rid him of this nightmare and make life among them bearable for the departed one.

And again, I told you: If an older person is torn from his family, he takes their souls with him, in a certain respect. He draws them after him; but if they are not permeated by spiritual thoughts, they likewise constitute a nightmare for him.

Now let us consider the following: We can learn a great deal if we observe the sudden death of a human being caused by outer or abnormal inner conditions. Let us say, a human being is slain or shot. In such an instance, death is brought about in a way which is very different from gradual death through illness. Imagine the following case: A human being is shot in his thirty-fifth year; his life is destroyed through outer circumstances. If the bullet had not struck him (certainly, there are karmic connections, but what I am going to say nevertheless holds good) this human being's constitution might have enabled him to live another thirty-five years. He bears within him the constitution for another thirty-five years. This, now, produces a quite definite effect.

My dear friends, if a human being dies by violence with his life forces are still very active, he has tremendously significant experiences at the moment of death. Condensed into one moment, he experiences things which would have been spread over long periods of time. What he could have experienced during the next thirty-five years he now experiences in a single moment. For the important experience in the hour of death is the following: the human being sees in truth his body from outside; he sees the transition it passes through; he sees that it relinquishes the control of the forces it possessed when the soul dwelt in the body, and that it now becomes a nature-being, given over to the nature forces, to the external physical forces. The tremendously significant experience at the moment of death is that the human being then beholds the relinquishing of his organism to the physical nature forces. If a human being suffers a violent death, he is suddenly delivered not only to the normal nature forces, but his organism is treated by the bullet shot as if it were an inorganic, lifeless body; it is completely relegated to the inorganic world. There is a great difference between a slow death through illness and a sudden death through the interference of the external world with the human organism, be it in the form of a bullet or in any other form. In this moment there is a sudden flaring up, a sudden flashing forth of a tremendous amount of spirituality. The flaming up of a spiritual aura takes place, and the one who has passed through the portal of death looks back upon this flaming up. This flaming up greatly resembles the event that takes place only when the human beings devote themselves to spiritual concepts. These are values, my dear friends, which are interchangeable. It is extremely interesting to see the following similarity: the departed one perceives from the other side the sentient thought which arises in a person when he enjoys or creates an image, a painting, that is born out of spiritual life; the departed one then sees how similar this sentient thought, seen from the beyond, is to the sensation a person has (who is of course unconscious of this) when he suffers an external injury, let us say, to his arm and pain arises from it. There is a great relationship between the two events; one may take the place of the other.

Now you will grasp the karmic connection between the two events. Naturally, quite a number of people knew the “aspect of the stars” when the forties of last century approached. If occultists wish to designate such an event as the battle of the Archangel Michael with the dragon, they do so by using the technical expression: “this is the aspect of the stars.” There existed at that time quite a number of people who knew that such a significant event was taking place. There were some who wanted to take precaution, but one of the scales of the balance was too heavily weighted: the materialistic inclination was too strong. Thus the worse measures possible were restored to. People who understand the signs of the times were fully aware of the fact that spiritual life must enter mankind. If this spiritual life had entered mankind from the beginning of the forties onward, mankind would have been spared many catastrophes. For what took place would have taken place, but in another form. What is karmically necessary happens; but it may occur in various forms. This must always be kept in mind.

I shall express myself more explicitly. There are two ways of thinking about what ought to happen in the social sphere or any other field. We may present a program, may form programmatical concepts; we can think out how the world should develop in a certain field; this can be presented in beautiful words. We can swear by these words, take them as dogmas, but nothing will result from them, nothing at all! We might have the most beautiful ideas about what ought to happen, but nothing will come of them. Ideas, however beautiful, need not result in anything. Thought-out programs are the most worthless things in life. In contrast to this, we can do something else, and many a person does it without any special clairvoyance. We may, simply through a naive, intuitive knowledge of the condition of the times, ask ourselves: What is bound to happen in the next twenty or thirty years? What is it that in our time wishes to become reality? Then, if one has discovered what will inevitably happen, one can say to oneself: Now we can choose; people can either come to their senses and guide the course of events in the direction it must take in any case: then matters will turn out well. Or they can fail to do this by being asleep and simply allowing matters to run their course: in which case that which must take place will be brought about by catastrophes, revolutions, and cataclysms. No statistics, no programs, however well thought out, are of any value. Only the observation of what wills to appear out of the hidden depths of the times is of value. This must be taken up into our consciousness; by this the intentions of the present must be governed.

In the forties of the last century the many people who adhered to programs have won the victory over the few who understood what I have just stated. From this sprang all kinds of attempts to spiritualize mankind: spiritism (spiritualism,), for instance, is one of them; it is an attempt to spiritualize and reform mankind with inadequate means; to reveal the spiritual worlds materialistically. Even our thinking may be materialistic. It is a materialistic thought that says: This or that particular group of mankind is in the right. Why do the spiritual powers not intervene and help them vindicate their rights?—How often do we hear people say today: Why do the spiritual powers not intervene? The day before yesterday I gave an answer to this in a more abstract form: Mankind today must rely on its own freedom. Those who ask: why do the spiritual powers not intervene? proceed from the assumption that ghosts instead of men should make politics. That would certainly be easy progress if ghosts instead of human beings were to introduce the necessary reforms. This, of course, they do not do, because human beings must rely on their freedom. The expectation of help from ghosts is what most decidedly confounds human beings; it draws their attention away from what ought to happen. Thus the period in the life of mankind in which refined spiritual concepts were gradually developed was precisely the time when mankind was exposed to the strongest materialistic temptations. Human beings simply are unable to distinguish between refined spiritualized concepts and sensations on the one hand and that which, on the other hand, approaches them as temptation and counter-acts the grasping of the spiritualized element within them. Therefore, because people did not comprehend at the right time how evolution must proceed, our catastrophic age, our present difficult times have become a necessity. Without the present hard experiences mankind would have sunk still deeper into doubt of itself. To be sure, it would have developed spirituality, but it would have rejected it to a still greater degree.

This is part of the background of historical development. I should like very much, indeed, to throw light from this background upon much that lies in the foreground; but you will appreciate the reasons why this cannot be done in our present age. I must leave it to the individual to illuminate for himself what lives in our immediate present, seen from the background I have just described.

You see, my dear friends, the sleeping away of events which I have characterized causes an inward overlooking of the sharp angles and contours of life. But if we overlook the sharp angles and contours of life, compromises arise. Now, there may be times which are suitable for compromises. The time that preceded the forties of the nineteenth century was one; but this is not true of our time. Our time demands that we see things as they are, with all their angles and contours, in sharp relief; but it also arouses in the human soul the urge—just because of the presence of these sharp angles and contours—to close its eyes sleepily to them. What I have just stated may be observed even in regard to the greatest, the most significant events in human evolution.

In regard to the greatest event in world history, human evolution has brought about just these angles and contours! Indeed, even in regard to the greatest event of world history, namely, the Mystery of Golgotha. We know all the observations made in the course of the theological development of the nineteenth century concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. From the time Lessing began to speak about the Mystery of Golgotha right up to the time of the theologian Drews, all kinds of statements have been made regarding it. And it may well be said that the whole theological development of the nineteenth century offers complete proof of the fact that people have entirely forgotten how to understand the mystery of Golgotha. But there are some very interesting publications concerning the Christ Jesus. Very interesting publications, indeed! Take for instance, a Danish one {Emil Rasmussen Jesus, A Comparative Psychopathological Study.} This Danish publication is written entirely from the standpoint of the modern natural-scientific thinker. The author states: I am a psychologist, a physiologist, and a psychiatrist; I observe the Gospels from this standpoint. And at what conclusion does he arrive? Quite factually, in the sense of modern psychiatric judgment, he arrives at the following one: The picture which the Gospels sketch of the Christ Jesus is a pathological one. We can only conceive of the Christ Jesus as a person suffering from insanity, epilepsy, morbid visions, and similar conditions; he possesses all the symptoms of a serious mental illness.—If one reads the most important passage of this book to people, as I have recently done, {See: Rudolf Steiner, Geistige Wesen und ihre Wirkungen (Spiritual Beings and Their Effects), Vol. IV, first lecture (not yet translated) Anthroposophic Press, New York.} they are shocked. This is comprehensible; for, if what they consider sacred is described as a pathological case, people are horrified. But what are the real facts in the matter? My dear friends, the facts are as follows; Among the great number of dishonest compromisers one arose who takes his stand completely upon the natural-scientific viewpoint; he makes no compromises whatsoever but states: I am a scientist: therefore I must speak as I do; for these are the facts.—If people would place themselves honestly upon the standpoint of natural science, they would have to hold such views. There are these sharp angles and contours from which they cannot escape. They cannot escape unless they forsake the natural-scientific standpoint and go over to the spiritual-scientific standpoint: in this case they will remain honest,—or they may choose to remain honest upon the natural-scientific standpoint; then they are obliged to observe matters, without compromising, in the way of such a scientist who, although entirely honest in his field, is thoroughly limited in his views and does not try to conceal his limitations. He is thoroughly limited, but consistent. This has to be understood. If people would see today what must of necessity result if certain things are consistently carried through, they would see life without compromise.

Someone recently handed me an interesting slip of paper mentioning a book that is already known to me, but since I do not have it with me here, I can only read you what is written on this slip of paper. It was handed to me in order to show me what things are possible today.

“Anyone who has attended high school will remember the unforgettable hours when he had to ‘enjoy’ in his studies of Plato the conversations of Socrates with his friends. Unforgettable because of the fabulous boredom which was engendered by these conversations. He will perhaps remember that these conversations of Socrates struck him as extremely stupid; but, of course, he did not dare utter this opinion, for after all, the man in question was Socrates, ‘the greatest philosopher.’ Alexander Moszkowski's book, Socrates the Idiot, (published by Heysler & Co., Berlin) completely does away with the unjustified overestimation of the good Athenian. In this small, entertainingly written book, the historian Moszkowski undertakes to divest Socrates thoroughly of his philosophical honors. The title, Socrates the Idiot, is to be taken literally. We shall not go wrong in assuming that this book will call forth scientific discussions.”

Now, you will think it dreadful that such things are written. But I do not find it dreadful at all. I think it is self-evident and quite honest of Moszkowski; for, according to his concepts and sentiments, he cannot do otherwise, if he wishes to remain consistent, than to call Socrates an idiot. In doing so he is more honest than many others who, in keeping with their views, should call Socrates an idiot, too, but who prefer to make compromises instead.

I do not need to say, my dear friends, that you should not go out now and spread the news that I am in agreement with Moszikowski when he declares Socrates to have been an idiot. I hope that you understand what I really mean.

But I must acknowledge the fact that people arrive at certain judgments in our time because they make dishonest compromises. It is impossible to think about soul-pathology as modern psychiatrist do and not write a book such as that by the Danish author concerning the Christ Jesus. It cannot be done. One is dishonest if one does not either reject these concepts and replace them by spiritual concepts, or take the standpoint that the Christ Jesus was a mental case.—If one is acquainted with the views of such people, if one knows Moszkowski's opinion concerning the whole structure of the universe, his peculiar views about the theory of radiation and the theory of the quantum, one can appreciate why he, if he wishes to remain honest and consistent, must consider Socrates and also Plato idiots.

What is especially necessary for mankind is the rejection of compromises. Human beings should not make compromises, at least not within their souls. It is very important to consider this as a demand of our age, for it belongs among the most significant impulses of the Time Spirit, Michael, to pour clarity, absolute clarity into human souls. If one wishes to follow the Archangel Michael, it is necessary to pour clarity into human souls, to overcome sleepiness. This sleepiness arises in other spheres also, but above all it is an absolute necessity today to gain insight into the consequences of things. In previous ages this was different. During the centuries prior to the Michael age, in which European mankind was governed by the Archangel Gabriel, the compromises which human beings made in their thinking were lessened by the influence of the spiritual world. Michael is the spirit who works, in the most eminent sense, with the freedom of man. Michael will always do what is necessary. You must not believe that Michael fails to do the right thing. In the unconscious regions of the soul of every human being there is today, sharply outlined, every contour and angle of the spiritual life. It is there. Anyone who is at all capable of bringing to the surface what exists in the depths of the soul life as latent visions knows what it is that lives today in the souls as discrepancies and unrelated facts. He knows that in the souls there live side by side the modern materialistic psychiatry which does not shrink from seeing an epileptic in the Christ Jesus, and even the acknowledgment of the Christ Jesus. Anyone who is at all capable of raising these things into consciousness becomes aware of these facts. It would be interesting if a good painter, with a real understanding of our present time, would paint “Christ, seen from the point of view of a modern psychiatrist,” depicting it expressionistically. The result would be very interesting if the painter had a real understanding of what takes place at the present time in the depths of human soul life.

You see, in our time we have to plumb the depths if we wish to grasp what takes place at the surface of existence. But one can understand, on the other hand, that people are seized by a certain cowardice and discouragement if they are to approach the indicated matter.

This is the other quality necessary today: courage, even a certain audacity, in perceiving, in thinking; an audacity that does not dull our concepts but makes them highly acute. Everything that has to be said today may be found in outer events; the spiritual researcher simply describes it more precisely because he sees it against its proper background. And if the spiritual researcher then describes this background, the outer events will corroborate all the more what has, for example, been indicated today.

Many people ask: “What shall I do?” It is so obvious what one should do! One should open one's eyes! One's spiritual eyes, to be sure. If one opens one's eyes, the Will will follow. The Will depends upon our life situation. It is not always possible in one's particular circumstances, according to one's karma, to do the right thing; but one must try to open one's eyes spiritually. Today, however, the following often happens: If one tries to impart to people in words what is necessary for the present age, they quickly close their eyes, they swiftly turn their minds away form it. This is the descending of the scales on the other side.—What I am saying here might be considered a criticism of our age, but this is not my intention. My purpose is to draw attention to the impulses that must enter human souls, human minds out of the spiritual world, if we wish to get beyond the catastrophic times in which we live. As I have stated, it is not possible to enter into concrete details. Each of you can do that for himself.

Translated by Alice Wulsin

Anyone who follows the evolution of the human spirit over the course of centuries, or perhaps millennia, will come to feel that this human spirit moves on to ever new achievements in the realm of knowing and in the realm of doing. There is no need to place too much emphasis on the word progress, for in the dismal time that has now befallen humanity this might call forth bitter doubt in many. If we observe this evolution of the human spirit, however, something else makes a clear impression on us, namely, that the forms and configurations taken by man's striving spirit vary essentially from century to century. And since today in our studies we are chiefly concerned with a striving for knowledge that wishes to penetrate humanity's evolution in a new way, we need only bear in mind, by way of example, how such conceptions, which are to some extent in conflict with the old ones, have difficulty gaining access to evolving humanity.

We should continually recall, for example, how difficult it was to bring the Copernican world view into people's habits of thought, habits of feeling—indeed, in certain realms this took centuries. This Copernican world view had broken with what people for a long time believed necessary to maintain as the truth about the structure of the universe on the basis of their sense perception. Then came the time when a person could no longer rely on what the eye saw as the rising and setting of the sun, as the sun's movement. He had to accept that, contrary to the visual appearance, the sun in a certain way, at least in its relation to the earth, stands still. Human habits of thought and feeling did not easily accommodate themselves to such sudden reversals of knowledge.

In the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to which our considerations this evening are devoted, we have to do with an even greater reversal of this kind. Those who believe themselves convinced on firm scientific grounds of the content of this spiritual science also believe it necessary for it to have a decisive influence now and in the further evolution of human thinking, sensing, and feeling. It could also be said, if you will allow me these few introductory words, that the introduction of something like the Copernican world view was a matter of dealing with countless prejudices, with traditional opinions. People believed that if anything else were to supersede these it would upset all kinds of religious conceptions and things of that kind.

Many other objections concerning what we are to discuss this evening get in the way. Here the problem is not simply the prejudices such as those that confronted the Copernican theory, for example. In this case there is also the problem that in our time many people, indeed the majority of those considering themselves enlightened and cultured, not only bring with them their prejudices and preconceptions; they are actually ashamed of having to take seriously the realm about which anthroposophy has to speak. Such an individual feels he has to apologize not only to the world in general but to himself if he admits that it is possible to know about the things that are to be spoken of today in as thoroughly scientific a way as about the outer structure of nature. He believes that he has to regard himself as foolish or childish.

These things must be considered if we are to speak today about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Anyone speaking out of knowledge of this science knows the objections that must arise today by the hundreds and thousands. He already knows these objections, because doubt is felt today not only concerning the specific truths and results of this spiritual science; there is also doubt that knowledge of any kind can be acquired concerning the realm with which anthroposophy occupies itself. The possibility of developing conceptual beliefs in the soul, general conceptual beliefs about the realm of the eternal, is certainly still acknowledged as justified by many today; but it is generally considered something dreamy or sentimental to believe that a really factual knowledge can be developed about the facts that can be drawn from the sense world concerning the immortal and eternal in the nature of the human being. This is particularly the case among those who believe themselves to be forming their judgments out of the presently recognized mode of scientific conception.

This evening we will have nothing to do with the dreamy and sentimental. We will rather be dealing with a realm in which you could say that the student, particularly the scientific student, shrinks from its first conditions. I would like to touch very briefly on the fact that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has no wish to be sectarian. It is completely misunderstood by anyone who believes that it wishes to arise in the way some new kind of religious faith is founded. It has no such wish. It wishes to arise today as a necessary result of the world view brought by natural scientific development, a general, publicly accepted conception among the widest circles of humanity. This natural scientific development today supplies so many concepts, which are in their turn the source of feelings and sensations. It provides the concepts for the most widely held world view. This natural scientific mode of observation sets itself the task of examining and explaining what is yielded to the outer senses, of examining what is accessible to human understanding by way of the natural laws about facts given to the outer senses.

If only one takes a quick look at what is living, it is possible to see how everywhere today natural science must consider origins, going back to what the construction of the seed reveals concerning growing, becoming, flourishing. (Though this is more prevalent in other realms, it is most clearly apparent in the realm of the living.) If the natural scientist wishes to explain animal life or human life in this sense, he goes back to birth, he studies embryology, he studies that from which growing and becoming evolve. The natural scientist returns to birth, to the beginning of what unfolds before the senses. And when natural science seeks an explanation for the world, it goes back with various hypotheses—with the foundations laid by geology, paleontology, with what the individual branches of natural science can reveal—forming conceptions out of this about the birth of the universe's structure, you could say. Even if one or another may have doubts about the justification for such a way of thinking, it is always being striven for.

The thoughts are well known that people have presented in order to fathom, if not the beginning of earthly evolution, at least far distant epochs (those epochs, for example, before the human being walked the earth) in order to explain in some way out of what went before, out of what lay in a germinal state, what follows, the consequences that the human being takes in of his surroundings through his senses. The whole Darwinian theory, or, if one wishes to leave that aside, the theory of evolution, is based on the search for origins, looking for the emergence of something out of something else, I would say that everywhere we find this thought of going back to youth and birth for explanations.

Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense finds itself in another position. And by its point of departure it calls forth a vague opposition. Opposition without people being conscious of it; one could say that it calls forth an unconscious opposition, an instinctive opposition. Such opposition is often much more effective than the opposition that is clearly recognized, clearly thought through. In order to arrive at conceptions at all, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must not begin now with general, hazy concepts of spirit; to arrive at spiritual facts, it must make death its starting point. It thereby stands from the outset, you could say, in fundamental opposition to what is preferred today, namely to proceeding from birth, youth, growth, and the progress of development. Death encroaches upon life. And if you keep in touch with contemporary scientific literature, you can find everywhere that the conscientious scientist holds the view that death as such cannot be inserted in the series of natural scientific concepts in the same sense as other concepts.

The spiritual scientist must make death his actual starting point, death, the cessation, actually the opposite of birth. How death and all that is related to it encroaches upon life in the widest sense is the basic question. Death terminates what is perceptible to the senses; death dissolves what is becoming, what is developing before the senses. By the way that death encroaches on life, it can be conceived of as having no part in what is working and flourishing here in the sense world, springing forth and producing life. This is what yields the opinion that nothing can be known about what is concealed by death, as it were, cloaked by death. (Within certain limits this opinion is perfectly comprehensible, though totally unjustifiable.) And it is actually from this corner of human feeling that the objections rear up their heads, objections that obviously can be brought up against things that are the results of a science still in its youth today. For spiritual science is young, and for precisely these reasons just referred to, the spiritual scientist is in quite a different position from that of the natural scientist, even when speaking about things in the sphere of his own research. The spiritual scientist cannot proceed in exactly the same way as the natural scientist, who poses some fact and then proves it on grounds by which everyone is convinced: that it can be seen. The spiritual scientist, however, speaks about what cannot be perceived by the senses. Hence, in speaking about the results of his research, he is always obliged to indicate how such results can be reached.

There is a rich literature concerning the realm about which I will be speaking with you this evening. Believing themselves called upon to do so, critics constantly raise the objection when reading my writings, for example, that the spiritual scientist maintains such and such a thing but gives no proof, although this actually shows only how superficially things are read! He does offer proof, but in a different way. To begin with, he tells how he arrived at his results; he must first indicate the path into the realm of facts. This path is generally unknown, because it is not the customary one for today's habits of thinking and feeling. It must first be said that the spiritual investigator is forced by his investigation to conclude that with the methods and procedures by which the ordinary scientist comes to his brilliant results (not rejected by the spiritual scientist but admired) we do not arrive at the super-sensible. It is precisely this experience, namely, the very limitations of the methods of natural scientific thinking, from which the spiritual scientist makes his start. This is not done, however, in the way so prevalent today, which is to declare that certain things, beyond which the ordinary scientist does not go, are the limits of human cognition. No, it is done in such a way that an attempt is made to come to definite experiences that can be attained only at these limits. I have spoken about these boundaries to human cognition particularly in my most recent written work, Riddles of the Soul.

Those people who have not taken knowledge as something that falls into their laps from outside, those who have wrestled with knowledge, wrestled with truth, have always at least certain experiences at these limits of human cognition. Here it must be noted that times change, that the evolution of humanity undergoes changes. Not so very long ago, the most outstanding thinkers and those struggling for knowledge, when they stood before boundaries of this kind, thought that one cannot go beyond these boundaries, that one must remain there. Those of you in the audience who have often heard me speak here know how little it is my habit to touch on personal matters. When the personal has a connection in any way with the question under consideration, however, one may venture to refer to it briefly. I may say that what I have to say about experiences of this sort at the boundaries of cognition is the result of more than thirty years of spiritual research. And it was more than thirty years ago that these very problems, these tasks, these riddles that arise at the boundaries of cognition, made a significant impression on me.

From the many examples that can be cited about such boundaries, I would like to take one that has been referred to by a real wrestler with knowledge, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the famous aesthetician who was also a philosopher of distinction, though perhaps little known during his lifetime and soon forgotten. A decade or so ago Friedrich Theodor Vischer wrote a very interesting treatise about a book, also very interesting, written by Volkelt concerning dream fantasies. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the course of this treatise, touched on a variety of subjects of no further interest to us here. But I would like to quote one sentence, a sentence that may perhaps be passed over in reading but a sentence that can pierce like lightning into the human heart and soul when these are permeated by a striving for knowledge, a true inner striving for knowledge. It is the sentence that burst upon Vischer when he was reflecting, meditating upon the nature of the human soul. Out of what he had gleaned about the human being from contemporary natural science, he deduced that the human soul cannot be merely in the body; this much is clear; but it is just as clear that it cannot be outside the body.

Here we have a complete contradiction, a contradiction that cannot easily be resolved. It is a contradiction that poses itself with immutable necessity if an individual is wrestling for knowledge in all earnest. Vischer was not yet able for the time was not sufficiently ripe—to press on from what we might call his position in knowledge, at these boundaries of knowledge, to press on from cognition in the ordinary sense of the word to inward experience of a contradiction of this kind. Yet from all directions today, from the most knowledgeable people, we hear a particular conclusion when they come up against such a contradiction. (There are indeed hundreds and hundreds of such contradictions du Bois-Reymond a physiologist of great intelligence, has spoken about only seven world riddles, but these seven can be multiplied by hundreds.) Our contemporary man of knowledge says that from this point on human cognition is able to go no further. He says this for the simple reason that at the boundaries of human cognition he cannot determine to go on from mere thinking, from mere mental activity, to experience.

It is necessary to begin at a place where such a contradiction obstructs the way, a contradiction not ingeniously thought out but one that is revealed by the riddle of the world; we must seek to live with such a contradiction again and again, to wrestle with it in everyday life, to immerse the soul in it entirely. We must have no fear while immersing ourselves in this contradiction (and a certain inner courage of thought is part of this), we must have no fear that this contradiction will be able to split asunder the conceptual powers of the soul, or that the soul will not be able to penetrate through it, and so on. I have described this very struggle at such boundaries in detail in my book, Riddles of the Soul.

When an individual comes to such a boundary with his whole soul, instead of with mere mental images, with mere clever thinking and mental strategies, he progresses further. He does not go further on a purely logical path, however, but on the path of living knowledge. I would like to describe what he experiences by means of a comparison, for the paths of the spiritual investigator are really experiences of knowledge, facts of knowledge. Language today has not yet acquired many words for these things, because words have been coined for what is acquired by outer sense perception. Hence what stands clearly before the eye of the spirit can often be expressed only by means of comparison. When we live into such contradictions, we feel as if we were at the border where the spiritual world breaks in; this is not to be found in sense-perceptible reality, where indeed it breaks in but does so from outside, as it were.

Now, whether or not this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer, sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs. I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an individual face to face with the spiritual world.

It may be said that a systematically presented spiritual science, which is fully entitled to be called scientific, is something new in the progress of knowledge in human evolution. It is not new, however, in every respect. The struggle for it, the striving after it, is to be seen in the outstanding individuals of knowledge from the past. I have referred to one of these when I mentioned Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I would like to show from his own comments how he stood at such a border of knowledge, how he remained there, never making the transition from being inwardly stirred to actually breaking through the boundary to the spiritual sense of touch. Here I would simply like to read you a passage from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's works, in which he describes how he came to such a boundary where the spirit breaks through into the human soul in the course of his wrestling with natural scientific knowledge. This was at the time in which materialistically directed natural science posed many riddles for those struggling for knowledge in real earnest. Countless people claimed that the soul cannot be said to be anything but a product of material activity.

Here are his words: “No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain—so say our opponents. We reply: There would be no nerve center, no brain had they not been prepared for by countless stages from below upward; it is easy to speak mockingly of those who say that there is an echo of the spirit in granite and limestone. This is no harder than it would be for us to ask sarcastically how the protein in the brain rises to the level of ideas. Human knowledge cannot discriminate between stages. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, beneath which the spirit must be slumbering, stands there as such a perfect counter-blow of the spirit that we bruise ourselves against it.”

Please take note of how this wrestler for knowledge describes how we bruise ourselves! Here you have the inner experience of bumping against something by one who wrestles for knowledge: “It is a forcible separation with the appearance of such absoluteness that with Hegel's ‘differentiation’ and ‘non-differentiation’ (ingenious as this formula is, though it says as good as nothing) the steepness of the apparent dividing wall is concealed. One finds the right appreciation of the cutting edge and the impact of this counter-blow in Fichte, but no explanation for it,”

Here we have a man's description of his struggle for knowledge in the time before there could be a decision, a spiritual scientific decision, not merely to come to this blow and counter-blow but to break through the dividing wall into the spiritual world. I can speak about these things only in principle here; you will find them described in detail in my books. Particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, you will find all the details concerning what the soul must take upon itself in the way of inner activity and inner exercise (if I may use the expression) in order really to transform what is undifferentiated in the soul into spiritual organs able to behold the spiritual world.

A great deal is necessary, however, if an individual really wishes to make investigations on this path. So much is necessary just because in our age, due to the habits cultivated in the natural scientific sphere, in the sphere of the natural scientific world view, habits that are perfectly justified in their own field, a particular way of thinking has taken root in human life, a way that is opposed to the one leading to the spiritual world. Thus it goes without saying that from the side of natural science things are heard that demonstrate an utter lack of desire to know the actual facts about the spiritual world.

I will give just one example (as I have said, you can find more exact information in the books I have mentioned) of how the human being has to make every effort to acquire a totally different way of conceiving things. In ordinary life people are satisfied with concepts, with mental images of which it may be said that these concepts, these mental images are such that they offer a likeness to some external fact or object. This cannot satisfy the spiritual investigator. Even mental images, concepts, become something totally different in his soul from what they are due to modern habits of thinking. If I may use another comparison, I would like to show how the spiritual investigator stands today in relation to the world. Those who are materialists, spiritualists, pantheists, individualists, or monadists, and so on, all believe that in some way they can penetrate the world riddle. They try with definite mental images, concepts, to reach a picture of world processes. The spiritual investigator is totally unable to look on concepts in this way; his attitude toward them must be such that he is always clearly conscious of how, in a concept, in a mental image, he has nothing beyond what can be had in the outer sense world when, for example, one particular side of a tree or some other object is photographed and then another picture is taken from another side, from a third side, a fourth side, and so on. The pictures are different from one another. If combined mentally, they together present the tree as a formed mental image. But it can easily be said that one picture contradicts another.

Just consider how completely different an object looks when photographed from one side or another. The spiritual I investigator looks at the conceptions of pantheism, monadism, and so on as if they were simply different ways of looking at reality. Spiritual reality does not actually reveal itself at all to the life of mental images, the life of concepts, in such a way that it is possible to say that any one concept is a faithful image. We must always go all around the matter, forming manifold concepts from various sides. By this means we become capable of developing a much more flexible inner soul life than we are accustomed to when regarding the outer sense world. By doing this it becomes necessary to make our concepts far more alive. They are no longer simply images, but by being experienced they become much more alive than they are in ordinary life and for the things of ordinary life.

Perhaps you will understand me better if I describe it in the following way. Suppose you have a rose cut from the rose bush; you form your mental image of it. You are able to form this mental image yourself. You will often have the feeling about this mental image that it expresses something real for you, that the rose is something real. The spiritual investigator can never make any progress if he is satisfied with the mental image that the rose is something real. Pictured as a blossom on a short stalk, the rose is not real in itself. It can be real only when on the rose bush. The rose bush is something real. And the spiritual investigator must accustom himself to regarding every individual thing, to remaining conscious in what limited sense an issue is something real. People form mental images of these things, believing them to be something real. When the rose is in front of him on its stalk, the spiritual investigator must feel that it is not real; he must have a feeling for, an experience of, the degree of unreality contained in this rose as mere blossom.

By extending this to our observation of the whole world, however, the conceptual life itself is renewed, and we do not thereby get the crippled, dead mental images with which the modern natural scientific world view is satisfied; we get mental images that are living with the objects. It is true that in proceeding from the present habits of thinking, we at first experience a great deal of disappointment, disappointment that arises because what is experienced in this way differs a great deal from present habits of thinking. When speaking out of knowledge acquired in the spiritual world, much has to be said that seems paradoxical when compared with what is generally said and believed today.

A person today may be very learned in the sphere of physics, let us say; he may be an exceptionally learned person who quite rightly excites admiration by his erudition; but such an individual may work with clear concepts that have not been produced nor worked upon in accordance with what I have described, that is, without endowing the conceptual world with life. I have said something quite elementary, but this elementary statement must in the case of the spiritual investigator be extended over the whole observation of the world. I will offer an example. At the beginning of the century, Professor Dewar delivered a very important lecture in London. This lecture could be said to show in every sentence the great modern scholar who was as well acquainted with the conceptions of physics as a modern physicist can be. From his modern conceptions of physics, this scholar seeks to speak about the final condition of the Earth and about some future condition in which much of what is present with us today will have died away. He describes this correctly, because he bases his lecture on really well-founded hypotheses: he describes how one day after millions of years a condition of the earth will have to arise in which a great drop in temperature will occur; this can be well calculated, and this drop in temperature will bring about changes in certain substances. This can be calculated, and he describes how milk, for example, will not be able to maintain its fluid condition but will become solid; how the white of an egg smeared on a wall will become so luminous that people will be able to read a newspaper by its light alone, since so much light will come from the white of an egg; and many other such details are described. The consistency of things that can sustain hardly any weight today will be materially strengthened so that hundreds of pounds will be able to be supported by them. In short, Professor Dewar gives an imposing picture of the future condition of the earth. From the standpoint of physics there is nothing at all to be said against it, but for anyone who has taken living thinking into his soul, the matter has another aspect. When he turns to the conceptual forms of the kind given by the Professor, an example enters his mind that in its methods and manner of approach is very similar to the Professor's deductions and way of thinking.

Suppose, for example, we were to take a man of twenty-five and observe exactly how certain organs, the stomach for example, change from year to year in the course of two, three, four, five years (today such an observation can be managed; I need only remind you of X-rays). They take on different configurations. We can describe this in the same way that the physicist does when he compares successive conditions of the earth and then calculates what the earth will look like after millions of years. This can also be done in the case of the human being. The changes in the stomach or heart, for example, are observed, and a calculation then made of how this man will look after perhaps 200 years according to these alterations. We get just as well-founded a result if it is calculated what this man will look like after 200 years by taking into account all the individual perceptions. The only thing is that the man will have died long before this! He will no longer be there.

You see what I mean. What is important here is that in a particular case we know from direct experience that calculations of this kind do not correspond with reality, because, when 200 years have passed, the human body with its transformations will no longer be there; yet this same kind of calculation is made in connection with the earth. No heed is paid to the fact that after two million years the earth as a physical being will have been dead for a long time, will no longer be there. Thus the whole learned calculation about this condition has no value at all as a reality, because the reality it is applied to will no longer be there.

These matters are very far-reaching. In the case of the human being you can just as well calculate backward as forward; you might, in accordance with the small changes taking place in two years, calculate how a man looked 200 years ago, but he was not there then either! With this same method, however, the Kant-LaPlace theory was formulated. This theory assumes that there was once a condition of fog, a calculation that was based on our present condition. The calculation is entirely correct, the perceptions are good enough; it is just that the spiritual investigator becomes aware that at the time this primeval fog was supposed to be there, the earth was not yet born. The entire solar system did not yet exist.

I wanted to bring these calculations to your notice to show you how the entire inner life of soul must be raised out of abstractions, how it must immerse itself in a living reality, how mental images themselves must be living. In my book, The Riddle of Human Being, I have made a distinction between conceptions corresponding to reality and those corresponding to unreality. To put the matter briefly, the spiritual investigator must point out that his path is such that the means of knowledge that he uses must first be awakened, that he must transform his soul before being able to look into the spiritual world. Then the results take on a form enabling one to see that the spiritual investigator is not speculating as to the immortality of the soul or whether the soul goes through birth and death. His path of investigation leads him to the eternal in the human soul, to what goes through birth and death; the path shows him what lives as the eternal in the human being. He therefore seeks out the object, the thing, the being itself. If we reach the being, we can recognize its characteristics just as we recognize the color of a rose.

Hence it often appears as if the spiritual investigator were asserting that such-and-such is so. For when he presents evidence he must always indicate by what path he arrived at these things. He has to begin where the other science ends. Then, however, a real penetration is possible into spheres that may be said to take death as their starting point, just as natural scientific spheres take their start from birth and youth. We must simply be clear that this death is in no way merely the final event, as it is ordinarily regarded from the viewpoint of outer sense perception. It is rather something that has its part in existence in the same way that the forces called into life with birth have their part in existence. We do not meet death only through its taking hold of us as a one-time event; we carry the forces of death in us—destructive forces, forces that are continually destroying—just as we carry in us the forces of birth, the constructive forces that are given to us at birth.

To have real insight into this we have to be able to pursue research at a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. Today I am only able to cite the results of such research, of course; I only wish to arouse your interest. Were I to go into all the details of what I am suggesting, I would have to offer many lectures. If an individual is to pursue what has been suggested here, he must approach a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. It is widely believed today, and has been believed for some time, that the human nervous system, the human nerve apparatus, is simply an instrument of thinking, feeling, and willing, in short, an instrument for soul experiences, (Science today has for the most part gone beyond this belief, but the world view of the general public usually remains at the standpoint abandoned by science some decades before.) An individual who develops the soul organs—the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the spirit—as I have described at least in principle, comes to recognize the life of the soul.

Whoever really discovers this soul life knows that to call the brain an instrument of our thinking is much the same as to maintain the following. Let us say that I am walking over ground that has become sodden, and in it I leave my footprints. These footprints are found by someone else, who then wishes to explain them. How does he do this? He assumes that underneath in the earth all kinds of forces are surging up and down, and because they surge in this way they produce these footprints. Of course the forces in the earth have nothing to do with the fact that these footprints have been produced, for I myself left them there, but the traces I left can now be reflected upon. This is the way that physiologists today explain what goes on in the brain, what originates in the brain, because all thinking, all mental activity and feeling correspond to something in the nervous system. Just as my tracks correspond with my footsteps, so something actually in the brain corresponds with the impressions of the soul; but the soul has first to leave its imprint there. The earth is just as little an organ for my walking or footprints as the brain is the organ for processes of thinking or mental activity. And just as I cannot walk around without firm ground (I cannot walk on air, I need ground if I want to walk) so the brain is necessary; this is not, however, because it calls forth the soul element but because the soul element needs ground and footing upon which it expresses itself during the time that the human being is living in the body between birth and death. It therefore has nothing to do with all that.

The brilliantly intellectual natural science of today will come to full clarity when this revolution in thinking comes about to which I have referred here. This revolution is more radical than the transition to the Copernican world view from the world view held previously. In face of the real world view, however, it is as justifiable as the Copernican world view was in relation to what preceded it. When we have pressed forward on the path of investigation of the soul, we will find that the processes in the brain, in the nervous system, that correspond to the soul life are not constructive. They are not there so that the productive, growing, flourishing activity is present in the nervous system as it is in the rest of the organism. No! What the soul brings about in the nervous system is a destructive activity. During our waking consciousness outside sleep it is a destructive activity.

Only by virtue of the fact that our nervous system is inserted within us in such a way that it receives constant refreshment from the rest of the organism can there be constant compensation for the destructive, dissolving, disintegrating activity introduced into our nervous system by thinking. Destructive activity is there, activity qualitatively of the same nature as what the human being goes through when he dies, when the organism is completely dissolved. In our mental activity death is living in us continually. You might say that death lives in us continually, distributed atomistically, and that the one-time death that lays hold of us at the end of life is only the summation of what is continually working in us destructively. It is true that this is compensated for, but the compensation is such that in the end spontaneous death is evoked.

We must understand death as a force working in the organism, just as we understand the life forces. Look today at natural science, so thoroughly justified in its own sphere, and you will find that it looks only for the constructive forces; what is destructive eludes it. Hence external natural science is unable to observe what arises anew out of the destruction, not in this case of the body, for the bodily nature is destroyed, but of a soul and spiritual nature, now constructive. This aspect is always lost to observation, being accessible only to the kind of observation I have previously described. Then it becomes evident that, having meanwhile brought our life to this point, the whole activity of our soul does not work only in conjunction with the ground on which it has to develop and which, indeed, it acts upon destructively (in so far as the soul forms mental images, in so far as it is active); instead, the whole of our soul activity is attuned to a spiritual world always around us, in which we stand with our soul-spiritual element just as we stand in the physical, sense-perceptible world with our physical body. Spiritual science is thus striving for a real connection of the human being to the spiritual world that permeates everything physical to the actual, concrete, real spiritual world.

Then the possibility truly arises for a more far-reaching observation of how what is working and weaving within us as soul, working destructively within the limits I described, is a homogeneous whole. What I have called the development of the soul presses on from ordinary consciousness to clairvoyant consciousness. I have spoken about this in my book, The Riddle of Human Being. This clairvoyant consciousness creates the possibility of possessing Imaginative knowledge. This Imaginative knowledge does not yield what belongs to the outwardly perceptible; it yields to the human being himself (I would like to look away from the other world for the moment) what is not perceptible to his senses. To avoid misunderstanding I recently called what can be perceived at first by an awakened knowledge of this kind the body of formative forces. This is the super-sensible body of the human being, which is active throughout the whole course of our life, from birth, or let us say, conception, until our physical death. It also bears our memories, yet it stands in connection with a super-sensible entity, with a super-sensible outer world.

Thus, our sense life with the rest of its consciousness is there as a mere island, but around this island and even permeating it we have the relationship of the human body of formative forces to the super-sensible outer world. Here, it is true, we reach the point of bringing the whole conceptual world (not any different now from the way I have described it) into connection with the physical brain that provides the ground for all this; but we arrive at the insight that the body of formative forces is the carrier of human thoughts, that thoughts develop in this body of formative forces and that in thinking the human being lives in this body of formative forces.

It is different if we go on to another experience of the soul, namely to feeling. Our feeling, our emotions, our passions, stand in a different relationship to our life of soul from that of our thinking. The spiritual investigator finds that the thoughts we usually have are bound up with the body of formative forces. This does not apply, however, to our feelings, our emotions. Feelings and emotions live in us in a much more subconscious way. Thus they are connected with something far more all-encompassing than our life between birth and death. It is not as though the human being is without thoughts in the part of his life about which I am now speaking; all feelings are permeated by thoughts. But the thoughts by which feelings are permeated do not, as a rule, enter man's ordinary consciousness. They remain beneath the threshold of this consciousness. What surges up as feeling is penetrated by thoughts, but these thoughts are more far-reaching, for they are found only when an individual progresses in clairvoyant cognition, when he progresses to what I call the Inspired consciousness (I am not thinking of superstitious conceptions here). You may study the particulars of this in my books.

If we go deeply into what is actually sleeping in regard to ordinary Consciousness (in the same way that from going to sleep to awaking a person sleeps in regard to the ordinary images of the senses) we see that it surges up just as dreams surge up into our sleep. Feelings actually surge up from the innermost depths of the soul; it sounds strange, but it is so. But this deeper region of the soul that is accessible to Inspired knowledge is what lives between death and a new birth. It is what enters into connection with the physical through our being conceived or born, what goes through the portal of death and has a spiritual existence among other conditions until the human being is reborn. Whoever really looks into what is living in the world of feeling with Inspired knowledge sees the human being not only between birth and death but also during the time the soul undergoes between death and a new birth.

The matter is not quite so simple as this, however; it is indeed like this, but it is also shown how forces arise in the soul that make it possible to look upon the feelings, emotions, passions, that make it possible to live in them. Just as in the plant we see what has arisen through the forces of the seed, so we see something that has not arisen with our birth or conception but that has emerged from a spiritual world.

I know very well how many objections can be made to a conception of this kind by those who accept the natural scientific world view. Those who are familiar with this world view will find it easy to say, “Here he comes and like a dilettante describes how the aspects of the soul he wishes to encompass come from a spiritual world; he even describes their special configurations, the colors of the feelings and so on, as if, on the one hand, there were hints in these feelings concerning our life before birth and, on the other hand, something in these feelings that is like the seed of the plant, which will become the plant of the next year. Doesn't this man know,” people will say, “about the wonderful laws of heredity presented by natural science? Is he ignorant of everything that those who created the science of hereditary characteristics have brought about?”

Even if the facts indicated by natural science are entirely correct, it is nevertheless the case that concealed in the emergence of heredity are the forces through which we have been preparing ourselves for centuries and which we ourselves send down. From grandparents and parents, constellations are built up that finally lead to the material result with which we then sheathe ourselves when we leave the spiritual world to descend into the physical. Whoever really keeps in mind the wonderful results of modern research into heredity will find that what spiritual science finds out about the soul (yet in a quite different way, it might be said, in the entirely opposite way) will be fully confirmed by natural science, whereas what natural science itself says is definitely not confirmed in the least by natural science. I can only suggest this here. When we then enter the sphere referred to as that of the will, this totally eludes the contents of man's ordinary consciousness. What does a person know about the processes going on in him when the thought, I want something, shapes itself into a movement of the hand? The actual process of willing is asleep in the human being. Regarding the feelings and emotions it could at least be said that the human being dreams within the human being. This is the reason that the question of freedom is so difficult, because the will is sleeping in relation to the higher consciousness. We come to knowledge about what is going on in the will in clairvoyant consciousness only by reaching the stage of actual Intuitive consciousness. By this I do not mean the vague, everyday consciousness called intuitive, but rather what I refer to in my writings as one of the three stages: Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive cognition.

Here we come into the sphere of the will, into the realm that is supposed to live and work within us. This must first be drawn out of the deep regions of the soul. Then we find, however, that this element of the will is also permeated by thoughts, by the spiritual (in addition, the ordinary thought stands by itself). But in bearing the will within us, there works into this will something in addition to what we have experienced in the spiritual world in our feelings, working between death and a new birth. Something is active there that we have experienced in the preceding life on earth. The impulses of earlier earthly lives work into the will nature of the human being. In what we develop or what we cultivate in our present willing live the impulses for our lives on earth to come. For real spiritual science, then, the whole of human life separates into the lives lying between birth and death and those which, because all physical existence has to be built up out of the world, are experienced in far longer periods in the spiritual world. Out of such lives, out of repeated earthly lives, repeated spiritual lives, the complete human life is composed. This is not some fantasy, it is not a capricious thought, but rather something we find when we learn to turn the eye of the spirit to the eternal, the imperishable, in the human soul.

These things do not preclude human freedom. If I build a house this year in which I will live for the next two years, I will be a free man in this house despite having built it for myself. Human freedom is not precluded by this. One earthly life determines the other that follows. Only through a lack of understanding could this be represented as an infringement on the idea of human freedom.

Thus, in spiritual investigation by making death our point of departure, we gradually arrive at the spiritual facts. If in spiritual investigation one makes death the foundation, just as physical investigation is based on birth and embryonic life, this observation reveals the most varied things in individual detail. I will point to something specific here, because I would not like to remain with the indefinite but rather to quote concrete results of anthroposophical research. In the ordinary life of the spirit we are able to differentiate between the forcible entry of death due to an external cause and death that comes from within through illness or by reason of old age. We are therefore able to distinguish two different kinds of death.

Spiritual investigation that goes concretely into the nature of death discovers the following. Let us take as an example the entrance into life of violent death, be it through accident or some other cause. The entrance of such an event brings about an end to life in this earthly existence. The development of spirit consciousness for the spiritual world after death depends on this one-time entrance of death, just as the consciousness we are able to develop in life depends on the forces given us at birth (in the way that I have described). The Consciousness we develop after death is of a different kind. The consciousness developed here on earth stands on the ground of the nervous system, just as when I walk around on the ground my foundation is the ground. In the spiritual world the consciousness after death has different foundations, but it is definitely a consciousness. If a man dies a violent death this is not something that merely lays hold of his mental images. The mental activity of ordinary consciousness ceases with death, and another Consciousness begins, but this lays hold of his will which, as we have seen, passes over into the next earthly life. The spiritual investigator possesses the means to investigate what can arise in an earthly life if, in a previous earthly life, there has been a violent death.

Now when we speak of such things today, people will obviously condemn this way of speaking as foolish, childish, fantastic. Yet the results are attained just as scientifically (and it is only such results that I present) as the results of natural science. If a violent death intervenes in a life, it shows itself in the following life on earth, where its effect produces some kind of change of direction at a definite period in that life. Research is now being done concerning the soul life, but as a rule only the most external things are taken into consideration. In many human lives, at a particular moment, something enters that changes a person's whole destiny, bringing him into a different path in life in response to inner demands. In America they call these things “conversions,” wanting to have a name for such events, but we do not always need to think in terms of religion. A person on another path of life may be forced into a permanent change of the direction of his will. Such a radical change of the direction of his will has its origin in the violent death of his previous life. Concrete investigation reveals the tremendous importance of what happens at death for the middle of the next life. If death comes spontaneously from within through illness or old age, then it has more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for the next earthly life.

I would like to offer the following example so that you may see that I am not speaking about anything vague here. In fact, I am speaking about details arising in life's conditions that can be gained by definite perceptions. Spiritual investigation, which is something new even for those convinced of the immortality of the human soul, makes us aware that we must not speak in merely a general way about immortality. Instead, by grasping the eternal in the human soul, human life as such becomes comprehensible. All the strange processes that are observable if we have a sense for the course taken by the soul life, for the course of the soul life in the human being, all the wonderful events find their place if we know we are dealing with repeated earthly lives and repeated spiritual lives. In the spiritual world (I say this merely parenthetically) the human being lives with spiritual beings—not only other human beings who are closely connected with him by destiny and have also passed through the portal of death, but with other spiritual beings to whom he is related in the same way that on earth the human being is related to three kingdoms: the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The spiritual investigator speaks of particular individual spirits, particular individual spiritual beings, belonging to a concrete, individualized spiritual world, just as here we speak of individualized plant beings, animal beings, and human beings, in so far as they are physical beings between birth and death. It can be shattering to people when knowledge itself approaches the human soul in a totally different way. It is difficult to speak about these things so that they arise out of the dim depths of the spirit in a new way.

From what I have said you will have seen that knowledge about the spiritual world can be acquired. This knowledge has profound significance for the human soul; it makes the soul something different, as it were. It lays hold of the life of the soul, regardless of whether one is a spiritual investigator or has merely heard and understood the results of spiritual investigation and has absorbed them. It is of no importance whether or not one does the research oneself; the result can be comprehensible just the same. Everything can be understood if we penetrate it with sufficient depth. We only need to have absorbed it. Then, however, when we have grasped it in its full essence, it enters the human soul life in such a way that one day it becomes more significant than all the other events of life.

A person may have difficulties, sorrows, that have shattered him, or joy that has elevated him, or some truly sublime experience. It is not necessary to be indifferent to such experiences to be a spiritual investigator, someone who knows the spirit; one can participate as fully with the feelings as other people do who are not investigators of the spirit. But when someone penetrates with his essential being into what is given the soul by spirit knowledge, and when he becomes capable of answering the question, “What are the effects upon the soul of these spiritual results?”—when a full answer is given to the question of what the soul has become through this spiritual knowledge, then this event becomes more important than anything else in destiny, more important than any of the other experiences of destiny that approach the human being. Not that the others become less significant, but this one becomes greater than the others. Knowledge itself then enters through the human soul life in accordance with destiny. If knowledge thus enters through the human soul life, he begins to understand human destiny as such. From this knowledge comes the light that illumines human destiny.

From this moment on, an individual can say this: that if one has this experience of destiny so purely in the spiritual in this way, it becomes clear how one is placed into life in accordance with destiny, how our destiny hangs on threads spun out of previous lives, previous earthly lives and lives between death and a new birth, which again spin themselves out of this life and into a following life. Such an individual goes on to say that ordinary consciousness only dreams through its destiny; ordinary consciousness endures its destiny without understanding it, just as one endures a dream. Clairvoyant consciousness to which one awakes, just as we awake from a dream to ordinary consciousness, acquires a new relationship to destiny. Destiny is recognized as taking part in all that our life embraces, in the life that goes through all our births and deaths.

This matter should not be grasped in a trivial way, as if the spiritual investigator were to say, “You yourself are the cause of your own misfortune.” That would simply betray a misunderstanding and would even be a slander of spiritual investigation. A misfortune may not have its source at all in the previous life. It may arise spontaneously and have its consequences only in the life to follow and also in the life between earthly lives. We can see again and again that out of misfortune, out of pain and suffering, emerges a consciousness of a very different form in the spiritual world, Meaning enters the whole of our life, however, when we learn to understand our destiny, which otherwise we only dream our way through.

One thing particularly stands out when we bear in mind this knowledge of the spirit. We can no longer say, “If, after death, the soul enters another life, we can wait until this happens. Here we take life as it is offered us in the physical body; we can wait for what comes after death.” The matter is a question of consciousness. We may be sure that what happens after death is connected with the life we undergo in the body. Just as in a certain sense we have the Consciousness of our ordinary waking condition by means of our body, so after death we have a Consciousness that is no longer spatial, no longer built up out of the nervous system, but built up out of what has to do with time, built up out of looking backward.

Just as our nervous system in a way is the buttress and counterpart to our ordinary consciousness between birth and death, so our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is founded on what takes place here in our consciousness. Just as here we have the world around us, so when we are dead we have before us our life as the significant organ. Hence, a great deal depends upon our consciousness in the physical body, which is able to extend into the consciousness we have after death. An individual may be occupied exclusively with physical conceptions grasped by the senses, as often happens in the habitual thinking of the present time; he may take into his consciousness and also in his capacity of memory, in everything playing itself out in his soul, concerns exclusively having to do with ordinary life. Such an individual, however, is also building up a world for himself after death! The environment there is built out of what a person is inwardly. A person born physically in Europe cannot see America around him, and just as he receives what he is born into physically as his environment, so to a certain extent he determines the environment, the place of his existence, through what he has built up in his body.

Let us take an extreme case, though one unlikely to happen. Let us take the case of someone who fights against all super-sensible conceptions, who has become an atheist, someone who doesn't even have any inclination to occupy himself with religion. Now I know that I am saying something paradoxical here, but it is based on good foundations anthroposophically: such an individual condemns himself to remaining in the earthly sphere with his consciousness, whereas another individual who has absorbed spiritual conceptions is transposed to a spiritual environment. The one who has absorbed only sense-perceptible conceptions condemns himself to remaining in the sense-perceptible environment.

Now we can work properly in the physical body because our physical body is, as it were, a sheath protecting us against the environment. And though we can thus work properly in the physical body when we are present in the physical world, we cannot do so if we hold to the physical world after death. We become destructive if we have physical conceptions in our consciousness after death. In speaking of the problem of heredity, I intimated how, when the human being is in the spiritual world, his forces lay hold of the physical world. Whoever condemns himself, by reason of his merely physical consciousness, to hold to the physical world becomes the center of destructive forces that lay hold of what is happening in human life and in the rest of universal life. As long as we are in the body, we are only able to have thoughts based on the sense-perceptible, we are able to have only materialistic thoughts: the body is a defense.

But how much greater a defense than we imagine! It seems strange, but to anyone who perceives the spiritual world in all its connections, one thing is clear: if an individual were not shut off from the surrounding world by his senses, if the senses were not curbed so that in ordinary consciousness he is incapable of taking up living concepts but takes up only those that are lifeless and designed to prevent him from penetrating into the spiritual environment, if an individual were able to make his conceptions active directly and did not have them merely within him after things have already passed through the senses, then even here in the physical world, if he were to develop his conceptual life, his conceptions would have crippling, deadening effects. For these conceptions are in a certain way destructive of everything they lay hold of. Only because they are held back in us are those conceptions kept from being destructive. They destroy only when they come to expression in machines, in tools, which are also something dead taken from living nature. This indeed is only a picture, but one corresponding with a reality. If an individual enters the spiritual world with merely physical conceptions, he becomes a center of destruction.

Thus I have to bring a conception to your attention as an example of many others: we should not say that we can wait until after death, because it depends on a person's nature whether he develops conceptions of the sense world or of the super-sensible world, whether he prepares for his next life in this way or that. The next life is indeed a very different one, but it is evolved from our life here. This is the essential thing that has to be comprehended. In spiritual science, we encounter something different from what is surmised. For this reason I must still make a few remarks in closing.

The belief might easily arise that anyone now entering the spiritual world must unconditionally become a spiritual investigator himself. This is not necessarily so, although in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described much of how the soul must transform itself in order really to be able to enter. And to a certain degree, everyone is able to do this today, but it need not be everyone. What a person develops regarding the soul element is a purely intimate concern; what arises from it, however, is the formation of concepts of the investigated truths. What the spiritual investigator can give is clothed in conceptions such as I have developed today. Then it can be shared. For what a person needs, it is quite immaterial whether things are investigated by himself or whether he accepts them from some other credible source. I am speaking here from a law of spiritual investigation. It is not important to investigate the things oneself. What is important is for us to have them within us, for us to have developed them within. Hence, we are in error if we believe that everyone has to become a spiritual investigator.

Today, however, the spiritual investigator has the obligation (as I myself have had the obligation) to render an account, as it were, of his path of research. This is due not only to the fact that everyone today can, to a certain extent, follow the path I have described without harm, but it is also because everyone is justified in asking, “How have you arrived at these results?” This is why I have described these things. I believe that even those who have no wish to become spiritual investigators will at least want to be convinced of how spiritual investigators arrive at the results that everyone needs today, the results of those who wish to lay the foundation for the life which must develop in human souls for human evolution today.

The time is now over during which, in ancient times, so much was held back regarding spiritual research that brought about the evolution of the soul. In those ancient times, to impart what was hidden was strictly forbidden. Even today, those who know of these mysteries of life (of which there are not just a few) still hold these things back. Whoever has learned about these things merely as a student from another teacher does not under any circumstances do well to pass them on. Today it is advisable to pass on only what an individual himself has discovered, the results only of his own investigations. These, however, can and must be put at the service of the rest of humanity.

Already from the few brief indications I was able to give today it can become evident what spiritual investigation can mean for the individual human being, but it is not only significant for the individual. And in order to address this other aspect in closing with at least a few words I would like to point to something that is taken into consideration only a little today. There is a curious phenomenon to which I would like to direct your attention in the following way. In the second half of the nineteenth century we have seen the rise of a certain natural scientific orientation: the explanation of living beings connected with the name Darwin. Enthusiastic scholarly investigators, enthusiastic students have carried these things through the second half of the nineteenth century. Maybe I have already remarked upon the occurrence of a curious fact. Already in the 1860's, under the guidance of Haeckel, there developed a powerful movement based on a world view. This movement wanted to overthrow everything old and to restructure the entire world view in accordance with Darwinistic concepts. Today there are still numerous people who emphasize how great and significant it would be if there were no longer a wisdom-filled world-guidance but instead if the evolution of everything could be explained out of mechanical forces in the sense of Darwinism.

In 1867 Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) and turned against the purely external view of the world represented by Darwinism. He pointed to the necessity of inner forces, although he did so in an inadequate way, in a philosophical way (he did not yet have spiritual science). Naturally those who were enthusiastic about the rise of Darwinism were ready to say, “That philosopher is simply a dilettante; we don't need to pay any attention to him.” Counterattacks appeared in which the “dilettante” Eduard von Hartmann was ridiculed and which asserted that the true, educated natural scientist need not pay any attention to such things.

Then there appeared a publication by Anonymous, which brilliantly argued against the publication of Eduard von Hartmann. The natural scientists who all thought as they did were in full agreement with this publication because Eduard von Hartmann was completely contradicted in it. Everything that could possibly be gathered from the basis of natural science was there used by the anonymous author against Eduard von Hartmann just as today so much is brought up against spiritual science. This publication was received very favorably. Haeckel said, “For once a real natural scientist has written against this dilettante, Eduard von Hartmann; here one can see what a natural scientist is able to do. I myself could write no better. Let him identify himself and we will consider him as one of us.” To state it briefly, the natural scientists spread a lot of propaganda in relation to this publication, which they welcomed highly because it solidified their position. The publication was very soon sold out, and a second edition became necessary. There the author revealed himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

In that instance someone taught the world a necessary lesson. Whoever writes about spiritual science today and reads what is written against it could without much effort invent everything that is brought against spiritual science. Eduard von Hartmann was able himself to make all the objections that the natural scientists made against him—and he did so.

But I mention this only in introduction to my main point. Oskar Hertwig is one of the most important students of Haeckel who entered upon the industrious, reliable, and great path of natural scientific investigation. Last year Hertwig published a very beautiful book, The Evolution of the Organism. A Rebuttal to Darwin's Theory of Chance (Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie). In this book he points to issues that were already raised by Eduard von Hartmann. Such a matter is pretty much without precedent: already the generation immediately following, which still grew up under the master, had to get away from something that had been believed could build a whole world view; it had even been believed that it could provide elucidation of the spiritual world. A good Darwinist contradicts Darwinism! But he does still more, and that is what is actually important to me.

Oskar Hertwig writes at the conclusion of his superb and beautiful book that the kind of world view that Darwinism represented does not stand there merely as a theoretical edifice; rather it intervenes in the totality of life, encompassing also what people do, will, feel, and think. He says, “The interpretation of Darwin's teaching, which because of its vagueness can have such varied meanings, permitted also a very varied application to other realms of economic, social, and political life. It was possible, just as it was from the Delphic Oracles, to use what was said as desired for specific applications to social, political, health-related, medical, and other questions and to support one's own assertions by basing them on the Darwinistically restructured biology with its immutable natural laws. If these supposed laws are not actually laws, however, could there not exist social dangers—because of their many-sided application in other realms? We had better not believe that human society can for centuries use expressions like, ‘a struggle for existence,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘the most suitable,’ ‘the most useful,’ ‘perfection by selection,’ etc., applying them to the most varied realms of life, using these expressions like daily bread, without influencing in a deep and lasting way the entire direction of idea formation! The proof for this assertion could easily be demonstrated in many contemporary phenomena. For this very reason the decision concerning the truth or error of Darwinism reaches far beyond the confines of the biological sciences.”

What arises in such a theory shows itself everywhere in life. Then a question arises from the realm of spiritual science that also intervenes in life. We live today in a sad time, in a tragic time for humanity. It is a time that has developed out of human conceptions, out of human ideas. Whoever studies interrelationships with the help of spiritual science knows about the connection of what we encounter externally today with what humanity is now tragically experiencing. A great deal is being experienced; people believe that they can encompass reality with their concepts, but they do not encompass it. And because they do not encompass it, because with natural scientific concepts reality can never be encompassed, reality grows over their head and shows them that human beings can take part in such events but that the result is the chaos by which we are surrounded today.

Spiritual science does not arise only through an inner necessity, though this is also true. It would have arisen through this inner necessity even if the outer events did not stand there as a mighty, powerful sign. Such signs are there, however, from the other side: that the old world views are great in the natural sciences but can never intervene formatively in the social, legislative, political spheres in the world, that reality grows beyond human beings, if that is what they want. These mighty signs point to the need for spiritual science, which seeks concepts that correspond with reality, concepts derived from reality and that are therefore also capable of carrying the world in the social and political realms. No matter how much one believes that the concepts customary outside spiritual science today will enable us to emerge out of the chaos, it will not happen; for within the reality the spirit prevails. And because the human being himself intervenes with his actions in this reality, in the social, in the political life, he requires the conceptions, the feelings, the will impulses that are drawn from the spirit in order to come to fruitful concepts in these realms. In the future politics and social science will need something for which only spiritual science can provide the foundation. This is what is particularly important for contemporary history.

In this lecture, which has already been long enough, I can only hope to offer a few impulses. I only wish to point out that what appears today as spiritual science in a systematic order is wanted by the best. If it were only up to me, I would not give a special name to this spiritual science. For more than thirty years I have been working on the greater and greater elaboration of the conceptions regarding reality that Goethe acquired in his magnificent theory of metamorphosis, in which he had already attempted to make the concept living as opposed to dead. At that time this was only possible in an elementary way. If one does not consider Goethe simply as a historical figure, however, if one considers him still as a contemporary, then today the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis transforms itself into what I call living concepts, which then find their way into spiritual science. Goetheanism is the term I would most like to use for what I mean by spiritual scientific investigation, because it is based on sound foundations of a grasp of reality as Goethe wanted it.

And the building in Dornach that is to be dedicated to this spiritual investigation, and through which this spiritual investigation has become more well known than it would have without the building, I would like most to call the Goetheanum, so that one would see that what arises as spiritual investigation today stands fully in the midst of the healthy process of the evolution of humanity. Certainly many today who wish to acknowledge the Goethean way of looking at the world will still say that Goethe was one who recognized nature as the highest above all and who also permitted the spirit to emerge out of nature. Already as a very young man, Goethe said, “Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig” (“She did think and ponders incessantly”), ponders incessantly although not as man but as nature. Even if one is a spiritual investigator one can agree with the kind of naturalism that, like Goethe, thinks of nature as permeated by spirit. And those who always believe that one must stop at the boundaries of knowledge, that one can't get any further there, can be repudiated with Goethe's words. Permit me, therefore, as I conclude here, to add the words that Goethe used concerning another accomplished investigator who represented the later Kantian view:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!

Next to these words Goethe placed others that show how well Goethe knew that when the human being awakes the spirit within himself, he also finds the spirit in the world and himself as spirit:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!
This I hear repeated for sixty years
And damn it but secretly—
Nature has neither core nor shell,
She is everything at once.
Above all simply examine yourself
To see whether you yourself are core or shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist.
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!—
So hoer ich schon an die sechzig Jahre wiederholen
Und fluche darauf—aber verstojileri,—
Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
A lies ist sie mit einemmale,
Dich pruefe du nur zu allermeist,
Ob du selbst Kern oder Schale seist!

Spiritual science wishes to work toward the human being learning to examine himself as to whether he is core or shell. And he is core if he grasps himself in his full reality. If he grasps himself as core, then he also penetrates to the spirit of nature. Then in the evolution of humanity in relation to spiritual science something occurs that is similar to when Copernicus pointed from the visible to the invisible, even of this visible itself.

For the super-sensible, however, humanity will have to stir itself to grasp this super-sensible within itself. To do this one does not need to become a spiritual investigator. One needs, however, to remove all prejudices that place themselves before the soul if one wishes to understand what spiritual science intends to say out of such a Goethean attitude.

I wished to offer today only a few impulses to stimulate you further. From this point of view it is always possible at least to stimulate something, but if one wanted to go into all the details, many lectures would be needed. But I believe these few comments will have sufficed to show that something needs to be drawn out of the evolutionary process of humanity, something that will first awaken the soul to full life. No one needs to believe that this will shrivel the soul, that it will kill off anything, not even the religious life. As Goethe said:

Whoever possesses Science and Art,
Has also Religion,
Whoever possesses neither of the two,
Had better have Religion!

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt
Hat auch Religion,
Werjene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion!

So one can say, as the modern way of thinking is evolving, whoever finds spiritual scientific paths will also find the way to true religious life; whoever does not find the spiritual scientific path will be in danger of losing also the religious path so necessary for the future of humanity!

In order to reach the goal of our discussions, we shall have to endeavour to comprehend the whole nature of the fifth post-Atlantean period in all its deepest significance. It is impossible to come to an understanding of events as deeply important as those of the present day by refusing to enter into concrete matters, and by insisting on considering only general aspects of the universe and man in the way that can be done when one is not concerned with specific circumstances. Unfortunately, I have to stress that an understanding for the deeply important nature of these events is largely lacking today.

For certain quite definite reasons which will become apparent, I yesterday spoke to you about two matters. First of all I told you how the book by Brooks Adams had been launched on mankind, a kite flown to gauge the scale on which such things are understood, at least by a few individuals. This book describes how a nation should be seen as a living organism which comes into being and passes through phases of childhood, youth, maturity and decline in a similar way to a human being, though of course only similar, not identical. Furthermore it is pointed out that at certain stages of their development nations evolve two characteristics which belong together, namely, at one stage those of an imaginative and a warlike nature, and at another those of a scientific and an industrial or commercial nature. So it is assumed that nations which are imaginative and warlike by nature, and others which are scientific and industrial or commercial, live side by side and that in the mutual interplay of such nations the universal development of mankind proceeds.

I told you that this was a one-sided view. How do such views surface in the first place? What does it signify that they are launched on the public?

Views of this kind have made an impression on individuals of a certain standing and therefore have become part of the impulses working today. In such matters it is always a question of disconnecting portions of the overall spiritual knowledge of man's evolution and planting them in the world when needed or wanted. By taking a portion of the total occult picture of mankind's development it is possible to achieve definite things in the service of a particular group and its particular egoism. Knowledge of the whole picture always serves the whole of mankind. Portions taken out of context always serve the egoism of individual groups. It is significant and important to take into account that much that is launched on the public from occult sources is not untrue, but half true, a quarter true, an eighth true, and just because it bears within it a part of the truth it can be used to achieve one aim or another in a one-sided way. That is why those who see through these things gain a significant impression from the fact that, on the part of America, the twentieth century is introduced by the launching of certain ideas in the world via some channels of the bookselling trade serving certain movements which make use of occult means.

The second matter about which I spoke was the remarkable treatise by the noble Thomas More on the best form of public adminstration in the state and on the island of Utopia. Out of this treatise by Thomas More I quoted to you yesterday the passage in which More says through the mouth of a stranger what he wants to say about Utopia. This stranger is presented as a fictitious person; perhaps we shall get to know him better today, but he is not fictitious, as you will see. Out of a certain mood of his time, which I described yesterday, he develops the theme of his feelings and then describes Utopia itself.

This description of Utopia by Thomas More, who flings these particular ideas into the midst of human development at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, is indeed quite remarkable. I have found a number of people who have read Utopia, but not a single one who has read it carefully enough to become even partly aware of all the extraordinary ins and outs and unlikely details the book describes. People simply take the description of the island of Utopia as that of an imaginary island and just read on, page after page. This is understandable in the present age, which is void of all spirituality. But at least one should notice either that Thomas More is describing something incomprehensible, even if it is only meant to be imaginary, or that he must have been a complete idiot, an absolute fool. But such logical conclusions are not drawn in our time; people far prefer to pass over things by means of superficial judgements. I shall now call up before our souls an outline of the content of this work. If you want all the details, you must read Utopia yourselves.

It is significant that Utopia is described as having reached a certain maturity in its institutions. It is expressly stated that the situation being described did not exist in the beginning but has taken 1,760 years to achieve, so that we are now presented with a kind of finished product of some maturity.

The first point to be particularly stressed is that property is common, nobody owns anything. The state is divided into certain families who, if we can put it like this, elect elders, and from among the elders a prince is elected. From time to time a council is called at which public matters are discussed in accordance with the instructions of the different sections of the population. Here we immediately come to an extraordinary arrangement: Public affairs may only be discussed in the prescribed manner. Anybody who privately discusses public affairs is liable to be condemned to death. Further, we discover a highly sensible arrangement: When a suggestion is made during the council meeting it may never be discussed immediately; people must first go home and think about it and it is then brought up again on a subsequent occasion. The one who is telling us the story says that in this way people have an opportunity to think about things, and do not make hasty judgements which they would naturally defend with stubbornness and egoism, just because they have become attached to their own judgement instead of thinking carefully and coming to the right conclusion.

In Utopia everyone has to learn farming while still a child. Later they also learn a trade, usually that pursued by their parents, though they may choose another if they have the skill for it. Work is strictly regulated and nobody need labour for more than six hours a day.

Everything else is also arranged in the best way; there are three hours of work in the morning but, before this, at sunrise, those who wish may gather to learn about spiritual and similar things. Games such as those we know outside Utopia do not exist there. They have, however, a competitive game something like chess, a kind of arithmetical battle, and also another competitive game, again similar to chess, in which the vices and the virtues compete with one another.

Under the supervision of the elected representatives those who are suitable are declared scholars. From among their number the ambassadors and the priests are elected. The dirtiest work is performed by slaves who are either recruited from amongst conquered peoples or else are criminals. Every true Utopian is free. There is another arrangement in Utopia which we, who are not from Utopia, have only just come to enjoy: no journey may be made without permission from the appropriate authority. A passport is necessary for even the shortest journey. Money does not exist. Anything available for consumption is taken to the markets where anybody can help himself. Since this is so well arranged that no one takes more than he needs, there is no necessity to pay anything, for everyone receives what he requires. Money or anything like it is simply not necessary.

The only metal of any value is iron. Please take note of this, for it is very significant. Silver is valued less and gold least of all. Gold is not fashioned into the articles non-Utopians would use it for, but mainly into chains for criminals, and for similar objects. Gold is forged into chains for criminals; they have to wear them as a symbol of their shame. Certain receptacles which one does not mention in polite company are also made of gold, and so on. This had a curious consequence once, when some foreign diplomats visited Utopia and sought to impress the Utopians by festooning themselves in gold chains and jewellery. The Utopians thought them to be of very lowly origin, since such things were only used as toys for children, who discarded them as they grew older. When the diplomats came, the children watched them pass by in the street and said: Look at those old fogeys still wearing children's playthings!

No value is attached in Utopia to the wearing of fine clothes, for they say: How can anyone fancy it matters whether his clothes are made from this wool or that wool? The sheep were the first to wear them. How can you fancy there is anything special in wearing what the sheep first wore naturally!

In Utopia there is also another peculiarity; good and evil, virtue and vice are only judged in connection with religious ideas. A goal to be striven for in life is a kind of epicureanism in the pleasures one enjoys. The more fun one has in life, the more virtuous one is considered to be. The Utopians believe in the immortal soul of man and have a kind of religion of reason. They consider that everybody may use his common sense to see that God rules the world like an overseer, that man has an immortal soul and that after death this will enter into a spiritual world where there will be reward and punishment for virtue and vice.

The Utopians think nothing of jewels for they say: When somebody buys a jewel he has to seek the assurance of the seller that it is genuine; why on earth should something be valuable if you cannot see with your own eyes whether it is a genuine or a counterfeit jewel? This could only happen in Utopia. Hunting is also scorned as something undignified. Only butchers are allowed to hunt, and theirs is not an esteemed profession.

The man who tells all these things explains that he himself introduced the Utopians to Greek literature and art and that they proved to be extraordinarily intelligent. Indeed their language seems to have affinities with Greek, and their culture is unusual in that it seems to remind one of that of Greece mingled with something of Persia. The manner in which husband and wife are selected I shall not describe for reasons which you will understand if you read the book. There are no lawyers in Utopia; they are considered to be the most harmful people. Contracts are not entered into because the Utopians believe that if someone wants to keep an agreement he can do so without a contract, whereas if he does not, he can break it even if he has a contract.

In war, they avoid bloodletting if at all possible; it is considered the most shameful thing. They say: If one spills blood in war, one is no better than wolves and tigers. Other methods must be sought, for man has intelligence. Only in absolute extremity, if there is no other hope, will they spill blood. They set about the matter of making war on another nation by sending out scouts whose task it is either to bring about confusion among the enemy so that they start to quarrel among themselves, or to murder one or another member of the enemy force, or something similar. In other words they seek to use ‘love and good sense’ to bring about discord and dissension as well as mutual irritation among those on whom they wish to make war, and only if this fails will they decide to shed blood. And even then they use quite special methods which show that they intend to cease the bloodletting at the first possible opportunity.

Another point is that religious tolerance is a fundamental characteristic of the Utopians. So long as he does not break the law, anybody may belong to any sect or represent any religious view he likes. This was instituted by the founder of Utopia, Utopus himself. However, all must believe in a highest being, whom they call Mythra. The one who tells us this has himself attempted to introduce Christianity there. The A-94-Utopians proved to be most open to it and recognized it as being indeed the best religion. The utmost religious tolerance prevails, and all may believe whatever they will, except that someone who is a materialist or who does not believe in the immortality of the soul forfeits all civil and other rights, indeed is declared to be without rights.

There is a sect which holds animals to be creatures who have souls like people. There are priests who teach in special mystery churches and perform cultic rites. Festivals are celebrated at the end and the beginning of each year. Musical instruments differ somewhat from those in other countries, for they are particularly suited to expressing in music what the human soul feels in its various moods. And so on.

I have told you all this just as it is described in the book. You will have noticed I said on the one hand that the Utopians have a religion of good sense, in which each individual believes what his good sense tells him is right; and yet, on the other hand, we are told that Christianity has been introduced and that all believe in a kind of Mythra. Further, it is said that tolerance prevails, and yet those who are materialists forfeit their rights as citizens. In short, you will find in the book one contradiction after another.

So what is this book really about? What is it describing? We can indeed only understand it on the basis of spiritual science. We must understand that Thomas More, like Pico della Mirandola and others, is a man who stands with part of his being in the fourth post-Atlantean period while another part already projects into the fifth. But he is also a man who knows that this is so and develops it in full consciousness because he possesses a certain spiritual life.

Thomas More spent many hours every day in meditation, and with his meditations he achieved certain quite definite results. But these results came about because, as I said, part of his being still lived in the fourth post-Atlantean period, so that atavistic elements joined in him with a conscious raising of his soul into the life of the spiritual world. Yet he lived a whole century after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period and in his soul everything lived which was characteristic of that fifth period: intellectuality and reasoning as we know them today—which did not yet exist during the fourth period, contrary to the opinion of those whose view of history is utterly fantastic. All this worked and mingled in his soul. You can discover what must have gone on in such a soul if you study Pico della Mirandola and also the relationship of Pico della Mirandola to Savonarola.

We have, then, a man into whose soul we must penetrate a little if we are to understand what he meant with his description of Utopia. Such a man as this knew that occult impulses work and weave in the evolution of mankind, and also that at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period it was necessary to provide the right impulse for many people. Whether they then make use of it is another question. What did such people know? We have often discussed that things are different nowadays, but this is what it was like then; so what did such people know? They knew that mankind must grow decadent if only those things were developed which were, let me say, unspiritual, thought-out, merely reasoned. Such people know that human beings must become desiccated even down to their physical bodies—of course not during the course of a few centuries but over a long period—if only dry reasoning, if only that spiritual element is developed on which materialistic views are founded. Such people have quite a different concept of the truth from that which gradually evolved during the fifth post-Atlantean period. They know that thoughts must be thought which do not relate to the physical plane, because, quite apart from the truth of such matters, human beings, if they do not wish to wither, must think thoughts which do not relate to the physical plane. These are the thoughts which bring life, which make life possible and help it to make progress. This is why what is spiritual is so important, quite apart from the aspect of truth.

Through his meditations Thomas More had come to experience pictures of the higher worlds in a partly atavistic and partly conscious way, but these were mingled with the material aspect of the dream worlds. Out of these actual experiences arose what he relates in Utopia. It is not something he has thought out, it is not fantasy, but something he really experienced as the fruit of his meditation. He placed it before us just as he experienced it, in order to say: Behold! A man who lives in England under King Henry VIII, a man who is even a servant of Henry's state, a man who bears in his soul the feelings, the desires, the intimate goals of England at this time—when his visions stir up his inner being, he experiences what is here described to be a kind of ideal state. He wanted to express what are the wishes, the goals, the ideas lurking in the subconscious of those who are dissatisfied with the external world. This is what he wanted to express.

So it can be said: this is the astral self-knowledge of a man of that time. A wise man such as Thomas More does not simply set before his contemporaries a fantastic ideal for the future. He sets before them what he himself experiences because, through this, in his own way and in keeping with his own time, he wants to present them with the great truth that the external world perceived by the senses is maya and that this external world of the senses must be seen in conjunction with the super-sensible world. But if one sees them in conjunction in this way—so that all the desires, all the wishes which belong to a particular age and are in keeping with that age, are allowed to play their part—then the outcome is something which, if looked at closely, is by no means a proposition that could be considered ideal. For I must admit, if I were to be born in Utopia I would probably see it as my primary task to overcome the prevailing conditions as quickly as possible and replace them with others. I might even consider the conditions prevailing here or there on our earth—apart from those of the immediate present—to be more ideal than those in Utopia. But it was not Thomas More's aim to describe ideal conditions. His intention was to show what he really experienced under the conditions as I have described them. He wanted to say to people: If you could see your wishes, if you could see before your eyes what you imagine to be ideal conditions, you would find that you were not in agreement with them at all.

Now we have made the acquaintance of the stranger who describes Utopia: he is the astral self of Thomas More. These things must be seen as being much more real than is usually supposed. At certain points of human evolution the fundamental facts must be sought out if one wants to understand this human evolution. A judgement cannot be made simply by taking the few facts closest to hand. A valid judgement cannot be based on these, for it would merely relate to sympathies and antipathies. These are valid, of course, but they take us no further, and mankind cannot be served by them.

My purpose here—and we shall return to these things later—has been to place before you a man who is particularly typical of the turning point between two ages, namely, between the fourth and the fifth post-Atlantean ages: one who is able to bring to the surface what is characteristic of his deeper soul life in such a way that he has an experience of self. Let me just leave this as a fact for the moment.

In order to gain an understanding of the kind for which a number of our friends here have expressed a wish, we must now also work on achieving a comprehension of the concrete reality of a folk soul. For our materialistic age and way of feeling tends to make us confuse the folk soul with the individual soul. I mean, when we speak of a people, a nation, we believe that this has something to do with the individuals who constitute this nation. To use a rather rough-and-ready, though graphic comparison: To say that an Englishman or a German can be identified with the folk soul of his nation is, for the spiritual scientist, as nonsensical as saying that a son or daughter can be identified with father or mother.

This is a rough-and-ready comparison, as I said, because on the one hand we are dealing with two physical people, whereas on the other we mean one physical and one non-physical being, which differ totally from one another when examined concretely. Not until there is an understanding of the mysteries of repeated earth lives and of the karma which these involve will there really be a comprehension of what underlies all this, which it is highly necessary to understand if one wants to speak on a firm basis about these things. An immensely important truth lies in the fact that one lives within a certain folk spirit only for a single incarnation, whereas one bears within one's own individual being something quite different, something immeasurably greater and yet also immeasurably smaller than that which lives within a folk soul. To identify oneself with a folk soul is, in reality, totally devoid of meaning once one goes beyond what is described by such words as love of the fatherland, love of the homeland, patriotism and so on. We shall only understand these things properly, once we can look earnestly and deeply at the truths of reincarnation and karma.

I have spoken recently in various places about the connection between the human soul between death and rebirth and what comes into being when man enters a new existence through birth. I pointed out that between death and rebirth man is linked with the forces which bring people together over many generations. Through the ever-repeated union of different pairs of parents and all that leads to descendants, as well as other aspects of the succession of generations, it comes about that the human being between death and rebirth finds himself within a whole stream which, in the end, leads him to the parents through whom he can incarnate. Just as in physical life one is linked with one's physical body, so between death and rebirth is one linked with the conditions which prepare for birth through a particular pair of parents. One is immersed in the forces which bring one to particular parents, and which brought father and mother to their parents, and so on back through the generations, in all their offshoots and ramifications, and whatever works together here in the most varied ways—in all this one is immersed for centuries!

Consider the imposing number of centuries one would remain within all this in order to pass through a mere thirty generations. The period from Charlemagne to the present day encompasses approximately thirty generations, and over all that time, in all that has taken place in the way of meeting, falling in love and begetting descendants which at last led to our own parents—in all this we have ourselves been involved, all this we have ourselves prepared.

I am repeating this because in connection with those personalities one calls leaders, those who can be recognized as leading personalities in some respects, it is important to understand that what makes them significant for mankind comes about through all that I have just described. I shall draw your attention now to a leading personality, and the climax of what I have to say about him will be expressed in the words of another. You will see in a moment why this is so.

We see in Dante a most eminent personality who lived at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period. We may juxtapose such an eminent personality with those personalities who gained a certain eminence after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, such as, for instance, Thomas More. Let us look closely at what may be recognized in general in a personality such as Dante. A personality such as Dante is of far-reaching significance, gives far-reaching impulses. It is therefore interesting to consider, or at least to guess, how such a soul before entering through birth into a physical existence that is to be significant for mankind, puts together—excuse this rather peculiar expression—what he is to become, in order to be born in the right way through the right parents. Obviously these conditions are brought about out of the spiritual world, but they are realized with the help of the physical tools. In a certain sense the spiritual world guides this blood to that blood, and so on.

As a rule, a personality like Dante cannot be born of homogeneous blood. To belong to a single nation is impossible for such a soul. It needs a mysterious alchemy; various blood streams must flow together. Whatever those over-patriotic people might say who claim great personalities for a single people, there is no great reality behind it!

As regards Dante, so that you do not think I am taking sides I shall now let another, who knows him intimately, describe what is clearly apparent in his being. It would be easy to imagine that I might be carrying on politically, which is actually furthest from my intentions. So for this reason I have made enquiries of Carducci, the great Italian poet of today, who is an expert on Dante. Behind Carducci—and this is why I am quoting him—stand what are called ‘Massonieri’ in Italy, and what is connected with all those secret brotherhoods to whom I have drawn your attention. Because of this, Carducci's theoretical arguments about the actualities of life are, to a certain extent, based on some deeper knowledge. I would not maintain that he has flaunted this deeper knowlege all over the market place or that he is in any way an occultist. But what he says does contain a certain amount of what has come to him via all kinds of secret channels.

Carducci says: Three elements work in Dante, and it is only because these three elements work together that Dante's being was able to become what it was. First, through certain branches of his lineage, there was an ancient Etruscan element. This gave Dante whatever it was that opened the super-sensible worlds to him; because of this he was able to speak so profoundly about the super-sensible worlds. Secondly, there was in him a Roman element which gave him a proper relationship to the life of his time and a basis of certain legal concepts from which to proceed. And thirdly, says Carducci, there was a Germanic element in Dante. From this he gained the boldness and freshness of his views, a certain candour, and the courage of his convictions in what he had set himself. These three elements, says Carducci, made up the soul life of Dante.

The first element points to the ancient Celtic influence which pulses through him like blood in a certain way, leading him back to the third post-Atlantean period; for the Celtic element in the North leads back to what we have come to know as the third post-Atlantean period. After this we find the fourth post-Atlantean period in the Roman, and the fifth in the Germanic element. Carducci maintains that the elements in Dante's soul are composed of these three periods and their impulses, so that we really have three layers lying side by side—or rather one above the other—the third, fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods: Celtic, Roman, Germanic. Dante experts of some stature have gone to great pains to discover how, from the spiritual world, Dante managed to mingle his blood in such a way as to obtain the final composition with which he was born. Of course, they did not express this in these words, but they went to great pains and came to believe that much may be put down to the fact that a great many of Dante's ancestors are to be found in the Grisons area of present-day Switzerland. This is borne out to some extent by history. The chain of Dante's predecessors points in every direction of the compass, including this district, where so much mixing of blood streams took place.

We now see how, in a single personality, the remarkable working together of the three layers of European human evolution is revealed. We also see how a man like Carducci, whose judgement is based on a certain objectivity and not on present-day nationalistic madness, points to the foundation on which Dante stands.

Herewith we touch on conditions which are well-known in circles familiar with the realities of life, conditions which may be reckoned with and which may be used as forces if one wants to do certain things. These conditions are by no means unknown to the secret brotherhoods, neither in their rightful use, nor in that other direction which uses secret knowledge in one way or another in the service of some group egoism. For the secret of how the three consecutive layers—which are exceedingly meaningful, mainly for Europe—work together, is discussed most carefully in all secret brotherhoods worthy of the name, though naturally in some cases in a manner which deflects from what might be termed the good direction.

Please be sure not to forget that knowledge about such things exists, and that it is taught—even though, in the external, clever world no one wants to know much about it—very systematically and with great care, especially in the western and American secret brotherhoods.

Having now prepared the way and brought to your attention the teaching about what is, in a certain way, a mystery of evolution and which is taught, albeit with the most varying aims, I shall now point to some further teachings simply by describing them to you. These teachings formed the content of the instruction given in certain occult schools, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century. They continued into the twentieth century, but it was particularly in the nineteenth century that they were taken up, at which time they gained a considerable degree of influence. Efforts were made to bring them into all kinds of situations in which it was felt necessary to use them for certain ends. So to start with I shall simply report, quite uncritically, on certain teachings from the secret brotherhoods of England, whereby I shall be alluding to what I have prepared.

The following was taught and is still taught: The evolution of Europe can be comprehended if, to start with, one looks at the transition from the Roman, the fourth post-Atlantean period, to the fifth post-Atlantean period. The teaching was—please remember that I am merely reporting—that the mystery of the transition from the fourth to the fifth period or, as was said in these brotherhoods, from the fourth to the fifth sub-race, must be understood. You know that we cannot use the term ‘sub-race’ for the reasons I have frequently expressed, for to use this term means to pursue one-sided group aims, whereas group aims can never be our concern, but solely the general aims of mankind. So the teaching was that the fourth sub-race is represented mainly by the Roman, the Latin peoples. Throughout human evolution it is the case that when things develop in sequence it is not a question of what comes after taking its place behind what came before. What came before remains and takes its place side by side with what comes afterwards, so that they remain side by side in space. Thus, the stragglers of the fourth sub-race, consisting chiefly of the Roman and Latin elements, have remained during the period of the fifth sub-race.

The fifth sub-race, which began at the start of the fifteenth century, is composed of those peoples who are called upon to speak English in the world. The English-speaking peoples represent the fifth sub-race, and the whole task of the fifth post-Atlantean period consists in conquering the world for the English-speaking peoples. It will be evident that the stragglers of the fourth sub-race, the peoples touched by the Latin element, will fall more and more into a certain materialism. They bear within themselves the element of their own inner dissolution, and even in the physical sense bear their own decadence within them. As I said, I am merely reporting and not saying anything which I myself maintain to be true. Further, it is said that the fifth sub-race bears within it a germ of spirituality, of a capacity to comprehend the spiritual world. It is necessary, it is said, to understand how the fourth sub-race affected the fifth, and for this purpose one must look back to where the Nordic peoples, who later became the Britons, the Gauls, the Germans, came towards the Roman Empire. The question was asked: What were these peoples at the time when the Roman Empire was making war on them; in other words, when the conflict between the fourth and the fifth sub-race began? As peoples they were at the stage of infancy! The important point is that the Romans, the Roman element, the fourth sub-race, came in order to be their wet-nurse. These expressions are needed to enable us to draw the analogy between the folk element and the element of the individual human being. So the Romans became wet-nurses and they remained so for approximately as long as they maintained their dominance over the peoples of the North who were going through their infancy.

Infants grow to be children. This is the age in which the Papacy is founded in Rome and in which the Pope in his reign becomes the guardian of the child, just as the Roman Empire was the wet-nurse of the infant. Again, I am merely reporting, and not maintaining that this is the case. So now we have the interplay between the Papacy and what is going on in the North, what developed through Central Europe right out as far as Britain. This is the education of these people under the guardianship of the Papacy, out of which the Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean period is still working. Round about the twelfth century, when the Papacy began to be no longer what it had been, the youth of these various people commenced, this being characterized by the awakening of their own intelligence. The guardian now withdraws. The youth of these peoples continues until roughly the end of the eighteenth century. As a rule, when such things are taught the present is omitted, because for certain reasons this is thought to be a good thing to do. People must not be told too clearly what one thinks about the present time; they learn about this more through suggestion.

Thus, in the course of time in the North, under the rule of the wet-nurse, the guardian, and so on, the present mature condition grew. This bears within it the germ of rendering Britain the ruling nation of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the same way as were not only the Romans but also the Roman element in the form of the Papacy, which was derived from them. So, according to this doctrine, while the remains of the Latin element crumble away from the human race, a new fruitful element expands from the factor in which lives the British element. Now it is hinted that all external actions and measures which are to serve any purpose and be fruitful, must be made under the sign of these views. Anything that is undertaken without these views, anything that does not take into account that the Latin element is in decline and the British element ascending, is doomed to wither. Of course such things may be undertaken, say these people, but they are condemned to remain meaningless, they will not grow. It is like sowing seeds in the wrong soil.

In the doctrine I have sketched for you we have a foundation which seeped into all the brotherhoods, even the more esoteric ones—those who worked in the West as so-called high grade Freemasons and suchlike. These things were insinuated into public affairs by people who had either close or loose connections with these brotherhoods, often in such a veiled way that those concerned had no idea how they had come by their knowledge. Particularly since the sixteenth century these things have been carried from the West into much that can be experienced in human evolution.

Other things are also taught. It is said: Just as those people in the North during the time of the Roman element were preparing themselves to be the fifth sub-race, so today, in a similar way, the Slav people are coming towards the West as the developing sixth sub-race; in the same way the Germanic peoples came out of the North to meet the Roman element. Thus it is said that living in the East, under a despotic rule that is doomed to destruction, are a number of individual peoples who, like the Germanic peoples when the Roman Empire started to spread northwards, are not yet nations as such but still tribal peoples. These tribal peoples constitute the separate elements of the so-called Slav people, which for the moment is only held together in an external way by a despotic government which is to be swept away. I am using the terms which are customary within these secret brotherhoods.

After saying so many positive things about the Slavs, let me just add in parentheses: It is true that these peoples are still tribal in a certain way. This became evident at the Slav Congress in Prague in 1848. Each group wanted to speak in their own language, but this proved impossible because they were then incomprehensible to the others; so they were forced to use standard German instead. I do not say this to amuse you but in order to show that what is taught in the West about the Slavs does have a certain basis of truth.

It is said further in the English brotherhoods that the Poles have evolved ahead of the other Slavs, for they have developed a homogeneous cultural and religious life of a relatively high calibre. The destinies of the Poles are described to some extent, but it is then maintained that they really belong to the Russian Empire. Then the Balkan Slavs are discussed. Of them it is said that they have thrown off the yoke of Turkish oppression and formed themselves into individual Slav states which, however—and this is repeated over and over again—are destined to remain as they are only until the next great European war. In the nineties particularly, these brotherhoods held this great European war to be imminent, and it was linked especially to evolutionary impulses which were to emanate from the Balkan Slavs, born of the fact that these states, which had come into being as a result of their disengagement from the Turkish Empire, had to undergo a transition to new forms. Only until the next great European war, it was said, would these Balkan Slavs be able to maintain their independence. After that they would meet with quite other destinies.

These peoples are at present, so it is taught, in their infancy. So it is hinted that since they are the future sixth sub-race, while the Britons are the present fifth sub-race, the Britons will have to play a role towards them similar to that played by the Romans towards the northern Germanic peoples, namely that of wet-nurse; to be a wet-nurse to these peoples is their primary task. This role of wet-nurse will cease to be necessary, it is said, at the moment when these peoples will have reached a point when the Russian Empire no longer exists and they have succeeded in creating their own forms out of their own dawning intelligence. But gradually the wet-nurse must be replaced by the guardian. This means that in the West a kind of papacy must develop out of those who form the fifth sub-race. For this, a strong spirituality must develop and, just as the Papacy stood in relation to Central Europe, so a configuration will have to come about which works comprehensively from the West over towards the East. This must result in the East being used as a place where certain institutions can be created in a manner similar to that in which the Papacy created its institutions in Europe.

Of course we have now progressed by one sub-race. The Papacy created churches and religious communities of all sorts. But now the western ‘papacy’, which is to develop out of the British element, will have the task of carrying out certain quite definite economic experiments, that is, of instituting a certain form of economic society of a socialist nature which, it is assumed, cannot be founded in the West because there the fifth and not the sixth sub-race has its being. The East, experimentally at first, must be used for such experiments for the future. Political, cultural and economic experiments must be carried out.

Of course these people are not so stupid as to maintain that the dominance of the West will last forever, for no serious student of spiritual matters would believe that. But they are quite clear about the fact that just as at first the services of the wet-nurse were offered, so must these be metamorphosed into the role of the guardian—in other words a kind of future ‘papacy’ on the part of western culture.

I have been reporting, my dear friends! These things are buried deeply in the teachings of western Freemasonry and it is a matter of recognizing whether the ones I have mentioned, which are very influential, are really justified as being for the good of mankind in general in its evolution, or whether it is necessary to think of them as needing correction in some way. This is what we are concerned with. We shall return to all this again.

Now I want to point out that certain stages of evolution are really not mere fantasy, but that the more deeply one enters into the real facts, the more does it become possible to prove in the external world what was found at first by spiritual means. External science, even today, is occupied with the search for theories which prove that evolution takes place in stages which follow one another. That there is really something correct in what the spiritual scientist says can today be confirmed in some of the symptoms of ordinary science, if only one has the good will to search for them.

Let me mention in this connection something of which I have repeatedly spoken already. Although external culture cannot comprehend these things there is, in spiritual development, something which is expressed in laws which are as definite as the laws of nature. I once drew your attention to a linguistic law. Human evolution from the fourth post-Atlantean period up to the present shows that Greek and Latin represent a particular stage of linguistic development; the next stage was then Gothic, and the one after that New High German. Evolution takes place here in a perfectly regular manner. I can only sketch this for you, but these things follow laws which are every bit as absolute as those of nature, and exceptions merely seem to be so.

The sound D in Greek or Latin is transmuted into T and this again into Th which, because of certain language laws, can also be Z. A Greek Th or Z becomes a Gothic D, and this becomes T in New High German. A Gothic Th or Z becomes a New High German T, and so the circle continues. Similarly, a Graeco-Roman B becomes a Gothic P, and this in turn a New High German F or Pf. A Greek F or Pf would be a Gothic B and a New High German P. There is another circle which goes from G to K to Ch. Take for example treis, three, drei: T / Greek; Th / Gothic; D / New High German. This is so in every case and exceptions can be explained by special laws which complement the main laws.

We have three stages, one above the other: Greek-Latin, Gothic—which corresponds to the time when the Roman Empire was coming up against the Germanic tribes—and the further stage of New High German. The strange thing is, as I have said before, that English has remained behind at the Gothic stage. So if you want to find the English for a New High German word, you have to go back a stage. Take ‘Tag’; to find the English for this you have to go, not forwards, but backwards: ‘day’. Take ‘tief’; again you have to go backwards to ‘deep’; take New High German ‘zehn’; if you want the English you have to go backwards: ‘ten’. Take ‘Zahn’; you have to go backwards if you want the English: ‘tooth’; take ‘Dieb’, here too you have to go backwards: ‘thief’. New High German ‘dick’, if you go backwards, becomes ‘thick’. So, to go from New High German to English, the direction is opposite to the normal.

So we can say quite objectively: If we seek to find the evolution of language as a folk element in respect of English, we have to go back to the Gothic stage. New High German has risen in evolution to become a special element. This is not said out of any patriotic or nationalistic feeling but simply because it is true, just as there is no need to say the polar bear is white out of any sympathy or antipathy for him. The law I have demonstrated to you is a well-known linguistic law, Grimm's law. I have only demonstrated it with regard to some voiced and unvoiced plosives and some aspirated sounds, but it can be done for the whole system of sounds. The evolution of language proceeds in accordance with strict laws and it corresponds to the impulses that rule in human evolution. Little by little natural science discovers these things, though sometimes only sporadically. In spiritual science you may find the deeper foundations for all these things.

We shall come to other aspects of spiritual and cultural life which will show that what applies to the realm of language holds sway in other fields as well. Something unconscious, when it is brought to light, bears witness to objective laws. This cannot be turned and twisted according to sympathy or antipathy!

Do not imagine that this Grimm's law on sound-shifts is unknown to those secret brotherhoods of whom we have spoken. Tomorrow we shall see how they come to terms with such matters and how they have relevant things to say about them too. What they have to say is not foolish but perfectly in keeping with a certain kind of occultism. It will be up to you to decide, when you know more about it, how you want to judge it and whether it is something legitimate or not. Through the karma of human evolution it will come about that certain things are made more easily accessible to the public at large, in particular as a result of the circumstance that a certain amount of confusion has entered into the Masonic orders. Because of these circumstances a variety of things are coming to light for the outside world. We, however, want to understand, above all, the deeper foundations of all this.

Some quite bizarre symptoms are indeed coming to light. For instance there exists today an interesting dissertation by a man who met his death—this too is a remarkable karmic circumstance—on the battlefield of the present war. It is about the parallelism that exists between French politics and French secret societies, and it shows how the two run entirely parallel, how the same forces live in both. Much more intimate and concealed are the circumstances of English politics which are totally under the influence of what lies hidden behind them in this way. Here the main concern is to find ways of placing suitable people in the right places. The people in the background who are involved in occult manipulations are often like a number one; they do not amount to much on their own. They need something else: a nought. Noughts are not ones, but the two together make ten. If more noughts are added, so long as there is a one somewhere as well, a great deal can result—for instance a thousand—though every nought remains a nought. And if the one remains hidden, then only the noughts are visible. So the aim is to combine the noughts in a suitable way with the ones, whereby the noughts have no need to know much about the way in which they are combined with the ones.

There is, for instance, a certain man who is a perfectly honest fellow. I have often said that I in no way look on him as the wicked ogre—for which many in Central Europe want to take him. I think he is an honest, nice man who, in his own way, longs to speak the truth. Yet this does not prevent him from being a nought. This man's education began at Winchester public school, whence he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford. Then he won something very important, the Marlylebone Cricket Prize, followed by the Queen Anne Tennis Prize. At the age of twenty-three he became a member of parliament. At that age one is susceptible to all kinds of influences. At thirty he became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had long been Foreign Minister when he set foot outside England for the first time in order to accompany the King of England on a journey to Africa. He also wrote a little book on angling entitled Fly Fishing. Sir Edward Grey then ascended the social ladder before sinking into obscurity. A fellow student at Oxford, ten years his senior, was Asquith, with whom he spent his years there.

This is how those appear who are the visible accomplices. We shall proceed thus far today and carry on tomorrow.

When the theosophical movement was created three decades ago, the leaders' concern was not to introduce a new teaching that would meet a thirst for knowledge but above all to make a spiritual insight available to more people that would show how it is possible to solve important problems in practical life with the help of spiritual perceptions. One of the problem areas where we can see how the science of the spirit can play a role in practical life is the subject of this lecture, the question of education.

Proper consideration of this needs more intimate knowledge of essential human nature. Such knowledge also concerns the supersensible nature of man, yielding fundamental educational principles for anyone who takes the matter seriously. We must therefore first of all consider the essential nature of the human being. Such an enquiry will give us the basis we need for finding answers to the education problem.

In the science of the spirit, anything we perceive of the human being with the ordinary senses is but one part of the whole. This physical body, physical nature, is something man has in common with the rest of the natural world. Using the eye of the spirit, occult science perceives the ether or life body to be the second part of the human being. This organism is more subtle than the physical body, but all its organs and parts are the same as in the physical body. It would perhaps be better to see it as a sum of energy currents, as the architect of the physical body, with the latter crystallized out of the ether body, as it were. Just as ice develops when water cools down, so has the physical body developed out of the ether body. Man has his ether or life body in common with all forms of life.

The third part of the essential human being is the astral body, vehicle for all lower and higher soul qualities, of pleasure and pain, joys and sorrows, and all will impulses. Man has this third body, which may be perceived by those who have developed higher organs of perception, in common with the whole animal world. It surrounds the human being as a kind of cloud that passes through both the physical and the ether body. The astral body is in continual motion, reflecting everything that goes on in the human being. But just as the physical body is connected with and dependent on the whole earth through its physical substances, so is the astral body connected with the whole world of stars that surrounds the earth. All the forces which essentially determine the destiny and character of the human being are connected with that world.

A thinker of more recent times, Goethe, saw deeply into the connections between the natural world and the spiritual human being in his connection with the cosmos and wrote:

As on the day that gave you to this world
The sun stood to the salute of the planets,
So you have flourished then and ever after
According to the law that govern'd your beginning.
Thus you shall be, unable to escape your self,
As sibyls once have said and prophets;
And neither time nor power will break down
Form that was given and in life develops.²¹²

The third part of essential human nature is thus called the astral body because of its connection with the world of stars.

The fourth part is something human beings do not have in common with the rest of creation. It is the part that gives human beings the power to call themselves ‘I’. ‘I’ is the mysterious word everyone can apply only to himself. In it, the soul gives expression to the original spark of the divine within it. With the I, the god in man begins to speak. In the occult schools of ancient Judaism, the I was called the name of god that must not be spoken, and the multitude would feel a shiver of profound veneration when the initiate spoke the name which those outside were not allowed to say: Yahweh—I am the I am.

These four parts make up the fourfold human nature that exists in every human being. It develops from childhood to adulthood but in a thoroughly differentiated way, and we must therefore consider each on its own.

The embryo holds the potential for everything, but development is different in each case. Human beings cannot develop without an environment and are only able to thrive if other spirits and elements of the cosmos are around them. The process which occurs when the physical body is born is later repeated, for it is not yet the whole human being who is born at that time. Just as the developing embryo is protectively held within the physical material organism, so is the human being surrounded by a spiritual organism after his physical birth, an organism that is part of the whole spirit world. The child has a protective ether form and a protective astral form around it and rests in these, as the embryo does in his mother's womb.

In the seventh year of life, at about the time when the second teeth emerge, an enveloping ether form separates from the ether body, just as at physical birth the maternal organism separates from the child's physical body. The child is thus gradually born a second time, this time etherically. The third body, the astral body, continues to be surrounded by a protective astral form. This envelops the human being until sexual maturity is reached, up to the 14th or 15th year, and then withdraws. The human being is thus born for the third time when his astral birth takes place.

This triple birth process shows that we must consider each of the bodies separately, for only the first of them, the physical body, becomes free in every newborn child. And just as it is impossible to bring external light to the child in the womb, so we should avoid letting external influences reach the ether body from outside before it has come free of its protective envelope. Influences should not reach the ether body before the changing of the teeth, nor the astral body before sexual maturity is reached. Up to the seventh year of life we can only educate the human being in the right way by influencing him in his physical aspect. Just as the care given to the mother is intimately bound up with the well-being of the embryo, so we have to respect the inviolability and sacredness of the child's protective ether envelope if the child is to develop and thrive. Up to the changing of the teeth, only the physical body is open to external influences and only the physical body can therefore be educated. If we bring anything external to the child's ether body, we commit a sin against it. The human ether body is the bearer of everything that has lasting nature—habits, character, conscience, memory, temperaments. The astral body relates to the ability to form opinions, using reason to judge the surrounding world. Just as the child's external senses should develop up to the seventh year, so his habits, memory, temperament and so on are let go free by the 14th year, and then, by the 20th, 21st year, critical reasoning, an independent relationship to the surrounding world.

In the science of the spirit we thus have quite definite rules for educating children in these different stages of life. Care of everything connected with the physical body is what counts up to the 7th year. This includes harmonious development of the organs by influencing the child's senses. The physical body is what matters, therefore, and needs to be educated. We do this by offering everything to the child that encourages development through the senses. Aristotle said: ‘Man is the most imitative of all creatures.’ The child is thus an imitator, everything is for him under the sign of imitating things he hears and sees. Dictates and prohibitions carry little weight at this age. The greatest significance attaches to example, and this is how the environment must awaken the child's senses. What matters is the way we are, and adults must carefully observe everything they do and do not do. They should not do anything the child would not be allowed to imitate, for the child believes everything it sees to be something it is allowed to imitate. Thus a good-natured child surprised his parents by taking money from a cash box. They were horrified and thought the child was going to be a thief. But when they asked some questions they found that he had simply copied something he had seen his parents do every day. Up to the changing of the teeth, education consists in being an example to be imitated. Because of this, anyone bringing up a child must be in every respect an example to the child up to his 7th year. It would also be wrong to make the child learn the significance of letters up to that age. A child can merely copy their shapes, for the power to grasp their significance belongs to the ether body.

In these years, when the organs of the child should develop and the foundations are laid for health, everything that happens around the child in moral terms is also most important. It is far from immaterial if the child sees pain and sorrow or joy and pleasures in his world, for joy and pleasures lay sound foundations in the physical body. Everything around the child should breathe pleasure and joy, and those bringing him up should make it their concern to create them, even in the colour of clothes, wall paper and objects. Careful attention must be paid to the child's individual nature. A child tending to be serious and quiet should have darker, bluish, greenish colours around him, a quick, lively child more yellows and reds, for this evokes the ability in the senses to produce the counter colours. The organs that are developing should thus be made to evolve their inner powers. This is also why children should not be given finished toys such as boxes of bricks, dolls, and so on. Every child prefers a doll he has made himself from a boot jack or an old serviette to dressed up ladies made of wax. Why is that so? Because this brings the imagination alive, fantasy is used and the internal organs begin to function to give the child pleasure and joy. See how lively and interested such a child is in his play, entering into the images created in his fantasy with heart and soul. And think of the slouching, bored child whose inner senses are not brought alive. A child knows very well what is good and what is harmful for him. His relationship to the outside world is such that he'll reject anything that is not good for his physical body, for example his stomach, and show desire for the things that suit his stomach. And it would be foolish to go against the healthy desires that help the child develop and force the child to eat foods, for instance, that will drive out his natural instincts. The least suggestion of asceticism serves to eradicate the child's natural health.

Towards the 7th year, as the second teeth are gradually emerging, the protective ether forms around the ether body fall away and now the teacher must bring in everything that develops the ether body and influences it so that it evolves. But the teacher must still be careful not to put too much emphasis on developing the mind and the intellect. During this period, between the 7th and 12th years, what matters most is authority, belief, trust, respect. Something that is most important for the whole of later development in life is that the child should have known many moments like the following. He looks up with some degree of holy awe to someone he respects, feeling a reverence in his inmost heart that will make it impossible for him to think of criticizing or opposing that person. So there he stands one day outside the respected person's door in reverential awe, hesitating to turn the door handle and enter the room which to him his sacred ground. Such moments of reverence give strength for later life, and it is of tremendous importance that the teacher himself is an authority for the child. The people around the child, people he sees and hears, should be his ideals. Every child should choose a hero from history and literature, someone he looks up to with admiration and respect. It is utterly wrong for people with materialistic views to say that they are against all authority and have no regard for feelings of devotion and veneration.

It is important to train memory at this time, something best done in a wholly mechanical way. They should not use calculators but learn numbers and poems and so on, to develop their powers of memory. In earlier times children were brought up very sensibly in this respect. The good old nursery rhymes and children's songs, where it was not the intellectual meaning that mattered but the awakening of an immediate inner response, seem meaningless today because people no longer have a feeling for them. But they hold profound meaning. When they were sung for the children, it was the combination of sounds and harmony that mattered for the child's ear, hence the often meaningless rhymes.

Anyone who has not received a good foundation in character, memory and so on between the ages of 7 and 14 has been wrongly brought up. The right way of education at this age is through authority. The child intuits something in the inmost nature of the individual who is an authority for him, and this develops his conscience, his character and even his temperaments and becomes a permanent disposition in him.

Parable and allegory also shape the ether body in these years, anything that shows the world in parables. Hence the blessing of fairy tale books in our time and the stories about great people and heroes in legend and history.

Gymnastics are also important, for they give the child a feeling of strength, health and joy in life, thus helping to develop his organs just as much as joy and pleasure do. But at the present time physical education is very badly taught. The teacher should not look at his pupils with an anatomist's eye but consider what kind of physical movement would give the child's soul a feeling of greater strength and let him enjoy his body. A teacher must intuitively think his way into the child's feeling soul and design every exercise in such a way that it will give a feeling of growing strength.

Any work of art has a great influence that goes right into the ether body and astral body. Because of this, genuine, true art must enter into the ether body. Thus good vocal and instrumental music is very important, and the children should see many things around them that are beautiful.

Nothing, however, can take the place of religion lessons. The images of things beyond the world of the senses leave a deep impression in the ether body. Children should not hear criticism and learn to judge a particular confession but be given images from the world of infinity. All religious ideas must be images; a parable has a strong influence on the ether body. The greatest care must be taken to teach the children out of the sphere of life.

Today, children's minds and spirits are much involved in dead things. Mobile picture books will help to counteract this in the first seven years of life, for example. Everything should be action, deed, life; this enlivens mind and spirit and makes inwardly mobile. Children should therefore not build with building bricks and play with finished things; they must learn to let something that lives come forth from something that is not living.

Much dies in the child's developing brain with dead activities such as woven or plaited work. Much potential will remain undeveloped because of this. Toys without life in them will also fail to develop belief in the sphere of life. A deep connection therefore exists between the way children are brought up and the lack of faith that exists in our age.

When sexual maturity is reached, the protective astral envelopes drop away. As a feeling for the other sex develops, personal powers of judgement emerge. From then on we can appeal to their yes and no, the critical intellect. Powers of judgement only develop from the 12th year onwards, but the process needs quite some time. Critics aged 19 or 20 cannot possibly judge an issue properly. It is extremely important who will be the young person's teacher at this time, to guide his desire to learn and his urge for freedom in the right direction.

These principles, the fruit of spiritual research, are of the greatest importance for the healthy further development of the human race. Theosophy may use them to intervene in the most important processes in human life in a practical way. This spiritual view of the world thus offers the educator an abundance of insights, which are needed to solve the riddle of the developing young person. The science of the spirit is intended not only to convince and teach; it is meant to do things, to act, to have an effect in everyday life. It it meant to prove its value, becoming part of everyday practice and making life healthy in both body and mind. Theosophy is a truth that is not only correct but also healthy. We can best serve humanity and give it social and other powers if we are able to let these powers come from the growing individual. The growing, developing human being is one of the greatest riddles in life, and to be a proper educator you must be a solver of riddles in taking a practical approach to the education of the developing human being.

• 212. Goethe. Urworte. Orphisch.

The meetings at Stuttgart came to a close two days ago, and you are probably thinking that I ought to give you a report on some of the things that happened there. We arrived at a certain definite conclusion, which seemed inevitable under the conditions that prevailed.

It will be essential to an understanding of what came about that I give you a sketch of how things developed. You know from comments I have been making these past several weeks that lengthy preparations preceded the Stuttgart meetings. The aim of these preparations, which proved extremely tiring to all concerned, was to try to create a situation in which the life-needs of the Anthroposophical Society could be met, thus ensuring the Society's continuance in the immediate future.

In everything that follows it should be kept in mind that what went on in Stuttgart did not have its origin in the sad events surrounding the Goetheanum fire, nor was it influenced by them. For I had already talked with a member of the Executive Committee early in December and discussed with him the necessity of doing something to consolidate the Society, and he was given the assignment of getting the whole Executive Committee and various others to take on the problem. So what occurred in Stuttgart was a direct consequence of the talk I had on December tenth with Herr Uehli to acquaint him with my observations on the current state of affairs in the Society.

The burning of the Goetheanum came as a most painful experience while we were in the midst of these developments. But even if we still had the Goetheanum standing here in its pristine form, these things would have happened exactly as they did. For what was it we faced? We were facing the fact that the Anthroposophical Society had taken on a form in the past two decades that had undergone considerable modification since 1919 as a consequence of including various enterprises among its concerns.

My words could easily be taken as deprecating these undertakings, but nothing of the sort is intended. I need only mention the name of the Waldorf School, which is one of the enterprises I was referring to, to convince you that my remark was made for quite a different purpose than to express some superficial judgment. It implied no reflection on the worth and significance of any of these enterprises or on anyone responsible for their guidance.

The transactions in Stuttgart were meant to—and indeed did—concern themselves solely with the Anthroposophical Society from the aspect of its whole configuration and how it should be shaped.

Now it is not an easy matter to describe this configuration as it really is, since it branches out in so many directions. But I believe that everyone of you has some idea of how the Society has developed up to the present, and can picture things for himself with the help of the comments I have been making here in the past several weeks to round out the picture.

One of the especially important developments that have taken place in the Society's life has been the incurring by leading individuals—or at least by a considerable number of them—of quite specific anthroposophical tasks for the Society that have grown out of the work. These tasks have been waiting for completion since 1919, but they were not carried out. When the problem this caused became only too plain, I had to speak to the Central Executive Committee in Stuttgart as I did on December tenth last.

One of the latest undertakings to grow out of the soil of the Anthroposophical Movement was the Movement for Religious Renewal, which has contributed heavily to the current crisis in the Society. That is one aspect of the facts that have developed in the Society's life.

The other aspect is that youth has approached the movement—youth full of deep inner enthusiasm for anthroposophy and everything it includes, and university youth has also come into the picture with quite different expectations, with a quite definite picture of what is to be found in the Society, with quite definite feelings. One might say that these academic young people approach the Society with strong heart impulses and a special sensitivity to the way the anthroposophists reacted to them, and that they took everything not so much from a rational angle as in a spirit of keen feeling-judgment.

Now what lay behind all this?

The fact is, my dear friends, that young people today are having soul experiences that are making their first appearance on the stage of human evolution. This fact is not to be summed up in abstract, superficial phrases about a generation gap. That gap has always existed in some sense, and been especially marked in strong personalities while they were young and preparing themselves for life at an educational institution. We need only recall certain characteristic examples. You can read in Goethe's Truth and Science how, when he was a student in Leipzig, he stayed away from lectures because he found them so terribly boring, and went instead to the pretzel bakeshop across the street to chat with companions while Professor Ludwig and others held forth in the lecture halls on learned doctrines.

But despite the ever-present generation gap, even these somewhat radical members of the younger generation eventually took over their inheritance from their elders. The geniuses among them did likewise. Goethe most certainly remained an incomparable genius to the day he died. But when it came to taking part in the life of his time, he became not simply Goethe the genius but the fat privy councillor with the double chin. That must also be recognized.

These things have to be looked at in a completely unprejudiced way. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, the generation gap about which people talk superficially today was always there, but it was resolved in good philistine style, with youth gradually absorbing more and more philistine characteristics and entering, as it always had, into what its elders passed on to it.

Today, however, that is no longer possible. If one were to use terminology borrowed from Oriental wisdom, one would have to say that it became impossible when Kali Yuga ended, because from that time forward social life was no longer ruled by the principle of authoritarianism as it had been heretofore. Mankind's involvement in the consciousness soul phase of its development took ever more marked effect. This lived in the souls of people born in the 1890's and in the first few years of the twentieth century, perhaps not in a sharply defined form, but nevertheless in an extremely strong instinctive way. This inner life of theirs has to be really lovingly contemplated by older people if they want to understand it. That takes quite a bit of doing. For our culture, our civilization has assumed a form, especially in educational institutions, which makes the resolving of problems between youth and age that always used to take place no longer possible. Young people of the present feel this; it is their inner destiny. It shapes every aspect of their lives, and means that they approach life with a quite definite craving or demand. This predisposes present-day young people to become seekers, but seekers of a wholly different stripe than their elders.

This holds true of them in every area of life, and especially in the spiritual area. It is very strange how the older generation has been reacting to them for some time past. I have not neglected to call your attention to characteristic instances. Let me remind you of the lecture I gave on Gregor Mendel. Every now and then, scientists of the twentieth century have rather vehemently stated it as their opinion that Gregor Mendel, a Moravian, the solitary schoolmaster who later became an abbot, was a genius who had made remarkable contributions to the work of determining the laws of heredity. If we review Gregor Mendel's relationship to the educational institutions he attended, we cannot miss the fact that when he was old enough to take his examinations for the teaching profession he failed them by a wide margin. He was thereupon given time to prepare himself for a second try. Again he flunked. At that time—I am speaking of the 1850's—people were a lot more tolerant than they became later. So, in spite of his two failures to pass his teacher's examinations, Mendel was appointed to a secondary school position, and he became the man who accomplished something regarded as one of the greatest feats in the field of modern natural science.

Let us take another case closer at hand: that of Röntgen. Nowadays nobody doubts that Röntgen is one of the greatest men of modern times. But he was dismissed from secondary school as a hopeless case. He had the greatest trouble getting a position as a tutor because he couldn't finish school; he had been thrown out, and later just barely managed to get into a college, where he finally graduated. But even then he was unable to get a tutorial post in the field in which he sought it. In spite of this, he performed one of the most epoch-making feats in the fields of practical and theoretical science.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. On every hand we find indications of the unbridgeable gap between what older times had to offer and what lives in youth in an indefinable way.

Putting the matter in rather radical terms, one can say that modern youth could not care less how many Egyptian kings' graves are opened; they are not much concerned with that. But they do care about finding far more original sources of serving human progress than the opening of ancient kings' graves offers. Youth feels that we have entered upon a phase of mankind's evolution in which much more elementary, more original sources will have to be drawn upon for its furthering.

Now we can certainly say that young people with this longing have done a great deal of searching during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then they came to know of anthroposophy and felt at once that it led to the primal sources of their seeking, to the deepest origin of humanness. They then approached the Anthroposophical Society. And last Monday or Tuesday a representative of these young people said in Stuttgart that they had received a shock on approaching it, that the contrast between the Anthroposophical Society and anthroposophy had startled them. This is a very weighty fact, is it not? It cannot simply be dismissed. You have to consider what young people, especially those from the universities, have had to suffer.

Let us say, for example, that they wanted to take a doctorate in one of the freer branches of learning and teaching, such as the history of literature. How were things done in the last third of the nineteenth century? Where did most of them get the themes for their dissertations? For brevity's sake I will have to put it rather radically. The professor had undertaken to write a book about the Romantic school. So he assigned one student Novalis, another Friedrich Schlegel, a third August Wilhelm Schlegel, and a fourth Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann—if they were lucky. If they weren't, they were assigned dissertations on Hoffmann's punctuation or his use of parentheses. The professor then read through these dissertations and took the substance of his book from them. It had all become quite mechanical. The young person was just part of a mechanism, a learned mechanism, and if I may repeat myself, after the end of Kali Yuga everything that lived in an elemental way in the youthful soul rebelled against this sort of thing. I am citing just one of countless possible examples of the same phenomenon.

Now here we have these two factors side by side: the Anthroposophical Society, in the form it had assumed during its two decades—a form I need not describe, as everyone can picture it for himself from his own standpoint—and the young students. But what the Society was encountering in these young people was simply the keenest and most radical fringe of an omnipresent element. This fact stood out only too plainly at the Stuttgart meetings.

On the one hand, the leaders of the old society were committed to what had gradually taken on fixed forms. One was perhaps a Waldorf teacher, another an office manager at “Der Kommende Tag.” We have to give all due weight to the fact that all these people were overwhelmed with work. Everybody in the Society who had any free time had been drawn into these enterprises. Rightly or wrongly, this caused a certain bureaucratic spirit to spring up in the Society.

Among these undertakings was the “Union for the Threefold Membering of the Social Organism.” Right from the moment of its founding in 1919, it had a director, and after I had worked awhile with this Union I was compelled to say that I could not go on, that I would have to withdraw. As I said in Stuttgart recently, I had to strike out and simply declare that I could not go on.

Then another director, an excellent man, took things over. I was unable to get to Stuttgart for several weeks, but when I eventually arrived, I was anxious to find out what had been happening. There were a number of matters awaiting disposition, so a meeting was held and I was informed about what had transpired. I was told, “Well, we've been setting up a card file. We have small cards on the lower right-hand section of which we clip the smaller newspaper items, and then we file them in cabinets. Then there are larger cards made of heavier paper to which we attach longer magazine articles, and there are other cards of still another size for filing letters that come in.” This went on and on. Hours were spent describing the way the card file was set up, the sacrifice and devotion with which people had been working on it for many weeks, what it contained, how everything had been so neatly stowed away in it. Now I had a mental picture of this card file with all the various sizes of cards in it, and the marvellous record there of everything that had been going on in the Society and what our opponents had been up to. It was all beautifully recorded! There must have been a simply huge pile of these cards stacked up in layers. But the people sitting there vanished as though they were ghosts; only the card file was real. Everything had been recorded!

I said, “Well, my dear friends, do you have heads as well as a card file? I am not in the least interested in your files, only in what you have in your heads.”

I am sure you will understand that I am not criticizing, just reporting, for the people who had arranged the files were groaning under the tremendous burden of their work. But on the other hand, just imagine youth coming there with their hearts on fire with enthusiasm for ideals that encompassed the whole future, only to be told the story of the card files. I am not saying that it was superfluous to have files or that they were of no value; I am saying that they were excellent and vitally necessary. But that is not the way things should be going. Hearts were needed to go out to hearts.

Now this created all sorts of impossible situations. These and many other problems finally reached a point where a reorganization of the Society had to be considered. There had to be a chance for the Society to provide human beings with opportunities to work in it, to live out their special individual capacities, to find and breathe an atmosphere in which they could go on developing. These were absolutely fundamental problems that the Society was facing. A complete revision of all the conditions surrounding its life was indicated, and that it has a tremendous life-potential is shown in the fact that youth has now approached it full of teeming inner life. But the contrasts grew and grew.

Of course, there were some individuals in the older group who had never taken any interest in the card files (if I may use the files as symptomatic of the whole approach in question). Some of these others may have been very old indeed, but still not have wanted to bother with things like the files, which had gradually become a necessity. There were definitely such members who had joined the Society as early as 1902 or 1903, who, though they may have been very different from the young people in many other respects too, had also never concerned themselves with what I will term the history of the Society.

So we faced extraordinarily difficult problems at the preliminary meetings. An incalculable weight of worry burdened one's soul.

But we don't need to talk about those sessions now. The Delegates' Conference, a summons to which was the outcome of the preparatory meetings, was held in Stuttgart last Sunday. The first order of business was to hear what the provisional steering committee, which was made up for various reasons of members of the erstwhile Central Executive and called the Committee of Nine, had to say about the past and present and future of the Anthroposophical Society. Then the German and Austrian members were to be given a hearing in the persons of their delegates.

Well, things proceeded as planned. But since I want to give you just a brief sketch of what led to the final decision, I will refrain from describing what amounted to a veritable hailstorm of motions. Scarcely was one taken care of and the business of the meeting resumed than two or three more fairly flew up to the chairman's table. It can only be described as a hailstorm, and there seemed to be no end to the discussion about them. But I will skip over all this and stress instead that absolutely excellent talks were given, penetrating, deeply anthroposophical talks. Albert Steffen spoke wonderful, heartfelt, profound words. Mr. Werbeck gave a masterly description of the categories of our opponents and of their relationship to the Anthroposophical Movement and to the rest of civilization. Dr. Büchenbacher gave a vivid account of the way people who entered the Society from about 1917 on responded to what they encountered in it. As to the fact that not everything said was first-rate and as to some lesser contributions in between, it is probably better to maintain a courteous silence. But excellent, magnificent contributions were interspersed among what I will refer to as “others.” In spite of this, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday passed, and by Tuesday evening a point was reached where one could see clearly that if the next day, the final one, were to be anything like the preceding ones, the delegates would leave as they had come. For almost nothing of what lived in the many individuals assembed in the hall had really come out, even though much anthroposophical substance had been contributed in excellent speeches. This was an assemblage of human beings and the speeches all dealt with realities, but there was no living reality in the meetings, just abstraction; they were a classic example of life lived in the abstract. By Tuesday evening real chaos reigned. Everybody was talking past everybody else.

Now I had no choice but to decide to make a proposal of my own directly after the Tuesday lecture that had been scheduled for me—a proposal based on what lived in the people represented there—and almost the entire membership of the German and Austrian Societies was present. But one had to get at what was real there and pull it together. I was to speak on Tuesday about community building, a theme called for by much that had been said. So I made a proposal. I said that we could see how everyone was talking past the others and that nothing that was being said was bringing the underlying realities of the situation to the surface. Leaving other aspects aside for the moment, one could distinguish two types of feeling, two differing viewpoints, two sets of opinions. One type is represented by the old Anthroposophical Society and the committee speaking for it; the other is made up of individuals who, to put it as exactly as possible, have no real interest in the stand taken by the committee representing the Society. They are individuals completely without interest in what the committee had to say, though they are fine anthroposophists: One can scarcely imagine anything finer than the contributions made by the young people at the Stuttgart conference; they reflected an energetic, wonderful spirit. The soul of youth made a noble impression as it urgently stormed the gates of anthroposophy. But here too there was no interest in what the Society was as a society, or in what it stood for.

A phenomenon like this has to be taken as a reality. We have to learn to see it as a fact; there is no use acting like blind men and closing our eyes to it. So I had no choice but to say that since we were confronted there with these two types, any abstract talk about reaching agreement was simply false. The old society cannot be other than it is, nor can the second group. The Society as a whole will therefore have the best chance of continuance if each faction goes its own way, with the old aristocracy—no, let me rather call them the members of the older society, laden down with history—forming one group, and the stormily progressive old and young forming another.

There is in existence an ancient draft of a constitution for the Anthroposophical Society. I can recommend its study to both parties! Each of them can carry out its provisions quite literally, but the outcome will be entirely different in the two cases. That is the way things are in real life, no matter how they may look in theory.

So I made the proposal that the old Anthroposophical Society continue with its Committee of Nine. I characterized things in the following way. I said that the old society included the prominent Stuttgart members who carry on their separate undertakings in exemplary fashion and do a tremendous lot of work; in fact, one of their outstanding characteristics, demonstrated during the four days of the conference, was the weariness they brought with them from their previous labors. I said that when I come to Stuttgart and find something needing to be done, I have only to press a button; that is the way it has been in recent years. These leading personalities in Stuttgart are extremely insightful. They grasp everything immediately without one's having to say very much. There would never be time enough to discuss everything at length. Theirs is a lightning grasp; one need only touch on a matter to have it absolutely clear to them. But for the most part they do nothing about it. Then there is the other party, full of anthroposophical soulfulness, whole-heartedly immersed in anthroposophy. I can also say something to the leaders of this group. They understand nothing of what I am saying, but they do it that very instant. That is a tremendous difference. The first group understands immediately, but does nothing. The second category understands nothing; they only give promise of eventually understanding everything; they are full of energy and feeling, but they do the things at once. They do everything without understanding it.

So there will have to be two quite differently constituted groups in the Society if it is to stay united. One group should never be allowed to get in the way of the other's functioning. There is the one group—what name shall I give it, since we have to have one? It's just a question of terminology, of course. Let's call it the conservative, the traditional party, the neatly-filed members (not to limit the term to just a set of cards), the party that occupies the curule seats. People in this party have titles: president, vice president, and so on, and administer the Society. They sit there and have a routine procedure for everything. I see a man in the audience looking at me significantly who, while I was still in Stuttgart, was in a position to inform me what such procedures sometimes lead to. For example, a credit slip for a sum like 21 marks was sent out, and it cost 150 marks to send it. That is what it costs these days to send mail to foreign countries: 150 marks. If one wants to write somebody that a credit of 21 marks has been entered on the books to his account, it costs 150 marks to do it properly. That is the way things go in an orderly ABC set-up. So there we have the party of routines, the old Anthroposophical Society. One can belong to it and be a good member. Then there is the free union of individuals who care not a whit for all that sort of thing, who simply want a loose association based on a purely human element. These two streams should now be acknowledged.

I started by giving just a thumbnail sketch of this, a mere indication. That same evening a speech was made, maintaining that it would be the worst thing that could possibly happen, for it would split the Society in two, and so on. But that was the reality of the situation! If a move were to be made that fitted the facts rather than the way people thought—for what they think is seldom as significant as what they are—it had to be the one suggested, for that would fit the realities involved. As I said, a speech was instantly made about it, warning of the terrible consequences that would ensue if anything of the sort were to prove necessary, and so on.

Even in an external, purely spatial sense, the outcome was chaos. The hall was crammed with people huddled in groups, leaving no loopholes to squeeze through between them, and they all stopped me to ask what this or that had meant. The inner chaos of the situation had become outer chaos by eleven o'clock that Tuesday evening when I tried to leave the assembly hall.

I arrived, rather weary, at the place where I was staying. At midnight someone came to fetch me. I wasn't quite on the point of going to sleep. Someone came and said that a meeting was underway down in the Landhausstrasse. I was stopped again on my way to the floor where the meeting was in progress, and drawn into a side-meeting, so that it was nearly one o'clock in the morning by the time I arrived where I was supposed to be. But it was at once apparent that my proposal had been understood after all, quite correctly understood. Now the details could be profitably discussed. It had become clear that something could really be done on the basis proposed.

Certain doubts were expressed, as was perfectly natural. It was said, for example, that there were members who sympathized with the young people and wanted to go along with their aims, but who nevertheless belonged historically to the old society and even held positions in it, which they wanted to keep so they could go on working there.

I said that this could easily be solved. The only problem in the case of individuals who join both sections is to arrange that they pay only one membership fee. Surely some technical means of doing this can be worked out. There should be no question of anyone being excluded from one of the sections because he is a member of the other. In all such matters, we should simply see to it that the realities of a situation have a chance to be recognized.

I went on to say that the various institutions can also accommodate both directions. I can easily conceive the possibility of a Waldorf teacher leaning toward the looser association and becoming part of it while a colleague feels drawn to and joins the more tightly organized group. They will, of course, still work together at the Waldorf School in a perfectly harmonious spirit.

Yesterday some people were wondering how life in this or that branch of the Society would be affected. I asked why adherents of the two groups should not be able to sit beside each other at branch meetings. But the inner realities must always be given a chance to live themselves out. When a thing is conceived in a realistic spirit, there is always a way of working it out, and this makes for unity.

It took only until 2:15 a.m. for the young people to become clear on essentials. There were, however, some white-haired young ones among them who could look back over a span of quite a few decades. It became clear, as Tuesday night changed into Wednesday morning, that the proposal would work.

Wednesday was devoted to discussing these plans. And Wednesday evening witnessed their adoption—I will give you just the résumé, and then add a few supplementary comments to this report.

So there we now have the old Anthroposophical Society with its Committee of Nine as described, and the other looser, freer Anthroposophical Society whose chief striving it is to get anthroposophy out into the world and to work for a deepening of man's inner life.

Tomorrow and the following day I will review the most important aspects of the two lectures I delivered in Stuttgart. They are intimately bound up with the life in the Anthroposophical Society, for the first lecture was on the subject of community building and the second on the reasons why societies based on brotherliness are so given to quarreling.

A provisional committee was formed for the loose association. It was made up of Herr Leinhas, Herr Lehrs, Dr. Röschl, Herr Maikowski, Dr. Büchenbacher, Herr Rath, Herr von Grone, Rector Bartsch from Breslau, and Herr Schröder. You notice that not all of them are extremely young; their number includes dignified patriarchs. So the radicalism of youth will not be the only standpoint represented, but it will certainly be able to make itself felt.

That is the way things came out. Now they need only be rightly managed. The loose association undertook specifically to form smaller, closer communities—to work for anthroposophy exoterically on a big scale, and to work esoterically on a small scale forming communities held together not so much by any set system of external organization as by inner, karmic ties.

These, then, were the two groupings we came out with. I will have something more to say about them tomorrow and the next day. It was a very necessary development! Anything that is alive refuses to let itself be preserved in old, preconceived forms; arrangements must change with and adapt themselves to the living.

You remember my saying as I left for Stuttgart that the Society's whole problem was really one of tailoring. Anthroposophy has grown, and its suit, the Anthroposophical Society—for the Society has gradually become that—has grown too small. The sleeves scarcely reach to the elbows, the trousers to the knees. Well, I won't labor the analogy. The suit looked grotesque, and this was apparent to any wholehearted person who has recently joined the Society.

Now we shall have to see whether this effort to make a new, more fitting garment rather than take the old one apart—for it would certainly get torn—will succeed. It definitely has the inner capacity to do so. We shall have to see whether people develop the strength essential to this way of working. Real life presents very different possibilities from those of theory, and that holds true in this case also. We will have to create something that can really stand the test of life.

Now there we have Herr von Grone, who is a member of both committees, the committee of the free and the committee of the more tightly organized; he will serve on both. Things will work out best if we let everybody function in his own way, either as a patriarch or as a young enthusiast, and if someone wants to be both at once, why should he not be a two-headed creature? It is absolutely vital that people's energies develop freely.

Certain things won't work, of course. I was told about one such situation, where the chairman of a group once had the startling experience of yielding the floor to someone who launched out on a flaming address only to have another person talk at the same time. The chairman said, “Friends, this is impossible!” “Why that?” was the answer. “We're trying to live a philosophy of freedom here! Why should one's freedom be limited by allowing only one person to speak? Why can't several talk at the same time?” You will agree that some things won't work, but fortunately they're not always specifically called for.

I, for my part, am thoroughly convinced that things will work again for awhile. Not for always, though; nothing can be set up for eternity. As time passes we will again find ourselves confronted with the necessity of devising new garments for the anthroposophical organism. But every human being shares that destiny; one can't keep on wearing the same old clothes. An organization is actually never anything more than a garment for some living element. Why, then, should one make a special case of social organisms and try to tailor them for eternity? Everything living has to undergo change, and only what changes is alive. In the case of something as particularly teeming with life as the Anthroposophical Movement we must therefore shape a life-adapted organization. Of course we can't attempt reorganization every single day, but we will certainly find it necessary to do so every other year or so. Otherwise the chairs occupied by the leading members will really become curule seats, and when some people make a specialty of resting on the curule seats, those not occupying them begin to itch. We must find a way to make sitters on curule seats itchy too. In other words, we're going to have to start jostling these chairs a little. But if we find the right way of arranging things, everything will go beautifully.

My dear friends, my intention was to give you a report. I certainly did not feel it to be a joking matter. But things of real life are sometimes just exactly those most suited to a slightly humoristic treatment.

Life and Form are the two principles that must guide us through the labyrinth of the manifested world, in multitudinous forms, life is forever changing, coming to expression in manifold variety. Life could not manifest outwardly or present itself in the world if it were not to appear in constantly new forms. The form is the revelation of the life. But all life would vanish, would be lost in the rigidity of form, were it not ever and again to become seed for the building of new forms out of the old. The seed of the plant grows into the developed form of the plant and this plant must again become seed and give a new form existence. So it is in nature everywhere and so it is in the spiritual life of man. In the spiritual life of man and of mankind the forms also change; life maintains itself through forms of infinite variety. But life would lose all power were the forms not perpetually renewed, were not new life to spring forth as seed from old forms. Just as the epochs change in the course of human history, so also do we see life changing in infinitely diverse forms during these epochs. In the lecture on Theosophy and Darwin¹ we heard of the diverse forms In which the civilisations of mankind have come to expression. We heard something of the forms that existed in the ancient Vedic civilisation of India, changing perpetually through the ancient Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian, the Greco-Roman and finally through the Christian civilisation until our own time. But the significant point about spiritual development in our own time is that a common life flows more and more into external forms, for this reason it may be called the epoch of forms, the epoch when on every hand man is taught to devote his life to form.

Wherever we look we see the predominance of form. Darwin is the most brilliant illustration of this. What was it that Darwin investigated and bequeathed to humanity in his theory? The origin and change of the forms of animals and plants in the struggle for existence. This confirms that the attention of science is directed to the outer form, And what did Darwin openly declare? He asserted that the plants and animals live out their lives in the most manifold forms but that originally, according to his conviction, there were forms into which life was breathed by a Creator of worlds. This is what Darwin himself says. His eyes are directed to the evolution of forms, of the outer form, and he himself feels that it is impossible to penetrate into what imbues these forms with life. He takes this life for granted and does not attempt to explain it. He pays no heed to it, the question for him being merely the shape and form which life assumes.

Let us consider life in another domain, in the domain of art. I will mention one characteristic phenomenon only, in its most radical form. What a storm of dust was raised in the seventies and eighties of last century by the catchword Naturalism! I do not mean this in any derogatory sense, for this catchword is entirely in keeping with the character of our time. Naturalism emerged again in its extreme form in Zola, the Frenchman. His descriptions of human life are powerful and magnificent. Yet for all that his gaze is not focused upon human life itself but upon the forms in which it manifests. How life comes to expression in mines, in factories, in city districts where immorality is the undoing of men, and so forth. Zola describes all these various manifestations of life, and fundamentally speaking, all naturalists do the same. Their attention is focused, not upon life itself, but upon the forms in which life takes expression.—And now think of our sociologists who are concerned with giving details about the forms which life has assumed and ought to assume in the future. Catch-phrases about the materialistic conception of history and about materialism are much in evidence. But what is the approach of the sociologists? They do not concern themselves with the soul of man, with his inmost spirit. They study external life as it presents itself in the field of economics, how trade and industry prosper in one district or another, and how the human being is obliged to exist as a result of these configurations of life. That is how the sociologists study life. They say: Ethics and the idea of morality are no business of ours! Create better outer conditions for human beings and the standard of living will automatically improve.—in terns of Marxism, modern sociology has declared that the external forms of the economic life, not the forces of ideas, are of paramount importance in human life.

All this indicates that we have reached a phase of evolution when attention is focused primarily on the forms of outer existence. If you think of the greatest writer at the present time you will perceive how his gaze is riveted on the forms of outer existence because, since he is also filled with the warmest feeling for the life of the soul, for a free inner life, he has been reduced to despair by these outer forms of existence. I refer to Henrik Ibsen.² He is one who depicts life in most diverse forms, who shows us how life in form always evokes obstacles, how souls go to pieces and are destroyed by the forms which life assumes. The way in which he concludes the poem When We Dead Awaken, is symbolic of the prevailing forgetfulness of the soul find spirit. It is as though Ibsen wished to say: We men, of modern civilisation are completely caught up in the external form of life we so often censure ... and when we awaken, how does the life of soul present itself to us in the tightly knit forms of society and thought in the West?—That is the fundamental trend in Ibsen's dramatic works.

Certain flashlights have now been thrown on the form-culture of the West. In considering Darwinism we saw how this culture is bound up with the outer, mechanical life of nature and how the soul is yoked to rigidly circumscribed forms of life and of society. We saw how this state of things has been reached by slow degrees, how our Fifth Race (the Aryan Race), starting from the spirituality of the ancient Vedic culture which recognised by direct Vision that life is filled with soul, has passed through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian culture-epochs and then through Greco-Roman culture with its view—shared even by the Greek philosophers—that the whole of nature is ensouled. In the 16th century Giordano Bruno still recognised the life that fills the whole of nature, the whole universe and the great world of stars. But in later times, life has become wholly entangled with external form. This is the lowest standpoint. Again I do not say this in a derogatory sense, for every standpoint is necessary. What makes the plant beautiful is the external form, that which comes forth from the seed. Our cultural life has become externalised in every possible way. It is inevitably so, and least of all would it be fitting for theosophists to censure. Just as a culture imbued with spirit and with life was once necessary, so is a form-culture necessary for our age. In science we have the Darwinian view, in art the naturalistic, and in sociology a culture of form.

At this point we must pause and ask ourselves: According to the principles of spiritual science, what must happen when a form is actually present? It must be renewed, must again be imbued with new germinating life!

Those who from this point of view study Zola's contemporary, Tolstoy, attentively and without bias, find in Tolstoy the artist, the observer of the various types among the Russian people—the type of the Russian soldier, the martial type described in War and Peace, and later in Anna Karinina—a keynote quite different from that prevailing in the naturalism of the West. Tolstoy looks everywhere for something else. He describes the soldier, the official, the human being belonging to some class of society, family or race ... but everywhere he is looking for the soul, for the living soul that comes to expression in one and all, although not in the same way. He portrays the simple, straightforward workings of the soul—but at different stages and in different forms. What is life in its diverse forms, in its thousand-fold variety?—this is the basic question running through Tolstoy's works. And then he is able to understand life even when it seems to annihilate itself in death. Death is still the great stumbling-block for the materialistic view of the world. How can a man who regards the outer material world alone as real, grasp the meaning of death, how can he get the mastery over life when death stands at its end like a barrier, filling it with anxiety and terror? Even as an artist Tolstoy has surmounted this standpoint of materialism. In the novel The Death of Ivan Ilyitsch you can see with what artistry materialism in its roost extreme form is transcended, how in this figure of Ivan Ilyitsch there is complete inner concordance. We have a sick man before us, not one who is sick in body, but in soul. In everything Tolstoy says, one thing is clear: he is not of the opinion that there dwells within the body a soul that has nothing to do with the body; it is obvious from his words that he regards the constitution of the body as the expression of the life of soul; the soul, when it is itself sick, causes sickness in the body; it is the soul that pours through the veins of the body. This is a portrayal of how life comes to its own. And here we find a remarkable understanding of death, not as theory or dogma but in the life of feeling. This conception of the soul makes it possible to think of death not as an end but as an outpouring of the personality into the universe, a merging into infinitude, and the rediscovery of the self in the great primal Spirit of the world. The problem of death is here solved by the artist in a wonderful way. Death has become a blessing in life. a dying man feels the metamorphosis from the one form of life to the other.

As a contemporary of the naturalists in the domain of art, Leo Tolstoy was one who sought for life, who enquired into the riddle of life in its different forms. This riddle of life—in its scientific as well as in its religious aspect—lay at the very centre of his soul, at the very core of his thinking and feeling. He strove to fathom this riddle, seeking for life wherever it encountered him. Hence he has become the prophet of a new era that must supersede our own, an era that in contrast to the trend of natural science will again experience and know the reality of life. In Tolstoy's whole judgment of Western culture we see the expression of a spirit who represents fresh, childlike life, a spirit who strives to imbue this life into evolving humanity, a spirit who cannot rest content with a mature, nay an over-mature culture manifesting in external forms. This indicates the nature of Tolstoy's antagonism to Western culture. It is from this point of view that he criticises the forms of society and of life—indeed everything else—current in the West; this is the point of view on which his judgment is based.

In Darwinism, as we heard, Western science succeeded in grasping the forms of life. But Darwin himself declared that he was not able to understand anything of the life he postulates as a given reality. The whole of Western culture is founded on the observation of form—external form in the evolution of mineral, plant, animal, man.—Open any book on Western science and you will find that it is form which is everywhere brought into prominence. Western researchers have themselves declared that they are confronted by the riddle of life and are unable to fathom it. Ever and again, when information about life is expected from scientists, we hear the words: Ignoramus, ignorabimus (we do not know, we shall never know). Science is able to say something about how life is expressed in forms, but knows nothing about the operations of life itself. It despairs of being able to solve this riddle and merely says: Ignorabimus we shall never know. Tolstoy discovered the true principle for contemplation of life. I will read an important passage from his essay On Life,³ which will show you how he emphasises the principle of life as contrasted with all science of the forms of life.—

“The false science of our day” (i.e. in the West) “assumes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know the one thing we really do know. A man with this false knowledge assumes that he knows all that presents itself to him in space and time, and that he does not know what his reasonable consciousness tells him.

Such a roan imagines that good in general, and his own good in particular, are the most unknowable of all things for him; his reasonable consciousness seems to him almost equally unknowable, he himself as an animal seems rather more knowable, animals and plants more knowable still, and inanimate and infinitely diffused matter seems to him the most knowable of all.

Something similar happens with regard to man's sight. A man always unconsciously directs his look first to objects that are farthest away and which therefore seem simplest in colour and outline: the sky, the horizon, the distant fields and woods. The farther those things are away the more definitely and simply do they present themselves, while the nearer an object is the more complex are its outlines and colour.” ... “Is it not the same with man's false knowledge? What is indubitably known to him, his reasonable consciousness, appears to him unknowable because it is not simple, while what la certainly incomprehensible to him—illimitable and eternal matter—seems to him to be the most knowable of all things because its very remoteness from him makes it appear simple*

In reality it is just the reverse.” (p. 53)

The Western scientist looks first and foremost at immobile, lifeless matter. Then he perceives how plants, animals and human beings are built out of this as the result of the working of chemical and physical forces, be perceives how lifeless matter is stirred into movement, conglomerates and finally gives rise to the movements of the brain. Only he cannot grasp how life itself comes into being, for what he is investigating is nothing but the form in which life is manifesting. Tolstoy says in effect: Life is our immediate concern, we are within life, nay we are life; if we think that we shall understand life by investigating and observing it in form, we shall never do so. We need only contemplate life in ourselves, we need only experience life—and then we have grasped it. Those who believe that it is impossible to grasp the reality of life itself do not understand it at all.—Tolstoy investigates what the human being is able to apprehend as his life, although the overcomplicated mode of thinking cannot grasp it in the broad outlines of simple thought.—If you would truly understand form, you must look into its innermost essence. If you are willing only to investigate the laws of nature in their outer expression, how can you hope to discover how life that is subjected to reason differs from life that is not? Organisms are healthy and become sick in accordance with identical laws; the sickness and the health of a human being are governed by exactly the same laws.—Again Tolstoy speaks significant words in his essay On Life:

“However strong or rapid a man's movements may be in his death struggle, in madness, in delirium, in drunkenness or even in a paroxysm of passion, we do not recognise life in him, we do not treat him as a living man, we only admit the possibility of life in him. But however weak and motionless a man may be, if we see that his animal personality is in subjection to reason, we recognise life in him and treat him accordingly.” (p. 62)

Tolstoy means that the outer form has significance only when we do not merely study it from outside but grasp that which is not form, which is only spirit—the inmost essence. If we try merely to understand the form we can never penetrate to the actual life; but we shall understand the forms if, starting from life, we then pass to the form.

But Tolstoy did not approach his problem from the scientific side alone; he approached it from the moral and ethical side as well. How, as human beings, do we reach this true life with its law that extends into the outer form? Tolstoy asks himself: How do I, how do other men satisfy the needs of our own well-being? How can I achieve the satisfaction of my own personal life? If his starting-point is that of animal life, a man has no other question than: How do I gratify the needs of the external form of life?—This is an inferior viewpoint. A somewhat higher one is held by those who say: It is not a matter of the gratification of the needs of an individual; the individual has to lend himself to the common weal, to be a member of society—moreover to care not only for what satisfies the form of his own external life but to see to it that the needs of this form of life among all living beings are satisfied. We must be members of a community, we must make our needs subordinate to its needs. Subordination of the needs of the individual to those of the community—this is regarded as the ideal by many moralists and sociologists in Western culture. But—says Tolstoy—this is not the highest viewpoint, for what have I still in mind except the external form? How one lives in the community, how one participates in it—this, after all, is a matter only of the external form. And these external forms are perpetually changing. If my own personal life is not to be the aim, why should the life of the many be the aim? If the welfare of the single individual's form of life is not an ideal, no ideal of common welfare can be produced by an accumulation of individuals. The ideal cannot be the welfare of an individual, nor can it be the welfare of all, for this is a matter only of the forms in which life is contained. Where is life to be recognised? To what are we to put ourselves in subjection, if not to the needs dictated by our lower nature? If not to what common welfare or humanity prescribes?

That which in the individual and in the community alike craves for well-being and happiness is the life itself in the most manifold forms. It therefore behoves us not to shape our ethical, our innermost, ideal according to external forms, but according to what is vouchsafed as the ideal to the inmost essence of the soul itself by the indwelling God. That is why Tolstoy reaches out again for a higher kind of Christianity which he regards as the true Christianity.—Seek not the kingdom of God in outer manifestations—in the forms—but within you. What your duty is will become clear to you when you knowingly experience the life of the soul, when you allow yourself to be inspired by the God within you, when you give ear to the utterances of your soul. Let not the forms engross you, great and impressive though they may be! Go bade to the original, undivided life, to the divine life within you yourself. When a man does not take the ethical ideals, the cultural ideals, into himself from outside, but lets that which arises in his heart, that which the Godhead has imbued into his soul, stream forth from his soul, then he has ceased to live only in form; then he is moral in the true sense. This is inner morality, and inspiration.

From this standpoint Tolstoy strives for a complete renewal of all conceptions of life and of the world in the form of what he calls ‘original Christianity.’ In his view, Christianity has been externalised, has adapted itself to the diverse forms of life produced by culture and civilisation in the different centuries. And he awaits an era when form will be vibrant with new, inner life, when life will again be apprehended in direct experience. Therefore he is never tired of exhorting in ever new connections that it is a matter of experiencing the simplicity of the soul's existence, not the complex existence which all the time is trying to learn something new. The ideal prescribed by Tolstoy is that the simplicity of the soul must be maintained, that the intricacies of external science, of external artistic presentation, the luxury-adjuncts of modern life. must be resolved Into the simplicity inherent in the soul of every human being, no matter in what form of life and society he is placed. And so Tolstoy is a stern critic of the various forms of Western European culture, of Western science. He declares that this science, like theology, has little by little stiffened into a body of dogmas and that Western scientists give one the impression of being outright dogmatists, filled with wrongly directed intellect. He passes stern judgment on these scientists, above all on the ideal striven for in these forms of science, and on those who regard the final goal of all endeavour to be our material welfare. For centuries past mankind has been at pains to make forms preeminent, regarding external possessions, external well-being as the highest goal. And now—we know that this should not be censured but regarded as inevitable - well-being must not be limited to particular ranks or classes, but shared by one and all.—Certainly there is no objection to be made to this, but it is against the form in which Western sociology and Western socialism endeavour to achieve it that Tolstoy directs his attacks. What does this socialism proclaim? Its aim is the transformation of the external forms of life. Material culture itself is to lead men to a higher level, to a higher standard of life. And then, so it is believed, those whose conditions improve, whose, prosperity increases, will also have a higher ethical standard. All ethical endeavour on the part of socialism is directed toward revolutionising the outer form of the conditions of existence.—

It is this attitude which Tolstoy attacks, For the obvious result of the evolution of culture has been the development of the most manifold differences of rank and class. Can you possibly believe that if you make this culture of form preeminent, you will actually produce an ideal civilisation? No, you must take hold of the human being where he himself creates form. You must enrich his soul, imbue his soul with divine-moral forces, and then, acting from the very source of life, he will change the form. That is Tolstoy's socialism and it is his view that no renewal of moral end ethical culture can ever arise from any metamorphosis of the form-culture of the West, but that this renewal must be brought about by the soul, from within outwards. Hence he is not a preacher of dogmas but the champion of a complete transformation of the human soul. He does not say: Man's ethical standard is raised when the outer conditions of his life improve ... but he says: It is just because you have based yourselves on outer forms that you have brought upon yourselves the wretchedness of your existence. Not until you transform the human being from within will you be able to surmount this form of life. In sociology, as well as in Darwinism, we have the last offshoots of the old form-culture. But then we have, too, the preliminary factors for a new culture of life. Just as in the former case we have the line of descent, here we have the line of ascent. As little as an aged man who has already attained his settled form of life is capable of complete self-renewal, as little can an old culture produce a new form of life. It is from the child with its fresh forces of growth that the new form of life springs—inwardly quickened—from what is as yet undifferentiated and able to unfold into infinite diversity. Hence in the Russian people Tolstoy sees a people not yet entangled in Western forms of culture; it is within this people that the life of the future must germinate. From his observation of the Slav people who still regard the European ideals of culture—European science as well as European art—with apathetic indifference, Tolstoy declares that in this people there lives an undifferentiated spirit which must become the bearer of the future ideal of culture. It is there that he sees the hope of the future. His judgment is based on the great law of evolution, on that law which teaches us the principle of the change of forms and the perpetually new, germinal up-welling of life,

In the tenth chapter of his essay On Life, he says:

“And the law we know in ourselves as the law of our life is the same law by which all the external phenomena of the universe are ordered, only with this difference, that in ourselves we know this law as that which we must ourselves fulfill, while in external phenomena we know it as the law by which things take place without our participation.” (p. 47)

Thus Tolstoy himself bears witness to life that is evolving, that is eternally subject to change. We should be very poor representatives of spiritual science were we unable to understand such a phenomenon aright and were only to preach ancient truth. Why do we study the ancient wisdom? Because this ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its depths, because it reveals to us how the Divine manifests ever and again in an infinite variety of form. Anyone who becomes a dogmatist, who speaks only about the ancient wisdom without ears or words for happenings of the immediate present, is anything but a worthy representative of spiritual science. The ancient wisdom is not taught to us in order that we shall repeat it in words but in order that we shall live it, and learn to understand what is round about us. The development of our own race, which has been separating into different forms from the time of the ancient Indian civilisation up to our own, is accurately described and portrayed in that ancient wisdom, which speaks, too, of the development to come in the future, in our own immediate future. It tells us that we are standing at the starting-point of a new world-era. Our reason, our intelligence, have developed as this result of the passage through the different domains of existence. The powers of our physical intellect have attained their greatest triumph in the form-culture of our time. Intellect has penetrated the natural laws of form and has achieved mastery of them in the stupendous advances made in applied technology, in the standards of our life. We stand now at the starting-point of an epoch when something must pour into this intellect, something that must lay hold of and mould the human being from within outwards. That is why the Theosophical Movement has chosen as its guiding principle and aim, the establishment of the kernel of universal brotherhood among men without distinction of creed, class, sex or colour: it is the life that is to be sought in all these forms. The spiritual ideal hovering before us is an ideal of Love, an ideal which the human being, when he becomes conscious of divinity, experiences as the other divine principle that is within himself. The culture of intellect, of the spirit, is called by Theosophy, Manas; Buddhi is the principle that is inwardly pervaded by love, the principle that arrives only for such wisdom as is filled with love. And just as our race has produced a culture founded on intellect the next stage will be a culture where the individual, filled with love, acts out of his inner, divine nature, without losing his bearings in the chaos of the external world, be it in the domain of science or the social life. If we have this conception of the spiritual ideal we may claim to have understood it rightly—and then we shall not fail to recognise a personality who, living among us, is striving to instill into the evolution of humanity the Impulse of a new life.

Much of what Tolstoy says about the essential nature of man is in perfect accord with this. Let me read just one more passage that is particularly characteristic of his ethical and moral ideal:

“The whole life of such people is directed to the supposed increase of the welfare of their personality. And the good of their personality appears to them to consist in the gratification of its needs; and these needs are all those conditions of individual existence to which their attention is directed. The needs of which they are conscious—those to which they have directed their attention—always grow to infinite proportions as a result of this attention, and the gratification of these overgrown needs hides from them the demands of their true Life.” (pp. 82/3)

Tolstoy therefore says in effect: The reasoning consciousness is not enclosed within the confines of the personality. Personality is a quality of the animal and of man as an animal. Reasoning consciousness is an attribute of man alone. Not until man learns to become impersonal, to let the impersonal life hold sway in him, will he grow out of a culture of form into a culture of life—despite the continuing development of outer form. Man learns to live on rightly into the future when his being is steeped in the eternal, the imperishable. The culture based on intellect must be superseded by Buddhi, the culture based on wisdom. The most important factors here are those forces which operate in life itself.⁴

It behoves us to recognise and understand such a truth. The greatness of Leo Tolstoy lies in this: he has shown that the ideals are not to be found outside, in the material world, but can spring forth from the soul.

See also: The following passage is from Lecture VI of the Course The Gospel of St. John in relation to the other three Gospels, especially the Gospel of St. Luke:

“... Such a thinker merits the very greatest respect, above all in the West, where whole libraries are filled with lengthy philosophical dissertations on the same thing which Tolstoy expounds with greatness and power in a single work such as his essay On Life. There are pages in Tolstoy's writings where with an elemental force, certain deep knowledge of theosophical truth is set forth.”

See also: Tolstoy and Carnegie. Lecture given 28th Jan. 1909.

• 1. Berlin, 27th Oct., 1904. German text in Nachrichtenblatt, Vol. 23 (1946) Nos. 10 – 12, also in Gegenwart, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (April, 1956)
• 2. See also Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Vol. II, lecture XVI.
• 3. All the quotations are from Tolstoy's work On Life and essays on religion. Translated by Aylmer Maude. O.U.P. 1934.
• 4. At the end of a lecture given in Berlin, 30th September, 1905, (the fifth of the so-called “Thirty-one” Lectures, Dr. Steiner says: “Buddhi-Manas must now be developed. Man must learn to do something more than mere speaking. With his speaking he must combine another force, such as is found in the works of Tolstoy. What Tolstoy actually says is of less importance than the fact that behind what he says there is an elemental force which has in it something of Buddhi-Manas. The reason why Tolstoy's writings make such a strong impression is that they contain, in contrast to Western European culture, something new and rudimental. The element of uncouthness in Tolstoy's writings will be leveled out as time goes on. Tolstoy is merely an instrument of a higher spiritual force which was also behind the Gothic Initiate Wulfila. This spiritual force uses Tolstoy as its instrument.”