The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] For cognition the concept of a tree is conditioned by the perception of the tree. When confronted with a particular perception I can lift out only one definite concept from the general system of concepts. The connection between concept and perception is determined indirectly and objectively through thinking according to the perception. The connection of the perception with its concept is recognized after the act of perception; but that they belong to one another is already inherent in the object itself.

[ 2 ] The process is different when the relation of man to the world is considered, as it arises within knowledge. In the preceding explanation the attempt has been made to show that it is possible to throw light on this relation if one observes it without prejudice. A real understanding of such an observation leads to the insight that thinking can be directly experienced as a self-contained reality. In order to explain thinking as such, those who find it necessary to add something to it, such as physical brain-processes or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind the conscious thinking which is being observed, underestimate what can be seen when thinking is observed without prejudice. During his observation of thinking, the observer lives directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining activity of a living reality. Indeed one can say that he who wants to grasp the reality of spirit in the form in which it first presents itself to man, can do this in his own self-sustaining thinking.

[ 3 ] When thinking is observed, two things coincide which elsewhere must always appear apart: concept and perception. If this is not recognized, then in the concepts which have been worked out according to perceptions, one is unable to see anything but shadowy copies of the perceptions, and will take the perceptions to be the full reality. Further, one will build up a metaphysical sphere on the pattern of the perceived world, and each person, according to his views, will call this world a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, and so on. And he will not notice that with all this he merely hypothetically builds up a metaphysical world on the pattern of his world of perceptions. But if he realizes what he has before him in thinking, then he will also recognize that in the perception only a part of reality is present, and that the other part that belongs to it and first allows it to appear as full reality, is experienced in the act of permeating the perception with thinking. Then in what arises in consciousness as thinking, he will also see not a shadowy copy of some reality, but spiritual reality itself. And of this he can say that it becomes present in his consciousness through intuition. Intuition is a conscious experience of a purely spiritual content, taking place in the sphere of pure spirit. Only through an intuition can the reality of thinking be grasped.

[ 4 ] Only when, by observing thinking without prejudice, one has wrestled one's way through to recognizing the truth that the nature of thinking is intuitive, is it possible to gain a real understanding of the body-soul organization of man. Then one recognizes that this organization cannot affect the nature of thinking. Quite obvious facts seem to contradict this at first. For ordinary experience, human thinking only takes place connected with, and by means of, the organization. This comes so strongly to the fore that the true facts can only be seen when it has been recognized that nothing from the organization plays into thinking as such. And then it is impossible not to notice how extraordinary is the relation of the human organization to thinking. For this organization has no effect at all on thinking; rather it withdraws when the activity of thinking takes place; it suspends its own activity, it makes room, and in the space that has become free, thinking appears. The spiritual substance that acts in thinking has a twofold task: first it presses back the human organization in its activity, and next, it steps into the place of it. The first, the pressing back of the bodily organization, is also a consequence of the thinking activity, and indeed of that part of this activity which prepares the manifestation of thinking. This explains the sense in which thinking finds its counterpart in the bodily organization. And when this is recognized, one will no longer mistake this counterpart for thinking itself. If someone walks over soft ground, his feet leave impressions in the soil. But one is not tempted to say that the forces of the ground have formed these imprints from below. One will not ascribe to these forces any participation in the creating of the footprints. So too, one who, without prejudice, observes the nature of thinking will not ascribe to the imprints in the bodily organization any participation in the nature of thinking, for the imprints in the organization come about through the fact that thinking prepares its manifestation through the body. [The significance of the above view in relation to psychology, physiology, etc., in various directions has been set forth by the author in works published after this book. Here the aim is only to characterize what can be recognized by an unprejudiced observation of thinking.]

[ 5 ] Now a significant question arises. If the human organism does not partake in the spiritual substance of thinking, what significance has this organism within man's being as a whole? Now what happens in this organism through thinking has nothing to do with the nature of thinking, but indeed it has to do with the arising of the I-consciousness within thinking. The real “I” exists within the being of thinking, but not so the I-consciousness. This will be recognized if only thinking is observed without prejudice. The “I” is to be found within thinking; the “I-consciousness” arises through the fact that the imprints of the activity of thinking are engraved upon the general consciousness in the sense explained above. (The I-consciousness therefore arises through the bodily organism. But by this is not meant that the I-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent on the bodily organism. Once arisen, it is taken up into thinking and henceforth shares its spiritual nature.)

[ 6 ] The human organism is the foundation of the “I-consciousness.” It is also the source of will-activity. It follows from the preceding explanation that an insight into the connection between thinking, conscious I, and will activity can only be obtained if we first observe how will-activity issues from the human organism.^44b

[ 7 ] The factors to be considered in a particular act of will are the motive and the driving force. The motive is either a concept or a representation; the driving force is the will element and is directly conditioned by the human organism. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary source from which the will is determined; the driving force is the permanent source of determination in the individual. A motive of will may be a pure concept or a concept with a definite reference to what is perceived, i.e. a representation. General and individual concepts (representations) become motives of will by influencing the human individual and determine him to act in a particular direction. But one and the same concept, or one and the same representation, influences different individuals differently. It impels different people to different actions. Will, therefore, does not come about merely as a result of the concept, or representation, but also through the individual disposition of human beings. This individual disposition we will call—in this respect one can follow Eduard von Hartmann ⁴⁵—the characterological disposition. The way in which concepts and representations influence the characterological disposition of a person gives his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed through the more or less constant life-content of our subject, that is, through the content of our representations and feelings. Whether a present representation stimulates me to will or not, depends on how the representation is related to the content of the rest of my representations, and also to my particular feelings. The content of my representations is determined in turn by all those concepts which in the course of my individual life have come into contact with perceptions, that is, have become representations. This again depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition, and on the range of my observations, that is, on the subjective and the objective factors of experience,⁴⁶ on my inner determination and my place in life. The characterological disposition is more particularly determined by the life of feeling. Whether I make a definite representation or concept the motive of my action will depend on whether it gives me pleasure or pain.—These are the elements which come into consideration in an act of will. The immediately present representation or concept which becomes motive, determines the aim, the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity toward this aim. The representation, to go for a walk in the next half-hour, determines the aim of my action. But this representation is elevated to a motive of will only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my life until now I have formed representations concerning the purpose of walking, its value for health, and further, if the representation of walking combines in me with a feeling of pleasure.

[ 9 ] We therefore must distinguish: 1) the possible subjective dispositions which are suitable for turning definite representations and concepts into motives; and 2) the possible representations and concepts which are capable of so influencing my characterological disposition that willing is the result. The first represents the driving force, the second, the aims of morality.

[ 10 ] We can find the driving force of morality by investigating the elements which comprise individual life.

[ 11 ] The first level of individual life is perceiving, more particularly, perceiving by means of the senses. Here we are concerned with that region of our individual life where perceiving, without a feeling or a concept coming between, is directly transformed into willing. The driving force in man, which comes into consideration here, we shall simply call instinct. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) takes place in this way. What is most characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which a particular perception releases the will. This kind of determination of the will, which is characteristic only of lower sense-life to begin with, can also be extended to the perceptions of the higher senses. We let a deed follow upon the perception of some event or other in the outer world without further reflection and without linking any particular feeling to the perception, as in fact happens in conventional social life. The driving force of such conduct is what is called tact or moral etiquette. The more often such a direct release of activity by a perception takes place, the more the person concerned is able to act purely under the guidance of tact, that is: tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings link themselves to the perceptions of the outer world. These feelings can become the driving forces of deeds. When I see a starving person, pity for him can become the driving force of my action. Such feelings, for example, are shame, pride, honor, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love and duty.^46a

[ 13 ] The third level of life is thinking and forming representations. A representation or a concept can become motive for an action through mere reflection. Representations become motives because in the course of life we continuously link certain aims of will with perceptions which keep returning in more or less modified form. This is why, when people not entirely without experience have certain perceptions, there always also enter into their consciousness representations of deeds which they themselves have carried out in a similar instance, or have seen carried out. These representations hover before them as determining models for all later decisions; they become united with their characterological disposition. We could call this driving force of the will, practical experience. Practical experience gradually merges into purely tactful conduct. This happens when definite typical pictures of actions have become so firmly connected in our consciousness with representations of certain situations in life that in any given case we skip over all deliberation based on experience and pass over directly from perception into willing.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thinking without reference to a definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from the ideal sphere. Such a concept contains no reference to definite perceptions at first. If we pass over into willing under the influence of a concept pointing to a perception, that is, a representation, then it is this perception which determines us indirectly via the conceptual thinking. When we act under the influence of intuitions, then the driving force of our deed is pure thinking. Since in philosophy it is customary to call the faculty of pure thinking, reason, it would be justifiable to call the moral driving force characteristic of this level, practical reason. The clearest account of this driving force of the will has been given by Kreyenbühl.⁴⁷ (Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XVIII, No. 3). (Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant) I count his article on this subject among the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, particularly to ethics. Kreyenbühl characterizes this driving force as practical a priori, that is, an impulse to action springing directly from my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that in the strictest sense of the word, such an impulse can no longer be considered as belonging to the characterological disposition. For here what acts as driving force is no longer something merely individual in me, but is the ideal and therefore the universal content of my intuition. As soon as I see the justification for making this content the foundation and starting-point of an action, I pass over into willing, irrespective of whether I had the concept already, or whether it enters my consciousness only immediately before acting, that is, irrespective of whether or not it was already present in me as disposition.

[ 16 ] An action is a real act of will only when a momentary impulse of action, in the form of a concept or representation, influences the characterological disposition. Such an impulse then becomes the motive of will.

[ 17 ] Motives of morality are representations and concepts. There are philosophers of ethics who also see in feeling a motive for morality; they maintain, for example, that the aim of moral conduct is the furtherance of the greatest possible quantity of pleasure in the individual who acts. But in itself a pleasure cannot be a motive; only a represented pleasure can. The representation of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, can influence my characterological disposition. For in the moment of acting the feeling itself is not yet there; moreover it is to be produced by the action.

[ 18 ] The representation of one's own or someone else's welfare, however, is rightly regarded as a motive of will. The principle: through one's deed to bring about the greatest amount of pleasure for oneself, that is, to attain personal advantage, is egoism. It is striven for either by ruthlessly considering only one's own welfare, even at the cost of the happiness of others (pure egoism), or by furthering the welfare of others because indirectly one expects a favorable influence upon one's own self through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (morality of prudence). The particular content of egoistical principles of morality will depend upon what representations a person has of his own or of another's happiness. A person will determine the content of his egoistical striving according to what he considers to be the good things in life (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from various misfortunes, etc.).

[ 19 ] Another motive is the purely conceptual content of actions. This content does not refer to a particular action only, as in the case of the representation of one's own pleasures, but to the reason for an action derived from a system of moral principles. In the form of abstract concepts these moral principles may govern moral life without the single individual troubling himself about the origin of the concepts. In that case, we simply feel the subjection to the moral concept which, like a command, overshadows our deeds as a moral necessity. The reason for this necessity we leave to those who demand our moral subjection, that is, to the moral authority we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). A particular instance of these moral principles is when the command announces itself to us, not through an external authority, but through our own inner being (moral autonomy). In this case, within ourselves we sense the voice to which we have to submit. This voice finds expression in conscience.

[ 20 ] It means moral progress when man does not simply take the command of an outer or inner authority as motive for his action, but strives to recognize the reason why a particular principle of conduct should act as motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority, to conduct based on moral insight. At this level of morality the person will consider the needs of moral life and will let this knowledge determine his actions. Such needs are: 1) the greatest possible welfare of humanity, purely for its own sake; 2) the progress of culture, or the moral development of mankind to ever greater perfection; 3) the realization of individual aims of morality, which are grasped purely intuitively.

[ 21 ] The greatest possible welfare of humanity will naturally be understood differently by different people. The above principle does not refer to a definite representation of this welfare, but to the fact that each person who acknowledges this principle strives to do what in his opinion best furthers the welfare of humanity.

[ 22 ] The progress of culture is seen as a special instance of the above-mentioned moral principle by those who connect feelings of pleasure with the advantages of culture, but they will have to accept into the bargain the decline and destruction of much that also contributes to the welfare of mankind. However, it is also possible that in the progress of culture someone sees a moral necessity, quite apart from the feeling of pleasure connected with it. Then for him, the progress of culture is a particular moral principle, distinct from the one mentioned previously.

[ 23 ] The principle of the general welfare, as well as that of the progress of culture, is based upon a representation, that is, upon how one relates the content of moral ideas to certain experiences (perceptions). But the highest thinkable principle of morality is one which contains no such relation from the start, but springs from the source of pure intuition and only afterward seeks the relation to perceptions (to life). Here the decision as to what is to be willed proceeds from a different sphere than that of the previous examples. In all his conduct, one in favor of the principle of the general welfare will first ask what his ideals will contribute to this general welfare. He who acknowledges the moral principle of the progress of culture, will do the same. But at this level he could do something even higher: if in a particular case he were not to proceed from one single definite aim of morality, but were to recognize a certain value in all principles of morality and were always to ask whether the one or the other would be more important here. It may happen that in certain circumstances one considers the progress of culture, in others, the general welfare, and in yet others, the furtherance of his own welfare, to be the right aim and motive of his actions. But when all such reasons take second place, then first and foremost the conceptual intuition itself comes into consideration. When this happens, then all other motives retreat from the leading position and the idea-content of the action alone is effective as its motive.

[ 24 ] Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have shown the one which acts as pure thinking, as practical reason, to be the highest. From the motives, we have now shown conceptual intuition to be the highest. On closer consideration, it will soon be seen that at this level of morality driving force and motive coincide, that is, neither a predetermined characterological disposition nor an external moral principle accepted on authority, influences our conduct. The deed therefore is neither a conventional one, carried out according to some rule or other, nor one automatically performed in response to an external impulse; rather it is one which is determined solely through its ideal content.

[ 25 ] Such conduct presupposes the capacity for moral intuition. Whoever lacks the ability to experience the moral principle that applies in a particular instance, will never achieve truly individual willing.

[ 26 ] The exact opposite to this moral principle is the Kantian: Act so that the principles of your actions can be valid for all men. This principle is death to all individual impulses of action. How all men would act cannot be a standard for me, but rather what is right for me to do in the particular instance.

[ 27 ] To this, a superficial judgment could perhaps object: How can an action be individually adapted to the particular instance and the particular situation, and yet at the same time be determined purely ideally by intuition? This objection is due to a confusion of the moral motive and the perceptible content of the action. The perceptible content could be a motive, and is one, for example, when an act is done for the progress of culture or out of pure egoism, etc., but it is not the motive when the reason for action is a pure moral intuition. My I naturally takes notice of this perceptual content, but is not determined by it. This content is used only to form a cognitive concept, but the moral concept that belongs to it, the I does not take from the object. The cognitive concept of a given situation confronting me is also a moral concept only if I base my view on a particular moral principle. If my viewpoint is limited to the general moral principle of the progress of culture, then I go through life along a fixed route. From every event I perceive which can occupy me, a moral duty also springs, namely, to do my best toward placing the particular event in the service of the progress of culture. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the natural law inherent in an event or object, there is also a moral label attached to it which contains for me, as a moral being, an ethical direction as to how I am to behave. This moral label is justified at a certain level, but at a higher level it coincides with the idea that arises in me when I face the concrete instance.

[ 28 ] Men differ greatly in their capacity for intuition. In one person ideas bubble up easily, while another person has to acquire them with much labor. The situation in which men live, which is the scene of their actions, is no less different. How a man acts will therefore depend on the way his capacity for intuition functions in the face of a given situation. The sum of ideas active within us, the actual content of our intuitions, is what, for all the universality of the idea-world, is individually constituted in each human being. Insofar as this intuitive content is directed toward action, it is the moral content of the individual. To let this content come to expression is the highest moral driving force and also the highest motive for the one who has recognized that ultimately all other moral principles unite in this content. This standpoint can be called ethical individualism.

[ 29 ] The discovery of the quite individual intuition which corresponds to the situation, is the deciding factor in an intuitively determined action. At this level of morality one can speak only of general concepts of morality (norms, laws) insofar as these result from the generalization of individual impulses. General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be derived. But facts must first be produced by human deeds.

[ 30 ] When we look for the laws (concepts) underlying the conduct of individuals, peoples and epochs, we obtain a system of ethics, not as a science of moral rules, but as a natural philosophy of morality. It is true that laws obtained in this way are related to human conduct, as the laws of nature are related to a particular phenomenon. But they are not at all identical with the impulses upon which we base our conduct. If one wants to grasp the means by which man's action springs from his moral will, then one must first consider the relation of this will to the action. One must first select actions where this relation is the determining factor. If I, or someone else, reflect on such an action later, then can be discovered upon what principle of morality the action is based. While I am acting I am moved to act by the moral principle insofar as it lives in me intuitively; the moral principle is united with my love for what I want to accomplish by my deed. I ask no man and no code, Shall I do this?—rather I do it the moment I have grasped the idea of it. This alone makes it my action. The deeds of a person who acts solely because he acknowledges a definite moral standard, come about as a result of a principle which is part of his moral code. He is merely the agent. He is a higher kind of automaton. If some impulse to action enters his consciousness, then at once the clockwork of his moral principle will be set in motion and run to rule, in order to bring about a deed which is Christian, or humane, or is deemed unselfish, or to further the progress of culture. Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. At this level of morality I do not act because I acknowledge a ruler over me, an external authority, or a so-called inner voice. I do not acknowledge any external principle for my conduct, because I have found the source of my conduct within myself, namely, my love for the deed. I do not prove intellectually whether my deed is good or bad; I do it out of my love for it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, immersed in love, exists in the right way within the relationship between things; this can be experienced intuitively; the action will be “bad” if this is not the case. Nor do I ask myself: How would another person act in my place?—rather I act, as I, as this particular individuality, find my will motivated to act. I am not guided directly by what happens to be the usual thing, the general habit, some general human code or moral standard, but solely by my love for this deed. I feel no compulsion—neither the compulsion of nature which rules me through my instincts, nor the compulsion of moral commands. Rather, I simply carry out what lies within me.

[ 31 ] Those who defend general moral standards will perhaps object: If each person strives to express and do only what he pleases, then there is no difference between a good deed and a crime; every depraved impulse in me has the same right to express itself as has the intention to do my best. The fact that I have a deed in mind, according to an idea, cannot set my standard as a moral human being, but only the test as to whether it is a good or evil deed. Only if it is good should I carry it out.

[ 32 ] My reply to this obvious objection, which nonetheless is based on a misunderstanding of what is meant here, is this: One who wants to understand the nature of human will must differentiate between the path which brings this will to a certain degree of development, and the unique character which the will assumes as it approaches its goal. On the way toward this goal standards do play their justified part. The goal consists in the realization of aims of morality, grasped purely intuitively. Man attains such aims to the degree that he is at all able to raise himself to the intuitive idea-content of the world. In particular instances such aims are usually mixed with other elements, either as driving force or as motive. Nevertheless, in the human will intuition can be the determining factor, wholly or in part. A person does what he ought to do, he provides the stage upon which “ought” becomes deed; it is absolutely his own deed which he brings to expression. The impulse here can only be completely individual. And, in fact, only an act of will which springs from intuition can be individual. To call the acts of criminals and what is evil an expression of the individuality, in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is only possible if blind urges are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind urge which drives a person to crime does not spring from intuition and does not belong to what is individual in man, but rather to what is most general in him, to what is equally valid in all men, and out of which man works his way by means of what is individual in him. What is individual in me is not my organism with its urges and feelings, but rather the universal world of ideas which lights up within this organism. My urges, instincts, passions confirm nothing more than that I belong to the general species, man; the fact that something ideal comes to expression in a particular way within these urges, passions and feelings, confirms my individuality. Through my instincts and urges I am a person of whom there are twelve to the dozen; through the particular form of the idea, by means of which I name myself “I” within the dozen, I am an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature; through my thinking, that is, through the active grasp of what expresses itself as an ideal within my organism, do I distinguish myself from others. Therefore one definitely cannot say that the action of a criminal springs from the idea in him. Indeed, this is just what is characteristic of a criminal deed: it stems from elements in man which are external to the ideal-element in him.

[ 33 ] An action is felt to be free insofar as the reason for it springs from the ideal part of my individual being; any other part of an action, irrespective of whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of a moral code, is felt to be unfree.

[ 34 ] Man is free insofar as he is able, in every moment of his life, to follow himself. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called free in this sense. What here have to be considered are the presuppositions necessary for a willed action to be felt as free; how this purely ethically grasped idea of freedom realizes itself in human nature, will be seen in what follows.

[ 35 ] A deed done out of freedom does not at all exclude, but includes moral laws, but it will be a deed done from a higher sphere compared with those dictated solely by such laws. Why should my deed serve the general welfare any less when it is done out of love, than when I do it solely for the reason that I feel that to serve the general welfare is a duty? The concept of mere duty excludes freedom because it does not include what is individual, but demands subjection of the individual to a general standard. Freedom of action is thinkable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.

[ 36 ] But how is it possible for people to live in a community if each person strives to assert only his own individuality? This objection is characteristic of misunderstood moralism. A person holding this viewpoint believes that a community of people is possible only if all men are united by general fixed moral rules. He simply does not understand the oneness and harmony of the idea-world. He does not realize that the idea-world which is active in me is none other than the one active in my fellow-man. This unity of ideas is indeed nothing but a result of men's experience of life. Only this can it be. For if the unity of the idea-world could be recognized by any means other than by individual observation, then general rules and not personal experience would be valid in its sphere. Individuality is possible only when each individual is acquainted with others through individual observation alone. The difference between me and my fellow men is not at all because we live in two quite different spiritual worlds, but because from the world of ideas which we share, he receives different intuitions from mine. He wants to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both really draw from the idea, and are not obeying any external impulses (physical or spiritual), then we cannot but meet in the same striving, in having the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash between men who are morally free, is out of the question. Only the morally unfree who follow natural instincts or some accepted command of duty, turn away from a fellow-man if he does not follow the same instinct and the same command as themselves. To live in love of the action and to let live, having understanding for the other person's will, is the fundamental principle of free human beings. They know no other “ought” than that with which their will is intuitively in accord; how they shall will in a particular instance, their power of ideation will tell them.

[ 37 ] If human nature were not fundamentally social, no external laws could make it so! Only because individual human beings are one in the spiritual part of their being, can they live out their lives side by side. The free man is confident that others who are free belong to the same spiritual world as he does, and that they will meet him in their intentions. The free man does not demand agreement from his fellow men, but he expects it, because it lies in human nature. This does not refer to the existing necessity for this or that external arrangement, but rather to the disposition, the attitude of soul through which man, in his experience of himself among fellow men for whom he cares, comes nearest to doing justice to human dignity.

[ 38 ] There are many who will say that the concept of a free human being outlined here is a chimera, is nowhere to be found as a reality, and that we have to deal with real people from whom one can hope for morality only when they obey some moral law, when they regard their moral mission as a duty, and do not freely follow their inclinations and preferences.—I certainly do not doubt this. Only a blind man could do so. But then, away with all hypocrisy of morality if this is to be the ultimate conclusion. Then simply say: Human nature must be compelled as long as it is not free. Whether the unfreedom is dealt with by physical means or through moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his immeasurable sexual instinct, or because he is hemmed in by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. But one should not maintain that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, for he is driven to them by external powers. But there are human beings who raise themselves above all these compelling rules, free spirits who find their own self in the jumble of habits, regulations, religious observance, etc. They are free insofar as they follow only themselves; unfree insofar as they submit themselves. Which of us can say that he is really free in all that he does? But in each of us exists a higher being in whom the free man comes to expression.

[ 39 ] Our life is composed of free and unfree deeds. But we cannot complete the concept of man without including the free spirit as the purest characteristic of human nature. After all, we are truly human only insofar as we are free.

[ 40 ] That is an ideal, many will say. Without doubt—but it is an ideal which works itself to the surface from within our nature as a reality. It is no “thought out” or imagined ideal, but one in which there is life, one which clearly announces its presence even in its least perfect form of existence. If man were merely a product of nature, the search for ideals, that is, for ideas which for the moment are inactive but whose realization we demand, would not be possible. In the case of external objects the idea is determined by the perception. We have done our share when we have recognized the connection between idea and perception. But with man this is not so. His content is not determined without him; his true concept as a moral being (free spirit) is not objectively united with the perceptual picture “man” from the start merely in order to be confirmed by knowledge later. By his own activity man must unite his concept with the perception, man. Concept and perception only coincide here if man himself brings it about. But he cannot do this till he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, his own concept. In the objective world a line of division is drawn by our organization between perception and concept; cognition overcomes this division. In our subjective nature this division is no less present; man overcomes it in the course of his development by bringing his concept to expression in his outward existence. Both man's intellectual as well as his moral life point to his twofold nature: perceiving (direct experience) and thinking. In the intellectual life the two-foldness is overcome through knowledge; in the moral life through actually bringing the free spirit to realization. Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its existence and activity), but in external objects the concept is indivisibly connected with the perception and separated from it only within our spiritual organism. In man concept and perception are to begin with, actually apart, to be united by him just as actually. One could object: To our perception of a man a definite concept corresponds at every moment of his life, just as is the case with everything else. I can form a concept of a typical man, and I may also find such a man given to me as a perception. If to this I also bring the concept of the free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 41 ] This line of thought is one-sided. As perceptual object I am subjected to perpetual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. In fact, at every moment the perceptual picture of myself is different from what it was a moment ago. These changes may take place in such a way that either it is always the same (the typical) man who expresses himself in them, or they become the expression of the free spirit. The perceptual object of my action is subjected to these changes.

[ 42 ] In the perceptual object “man” the possibility of transformation is given, just as in the plant-seed there lies the possibility of becoming a fully developed plant. The plant transforms itself because of the objective laws which are inherent in it; man remains in his imperfect state unless he takes hold of the substance to be transformed within him and transforms it through his own power. Nature makes man merely into a product of nature; society makes him into a being who acts rationally, but he alone can make himself into a free being. At a definite stage in his development nature releases man from its fetters; society carries his development a stage further; the final polish he can only apply himself.

[ 43 ] Therefore, from the standpoint of free morality it is not asserted that as free spirit is the only form in which a man can exist. Free spirituality is the ultimate stage of man's development. And it is not denied that conduct according to rules has its justification as a stage of development. However, this cannot be acknowledged as the highest level of morality. But the free spirit in man overcomes rules in the sense that he does not accept only commands as motives, but also regulates his conduct in accordance with his impulses (intuitions).

[ 44 ] When Kant says of duty: ⁴⁸ “Duty! You sublime, you great name, you encompass nothing beloved or endearing, but you demand submission,” you “lay down a law ... before which all inclinations become silent, even if in secret they also go against it,” then man, conscious of the free spirit, answers: “Freedom! You friendly, humane name, you encompass all that is morally beloved, all that is most worthy of my humanity, you make me no one's servant, you do not merely lay down a law, but wait for what my moral love will of itself recognize as law, because it feels unfree when faced with any law simply forced upon it.”

[ 45 ] This is the contrast between mere law-abiding morality and morality born of freedom.

[ 46 ] The philistine who sees morality embodied in some external rule, may perhaps even regard the free spirit as a dangerous person. But this is simply because his view is limited to a certain period of time. If he were able to see beyond this, he would soon find that the free spirit need go beyond the laws of his state as seldom as the philistine himself, and is never in any real opposition to them. For all the laws of the state have sprung from the intuitions of free spirits, just as have all other objective laws of morality. No law is exercised through a family authority which was not at some time intuitively grasped and laid down by an ancestor. Similarly the conventional laws of morality were first laid down by definite people and so too the laws of the state first arise in the head of a statesman. These individualities have established laws over other people, and only he is unfree who forgets this origin and either looks upon these laws as extra-human commands, that is, as objective moral concepts of duty independent of man, or turns them into the commanding voice thought of—in a falsely mystical way—as compelling him in his own inner being. However, he who does not forget the origin of such laws, but looks for it in man, will reckon with them as belonging to the same idea-world as that from which he too draws his moral intuitions. If he believes his own intuitions to be better, then he will try to replace those in existence with his own; but if he finds the existing ones justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own.

[ 47 ] The formula must not be coined: Man is meant to realize a moral world order which exists independent of him. Insofar as knowledge of man is concerned, one maintaining this stands at the point where natural science stood when it believed that the goat has horns in order to be able to butt. Fortunately natural scientists have rejected such a concept of purpose as a dead theory. It is more difficult to get rid of such theories in ethics. However, just as horns do not exist because of butting, but butting exists through horns, so man does not exist because of morality, but morality exists through man. The free human being acts morally because he has a moral idea, but he does not act in order that morality may come about. Human individuals, with the moral ideas belonging to their nature, are the presupposition for a moral world-order.

[ 48 ] The human individual is the source of all morality and the center of earthly life. State and society have come about only because they are the necessary results of life shared by individual human beings. That state and society should react in turn upon the life of the individual is understandable, just as it is understandable that butting, which exists through the horns, reacts in turn upon the further development of the goat's horns, which would waste away by prolonged disuse. Similarly, the individual would waste away if he led a separate existence outside a human community. This is just why the social order arises, so that it can react favorably upon the individual.

• 44b. Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.
• 45. Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.
• 46. .The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.
• 46a. Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.
• 47. Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.
• 48. Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III.

It is my intention today to continue with the subject we began here last Sunday, and I should like first to go back to the few words I then said concerning the Anti-Modernist Oath. I described its nature by saying that since the time of its inauguration anyone who holds a teaching office in the Roman Catholic Church, whether as theologian or preacher, has to take this oath which forbids anyone engaged in Catholic teaching to deviate from what is recognized as dogmatic truth by the Roman Catholic Church; which means, in fact, what is recognized as dogma by the Roman Curia.

Now in face of such a fact the important question to ask oneself is: “What is there actually new about this Anti-Modernist Oath?”

There is nothing new in the adherence of a Catholic preacher or theologian to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; please be clear about that. What is new is that the person concerned has to take an oath as to what is the doctrine of the Church. I want you to be clear about this first, and then to see it in relation to the fact that there has been a prodigious piling up of historical deeds in the Roman Catholic Church during the last half century. It began with the definition of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception; then came a further extraordinary, subtle, and clever step in the Encyclical and Syllabus of the sixties, in which Pope Pius IX in his eighty Articles declared all modern thinking to be heretical. Then on top of that came the definition of the Dogma of Infallibility, again a very important and extraordinarily clever and subtle advance. The next extremely logical step was the Encyclical “Acterni Patris,” which declared the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to be the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The crowning of this whole structure for the time being is this oath against Modernism, which in effect is nothing else than the carrying over of something which was always present intellectually into the sphere of human emotion, the sphere of will and feeling. That which always had to be acknowledged has, since the year 1907, had also to be sworn on oath.

Anyone who understands this grandiose dramatic development will certainly not underestimate its importance, for it demonstrates the only wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization. I should be interested to know how many people felt as if stung by a viper when they read a certain sentence in the last number of the “Basler Vorwarts,” which illuminates as by a flash of lightning the whole situation at the present time. I should really like to know how many people, when reading this, felt as if stung by a viper! The sentence runs: “Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings concerning their relations one to another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay through the victorious growth of the scientific, clear and naturalistic grasp of reality which is bound to develop parallel with the establishment of a planned society.” This sentence is to be found in an article which has not yet appeared in its entirety, but has yet to be concluded. It is to be found in an article on the measures taken by Lenin and Trotsky against the Russian Catholic Church and the Russian religious communities in general. This article is at the same time an indication of what is regarded as the programme for the future in these quarters.

One knows for a certainty that the number of Lenin’s opponents who feel as if stung by a viper on reading such a sentence is very small. I want to emphasize this as not being without significance, because it brings out to what an extent modern humanity passes lightly over things, usually asleep—how it passes over the weightiest facts, facts which are decisive for the life of mankind on this earth. It is, of course, not a question of any one such sentence; the point is that in certain quarters they will see to it that the content of what is there expressed will be made known throughout the world, that among the widest circles of the European population an outlook will come about which can be thus expressed: “Religion which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings concerning their relations to one another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay.” The so-called ‘enlightened’ humanity of today is still soundly asleep to the fact that such a view is coming. But the Roman Catholic Church is awake; she alone in fact is awake and is working systematically against the approaching storm. She works against it in her own way. And it is very important that we should understand that way, for I have had much to say about the attacks from that quarter that are being forged against what we have to stand for. Meanwhile the clouds are gathering. The latest is that the bill posters had to notify us that the man who this morning was to have posted up in Reinach the announcement of Saturday’s lecture had the posters taken from him and burnt. You see, these things are getting worse, even here they are getting systematically worse.

What was written by a man who frequently hides behind the bushes and calls himself ‘Spectator’—a pack of sheer lies, I told you last time about the most egregious of them—now goes through the whole Roman Catholic press, and this burning of our posters really takes one back out of modern times altogether.

Now, my dear friends, I have already raised the important question as to why the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church today must take an oath in support of what they were already pledged to maintain. No one will deny that the enforcement of such an oath strengthens the external grasp of the matter. Nor will anyone deny that if it is felt necessary to make people take this oath, the assumption is that without such an oath they would no longer go so firmly forward. But, my dear friends, there is, of course, still a third point, which it would be well for you to ponder. For verily things enter in here which must not yet be called by their right names; yet the question may nevertheless be thrown out as an aside. Must not confidence in a thing be already to a certain extent shattered if it has to be sworn on oath? Is it a possibility to administer an oath for the truth? Can there be such a possibility? Is it not necessary to assume that the truth of its own inherent force is its own guarantee in the human soul? Perhaps it is not so important to ask whether an oath is moral or good or useful; perhaps it is far more important historically to ask whether it has become necessary, and if so, why?

In face of this oath something else is now necessary. It is necessary that a certain number of human beings should feel how without spiritual science there must inevitably come over Europe the consequence of the frame of mind expressed in the words “Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings concerning their relations to one another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay through the victorious growth of the scientific, clear and naturalistic grasp of reality, which is bound to develop parallel with the establishment of a planned society.”

What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions one and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to four centuries as modern science, enlightened science—all that is taught as objective science in the educational institutions of civilized humanity. Bourgeois teaching and bourgeois methods of administration have been adopted by the proletariat. What the teachers of the universities and high schools right down to the elementary schools have put into the souls of men, comes out through Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out nothing but what is already taught in the institutions of civilized humanity.

My dear friends, today there exists an antithesis which one should contemplate without prejudice. It is this. What is to be done to prevent the influence of Lenin and Trotsky from spreading over the entire civilized world? The primary necessity is no longer to allow our children and our youth to be taught what has been taught right up to the Twentieth Century in our universities and in our secondary and elementary schools. To grasp this seeming contradiction demands courage, and because men do not want to have this courage, they go to sleep. That is why one has to say that whoever reads a declaration such as the one I have just quoted, even if it only appears in a few lines of an article, should feel as if stung by a viper; for it is as if the whole situation of present-day civilization were illumined by a flash of lightning.

Face to face with this situation, what would spiritual science with all its detailed concreteness have? What spiritual science would have, I would characterize somewhat as follows. The Roman Catholic Church, as a mighty corporation, represents the last withered remains of the civilization of the fourth post-Atlantean Epoch. It can be well authenticated in all detail that the Roman Catholic Church represents the last remnant of what was the right civilization for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, what was justified right up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century, but what has now become a shadow. Of course products of a later evolution often herald their arrival in an earlier period, and its earlier products linger on into a later epoch; but in essentials the Roman Catholic Church represents what was justifiable for Europe and its colonies up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century.

Spiritual science, however, as we understand it, has to further the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. The Roman Catholic Church represents in a number of dogmas, as a self-contained structure which is dead, but which still exists as a corpse, something which hangs together inwardly through a well-constructed logic, a logic of reality. In this structure there is spirit, the spirit of a past epoch, but it is spirit. The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an interesting way to wrestle.

Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, what has appeared as philosophy, science, public opinion, world conception, apart from the Roman Catholic Church, is, for the most part, void of spirit. For the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age begins only to emerge with such principles as those of Lessing and Goethe. And it wants to enter into what the natural-scientific trend inaugurated by Copernicus, Galilee and Kepler was able to yield without spirit, and out of which Darwin, Huxley, and so on have blown the last remnant of Spirit. It wants to enter into that and fill it with Spirit. And spiritual science wishes to make manifest the Spirit which has to be the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

An institution permeated by a certain spirit as its own soul, if it is to maintain itself as an institution, can only fight for the past. To demand of the Catholic Church that it should fight for the future would be folly, for an institution which carried the spirit of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch cannot possibly carry that of the fifth. What the Catholic Church has become, what has spread over the civilized world as the configuration of the Catholic Church, and has its other aspect in Roman law and the abstractness of the whole Latin culture, all that belongs to the fourth cultural epoch. And the Catholic Church configuration has permeated the entire of civilization far more than men think. The monarchies, even if they were Protestant ones, were in their structure at bottom Latin Catholic institutions. For the fourth epoch it was necessary that men should be organized according to abstract principles, and that certain hierarchical ordinances should form the basis of organization. But what is to come as the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age, which we seek to cultivate through spiritual science, does not require such a firm structure, does not need a structure organized according to abstract principles, but requires such a relation of one human being to another as is characterized in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as ethical individualism. What that book has to say on the subject of ethics stands in the same contrast to the social structure fostered by the Roman Catholic Church as in the last resort spiritual science stands to Roman Catholic theology.

Spiritual Science was verily never meant to appear in the role of belligerent; spiritual science was only meant to state what it saw to be the truth. Anyone who examines our activities here will have to admit that never, never have I taken an aggressive stance. Of course, one has had constantly to defend oneself against attacks which came from outside, and that is the essential thing. But it is simply a demand of the age that what spiritual science has to give should be stated quite concretely. One has to remember that modern civilization is asleep, and that Rome is awake. That Rome is awake is revealed by the mighty drama unrolled in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; in the publication of the Encyclical of 1864, with its Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and finally in the anti-Modernist Oath for the teaching clergy.

In face of the rising tide of Darwinism, in face of the rising tide of naturalism in the fifties, something was done which, although it can only be understood out of the spiritual demands of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch nevertheless throws down the gauntlet before all this rising materialism. The rest of the world lets it come, or at best counters it with foolish arguments such as those of Eucken. Rome, however, sets up the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which states clearly: “Naturally, no one can accept the Immaculate Conception and at the same time ascribe to Darwinism; thus we establish the incompatibility of the two things.” Not more than a decade later, the whole structure of the modern world conception, void of spirit, is condemned by the Syllabus. The definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was already a departure from all the earlier traditional development of the Catholic Church. In what then in former times consisted definition by an Ecumenical Council? Within the Catholic Church a fundamental condition for the definition of any dogma—I am simply relating, not criticizing—was that the Fathers gathered together in the Council in which the dogma was to be defined should be illumined by the Holy Spirit; so that in reality the originator of the dogma is the Holy Spirit. It is really a question of recognizing whether the Holy Ghost is really the inspirer of the dogma to be defined. How does one know, how did they know that? Because what was about to be defined as a dogma by an Ecumenical Council was already the opinion of the whole Catholic Church. Now that was not the case with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; consequently, one of the fundamental principles of the Catholic Church was broken, the principle which required that a doctrine shall only be made into a dogma if the faithful have previously signified an inclination towards it. Of course, as regards these modern definitions of dogma, one was already living in the events of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; and it was no longer so easy as in the Middle Ages so to prepare the faithful that a common opinion prevailed among them which could then be defined. But you see, the ground had been well prepared—preparations had really been going on all through the last three or four centuries for these latest revelations; that is to say, these last revelations so far. Even then the Roman Catholic Church was already awake; and if you remember when the Jesuit Order was founded, you will easily draw the inference that the foundation of that Order is essentially connected with the fact that some means had to be found to overcome the difficulties of working on the faithful in modern times and generally to take these difficulties into account. One ought to pay attention to the course things have taken. I am only relating, I am not criticizing. 1574 was the year in which the citizens of Lucerne themselves expressed a desire for Jesuitism. Let me repeat that it was Canisius, the immediate disciple of Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuit College in Freiburg in 1580 which later established its colony in Solothurn. I should like too, to say that after the suppression of the Jesuit Order by Clement XIV, the Jesuits had, of course, to disappear from Switzerland, and they then continued their activities only in the countries of Frederick II of Prussia and of Catherine of Russia, to whom the Jesuit Order really owes its continued existence.

But in this extraordinary interregnum between the suppression of the Jesuit Order in 1773 by Clement XIV and its reinstatement by Pius VII in 1814, strange things nevertheless happened. For you see, during this interval, in Sion, for example, the institution which had been conducted by the Jesuits naturally remained; and as a matter of fact for the most part, too, the same teachers remained in it; only up to 1773 these teachers were Jesuits, and from that date onward they were no longer Jesuits, but one spoke of the Fathers of the Faith as teaching in such institutions. Therefore, it is not surprising that after Pius VII had in 1814 withdrawn the decree of Clement XIV, these Jesuit colonies were again reinstated—in Brigue the same year, in Freiberg in 1818, in Schwiez in 1836.

It is not my task to criticize these things, but I want you to know about them, and I should further like to say this. From my explanations you will have seen that from the 21st of July, 1773, when Clement XIV issued the Bull “Dominus ac Redemptor Noster” until Pius VII caused his Bull “Solicitude omnium Ecclesiarum” to appear, the Jesuit Order was officially suppressed. Now comes something extraordinary. There exist memoirs written by a man who was called Cordara, a Jesuit, one who had gone through all the grades of the Jesuit Order. From his memoirs it is evident that he was not an ignoramus like Count Hoensbruch, whose speeches and writings are unimportant, for, of course, the Jesuits are clever and Hoensbruch is very foolish. It is a question of not being asleep over these things today, but of knowing how to distinguish the important from the unimportant. I should like to mention one point in Cordara’s memoirs, where he remarks that it was strange that the Jesuit Order should have been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV, who had a great liking for the Jesuits and was at the same time an extremely tolerant man and no fool. Thus Cordara gives Pope Clement an excellent character, almost lauds him to the skies, in spite of the fact that he suppressed the Jesuits. Therefore, Cordara naturally asks how it was that they had to be suppressed by this kindly Pope. “One must ask,” says Cordara, “What were the intentions of Divine Wisdom in the suppression of the Jesuits and why it was permitted?” Now, of course, Cordara was a Jesuit, but a man who had even been taught by them to think logically, and therefore, he does not ask abstract questions but very concrete ones. He said, “We have to look for what was blameworthy in the Order,” and he goes on to say, “I find that as regards morality, the Jesuit Order has gone admirably to work; as to unchastity or the like, we are very strict, nobody can deny it. But we are very lenient towards everything of the nature of slander, calumny, and abuse.” Cordara actually says that God probably allowed the suppression of the Jesuit Order by Pope Clement XIV because there had gradually crept into the Order a certain tendency to slander, calumny, and abuse. Now I am not criticizing this, I am only relating facts. I should only like to add that the Jesuit Cordara further says: “One of our chief faults is pride, which causes us to regard all other Orders as of no account and worthless, and all secular clergy as worthless.”

Now, if one puts together everything in these memoirs which is said, not as a reproach to the Jesuit Order but simply as a kind of mea culpa, as an examination of conscience by a Jesuit, one finds in the first place striving for political power; second—pride, arrogance; third—contempt of other Orders and secular priests; fourth—accumulation of wealth. But if one gradually comes to know what it means to maintain dead, withered truths by means of power, one cannot do better than to use such an Order to provide for their maintenance. The Roman Catholic Church in Pius VII well knew what it was doing. It discharged its debt of gratitude to world history, history made by Frederick II, King of Prussia, and by Catherine of Russia, both now dead, when it reinstated the Jesuit Order. And among the first ‘foreign’ Jesuits to teach here in Switzerland again were many of those who had been protected by Catherine, many who came back from Russia. You can read all this in the relevant historical documents.

You can see, therefore, that Rome was wide awake and made in advance her necessary preparations. Wide awake preparation was made. Now comes the next step, the condemnation of all that mounting tide of science—ripe for condemnation since after four centuries of effort to drive out the spirit, it remained void of spirit and mankind remained asleep. The next step was the Encyclical of 1864 with its Syllabus. If the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception had already been a break with all earlier custom of the Roman Catholic Church, undoubtedly what was promulgated in the doctrine of Infallibility constituted a far greater break. For all the acumen of the practiced logic of the Catholic Church was needed to justify the contention that the Pope is infallible after Pope Clement XIV in 1773 had suppressed the Jesuit Order, and his successor Pope Pius VII in 1814 had reinstated it. A goodly number of such things could be adduced. But the logic which had been so well cultivated was not applied to produce sharply defined concepts. What was needed was a well-formed concept which could justify infallibility. Not what the Pope expresses as his private opinion is regarded as infallible, only what he says ‘ex cathedra’. Then it was not necessary to decide whether Clement XIV or Pius VII was infallible, but whether Clement XIV or Pius VII had spoken ‘ex cathedra’ or privately. Clement XIV must have spoken privately when he suppressed the Jesuit Order, and Pius VII ‘ex cathedra’ when he reinstated it! But, you see, the trouble is that the Pope never states whether he is speaking ‘ex cathedra’ or privately. That he has never yet said! One must admit that it is difficult to distinguish in the individual instance whether it is subject to the dogma of infallibility, but the dogma is there, and with it a good blow was struck at what can arise as the elemental culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It then became necessary to draw the consequences and that was well done by Pope Leo XIII, a man full of insight and of very great intelligence. Pope Leo XIII sought to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The Church needed that philosophy which is so great but great for the last culture epoch, for, of course, objectively everything in the way of philosophy which has subsequently arisen is small compared to what blossomed as Philosophy in Scholasticism. But what is small is still a beginning, whereas what was in Scholasticism was an end, a climax.

Now we must remember that mankind is nevertheless trying to progress and therefore it happened that, both in the sphere of natural-scientific research and in historical research, strange vagaries cropped up among the Catholic clergy. Very well then, it now became necessary to adopt strong measures in support of the Catholic doctrine derived from St. Augustine. Hence the Oath against Modernism.

Now of course, my dear friends, nothing can be said against all that, if it is pursued by any community out of a free impulse, but when in 1867 the Jesuits were again allowed into Munich, a Jesuit priest in his first sermon then said that the Rules of the Order forbade Jesuits to meddle in politics, that a Jesuit never has taken any part in politics; then it appears to me that modern men are not likely to believe that. And it soon becomes otherwise. Up to that time it had not in fact been possible to find a really adequate measure.

My dear friends, what I am really trying to bring home to you is that all those who seriously want knowledge, progress and the good of humanity will have to recognize the threefold nature of the social organism. For how little political measures avail against the Roman Catholic Church has shown itself in the course of the German ‘Kultur’ campaign. But what I am primarily trying to bring home to you is how slow people are to see what, as the necessary consequence of spiritual-scientific endeavor, must come into the world as the impulse for the threefold order of society. That is what we need, a wide awake understanding for the phenomena of the time.

Now, my dear friends, I have plunged into a theme into which I would certainly not have entered had it not been for recent events here, of which we shall see further developments. You know that on Saturday I am to give a public lecture on “The Truth about Anthroposophy and its Defense against Untruth.” But in any case I must contrive next Sunday to continue the comments which I cannot complete today. So next Sunday at half-past seven we will meet here once more, although we have to start on a journey on Monday. In these troubled times one cannot do otherwise, and so on Saturday, despite the burning of our posters, the public lecture also will take place here.

Preliminary remark: Paula Matthes' lecture was not written down. The question she or one of the audience members asked about the relationship between imagination, inspiration and intuition and ordinary consciousness was also not recorded by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: The best way to solve this, as I understand it, is to think of the scale of imagination, inspiration and intuition not being built in such a way that they stand above one another; rather, it must actually be built in such a way:

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And if we were to imagine our ordinary consciousness wandering around there, if we develop in this way, then we have imagination, inspiration and intuition. We then have an ascent to intuition, but when we rise to this height, which really takes place in the spiritual world, we also have a kind of projection of it into our ordinary life - for those abilities of ordinary consciousness that play into the ethical realm. In the ethical realm, the ordinary consciousness is, I would say, instinctively intuitive. This is also what causes the word “intuition” to be used in a popular sense. Today, the word “inspiration” is sharply rejected because inspiration, in a certain sense, goes back a little further, but the word “intuition” is accepted because the moral consciousness that arises in ordinary consciousness already has something akin to intuition, but precisely because it is instinctive. Thus the word intuition occurs very frequently and is sometimes used with some justification. And so, if one proceeds in a straightforward way, as I have done in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, from thinking to enter the realm of living morality, if one wants to speak of intuition by skipping imagination and inspiration, one can have a point of reference in ordinary moral consciousness.

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I may then perhaps add a few words at this point - not, of course, to say anything about the lecture by Miss Matthes, which was completely self-contained and very beautiful in itself. She presented a thoroughly self-contained picture that is likely to shed light on the relationship - which would be desirable today - between the general consciousness of the times and what one could get from philosophy. Now, of course, it is a matter of the most diverse circumstances interacting to produce the present situation, which Miss Matthes has so aptly characterized.

You see, it is quite true that in recent years, brought about by the tragic world situation in our Europe, something has emerged that is an increased interest in philosophy among young people. But perhaps we will only be able to fully assess this interest psychologically if we follow how, over time, throughout the entire 19th century and also at the beginning of the 20th century, where there was an opportunity, the interest of young people in philosophy did flare up after all. I would like to cite a few facts in support of this. For example, in Vienna in the 1860s and 1870s, the generally prevailing philosophical view was that of the Herbartian school. The main representative of this Herbartian school in Vienna at the time was Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had a very strange situation in his lectureship when he taught practical philosophy, which was even a compulsory course. In the first two or three lectures, he usually had one of the largest audiences of the University of Vienna; it was all full, overcrowded. But then the audience decreased very quickly, and there were usually only seven or eight who stuck with the course, out of the several hundred who had actually remained. Robert Zimmermann himself, who spoke very beautifully and measuredly, often said of his lectures on practical philosophy: at the beginning the whole lecture hall is full, a large class, then it becomes a thinner thread, and finally, when the test comes, when people need the signatures, then they all come again. - This was not only due to the students and their lack of interest. In 1874 Franz Brentano was called to Vienna, who had an extraordinarily loyal audience. Brentano's lectures in Vienna, as in Würzburg, were very well attended. It cannot be said that this was due to the students only for the reason that it was also a compulsory course, but the lectures were still well attended even when Brentano, who had first been appointed as a full professor in Vienna, became a private lecturer again because of his private circumstances – he had married as a former Catholic priest and therefore had to resign the Vienna professorship. He always hoped that he would be called again, but that could not happen, even though his lecture hall was always overcrowded and the lectures of the other professors, who then had to take the exam, were just as empty as Zimmermann's. Brentano was repeatedly proposed by his colleagues for the full professorship in the first places, but there was always the obstacle that he was excommunicated as a clergyman because he had married, and a Jewish woman at that; the church claims to have authority over those whom it has excommunicated. And when the then emperor, to whom the matter was repeatedly brought, heard that Brentano, as a former clergyman, had married a Jewish woman, he said to the Minister for Education and Worship, who had brought the matter before him and who himself had advocated that Brentano should again have a full professorship: “Is she at least clean, the Jewish woman?” And when they couldn't say that with a clear conscience – she was, incidentally, the daughter of Professor von Lieben in Vienna – the Emperor said, “No, it's no use.” And this went on until Brentano left the professorship as a private lecturer in the 1890s.

So you could see that when really stimulating things were discussed, the students were interested. Brentano had also had a full college in Würzburg in the Auditorium maximum, where, when he first entered it, the students' verdict on his predecessor was written: “sulfur hut”! It had been completely empty before that. The same Auditorium maximum on which the students had written “sulfur hut” was filled by Brentano because he was, after all, a very stimulating personality, regardless of what one thinks of his philosophy.

It is the case that the intellectual development of the 19th and early 20th century actually increasingly suppressed the active pursuit of intellectual life, which emerged from ideas and the like. This suppression of actual intellectual production became more and more pronounced. And of course the spread of the natural sciences is entirely to blame for this. Now a kind of impossible situation has actually arisen from all this. And from this impossible situation, in turn, individual directions have emerged that have at least tried to become philosophically active again.

Now, Miss Matthes has presented the German schools in an excellent way here. For Switzerland, I have the feeling that these four German schools initially have less significance. Here, in broader circles, the Bergsonian school has gained a certain influence. And only to a lesser extent have these four German schools penetrated into the philosophical life of Switzerland. In Switzerland, too, it is probably not possible to perceive the same thing as is said to have been the case at German universities in recent years. In a sense, the emptiness that arose in the souls was already there before the war, where someone like Eucken in Jena, to whom the students trotted, was stimulating, albeit in a, I would say, more talkative way. Eucken's lectures were not very strong, but they were at least attended. And then came the war, with its devastating effects, also in the moral life, in the whole way of life, which nevertheless led to a certain longing in people to somehow hear something about that which is now the determining factor in life, that which holds it together.

Now, these four directions, which have been characterized by Miss Matthes, they all actually already existed before the war, and it is precisely in them that perhaps the bleakness of the intellectual substance of our present can be seen so clearly. The Marburg School has been rightly mentioned, which is based primarily on the very astute thinking of Cohen. Cohen has probably had the most significant influence in the Marburg School, and a great deal can be traced back to his astute thinking. One could also say that at a time when perhaps only Otto Liebmann was a truly astute thinker in German philosophy, except for the Marburg thinker, that the Marburg School actually had a disciplining effect and was educational for the development of a certain astute thinking. This Marburg School is actually quite dependent on a certain one-sided training of Kantianism. One would like to say that it was precisely through Cohen that the Marburg School came to the conclusion that thinking as such should not be regarded merely in its passivity, but that it must be taken in its activity. And of course the age was not at all suited to perceive the inner validity of thinking as something extra-human, as Fichte did, for example, but rather thinking has been thought of, or I should say worked out, more or less as subjective by the moderns, too, albeit with the claim of objective validity, as subjective at least. And it is this active aspect of thinking that was discovered. This was at a time when it was impossible to understand the objective structure of the world process, when it was almost impossible to look at anything other than this activity of thinking.

I would like to ask all philosophers who think along the lines of the Marburg School — and I am only saying a few aphoristic remarks here — how they can see a real being in thinking when the thinking subject, that is, the human being, has this activity of thinking interrupted every time from falling asleep to waking up? This is a crucial question that should be posed to the entire Marburg School. The point is that the Marburg School is basically a consistent elaboration of Descartes's phrase “I think, therefore I am,” but this is only based on a particular judgment about thinking in the present. For there is no denying that we are also then, when we are not thinking in our ordinary consciousness between falling asleep and waking up. And when we think backwards, our retrospective is divided into those currents in which we think and those currents in which we do not think, then think again and so on, and in the meantime we are without thinking. This is the cardinal problem, and it is the source of failure not only for the Marburg School but also for Bergson and certain American schools, which are noteworthy in their own way. First of all, we must overcome the influence of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”.

It is therefore necessary to get into the scope of human consciousness what encompasses, on the one hand, the activity of thinking and, on the other, the discontinuity of thinking. This is what must be raised as a problem in relation to this school, and it is a problem that has not even been touched upon by this Marburg school. There is not even an awareness that this problem exists, just as little as, for example, in Bergson and in the current epistemological direction; I do not mean James – he develops pragmatism – but I mean some other American directions. The problem is actually not touched upon, and when it is raised, there is no awareness of how to deal with it, not even epistemologically.

Then, of course, there is the direction of Husserl, but it is not given much consideration. My feeling is that he is a disciple of Franz Brentano. In Franz Brentano, the fact that he is a sharply trained Aristotelian and a sharply trained Thomist is evident everywhere, a good, thorough connoisseur of Thomism, so that some of both Aristotelianism and Thomism has been transferred to Husserl. Of course, a modern philosopher like Husserl cannot readily admit this, but it can be seen in his psychology and in everything that comes to light in him.

Now, I don't know what Miss Matthes thinks about this – I must confess that when I wrote my “Riddles of Philosophy” in the new edition and tried to incorporate some of these newer directions, I was repeatedly faced with the question: What should one actually do with Husserl? No matter how hard you try to get at it, to somehow get hold of it, to grasp it, you can't do it; nothing special comes of it. It struck me so strongly how Husserl basically rummages in words, how, despite all his insight into the essence of things and so on, he is completely dependent on the secondary content of words and how he cannot come to a real insight into even the simplest facts of consciousness. It seems, for example, to be impossible for Husserl to grasp the difference between the image of Cologne Cathedral that I have only in my memory, but noted in my consciousness down to the last detail, and the image that I have before me when I actually stand in front of Cologne Cathedral and really look at it. I don't see how, in the whole structure of Husserl's philosophy, a difference between these two images could be found as essentially real. And if I am not mistaken, Husserl himself once used this image of Cologne Cathedral in these two relationships, I believe for the sake of illustration. One does not actually come out of his confusion through all possible discussions to something tangible.

I also have this feeling when I consider Scheler's sometimes quite beautiful treatises. Scheler is a talented person, but I always ask myself why Scheler – who, for example, has written beautiful treatises on the direct perception of feeling, that is, on the direct experience of compassion – why he does not manage to somehow really gain an independent worldview? Why does he so terribly proselytize? Why does he seek the support of old Catholicism? This is something that shows me that these philosophers are disciples of Brentano.

Brentano has only [...] gap in the stenographer's notes] of his philosophy because he could not merge into a real spiritual science. He did not want to, nor could he. And it is not true, for Brentano was so strong that he did not turn to Catholicism, but his students are terribly Catholic in their efforts to find a connection for their world view.

As for the people of Baden – Windelband, Rickert and some others – it seems to me that the whole matter rests on an appalling one-sidedness in their conception of reality. It is not true that these people no longer know what to do with philosophy and want to save themselves by even excluding the value problem. They separate it out in such a way that they then have no need to make any kind of statements about the relationship of value to themselves. They crystallize the value problem out of the scope of the world problems, so to speak, and refer to John Mackay without feeling any obligation to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. This will also be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the law of the conservation of energy and matter in the near future. For one must realize that with value something is given that is germinal for future values, that is there when the present has decayed. One must therefore come to think of matter and force as transitory and to see the fruits, the germs that they have in them, as values. Only then will one be able to gain a further insight into these problems, into value problems. Today, there is a lack of courage for that. Of course, people completely lack the courage to somehow attack the law of the conservation of energy and matter. There are a few tentative attempts – Drews occasionally points out, after all, that the law of the conservation of matter and energy is only a kind of empirical problem and the like – but one will hardly find any far-reaching insight in this field.

With regard to Nelson and his direction, one should perhaps not overlook the fact that the people started from Hegel and the Fries, which he regarded as the “father of all shallowness”, because the people were all Friesians at first, weren't they? It was a Fries School at first. And now we must not forget that what I have emphasized time and again comes into play here: you can be an extraordinarily astute logician – there is no doubt about that in Nelson's case – but for real life problems, it is not enough. I must say that when he spoke at the Bologna Congress in 1911, among all the various illustrious philosophers, including Bergson, he was actually the very best in terms of dialectical power and solid craftsmanship in the use of thought. But then, especially when I saw Nelson again recently in Bern, I got the feeling that it is not at all sufficient for real life problems, that it leads to an abstractness - which is actually quite dreadful, but which was excellently characterized by Ms. Matthes - in that he tries to gain an ethic in three volumes from an abstract sentence. You see, you can be an excellent dialectician without having the slightest sense of reality. This can also be seen from the way Nelson treats the problem of knowledge. It is ultimately all the same to him whether the problem of knowledge is treated in the way of the many neo-Kantians who actually start from quite secondary things.

You see, it was perhaps in 1888 that I once sat in Berlin with Eduard von Hartmann, and the conversation revolved almost entirely around the fundamental questions of epistemology. Well, Eduard von Hartmann really could not be approached in this direction. So I expressed the opinion that when one speaks of the idea, one can initially say, for my sake, that the idea is something subjective, but that it is not possible to stick to it when one moves on to considerations. I recently compared it to this: if someone takes a letter, E or something else, they cannot raise the abstract question of what this individual letter means in itself. But if you have letters that then combine into words and the words combine into sentences, then the whole thing comes together. And so you can say: Certainly, if you just take a small thing from phenomenology, the problem of how this individual thing relates to the thing in itself and so on becomes a kind of life problem again and again. But if you connect the phenomena with each other, a certain structure arises, and you can no longer think the same about a certain sphere of phenomena in relation to reality as you can about an individual. Non-epistemologists like Nelson completely ignore such things. It really does not matter whether, on the one hand, it is said against epistemology, as Hegel said: you can't recognize without recognizing, because that would be the same as wanting to learn to swim without getting into the water - or whether on the other hand you say: in order to pose a problem of recognition, there would have to be a recognition already. - What is really at issue here is to realize that the problem of recognition could still be a completely valid problem, even though it presupposes a certain recognition. One could practise recognition first, and then afterwards one could observe it, and afterwards one could critically determine - or whatever you want to call it - whether the recognition is valid or not. So an epistemology could never be eliminated by Nelson's arguments.

So these things are there. Other images could be given, some noteworthy philosophical directions could be mentioned. I will only mention that, for example, pragmatism also has a great many followers in Germany, and that neo-Thomism also has a certain significance in the present, especially among Catholic philosophers, even if it is not noticed because of the divisions that exist and because people do not care what some produce when they live in the circle of others.

But all these schools of thought are actually faced with the necessity of finding a transition to a reality, of getting out of the mere formal. When one hears or reads Eucken – every book by Eucken says roughly the same thing – it really is as if someone were not standing on the ground, but were constantly floating in the air, pulling himself up by his hair. It is a lot of beating about the bush for no reason. This is especially striking in Eucken's work. And one must say, when one looks at what is there and what cannot be connected to reality, one can understand that young people, who really have the tendency to absorb something about the world, cannot get their rights and must ultimately be truly disappointed and must become desolate. It is really quite sad when one sees how little that which has been brought to the surface from the last moments of development is inclined to meet this longing of youth. Not true, the students might like to hear something, but what they can hear is really not worth listening to. And what happens next is basically terrible.

At a German university, they tried to interest a man who is actually well-intentioned but who came from the old system in the GDR in the threefold order. At the time, he had resolved, in order to get to know the threefold order, to give a student who wanted to take his exam with him a dissertation on the threefold order, because this would save him from having to read the “key points” himself. He then corrected the dissertation and believed that by becoming acquainted with the ideas of the “key points” in the course of his official duties, he was in this way getting to know the threefold order; because otherwise, directly, he does not do it. This reminds me vividly of how a student once asked his professor about Soloviev at a university. Well, the professor hardly knew the name, but he said to himself: There is the best opportunity for me to get to know him too. [And to the student he said:] Do a dissertation on it. — So it is at a German university when a dissertation is to be done on Soloviev. At the moment he gave the dissertation, the professor had no idea about Soloviev – nor did he later, he didn't know more than what he had taken from the dissertation itself.

It is almost impossible to describe the state we gradually entered into. And the subordination of the spiritual realm to the state structure is closely related to these conditions. And the only thing that can help is a truly emancipated, free spiritual life. Only on the basis of a free spiritual life can anything of what the students are actually looking for succeed today, when the need is so great. Here in Switzerland, people do not know; they do not know the hardship. It is really much more difficult, much worse than one thinks. And that is what I always try to explain to our friends, also in my anthroposophical reflections: that it is much worse than one thinks. If we could somehow manage to reach a sufficiently large number of people with ideas from spiritual science, on the one hand, and with the ideas of the threefold social order, on the other, which are necessary for the public introduction of spiritual science, we would be able to take a significant step forward.

What Ms. Matthes presented today can also fully prove to you that a completely new approach is necessary, that we cannot continue to muddle through in what has developed. We need a new approach in our public life; without it, we will not get anywhere.

The break [in spiritual life] actually happened relatively early on. You see, it may perhaps be pointed out after all that the great philosophers have no longer found great disciples. Take all of Hegel's disciples – the Hennings and Marheinekes and so on, Michelet is the name of one of them – take them all, they can be found first among those who published the Hegelian estate, and then take what actually emerged, the reactionary course of these sages, or take Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and then in philosophy take all those who were philosophers like Carriere and so on, even Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was a daredevil in many respects, one must still say: there was a major break in intellectual life as such in the mid-19th century. And instead of there being, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Germany, where it would have been natural for there to be a real deepening of intellectual life, there was, in particular, a flood in German philosophy of everything that was less than German philosophy. There was actually a spirit; what was missing was a sense of reality.

You see, I knew a philosopher who actually didn't play a role at all, but who was truly smarter than many who did play a role. His name was Gregor Itelson. As a dialectician, he actually outwitted everyone, and you can be sure that he would easily outwit Nelson in a discussion as well. Gregor Itelson, if he wanted to, could brilliantly refute someone who spoke in such a way as Father Wasman, for example. When he had appeared in Berlin – it was on the occasion of this Life-Jesus movement, in 1905 or so, at the beginning of the 20th century in any case – Gregor Itelson gave a brilliant speech against the Jesuit Father Wasman. But just recently I have again heard it said that Gregor Itelson, when a monist was defending his world view, did everything in the most brilliant way to bring the monist in question to his knees. But I never heard Gregor Itelson put forward any of his own positive thoughts. A brilliant dialectician – but no positive thoughts whatsoever! I once had a discussion with him, perhaps in 1901 or 1902. I said something like: What you said again today is nice, but why have you never said anything that is your own view? Yes, he said, that's what I'm working on; I've been working on a revision of logic since my youth, but I'm not finished yet. If you listen to people talking today, everywhere, whether they are natural scientists or theologians and so on – he was right, you can prove logical errors everywhere. And he said: We don't need a revolution in logic, we just need a revision of logic. Then he said, as we talked a little further: But this revision of logic, it is actually not that difficult, you can write it on two quart pages. I said: Yes, why don't you finally write these two quart pages? Why does it have to be two quart pages? But he still hasn't written them, at least I haven't seen them in front of me.

It is not a lack of logic or dialectics. During the time I knew Itelson, he got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, then went to the coffeehouse, read his newspapers; then he went to lunch, then he went back to the coffeehouse, and if you came to the coffeehouse after some lecture, you would meet him there as well. He was a dawdler, but he could still be extraordinarily stimulating, even at midnight, for example, talking about the impossibility of Maeterlinck's ideas. And a person like Nelson differs from dialecticians like Itelson only in that he is more brazen, that he relies more on his legs, is more brazen in his appearance, is not a drifter, is a hard-working person, an intellectual giant. Nelson has a brutal, not very wide-meshed [way of thinking], not the slightest finesse in his thinking. It is actually sad, basically, that a whole number of young people today let themselves be taken in tow by Nelson.

These also include people like Mühlestein, who appeared in Basel in the discussion after a lecture and said that threefolding was not possible after all, that everything had to be united into one unit. I replied that the right also has its place in the life of the spirit and in economic life; I said: Yes, the unit is, for example, a farming family, which includes the farmer, the farmer's wife, the children, the farmhands and also the cows. If the cows give plenty of milk, the whole family will have milk. Therefore, it is not necessary to demand that all members of the family give milk. And so it is in the social threefold order: if only the political state provides the law, then economic life and spiritual life will also have the law. Just as the farmer's wife or the farmer himself do not have to provide milk for the family to be supplied with milk, economic life and spiritual life do not have to produce law. Thoughts such as these, when they are examined with a sense of reality, are very easy to unhinge. And so it is with Nelson, especially in his ethical and political views.

What all such considerations point to, however, is that today, above all, we need the courage to leap the river and really penetrate into spiritual science. Then, as Miss Matthes quite rightly said, philosophy too will be able to become something very fruitful again. Without spiritual science, philosophy will always remain something that cannot be put into practice in life and that cannot prove that it has a solid foundation. Today, philosophy without spiritual science only leads to an empty formalism, not to content.

That is what I might add to what Miss Matthes said. We can certainly be very grateful to Miss Matthes for raising this topic in such an excellent and vivid way before us today.

Dear attendees! Anyone who speaks in all seriousness about a topic such as this evening's, or the one that I will discuss here in Utrecht on the 24th, must be aware that there are already numerous souls in the present who long for a new world view or at least for a new slant on the world view and on the way we live.

It can be said, however, that not all of the souls yearning for such a new direction in our present time are fully aware of it. Much of this yearning lies dormant in the depths of the human soul. But for those who can look at the soul life of the individual as well as at the social life of the present impartially, it is clear that there is a search, a serious search, going on in the present for such souls. And this search is basically connected with the great civilizational questions of our present time.

There are many such issues of civilization in the present day, but they can all be more or less mastered if they are viewed from two perspectives. One great riddle that has been dwelling in human souls for a long time – one might say – and which today already finds a very special revelation in these souls, comes from the scientific development of the last three to four centuries. This scientific development has brought humanity great, tremendous triumphs in the realm of knowledge, and provided remarkable insights. But for those who approach the results of this modern science with all their soul, especially with regard to soul and spiritual questions, understanding becomes clearer and clearer. I would like to make it clear from the outset so as not to be misunderstood: the spiritual science that is anthroposophically oriented – and that is what I mean here in giving my explanations – is fully grounded in the modern, scientific way of thinking. But we will see that precisely because it wants to be fully grounded in this way, it must go beyond what is usually considered the limits of this scientific way of thinking. Those who not only want external knowledge for some practical or other life tasks, but who want to gain something for the life of their soul and spirit from scientific insights, will indeed, if they are open enough to do so, gradually realize that the deeper one delves into these insights, the more they are actually riddles, the less they solve anything for us that wells up from the depths of the soul as the great existential questions of human life. On the contrary, these scientific insights teach us something quite different; they teach us to ask the questions that arise from the depths of our souls as human beings more deeply and more fundamentally. They teach us to pose more riddles than we posed before. For someone so unbiased, who lives with all his soul into these insights, there is no other way than to establish a relationship between what science has brought in the last three to four centuries and what is given in the old, traditional religions as a real spiritual upliftment, as a real spiritual content. Theoretically, one can discuss at length the question of whether religious life, a person's deepening of their religious life, should follow a path of its own alongside more recent scientific knowledge. The soul of man is one, and he cannot help it, when on the one hand he draws life-nourishment for the eternal destiny of his soul from religious foundations, and on the other hand he accepts what [the natural sciences] have to say to him, for example, about the structure of the heavenly building, about the development of organic living beings and the like. He cannot help but ask: How do the two relate to each other? We can say with our intellect: the two areas of life flow from different sources. However much we may declaim about how they flow from different sources, in our soul they flow together, and we must seek a balance. But in the search for this balance, new riddles arise, to which the man of the present day, when he really looks up to the general educational life, when he is immersed in this general educational life, is driven, which trouble him, which call for some other sources, from which a real unification of our whole soul life must flow.

And so we see that one of the most important questions of civilization today is actually an inner question of the soul. We have to come to terms with ourselves before we can meaningfully intervene in social life. We have to gain a certain inner strength. Therefore, all external questions of life, all questions of practical life, are fundamentally dependent on the questions of the human soul.

On the one hand, there are the great issues of civilization in the present. But from another side, too, life's riddles come to the contemporary, the modern human being. Scientific knowledge has not remained mere knowledge. They have intervened in practical life in a remarkable and admirable way. They have brought us modern technology, which we encounter at every turn in our external lives today, without which modern humanity can no longer really live. But here too, the modern results, the practical results of the scientific way of thinking, have not actually brought us solutions, but basically new, practical puzzles for life. Over the last two to three centuries, we have managed to create a complicated technology and a complicated human life that goes with it. We had to put people in large numbers at the machine, which is a result of the modern scientific way of thinking. We had to put humanity into the modern traffic conditions, which are a result of this very way of thinking. In the field of purely mechanical-machine work, even where the mechanical occurs in commerce, in world transport, in the world economy, the scientific way of thinking has proven fruitful. But in relation to the social way of thinking, in relation to the way people interact with each other as human beings, it has, so to speak, left everything behind. There is no need to study this theoretically; it can be seen in the convulsions of a social nature that are manifesting themselves in the present and that have a shockingly disturbing effect on humanity. You can see it in how little advice there is in humanity at first, these forces that gradually take on a terribly destructive character, a life-destroying character, in some way beneficial to humanity to guide and direct.

And so, especially with regard to the human, the moral, the soul-spiritual in the interaction between people, many puzzles have arisen in this modern, civilized life. And we are faced with the great soul question: How does modern insight unite with what the religious needs of humanity are? And we are faced with the great practical, social question of life: how do we bring such a direction into what has become mechanical-technical life, that in a sense that has grown out of modern thinking, human interaction is possible in such a way that all people perceive this relationship as leading to a dignified existence?

In short, we are faced with civilizational issues that require solutions and that run in the two currents mentioned. The anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, about which I would like to speak here today, first of all in terms of its insights, wants to approach precisely these riddle-like questions that come to modern man from the two sides just characterized. But it must do so in a way that is still unfamiliar to the broad masses of humanity, to the civilized world. It is therefore regarded as fantasy by one side; it is perhaps regarded as something even worse by the other. But we cannot advance in the evolution of humanity if we do not dare to express what in any age, because it is unfamiliar, will be fought against with extraordinary vehemence.

We see it in the souls that feel what I have just described in a particularly sharp way; they long, as it were, for a flood of knowledge from the supersensible, spiritual world into the human soul. And today such longing souls come up with many things that are, however, not compatible with our present-day civilized life. We see numerous souls looking to what was available to our ancestors in ancient times: a certain harmony between religious sentiment, artistic expression and scientific knowledge. Through its research into ancient times, external anthropological science also imparts to humanity today things that command great respect for these ancient cultures.

Some people look to the Orient, where the remnants of an ancient and original wisdom have been preserved in a decadent way. They want to have a sense of what once was. We see this emerging in numerous souls, but if we really want to understand the meaning of human development, we have to realize that we can understand such souls who long for something ancient or for what remains of something ancient in decadence, such as Indian mysticism or the like. We can understand such a yearning, but we have to say that it completely contradicts the meaning of the whole of human development. For this development is such that each age has its own character. And what was once in keeping with the drives and feelings of the human soul in ancient times is no longer so today.

However, we must also say something else. We must say: this urge for the old or this urge to warm up oriental wisdom also arises from a certain tiredness in the modern human soul. This weariness of the modern human soul announces itself in the fact that although a person may immerse themselves in what is centuries or millennia old tradition, or devote themselves to what are traditional external arrangements of practical life, within today's complicated life, it is difficult for him to muster the strength to unfold a creativity, an elementary creativity in the human soul, that is capable of bringing new spiritual forces from the depths of the soul to the surface of the soul, that is capable of giving new guidelines to practical social life. It is easy for the modern person to devote himself, but creation is far removed from his soul, which is fundamentally very tired. But it is precisely the creative powers of the human soul that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here seeks to address. For it believes that only through a new creation from the deepest, most elementary powers of the human soul can satisfaction come from what, in the manner characterized, is basically longed for by numerous people today from the great currents of civilization.

What spiritual science has to offer initially in terms of knowledge is, however, based entirely on the modern, scientific way of thinking. But at the same time, because it is based on this ground, it must go beyond this scientific way of thinking to the knowledge of a supersensible; while this scientific way of thinking only grasps the outer sense world and that which the mind can combine out of this sense world as abstract natural laws and the like with its means of knowledge, with its admittedly magnificent and admirable means of knowledge.

If I am to characterize the relationship between what I mean here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and this modern natural science, I would like to use a historical comparison. But I ask you not to count this comparison as immodesty. It is not meant that way. It is not a straightforward comparison that can be made today with spiritual science and the weak human power that corresponds to a great, powerful event, but rather with something that is also peculiar to this historical event: I am referring to the discovery of America. When Columbus set out to discover America, it was because he actually meant to cross the great ocean to reach what was already known to him from the other side, namely to reach India from the other side. So it was believed that one was heading for something already known. But on the way one found something unknown that had not been suspected.

This is basically the situation of the modern spiritual researcher. He wants to start from what modern life offers based on numerous scientific endeavors. He would like to venture out onto all the paths of research that are being taken in a conscientious and thoroughly methodical way in this modern scientific life. But on the way to this, he does not find what a large number of researchers basically think they are finding: a kind of knowledge that, although it is supposed to be distinguished from what we have around us in our sensory world by its smallness or the like, is still a kind of knowledge. Just as Columbus thought he was reaching India, that is, something familiar, so the researchers of the external sense realm want to discover atoms, molecules, ions, electrons and the like, which is nothing more than the smallest realization of what we already have in the sense world. And when we now look out into space with conscientious modern research methods, armed with all the admirable instruments that have been constructed, we also want to find nothing but what we already know here on earth. We construct the whole sky for ourselves out of the sensory elements that we already have on earth. One might expect this at first, and basically anyone who is not a dilettante in scientific life, but rather proceeds from the conscientious scientific life of the present, might expect something similar. But when he becomes very clear about what is actually available to him as a researcher, then he comes to something else. He may think he is coming to something familiar, to atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, but on the way he discovers something unknown, as unknown as America was to the Indian explorers. He discovers on the way, precisely by immersing himself in the thought processes, in the whole soul processes that he has to apply in scientific research, a previously unknown, supersensible world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to develop what one does inwardly in the soul through research in the clinic, in the laboratory, or at the observatory in a more refined and expanded way. By paying just the right amount of attention to this inner activity of the soul, it becomes clear that There it is the spirit, which, even if it adheres only to the external material, is active in you, especially in methodical research. And then, when one becomes aware of one's own activity in research, quite earnestly and as strongly as the human soul can, one gains the urge to further develop these soul powers that one carries within oneself, which are to be stimulated, as it were, by ordinary education. And then one comes to the spiritual scientific methods, of which I would like to give you a small indication here.

At the starting point of these spiritual scientific methods, however, there must be something that is also quite unfamiliar to today's humanity. That which I would call “intellectual modesty” must stand before the path of spiritual research. And again, I would like to explain what I mean by intellectual modesty by way of comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child, we give him a volume of Shakespeare in the hand, what will he do with it? It will tear him or play with him, but certainly it will not do that, what is appropriate for the band of Shakespeare. If the child has lived another ten to fifteen years, his soul forces will have developed so that it will do the right thing with this band of Shakespeare. We can say: What has been brought out of the most hidden depths of this child is what now enables him to do something quite different from what he was capable of earlier. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to be able to say this with intellectual modesty: As an adult, you could face all of nature that surrounds us in the same way as the five-year-old child faces the volume of Shakespeare. might feel challenged to develop the soul forces further through their own use, just as the soul forces of the five-year-old child were gradually developed, whereby the child became something quite different from what it was before. Spiritual scientific research seeks to further develop methods such as those already begun in natural scientific research, only in a natural way. And this spiritual scientific research is not based on any external measures, it is based entirely on inner soul work. This inner soul work is certainly no easier to perform than the work in the laboratory, in the clinic or at the observatory. What I am about to describe to you as the inner soul path of the spiritual researcher requires years of inner effort for its real training, although one does not work with external tools or instruments, but only with the powers of the soul itself; and basically, these soul powers are already present in ordinary life, they just need to be further developed.

Today, humanity does not love to further develop such soul powers within itself. Precisely because of the modern path of development, people have come to no longer think as they did in certain ancient ages about human development. From one point of view, this is fully justified. But on the other hand, it is also the case that other views must take the place of those that are currently popular. It is precisely for this reason that many seeking souls today long unhistorically for a certain way in which our ancient ancestors came to their insights, because these ancestors saw something completely different in the path of knowledge than people today see in it.

In ancient times — I can only hint at this, you can already find more explanations in outer science today — in ancient times there were wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries. In these mysteries, a science that was directed more towards the intellect was not cultivated in the same way as it is today. Instead, a science was cultivated that spoke so intensely to the human soul that it into the depths of this soul, while at the same time releasing religious fervor from this soul, which so stimulated this soul that it received what it received as knowledge in artistic visions at the same time. Art, religion and science were one in these ancient mysteries. But in these ancient schools of wisdom, the attainment of higher knowledge was spoken of in such a way as to appeal to the whole person and not just to the head. And one spoke of something that is somewhat dangerous to speak of today, because one will be considered paradoxical or fanciful when speaking of it. They spoke of the fact that between what a person can know, feel and want in ordinary life and that to which his soul actually belongs as the supersensible, an abyss opens up between these two areas of outer and inner life; that this abyss can only be crossed by the human soul through overcoming, through inner struggles. They spoke of the threshold that separates ordinary life from the supersensible world, to which the soul actually belongs. And it was said that man is protected by the world powers from entering the realm of supersensible knowledge unprepared. It was not a mere personification, but a very real experience for the students of the old wisdom schools when they spoke of the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold had not been experienced if one did not want to cross the abyss between the sensual and the supersensible world. But one had to pass by him if one wanted to enter this supersensible world. He only became visible, so to speak, when one wanted to swing one's insights up to the supersensible regions of existence. But one should not and must not do that, the old wisdom teachers said, without the human being being prepared in a healthy way and without fulfilling other conditions.

For differently than we speak now, people in ancient times spoke of what actual human wisdom and human science is. They said: The unprepared person, when handed the science of the supersensible, becomes a source of temptation for him, not only to do good but also to do evil. Knowledge of the supernatural incites human desires that would otherwise remain silent and tamed by external morality. These desires can no longer be tamed by insight into the supernatural. That is why these ancient wisdom teachers demanded of their students that they undergo such a discipline of the will, such an education, that these instincts receded, that these instincts no longer spoke, so that these students listened to everything that the ancient wisdom teachers presented to them as pure morality by virtue of their natural authority. And they demanded strict obedience.

You see, this was a relationship between student and teacher that has been preserved in many ecclesiastical contexts. But you will also admit that modern life is such that people no longer want to have such a relationship in any area. We can look up with great respect and full understanding to those ancient times when certain commandments, strict commandments for ethics, morality, obedience, and religious respect were handed over to the student of science and wisdom – otherwise they were not handed over if they did not submit to these conditions. We can understand this in the past, but today we can no longer enter into such relationships with science and wisdom from our modern, humane circumstances. Those who want to revive the old wisdom of the East do not understand this. Today we need something different, and this is revealed to us from a fact that I will characterize in the following way.

First of all, I would like to ask why it was that the ancient teachers of wisdom subjected their students to such strict discipline, willpower, and will training before they handed down their knowledge and wisdom? The reason for this was that the state of mind of people in the distant past was quite different from that of our own. External history only gives us the outer appearance of human development. The fact that the human soul has indeed undergone tremendous metamorphoses over the course of time is something of which this external history tells us very little today. We do not need to go back to ancient India or other regions of the Orient; we only need to look back to the times of ancient Greece, perhaps to the somewhat earlier and middle periods of ancient Greece, and we find a very different state of mind in people. That which we call intellect, that to which we attach such great importance as our intellectual culture, was not yet developed as a separate faculty of the soul in these older people. In them, instincts, drives, volitional impulses, emotional stirrings, and emotional forces rose up from the depths of the soul and permeated abstract concepts. Cognition worked its way out of the full human being, not just out of the head. We can only begin to understand what knowledge was for the Greeks if we can enter into this origin of their knowledge from the full human being.

This has changed in our time. From the Galilean-Copernican world view and from everything that is connected with it in the modern conception of nature, intellectual life has developed one-sidedly for us.

Some of you will surely say: This intellectual life would not be as one-sided as I would like to present it. It is true that we experiment. We are dealing with external facts and with what they reveal, and not with the mere intellect. We observe conscientiously according to our methods in all realms of nature and in the rest of the world. We are not dealing with the mere intellect. Of course we experiment and observe, but in doing so we apply only our intellect to these experiments and observations. And we are intent on recognizing as science and human wisdom only that which is gained from the experiment and the observation by the intellect of such natural laws or historical laws that can be expressed in intellectual forms. Our entire disposition has become intellectualistic. In this way it differs from the old soul disposition.

This old soul disposition, it came - not merely concepts, not merely ideas, but feelings and soul content about the world itself - from the depths of the whole human organization. There was a world knowledge for the ancients when they set out on the path of knowledge at all. They felt so closely connected with nature that, by observing minerals, plants, and animals, and by observing the physical human being, they simultaneously observed something spiritual and soul-like everywhere. Today we call this animism, but we know very little about the essence of what we are dealing with. This essence consists in the fact that in ancient times, when man looked at the outer nature, he did not just have the dry outer sensory perception before him, but a spiritual essence came out of everything to meet him. He knew that lightning was intimately connected with what was going on inside himself. He knew that moving clouds were connected with what was going on inside himself. He felt that he belonged to the whole universe. He felt as a part of the universe as a finger would feel about me as a part of me, if it had a consciousness. From this sense of the world all ancient knowledge emerged. But this sense of the world was only present because the sense of self, even in the ancient Greeks, was not as developed as our sense of self. The sense of self was dull, and that is why the old wisdom teacher said: One must not simply introduce the students to a higher knowledge, for which a higher sense of self is absolutely necessary, because if they came to this knowledge unprepared, they would fall into a kind of mental powerlessness. This mental powerlessness should be combated through the discipline of the will, the education of the will.

What about us? Yes, we can see this best from the following: Today we are justifiably proud of what we know, for example, about the structure of the external world through the Copernican worldview. We now profess the view that the sun is at the center of our planetary system and that the earth moves at great speed around the sun. We call this the heliocentric worldview, in contrast to the worldview of the Middle Ages and antiquity, which had placed the Earth at the center of our planetary system, so that man felt on the firm ground of the Earth, resting in space and letting the Sun circle with the other planets around the Earth. But even from the external history one can see that what we today call the heliocentric worldview was not unknown to the ancients, that it was not unknown in the schools of wisdom. Today's world view does not speak of this. But if you just read Plutarch's account of the astronomical view of Aristarchus of Samos, centuries before the emergence of Christianity, you will see that Aristarchus of Samos proclaimed the heliocentric world view, that he placed the sun at the center of the planetary system, that he made the earth revolve around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos only proclaimed in a more outwardly perceptible way what had otherwise been proclaimed to the students in the wisdom schools, after they had first undergone the preparation. And many other things were taught there that, like the Copernican world view and the heliocentric solar system, are now part of our general education, things that we learn, so to speak, at elementary school as part of our general education.

Thus we can note the remarkable fact that the ancient teachers of wisdom only handed down to their pupils what is now part of our normal school education after the pupils had undergone a strict training of the will. They awakened in their pupils the consciousness that they had to cross the threshold to the spiritual world. After that, they imparted to them the things that are now part of our general education.

We stand, so to speak, beyond the threshold through the very ordinary human development. The sense of historical metamorphosis is that what was given to students in ancient times, for example, only after tremendous preparation, is learned by every child today. Every child is led beyond the threshold today, which the ancients described in the characterized way. Why is that? It is because, through human development, we in turn have a different inner soul disposition from that of the ancients. We are no longer exposed to the soul fainting and soul numbness that had to be feared in ancient times. For centuries, we have, as civilized humanity, undergone a strengthening, an invigoration, precisely of our self-awareness through intellectual education. This self-awareness cannot be diminished, paralyzed, or rendered powerless by our entering into the world, which for the ancients was the world beyond the threshold. It cannot. The ancients would have said something like this: If one wanted to convey to the unprepared human being the realization that the earth moves in space with great speed, he would feel as if he were losing the ground under his feet, he would have the mental and spiritual feeling of losing his footing, as if he were becoming dizzy in his existence.

That is not the case today. But we are facing something different instead. The knowledge of the world that the ancients had instinctively is lost to us today, because we recognize from the outer world of the senses what was only given to the ancients after long preparation. We are standing at a different threshold today. We are just learning from the conscientious natural scientist how we must speak of the “limits of knowledge”, of “ignorabimus”. We sense this limit of knowledge wherever this knowledge of nature has to be put into practice for the benefit of humanity. We sense it in modern medicine, where it is so difficult to build a bridge from pathology to the actual practice of healing. We sense it when we want to apply the results of our knowledge to social life. We sense these limits, they are there.

We feel we have been moved to a new threshold. The task of spiritual science is to cross this threshold in a way that is appropriate for modern man. Therefore, it starts from intellectual modesty in order to bring back to its measure that which has just become great in modern man, and to develop the human soul forces out of the full human being. Spiritual science takes as its starting point two soul powers that are well known in ordinary life, and develops them further. It begins with what we call the power of memory in ordinary life. What does this power of memory give us in our ordinary human existence? It conjures up from memory what we have experienced since our birth or a few years after, what we have been through. These appear before our soul in more or less faded images through memory. What happens in this life fades away. We know, and modern science characterizes it very clearly, that when this ability to remember is not intact, there is a serious inner soul disease. This coherent memory, reaching back to childhood, must be present in the human being.

The methods of spiritual science take this power of remembrance as their starting point. They develop this power of remembrance into something different, into something more highly developed, through what I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science', in other of my writings, through what I call meditation or concentration. Here, however, I can only give a rough outline of what must actually happen to the soul in order to come to an immediate grasp of the supersensible world. Man must rest in a devoted way, rest energetically and patiently on ideas that are either recommended to him or that he prepares for himself by getting to know spiritual science. While otherwise the images flit past, he must, as memory becomes lasting, rest, and keep on resting, on clear images, and this he must do out of inner arbitrariness, out of complete inner composure — which must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking — and this inner composure must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking. Then, after some time, he will make a very definite discovery. He will feel that with his ordinary ability to remember, he is dependent on his organism. But if he further develops his ability to remember into a completely new soul power, then he is placed in a spiritual-soul activity in relation to which he is no longer dependent on his organism. He learns to understand what it means to think, feel, will or perform similar activities without the body providing the basis for it. He learns to unfold a soul life outside of his body.

I would like to characterize this soul life, which the human being gets to know as a spiritual researcher, in yet another way. We find that the ordinary life of a human being proceeds in such a way that it alternates between waking and sleeping. The human being goes through the states of falling asleep, sleeping and waking up. When falling asleep, consciousness is dulled. The human being is not aware of what he is going through between falling asleep and waking up because it is not shown by what pulses through the organism from the will. But what pulsates through the organism from the will, what the senses offer the human being in the way of perception, the spiritual researcher silences by immersing himself in self-made images. The content of the images is not important, but the immersion is, so that he feels the activity within him, which wells up from the depths of the soul through such resting on images, such lasting resting. He learns to be in a state in which one is otherwise only in sleep. But while one is unconscious in sleep, one is in a fully conscious state, in inner soul activity and soul activity. Only, this soul activity and soul activity does not refer, as the memory images of ordinary life, to things that we have gone through in the outer world and that now only arise from memory, but those images - I call them imaginations in the cited works — they can be immediately recognized as depicting a world that we have not lived through between birth and the present moment, but a world that is outside of us, just as colors and sounds are outside of us for the senses, just as warmth qualities are outside of us. We learn experientially that the spiritual world surrounds us; a spiritual world with real spiritual beings; that we are also in it in the time between falling asleep and waking up. But now we learn to look at it as a real world.

And by learning to see it in this way, we can broaden our view beyond life between birth and death. Let us learn to recognize at an elementary level how the life of sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And how, when a person sleeps, there is a growing , there is an urge to return to the body. Through such inner vision, as it arises from the developed ability to remember, we learn to observe how sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And we also learn to observe it in the times that preceded our birth, in which we lived in a spiritual-soul world from which we descended through birth, through conception into this physical-sensual world. We learn to distinguish between what lives in the soul as a mere desire to penetrate the body again, and the very different, stronger power that pervades the soul in the times when it is not yet conceived or born in a physical body, but which nevertheless tends to descend into the physical world in order to experience life between birth and death. Then we learn to recognize, as a development of what we have gained from the moment of falling asleep, what the soul experiences when it passes through the gate of death. We learn to recognize how this soul, because it is inwardly active, is driven precisely by the desire for the body lying in the bed; but as a result, its consciousness is extinguished. In death, consciousness is not extinguished, but remains. We learn to recognize that the extinction of consciousness in ordinary sleep comes from the fact that the bond between soul and body remains intact. When we learn to see through this, we also see through the mystery of death, just as we learn to see through the mystery of birth in the way indicated.

And so we learn to look at that which underlies us as human beings, as our eternal self, which passes through birth and death. We learn to recognize the inner strength of the human soul. We learn to recognize that which leads us through death. We learn to recognize that when the soul is led through death, at first it has no connection to a physical body, but that it receives this connection as a strength, so that it can descend to a new life. What we call 'repeated earthly lives' in spiritual science is not warmed-over oriental wisdom; it is drawn from the facts of spiritual life, which can be seen through in the present, and is scientifically extracted from them in the same way as other things are discovered by science. And anyone who says that such things are merely old wisdom, such as Gnostic or Oriental, or Indian wisdom, should just say: when we do geometry today, we are merely warming up the old Euclid. No, it is not just something historical that is brought out, but what is to be said about such things is brought out of original insights.

But then, when we get to know ourselves in this way, when we tap into the eternal of knowledge, then the eternal, the supersensible, the spiritual of the outer world also opens up to us. Then we will gain a different relationship to nature research than is otherwise possible for us in relation to today's civilizational spiritual current. What does the modern scientific world view give us – and if it is honest, it cannot give us anything else? Modern natural science, which must not be reproached for what I am about to characterize, can offer nothing else if it proceeds honestly and conscientiously. It can only give us a picture of external, natural, necessary events. It cannot help but look back to the times of the earth's formation, which it deduces from biological, astronomical, and other facts. At the starting point of this development, there is a nebulous world or something similar. Even if this is regarded as hypothetical today, science cannot arrive at anything other than the conclusion that man once formed out of purely external natural laws, which only imply an elementary necessity, but that the scene on which man forms will one day fall like a cinder into the sun, that everything that man experiences inwardly will be extinguished.

And so we get to know, alongside what an honest study of nature can offer us, how the moral world, ethical ideals, the whole spiritual and religious life, arises from within us . We feel it as the most valuable thing in us, but we cannot connect it to this outer world, because we find no connection between the moral in us and the physical-natural outside of us. If we want to remain on the ground of today's world view, we must regard them as two parallel worlds. But then the scientific world view asserts its persuasive power in such a way that it nevertheless predominates, that it nevertheless says: the ideals may be beautiful, they must be so, man must recognize them as valuable, but the world in which we live will one day be the great churchyard where the ideals that are now most valuable to us will be buried.

Through spiritual science, by looking into the transcendental world, by seeing the spiritual in every stone, in plants and animals, in clouds and springs, as it was revealed to the ancients; by developing the organs of the spiritual within himself, by learning to recognize himself as belonging to the spiritual world, he also comes to know the outer spiritual world in all of nature. But through this he can look back into distant times and say to himself: That which has come into being materially, in which you live today, has emerged from the spiritual, and that which you experience today as material will in turn be transformed into physical dross in the future; the physical dross will fall away, as the body falls away from the dying man. But just as the earthly-dying human soul enters the spiritual world, so that which lives in man, in humanity, will enter a spiritual world. The material world appears as a middle piece between one spiritual and another development. Man, however, belongs to the spiritual development of primeval times and he belongs to the future.

And today, when we see the interconnection of the world through spiritual science, through real knowledge of the supersensible, we can say: It is not true that what surrounds us as the material world has a future in the way that external science, if it is honest, must recognize. Rather, we have to say to ourselves: that which is external nature will fall away from that which is internal, and what human souls carry within themselves will leave the spiritual realm to which human beings belong, just as the body leaves the human soul. But that which lives in us today as moral ideals, as religious experiences, will have a future. One day it will break free from the earth, just as the individual human soul breaks free from the human body to find life and not death.

But when man learns to feel: That which is moral in him is like the germ of a plant; when the plant, when blossoms and leaves wither and dry up, the germ remains for the next year from the previous year's plant; we carry within us as a germ a distant future in which the earth will no longer be; when everything else by which we belong to the earth falls away from us; we carry our ideals, our fulfilled duties, we carry the social and religious life within us, which escapes from the earth with humanity. Let us consider what this means for the impulses that a person takes up for their social action. With such an awareness, they no longer stand in social life like a hermit on earth who can only think: I fulfill what is pleasant for me as a duty between birth and death, because the earth is only a body in space; it passes away. And when it has passed away materially, what is to become of ideals? If he remains true to natural science, if he does not claim to know from other sources what need not be united with natural science, then he will necessarily have to insert what ideals are into natural necessity. But thanks to spiritual science, his earthly consciousness is joined to the cosmic consciousness. This is the way to think about these things that the modern man needs.

Let us imagine today's social life. We make great social demands as today's humanity, but we have little social in our inner soul condition. We do not have social instincts, social drives. It is precisely because we do not have them that we demand so much from life on the outside. But everything that a person today feels as selfishness in relation to the social instincts is basically only an expression of the consciousness of the hermit on earth, as corresponds to the purely scientific view. If we learn to recognize that Everything you do for your neighbor or your fellow human beings, everything you do in the context of humanity, has a cosmic significance, a significance far beyond what it is for the day. If you link your earthly existence with your universal existence, you know that you are part of the universal existence, then social issues take on different impulses than they do today.

Therefore, it is indeed the case that something can be given to people from three sides through what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to develop. First of all, they are given a new understanding of the human being, an insight into the supersensible foundations of their existence. They are given self-knowledge in the true sense of the word. They can cross the threshold again. The limits of knowledge of nature can be crossed. He can again transcend himself; he can again enter into the world to which he belongs with his soul and spirit.

That is one thing: that the human being thereby gains inner support and security; that he does not sink into the abyss when he wants to acquire knowledge of the world, when he does not want to look at the unknown beyond the carpet of sensory perception. But when a person recognizes himself in this way, in his entire cosmic context, then he also encounters the other person with the respect that must arise when one knows: with every person there is a spiritual soul aspect. Our whole legal and constitutional life is placed on a different footing when we know that it only makes sense because it is the outer covering of that which is transplanted to earth from the spiritual realm of human souls, which we can also see through in terms of knowledge.

And the third thing is that human life takes on an immediate religious nuance, real brotherhood, because man behaves as we can understand the word, the wonderful word of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” So said the Being through whom the earth first received its meaning, without which it would have no meaning.

But it is true that this is the case with human ideals themselves. They germinate while the rest is ripe and withers all around. They are for the future. Everything that is lived out socially is basically the germ of future worlds; just as what surrounds us today as the natural world, as the material world, is the material expression of earlier moral worlds. If we see this clearly, we will be strengthened from three sides. And social life must also be transformed from within.

In 1913 and 1908, I spoke in Holland about spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. At that time I could only point out what this spiritual science was striving for, but not in a sectarian way or with the will to found a new religion. No, that is not what spiritual science wants. It wants to be science, and precisely through its scientific nature, to lead to the true religion, which places the mystery of Golgotha at the center of earthly development, in the right way. I was able to point out at the time how something like a world view has emerged in many souls. Since then, however, something has been added. We were able to start building the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, in Dornach near Basel in 1913. However, this construction has presented many difficulties; in particular, the times of the world catastrophe have also brought difficult times for this construction. But we can say that this fall, despite the fact that the building is not yet finished and much remains to be done to complete it, we were able to hold a number of courses. These courses were intended to show how the fundamentals of what I have described to you today — but which you can find more details about in the books I have mentioned — can have a fertilizing effect on all sciences as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Thirty personalities have been involved in these Dornach Autumn Courses, experts in all fields of science, from mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, jurisprudence, history and sociology. Artists also contributed, shedding light on spiritual science from their art. Men of practical life, of industrial and commercial life, have contributed to show how, when thinking in terms of spiritual science, one does not become an impractical person, but how one becomes more practical than one can be through any other contemporary way of life.

Furthermore, in the spring of 1920, I was able to show doctors and medical students, some of whom are here in Holland, in a course how what can be called medicine in the true sense of the word, how medicine can be fertilized by this insight into the supersensible life. For we come to know the inner nature of the outer products of life in the various kingdoms only when we are also able to observe them from the supersensible side. And those people who may absorb what is initially given in the form of a worldview through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should at least make a little effort to inquire how one can speak with full knowledge of the subject to the experts; how one can speak from the individual fields of science without dilettantism and with full mastery of what modern science is, to the renewal of science, precisely to lead beyond those boundaries that are not felt theoretically as boundaries, but that are felt as boundaries, that show up as unsatisfactory, as insufficient in the practical way science works in life.

In the fall, we were then able to show how spiritual science can have a stimulating effect on the individual sciences and branches of practical life and art. And those who gathered in large numbers — more than a thousand people were present at the opening of these courses — were able to see what this Goetheanum itself represents as an external structure. Where else would one have built such a university? If one had needed a special building in which to pursue this or that spiritual life or to pursue science, one would have called upon an architect; one would have had a Greek, a Romanesque, a Gothic or a Renaissance building designed, or something else. That was not possible in Dornach with our free university, the Goetheanum. There, out of the same soul impulses that were to be spoken and researched there, one also had to build, sculpt and paint. And so one sees in this Goetheanum, which is admittedly a first attempt — the first lift cannot be anything else — a new architectural style. For that which is spiritual science is not a one-sided culture of the head, it is something that engages all branches of practical life. It is something that, without becoming didactic or pedagogical or symbolic or corny allegorical, will also inspire artistic creativity. What is proclaimed from the podium as spiritual science, what is communicated there in ideas, in thoughts, in scientific results, comes from the same source of soul life as the columns are built from, the ceiling is painted from, and the figures that are sculpted are created from. Sometimes we speak of the living spiritual life through words, at other times through the forms of architecture or sculpture or through painting and so on. Spiritual science is something that comes from the full human being, but through this it can also intervene in all branches of human life.

There have been many people willing to make sacrifices who have supported us so far that we have been able to take this project to the point it has reached so far. It is with a sense of melancholy that we realize how much remains to be done and how many people are needed who understand the matter if this building is to be completed. But we want what is meant by this building to speak urgently to the souls of men.

And we have not stopped at what the Dornach building merely is, but we have also moved on to practical institutions, especially in the field of education. And today I can only briefly mention this – I will be discussing on the 24th what practical institutions have emerged from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for practical life itself – I can only briefly mention that the Waldorf School has been founded in Stuttgart as a creation of Emil Molt, and that I am leading it according to the educational-didactic impulses that can flow from spiritual science. This Waldorf School, despite its short existence, has achieved successes in the educational and teaching fields, which I will also talk about on the 24th of the month. Then we proceeded to form what are purely practical institutions, economic institutions, out of the spirit of spiritual science. For it must be shown everywhere that spiritual science does not mean an unworldly, remote spiritual life to which one can ascend when one finds earthly life too bad. Rather, spiritual science is meant to permeate the spirit so that it can be carried into all material things, including economic material things, so that everything becomes spiritualized and thus truly practical. I will have more to say about this on the 24th of the month. Then I will speak about education and teaching issues and about practical life from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science.

Today I just wanted to discuss what the direction, the actual spirit and meaning of this spiritual science are, and how this spirit and meaning of spiritual science accommodates the searching souls of the present day. And however much this soul searching has been decried as fantasy, as folly , humanity will have to learn from the catastrophic events of the present, from all the things that so clearly express the mood of decline and fatigue today, from all the things that are heralding in modern civilization as that which leads modern civilization into decadence , from all this humanity will have to learn that the seeking souls are on the right path – and of these seeking souls, those who seek in the whole of the rest of the universe that which must be experienced there in the innermost being as the deepest and most significant; who seek the spirit in spirit. Because, dear attendees, no matter how much one may deny the spirit, in the end, through reaction, what must emerge from this denial is the conviction that humanity cannot be without spirit in the long run, because the innermost depths of the soul need the spirit! And that which the soul needs so much, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to seek, albeit today with weak forces.

Answering questions

Question: Is it really inhibiting to search for ancient wisdom in the sense of earlier times because we have become different people within the present civilization?

Rudolf Steiner: That is absolutely the case, my dear attendees. Today, there is indeed a widespread yearning for the renewal of ancient wisdom. When one stands before humanity with something like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which draws from the very sources of today's soul life and, from an external point of view, arrives at many things that are similar to what was known to the ancients, people come and say, “Why not the old?” That many people cannot imagine anything different absolutely contradicts the meaning of human development.

Let us look at the matter from a point of view that can explain a lot: Suppose someone wanted to seek satisfaction for their soul without prejudice to what I have just said, simply by applying, say, ancient Indian wisdom in modern yoga philosophy or the content of Vedanta philosophy. What would happen to that soul? Something would arise that is simply not compatible with what this soul has become today, something that cannot be fully experienced by the soul of the modern human being. It is then the case that the person believes he has something to do with this old, warmed-up wisdom, but he does not get real soul content, but he gets a soul content that he cannot penetrate, and to which he actually only becomes intoxicated. We find such intoxication in people who unite in societies for the renewal of old wisdom. A certain inner untruthfulness then occurs in the soul. One believes to have something, but one cannot have it. And this inner dishonesty, even if it is not wanted at all, if it is striven for by the soul even in the most honest, consciously honest way, it still has a destructive effect on the soul life of the human being. It hollows out rather than filling it with a truly satisfying content.

One could also say that today, even if they do not participate in scientific life, people have already attained a certain kind of self-awareness through what they absorb at school. This self-awareness is dampened, tuned down, when one takes in an old world view, despite its beauty. One's consciousness is dampened and one does not arrive at a real understanding, but at a fantasizing, even if it sometimes looks more like dreaming. There is no reality in a soul that takes in something so old. These are things that can only be spoken from experience. Theoretically, one can of course believe that what was right for people in ancient times must still be right today. But I must say that it is rare to find the right understanding on this point.

I was once very pleased to be visited by an American clergyman in Berlin who had devoted much time to spiritual science. Unfortunately, he had already died, despite being still a young man, and so was torn away from his work in America. He addressed me immediately with the following words. He said: 'Today you speak of what you represent as anthroposophical spiritual science, what is in your books, for example in 'Geheimwissenschaft', in '' or otherwise in social views, of what is to come into the world as impulses. Do you believe that what you are giving now, in terms of content, as you are giving it now, must remain permanently?' I said, realizing very well that he was on the right track: “I don't think so. I am imbued with the recognition of human development that the spirit lives from eternity to eternity, but that what we express in our full humanity through the spirit, be it in religion, science or art, is in full development.” And so I believe that what I present as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is the right thing for the present time, but that it is precisely because of this that it will have changed completely after a relatively short time – times are moving ever faster, after all – and will undergo completely different metamorphoses. From this question I saw that I was understood by this American quite well. One must have this feeling about it; it lies in the development of humanity. Question: What reasons do you have for assuming that no more was taught in earlier schools than has become known today?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that. Much more was taught in earlier schools than is now known. I believe that even what I have said today about the teaching in the old schools is unknown in the widest circles. What is known today — mainly in the style —, in the present direction of the world view questions, that is general education today. That is the significant thing. I gave the example of the heliocentric world view; one could give many such examples. If we go back to ancient cultures, we find everywhere – although we first have to understand the languages of the ancient cultures and overcome the prejudice that primitive man made up some kind of world view and did not let his experiences speak – we find everywhere the content of ancient world views that commands respect, more and more respect. It is precisely by becoming acquainted with the old Chaldean ideas of the world and other blossoms of old mental states, the Indian, Egyptian, Greek worldviews in their true form, in their deeper, fully human impulses, that one gains great respect for the old. But then, as a spiritual researcher, one also becomes familiar with those soul experiences. It is really not the case that one produces things out of one's imagination. I must say that I began with some of the research that I am presenting today thirty to thirty-five years ago, and only in recent years have I dared to express these things because I have worked on them in the meantime. Everything I have said about the threefold human being in my book 'Von Seelenrätsel' (The Soul's Enigma) is based on thirty to thirty-five years of research. There one comes across many things, which are then indeed investigated in a modern way, and which are connected to the modern soul life, but which in a certain way were present in vague instincts in old wisdom that is no longer useful to us. Then a great respect arises for what the ancients have achieved in a completely different way, what we rediscover today, but what we must seek in a completely different way today.

And I would like to say: What the ancients have achieved by instinct, we have lost by instinct. But what they have achieved beyond the threshold is the result of our ordinary education. We must develop out of a developed consciousness what the ancients had as world knowledge from their instinctual life. These are deep connections. If we know how to read it, outer history speaks on every page, and we are not satisfied with just any old meanings of words.

For example, what Indian wisdom is, can be translated as Deussen translated it. But then those who receive such translations do not get any idea of this Indian wisdom. But you can also imbibe it with your mind, then you learn to recognize that in the old Indian schools of wisdom, based on the philosophy of yoga, things were found that we have to seek in a different way, and that is what matters. We learn to recognize how people said to themselves: If we start from our ordinary consciousness, we are not very connected to the world. But if we start from the things that give us more than sense perceptions, if we delve into the breathing process, then, by following breathing inwardly and organically, the meaning of the world becomes clear to us in a completely different way. This was then recorded, which was understood as the meaning of the world in this way. We can no longer renew these yoga schools, and if we do, we will stifle the organism. For what has been revealed to people is, in its main features, general human education today. We must do something else. We must deepen that which we have appropriated more completely than the ancients, the intellectual culture, so that we can plant the intellect in the life of the feelings and will impulses; in this way we can reach deeper into human nature and into nature itself. In this way we arrive at the spiritual. We have to go a different way, a way of soul and spirit. And only by knowing what the path of the Indian world view actually was, can we understand what is communicated in the scriptures. Then, whenever we discover a supersensible truth in some other way, we can understand it in its earlier form, although the reverse is not the case. From such insights arises what I have said about the relationship between what is today general human education and what the ancient students were initiated into.

It is not possible in a lecture, which has already lasted too long, to give more than the guidelines. In the literature, however, you will find that every assertion made in such a lecture has always been turned around in terms of its evidence, and that it is indeed the case that most of the objections raised by spiritual researchers have already been raised by them in the most diverse ways.

That is what I wanted to say about the justification of such a judgment as I have given. It is entirely possible to say, on the basis of the apologetic traditions, that it is as I have explained it using the example of Aristarchus of Samos and the heliocentric worldview.

[ 1 ] Besides the current of world conception that, through the idea of evolution, wants to bring the conception of the phenomena of nature and that of the spirit into complete unity, there is another that expresses their opposition in the strongest possible form. This current also springs from natural science. Its followers ask, “What is our basis as we construct a world conception by means of thinking? We hear, see and touch the physical world through our senses. We then think about the facts that our senses supply concerning that world. We form our thoughts accordingly concerning the world at the testimony of the senses. But are the statements of our senses really to be trusted?”

Let us consult actual observations. The eye conveys to us the phenomena of light. We say an object sends us red light when the eye has the sensation of red. But the eye conveys sensations of light to us also in other cases. When it is pushed or pressed, or when an electric current flows through our head, the eye also has sensations of light. It is, therefore, possible that in cases in which we have the sensation of a light-sending body, something could go on in that object that has no semblance to our sensation of light. The eye, nevertheless, would transmit light to us.

The physiologist, Johannes Mueller (1801–58), drew the conclusion from these facts that what man has as his actual sensation does not depend on the external processes but on his organization. Our nerves transmit sensations to us. As we do not have the sensation of the knife that cuts us but a state of our nerves that appears to us as pain, so we also do not have a sensation of the external world when something appears to us as light. What we then really have is a state of our optic nerve. Whatever may happen outside, the optic nerve translates this external event into the sensation of light. “The sensation is not a process that transmits a quality or a state of an external object to our consciousness but one that transmits a quality, a state of our nerves caused by an external event, to our consciousness. This Johannes Mueller called “the law of specific sense energies.” If that is correct, then our observations contain nothing of the external world but only the sum of our own inner conditions. What we perceive has nothing to do with the external world; it is a product of our own organization. We really perceive only what is in us.

[ 2 ] Natural scientists of great renown regarded this thought as an irrefutable basis of their world conception. Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94) considered it as the Kantian thought—that all our knowledge had reference only to processes within ourselves, not to things in themselves—translated into the language of natural science (compare Vol. I of this book). Helmholtz was of the opinion that the world of our sensations supplies us merely with the signs of the physical processes in the world outside.

I have been convinced that it is necessary to formulate the relation between the sensation and its object by declaring the sensation to be merely the sign of the effect of the object. The nature of the sign demands only that the same sign be always given to the same object. Beyond this requirement there is no more similarity necessary between the sensation and its object than between the spoken word and the object that we denote with it. We cannot even call our sense impression pictures, for a picture depicts the same by the same. In a statue we represent one bodily form through another bodily form; in a drawing we express the perspective view of an object by the same perspective in the picture; in a painting we depict color through color.

[ 3 ] Our sensations, therefore, must differ more from the events they represent than pictures differ from the objects they depict. In our sensual world picture we have nothing objective but a completely subjective element, which we ourselves produce under the stimulation of the effects of an external world that never penetrates into us. This mode of conception is supported from another side by the physicist's view of the phenomena of sensation. A sound that we hear draws our attention to a body in the external world, the parts of which are in a certain state of motion. A stretched string vibrates and we hear a tone. The string transmits the vibrations to the air. They spread and reach our ear; a tone sensation is transmitted to us. The physicist investigates the laws according to which the physical particles outside move while we hear these tones. He finds that the subjective tone sensation is based on the objective motion of the physical particles. Similar relations are observed by the physicist with respect to the sensations of light. Light is also based on motion, only this motion is not transmitted by the vibrating particles of the air, but by the vibrations of the ether, the thinnest matter that fills the whole space of the universe. By every light-emitting body, the ether is put into the state of undulatory vibrations that spread and meet the retina of our eye and excite the optic nerve, which then produces the sensation of light within us. What in our world picture appears as light and color is motion outside in space. Schleiden expresses this view in the following words:

The light outside ourselves in nature is motion of the ether. A motion can be slow and fast; it can have this or that direction, but there is obviously no sense in speaking of light or dark, of green or red motion. In short, outside ourselves, outside the beings who have the sensation, there is no such thing as bright and dark, nor are there any colors.

[ 4 ] The physicist expels colors and light from the external world because he finds only motion in it. The physiologist feels that he is forced to withdraw them into the soul because he is of the opinion that the nerve indicates only its own state of irritation no matter what might have excited it. The view that is given with these presuppositions is sharply delineated by Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) in his book, Reason. The external perception is, according to his opinion, nothing but hallucination. A person who, under the influence of hallucination, perceives a death skull three steps in front of him, has exactly the same perception as someone who receives the light rays sent out by a real skull. It is the same inner phantom that exists within us no matter whether we are confronted with a real skull or whether we have a hallucination. The only difference between the one perception and the other is that in one case the hand stretched out toward the object will grasp empty air, whereas in the other case it will meet some solid resistance. The sense of touch then supports the sense of sight. But does this support really represent an irrefutable testimony? What is correct for one sense is also valid for the other. The sensations of touch can also turn out to be hallucinations.

The anatomist Henle expresses the same view in his Anthropological Lectures (1876) in the following way:

Everything through which we believe to be informed about an external world consists merely of forms of our consciousness for which the external world supplies merely the exciting cause, the stimulus, in the language of the physiologists. The external world has no colors, tones and tastes. What it really contains we learn only indirectly or not at all. How the external world affects a sense, we merely conclude from its behavior toward the other senses. We can, for instance, in the case of a tone, see the vibrations of the tuning fork with our eyes and feel it with our fingers. The nature of certain stimuli, which reveal themselves only to the one sense, as, for instance, the stimuli of the sense of smell, is still inaccessible to us. The number of the properties of matter depends on the number and on the keenness of the senses. Whoever lacks a sense loses a group of properties without a chance of regaining them. A person who would have an extra sense would have an organ to grasp qualities of which we have no other inkling than the blind man has of color.

[ 5 ] If one glances over the physiological literature from the second half of the nineteenth century, one sees that this view of the subjective nature of the world picture of our perceptions has gained increasing acceptance. Time and again one comes across variations of the thought that is expressed by J. Rosenthal in his General Physiology of Muscles and Nerves (1877). “The sensations that we receive through external impressions are not dependent on the nature of these impressions but on the nature of our nerve cells. We have no sensation of what exerts its effect on our body but only of the processes in our brain.”

[ 6 ] To what extent our subjective world picture can be said to give us an indication of the objective external world, is expressed by Helmholtz in his Physiological Optics:

To ask the question if cinnabar is really red as we see it or if this is only a sense deception is meaningless. A red-blind person will see cinnabar as black or in a dark yellow-gray shade; this is also a correct reaction for the special nature of his eye. He must only know that his eye happens to be different from that of other people. In itself one sensation is neither more nor less correct or incorrect than the other, even if the people who see the red have the great majority on their side. The red color of cinnabar exists only insofar as the majority of men have eyes that are of a similar nature. One can say with exactly the same right that it is a quality of cinnabar to be black for red-blind people. It is a different question, however, if we maintain that the wave length of light that is reflected by cinnabar has a certain length. This statement, which we can make without reference to the special nature of our eye, is only concerned with the relations of the substance and the various systems of ether waves.

[ 7 ] It is apparent that for such a conception all phenomena of the world are divided into two completely separated parts, into a world of motions that is independent of the special nature of our faculty of perception, and a world of subjective states that are there only within the perceiving subjects. This view has been expressed sharply and pointedly by the physiologist, Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), in his lecture, On the Limits of Natural Science, which he gave at the forty-fifth assembly of German naturalists and physicians on August 14, 1872 in Leipzig. Natural science is the reduction of processes we perceive in the world to motions of the smallest physical particles of a “dissolution of natural processes into mechanics of atoms,” for it is a “psychological fact of experience that, wherever such a dissolution is successful” our need for explanation is for the time being satisfied. Moreover, it is a known fact that our nervous system and our brain are of a material nature. The processes that take place within them can also be only processes of motion. When sound or light waves are transmitted to my sense organs and from there to my brain, they can here also be nothing but motions. I can only say that in my brain a certain process of motion goes on, and I have simultaneously the sensation “red.” For if it is meaningless to say of cinnabar that it is red, it is not less meaningless to say of a motion of the brain particles that it is bright or dark, green or red. “Mute and dark in itself, that is to say, without qualities,” such is the world according to the view that has been obtained through the natural scientific conception, which

...knows instead of sound and light only vibrations of a property-free fundamental matter that now can be weighed and then again is imponderable. . . . The Mosaic word, “And there was light,” is physiologically incorrect. Light came into being only when the first red eye spot of the infusoria differentiated for the first time between light and darkness. Without the substance of the optic and auditory sense this world, glowing in colors and resounding around us, would be dark and silent. (Limits of Natural Science.)

Through the processes in the substance of our optic and auditory senses a resounding and colorful world is, according to this view, magically called into existence. The dark and silent world is physical; the sounding and colorful one is psychic. Whereby does the latter arise out of the former; how does motion change into sensation? This is where we meet, according to Du Bois-Reymond, one of the “limits of natural science.” In our brain and in the external world there are only motions; in our soul, sensations appear. We shall never be able to understand how the one can arise out of the other.

At first sight it appears is if, through the knowledge of material processes in the brain, certain processes and latent abilities can become understandable. I am thinking of our memory, the stream of the association of our thought pictures, the effect of exercise, specific talents and so forth. But a little concentration at this point tells us that this view is an error. We would only learn something concerning the inner conditions of our mental life that are approximately of the same nature as our sense impressions, but we should learn nothing that would explain how the mental life comes into existence through these conditions. What possible connections can there be between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain, on the one hand, and, on the other, such undeniable and undefinable facts expressed by the words: I feel pain; I am delighted; I taste something sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red, and also the certainty that immediately follows from all this, Therefore I am. It is altogether incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of perfect indifference to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., what their position is and how they move, how this has been and how it will be.

There is no bridge for our knowledge that leads from motion to sensation. This is the credo of Du Bois-Reymond. From motion in the material world we cannot come into the psychical world of sensations. We know that sensation arises from matter in motion, but we do not know how this is possible. Also, in the world of motion we cannot go beyond motion. For our subjective perceptions we can point at certain forms of motions because we can infer the course of these motions from the process of our perceptions, but we have no conception of what it is that is moving outside in space. We say that matter moves. We follow its motions as we watch the reactions of our sensations, but as we do not observe the object in motion but only a subjective sign of it, we can never know what matter is. Du Bois-Reymond is of the opinion that we might be able to solve the riddle of sensation if the riddle of matter were disclosed. If we knew what matter is, we should probably also know how it produces sensations, but both riddles are inaccessible to our knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond meant to check those who wanted to go beyond this limit with the words, “Just let them try the only alternative that is left, namely, supra-naturalism, but be sure that science ends where supra-naturalism begins.”

[ 8 ] The results of modern natural science are two sharply marked opposites. One of them is the current of monism. It gives the impression of penetrating directly from natural science to the most significant problems of world conception. The other declares itself incapable of proceeding any further with the means of natural science than to the insight that to a certain subjective state there is a certain corresponding process of motion. The representatives of the two currents vehemently oppose each other. Du Bois-Reymond rejected Haeckel's History of Creation as fiction (compare Du Bois-Reymond's speech, Darwin versus Galiani). The ancestral trees that Haeckel constructs on the basis of comparative anatomy, ontogeny and paleontology appear to Du Bois-Reymond to be of “approximately the same value as are the ancestral trees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of historical criticism.” Haeckel, on the other hand, considers the view of Du Bois-Reymond to be an unscientific dilettantism that must naturally give support to the reactionary world conceptions. The jubilation of the spiritualists over Du Bois-Reymond's “Limitation Speech” was so much the more resonant and justified, as Du Bois-Reymond had, up to that time, been considered an important representative of the principle of scientific materialism.

[ 9 ] What captivates many people in the idea of dividing the world dualistically into external processes of motion and inner, subjective processes of sensation and perception is the possibility of an application of mathematics to the external processes. If one assumes material particles (atoms) with energies to exist, one can calculate in which way such atoms have to move under the influence of these energies. What is so attractive in astronomy with its methods of strict calculations is carried into the smallest elements. The astronomer determines the motion of the celestial bodies by calculating the laws of the mechanics of the heavens. In the discovery of the planet Neptune we experienced a triumph of the mechanism of the heavens. One can also reduce the motions that take place in the external world when we hear a tone and see a color to laws that govern the motions of the celestial bodies. Possibly one will be able in the future to calculate the motion that goes on in our brain while we form the judgment, two times two is four. The moment when everything that can be expressed in mathematical formulas has been calculated will be the one in which the world has been explained mathematically. Laplace has given a captivating description of the ideal of such an explanation of the world in his Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités (1814):

A mind that would know for a given moment all forces that activate nature as well as the mutual position of the entities of which nature consists would, if its power of comprehension were otherwise sufficient, comprehend in the same formula the motions of the largest celestial body and of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for such a mind, and the future as well as the past would be within the scope of its perfect and immediate knowledge. Man's power of reasoning offers, with the perfection that it has given to astronomy, a feeble imitation of such a mind.

Du Bois-Reymond says in connection with these words:

As the astronomer predicts the day on which a comet reemerges from the depth of world space after years in the firmament of heaven, so would this mind read in its calculation the day when the Greek cross will shine from the mosque of the Hagia Sophia and when England will burn its last coal.

[ 10 ] There can be no doubt that even the most perfect mathematical knowledge of a process of motion would not enlighten me with regard to the question of why this motion appears to me as a red color. When one ball hits another, we can explain the direction of the second ball but we cannot in this way determine how a certain motion produces the red color. All we can say is that when a certain motion is given, a certain color is also given. While we can explain, apparently, as opposed to merely describe, what can be determined through calculation, we cannot go beyond a mere description in anything that defies calculation.

[ 11 ] A significant confession was made by Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–87) when, in 1874, he defined the task of mechanics: “It is to describe the motions occurring in nature in the most complete and simple way.” Mechanics applies mathematics. Kirchhoff confesses that with the help of mathematics no more can be obtained than a complete and simple description of the processes in nature.

To those personalities who demand of an explanation something essentially more than just a description according to certain points of view, the confession of Kirchhoff could serve as a confirmation of their belief that there are “limits to our knowledge of nature.” Referring to Kirchhoff, Du Bois-Reymond praises the wise reserve of the master, who characterizes the task of mechanics as that of describing the motions of the bodies, and places this in contrast to Ernst Haeckel, who “speaks of atom souls.”

[ 12 ] An important attempt to base his world conception on the idea that all our perceptions are merely the result of our own organization has been made by Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–73) with his History of Materialism (1864). He had the boldness and consistency of thought that does not allow itself to be blocked by any obstacle but follows its fundamental conception to its last conclusion. Lange's strength lay in a forceful character that was expressed in many directions. His was a personality able to take up many things, and he had sufficient ability to carry them out.

[ 13 ] One important enterprise was his renewal of Kant's conception that, with the support of modern natural science, we perceive things not as they require it, but as our organization demands it. Lange did not really produce any new conceptions, but he did throw light into given thought worlds that is rare in its brightness. Our organization, our brain, in connection with our senses, produces the world of sensation. I see “blue,” or I feel “hardness,” because I am organized in this particular way. I combine the sensations into objects. By combining the sensations of “white” and “soft,” etc., I produce, for instance, the conception of wax. When I follow my sensation with my thoughts, I do not move in the external world. My intellect produces connections within the world of my sensations according to the laws of my reason. When I saw that the qualities I perceive in a body presuppose a matter with laws of motion, I also do not go outside of myself. I find that I am forced through my organization to add the thoughts of processes of motion to my sensations.

The same mechanism that produces our sensations also produces our conception of matter. Matter, equally, is only a product of my organization, just as color and tone. Even when we speak of things in themselves, we must be clearly aware of the fact that we cannot go beyond our own realm. We are so organized that we cannot possibly go beyond ourselves. Even what lies beyond our realm can be represented to ourselves only through our conception. We become aware of a limit to our world. We argue that there must be something beyond the limit that causes sensations in us. But we can only go as far as to that limit, even the limit we set ourselves because we can go no further. “A fish can swim in water in the pond, not in the earth, but it can hit its head against the bottom and the walls.” In the same way we live within the realm of our conceptions and sensations, but not in the external things. We hit against a limit, however, where we cannot go any further, where we must say no more than that beyond this is the unknown. All conceptions we produce concerning this unknown are unjustified because we cannot do anything but relate the conceptions we have obtained within ourselves to the unknown. If we wanted to do this, we should be no wiser than a fish that would say, “Here I cannot go any further. Therefore, I want to go into some other kind of water in which I will try to swim in some other way.” But the fact is that the fish can swim only in water and nowhere else.

[ 14 ] This is supplemented by another thought that belongs with the first line of reasoning. Lange, as the spirit of an inexorable desire for consistency, linked them together. In what situation am I when I contemplate myself? Am I not as much bound to the laws of my own organization as I am when I consider something else? My eye observes an object. Without an eye there is no color. I believe that there is an object in front of me, but on closer inspection I find that it is my eye, that is to say, I, myself, that produces the object. Now I turn my observation to my eye itself. Can I do this in any other way except by means of my organs? Is not the conception that I obtain of myself also just my idea? The world of the senses is the product of our organization. Our visible organs are like all other parts of the phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object. Our real organization remains, therefore, as unknown to us as the objects of the external world. What we have before us is merely the product of both. Affected by an unknown world through an unknown ego, we produce a world of conceptions that is all we have at our disposal.

[ 15 ] Lange asks himself the question: Where does a consistent materialism lead? Let all our mental conclusions and sense perceptions be produced by the activity of our brain, which is bound to material conditions, and our sense organs, which are also material. We are then confronted with the necessity of investigating our organism in order to see how it functions, but we can do this only by means of our organs. No color without an eye, but also no eye without an eye.

The consistently materialistic view is immediately reversed into a consistently idealistic one. There is no break to be assumed in our nature. We must not attribute some functions of our being to a physical nature and others to a spiritual one, but we are justified to assume physical conditions for everything, including the mechanism of our thinking, and we should not rest until we have found them. But we are as much justified if we consider as mere pictures of the really existing world, not only the external world as it appears to us, but also the organs with which we apprehend this world. The eye with which we believe we see is itself only a product of our imagination. When we find that our visual pictures are produced by the structure and function of the eye, we must never forget that the eye with all its contrivances—the optic nerve as well as the brain and the structures we may still discover in it as causes of our thinking—are only ideas that, to be sure, form a world that is consistent and interconnected in itself, but merely a world that points beyond itself. . The senses supply us, as Helmholtz says, with the effects of the things, not with faithful pictures, and certainly not with the things themselves. Among these effects are also the senses themselves as well as the brain and the molecular movements assumed in it. (History of Materialism, 1887.)

Lange, therefore, assumes a world beyond our world that may consist of the things in themselves or that may not even have anything to do with this “thing in itself,” since even this concept, which we form at the limit of our own realm, belongs merely to the world of our ideas.

[ 16 ] Lange's world conception, then, leads to the opinion that we have only a world of ideas. This world, however, forces us to acknowledge something beyond its own sphere. It also is completely incapable of disclosing anything about this something. This is the world conception of absolute ignorance, of agnosticism.

[ 17 ] It is Lange's conviction that all scientific endeavor that does not limit itself to the evidence of the senses and the logical intellect that combines these elements of evidence must remain fruitless. That the senses and the intellect together, however, do not supply us with anything but a result of our own organization, he accepts as evidently following from his analysis of the origin of knowledge. The world is for him fundamentally a product of the fiction of our senses and of our intellects. Because of this opinion, he never asks the question of truth with regard to the ideas. A truth that could enlighten us about the essence of the world is not recognized by Lange. He believes he has obtained an open road for the ideas and ideals that are formed by the human mind and that he has accomplished this through the very fact that he no longer feels the need of attributing any truth to the knowledge of the senses and the intellect. Without hesitation he considered everything that went beyond sensual observation and rational combination to be mere fiction. No matter what the idealistic philosophers had thought concerning the nature of facts, for him it belonged to the realm of poetic fiction.

Through this turn that Lange gave to materialism there arose necessarily the question: Why should not the higher imaginative creations be valid if even the senses are creative? What is the difference between these two kinds of creation? A philosopher who thinks like this must have a reason for admitting certain conceptions that is quite different from the reason that influences a thinker who acknowledges a conception because he thinks it is true. For Lange, this reason is given by the fact that a conception has value for life. For him, the question is not whether or not a conception is true, but whether it is valuable for man. One thing, however, must be clearly recognized: That I see a rose as red, that I connect the effect with the cause, is something I have in common with all creatures endowed with the power of perception and thinking. My senses and my reason cannot produce any additional values, but if I go beyond the imaginative product of senses and reason, then I am no longer bound to the organization of the whole human species. Schiller, Hegel and every Tom, Dick and Harry sees a flower in the same way. What Schiller weaves in poetic imagination around the flower, what Hegel thinks about it, is not imagined by Tom, Dick and Harry in the same way. But just as Tom, Dick and Harry are mistaken when they think that the flower is an entity existing externally, so Schiller and Hegel would be in error if they took their ideas for anything more than poetic fiction that satisfied their spiritual needs. What is poetically created through the senses and the intellect belongs to the whole human race, and no one in this respect can be different from anybody else. What goes beyond the creation of the senses and of reason is the concern of the individual. Nevertheless, this imaginative creation of the individual is also granted a value by Lange for the whole human race, provided that the individual creator “who produces it is normal, richly gifted and typical in his mode of thinking, and is, through his force of spirit, qualified to be a leader.”

In this way, Lange believes that he can secure for the ideal world its value by declaring that also the so-called real world is a product of poetic creation. Wherever he may look, Lange sees only fiction, beginning with the lowest stage of sense perception where “the individual still appears subject to the general characteristics of the human species, and culminating with the creative power in poetry.”

The function of the senses and of the combining intellect, which produce what is reality for us, can be called a lower function if one compares them with the soaring flight of the spirit in the creative arts. But, in general and in their totality, these functions cannot be classified as a principally different activity of the mind. As little as our reality is a reality according to our heart's desire, it is nevertheless the firm foundation of our whole spiritual existence. The individual grows out of the soil of the species, and the general and necessary process of knowledge forms the only secure foundation for the individual's rise to an esthetic conception of the world. (History of Materialism.)

[ 18 ] What Lange considers to be the error of the idealistic world conception is not that it goes beyond the world of the senses and the intellect with its ideas, but that it believes it possesses in these ideas more than the individual thinker's poetic fantasy. One should build up for oneself an ideal world, but one should be aware that this ideal world is no more than poetic imagination. If this idealism maintains it is more than that, materialism will rise time and again with the claim: I have the truth; idealism is poetry. Be that so, says Lange: Idealism is poetry, but materialism is also poetry. In idealism the individual is the creator, in materialism, the species. If they both are aware of their natures, everything is in its right place: the science of the senses and the intellect that provide proofs for the whole species, as well as the poetry of ideas with all its conceptions that are produced by the individual and still retain their value for the race.

One thing is certain: Man is in need of an ideal world created by himself as a supplement of reality, and the highest and noblest functions of his spirit are actively combined in such creations. But is this free activity of the spirit to be allowed repeatedly to assume the deceptive form of a proof-establishing science? If so, materialism will emerge again and again to destroy the bolder speculations and try to satisfy reason's demand for unity with a minimum of elevation above the real and actually provable. (History of Materialism.)

[ 19 ] In Lange's thinking, complete idealism is combined with a complete surrender of truth itself. The world for him is poetry, but a poetry that he does not value any less than he would if he could acknowledge it as reality.

Thus, two currents of a distinctly natural scientific character can be distinguished as abruptly opposing each other in the development of modern world conception: The monistic current in which Haeckel's mode of conception moved, and the dualistic one, the most forceful and consistent defender of which was Friedrich Albert Lange. Monism considers the world that man can observe to be a true reality and has no doubt that a thinking process that depends on observation can also obtain knowledge of essential significance concerning this reality. Monism does not imagine that it is possible to exhaust the fundamental nature of the world with a few boldly thought out formulas. It proceeds as it follows the facts, and forms new ideas in regard to the connections of these facts. It is convinced, however, that these ideas do supply a knowledge of a true reality. The dualistic conception of Lange divides the world into a known and an unknown part. It treats the first part in the same fashion as monism, following the lead of observation and reflective thought, but it believes that nothing at all can be known concerning the true essential core of the world through this observation and through this thought. Monism believes in the truth of the real and sees the human world of ideas best supported if it is based on the world of observations. In the ideas and ideals that the monist derives from natural existence, he sees something that is fully satisfactory to his feeling and to his moral need. He finds in nature the highest existence, which he does not only want to penetrate with his thinking for the purpose of knowledge, but to which he surrenders with all his knowledge and with all his love.

In Lange's dualism nature is considered to be unfit to satisfy the spirit's highest needs. Lange must assume a special world of higher poetry for this spirit that leads beyond the results of observation and its corresponding thought. For monism, true knowledge represents a supreme spiritual value, which, because of its truth, grants man also the purest moral and religious pathos. To dualism, knowledge cannot present such a satisfaction. Dualism must measure the value of life by other things, not by the truth it might yield. The ideas are not valuable because they participate in the truth. They are of value because they serve life in its highest forms. Life is not valued by means of the ideas, but the ideas are appreciated because of their fruitfulness for life. It is not for true knowledge that man strives but for valuable thoughts.

[ 20 ] In recognizing the mode of thinking of natural science Friedrich Albert Lange agrees with monism insofar as he denies the uses of all other sources for the knowledge of reality, but he also denies this mode of thinking any possibility to penetrate into the essential of things. In order to make sure that he himself moves on solid ground he curtails the wings of human imagination. What Lange is doing in such an incisive fashion corresponds to an inclination of thought that is deeply ingrained in the development of modern world conception. This is shown with perfect clarity also in another sphere of thinking of the nineteenth century. This thinking developed, through various stages, viewpoints from which Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) started as he laid the foundations for a dualism in England. Spencer's dualism appeared at approximately the same time as Lange's in Germany, which strove for natural scientific knowledge of the world on the one hand and, on the other, confessed to agnosticism so far as the essence of things is concerned. When Darwin published his work, The Origin of Species, he could praise the natural scientific mode of thought of Spencer:

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in an Essay (1852), has contrasted the theories of the Creation and the Development of organic beings with remarkable skill and force. He argues from the analogy of domestic production, from the changes which the embryos of many species undergo, from the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, and from the principle of general gradation that species have been modified; and he attributes the modification to the change of circumstances. The author (1855) has also treated Psychology on the principle of the necessary requirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. (The Origin of Species, Historical Sketch.)

Also, other thinkers who followed the method of natural science felt attracted to Spencer because he tried to explain all reality from the inorganic to the psychological in the manner expressed in Darwin's words above. But Spencer also sides with the agnostics, so that Lange is justified when he says, “Herbert Spencer, whose philosophy is closely related to ours, believes in a materialism of the phenomenal world, the relative justification of which, within the realm of natural science, finds its limit in a thought of an unknowable absolute.”

[ 21 ] It is quite likely that Spencer arrived at his viewpoint from assumptions similar to those of Lange. He had been preceded in England by thinkers who were guided by a twofold interest. They wanted to determine what it is that man really possesses with his knowledge, but they also were resolved not to shatter by doubt or reason the essential substance of the world. They were all more or less dominated by the sentiment that Kant described when he said, “I had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief.” (Compare the first volume of this book.)

[ 22 ] The beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in England is marked by the figure of Thomas Reid (1710–96). The fundamental conviction of this man can be expressed in Goethe's words as he describes his own activity as a scientist as non-speculative: “In the last analysis it seems to me that my method consists merely m the practical and self-rectifying operations of common sense that dares to practice its function in a higher sphere.” (Compare Goethe's Werke, Vol. 38, p. 595 in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur.) This common sense does not doubt in any way that it is confronted with real essential things and processes as it contemplates the world. Reid believes that a world conception is viable only if it upholds this basic view of a healthy common sense. Even if one admitted the possibility that our observation could be deceptive and that the true nature of things could be different from the picture that is supplied to us by our senses and our intellect, it would not be necessary to pay any attention to such a possibility. We find our way through life only if we believe in our observation; nothing beyond that is our concern.

In taking this point of view Reid is convinced that he can arrive at really satisfactory truths. He makes no attempt to obtain a conception of things through complicated thought operations but wants to reach his aim by going back to the basic principles that the soul instinctively assumes. Instinctively, unconsciously, the soul possesses what is correct, before the attempt is made to illumine the mind's own nature with the torch of consciousness. It knows instinctively what to think in regard to the qualities and processes of the physical world, and it is endowed instinctively with the direction of moral behavior, of a judgment concerning good and evil. Through his reference to the truths innate in “common sense,” Reid directs the attention of thought toward an observation of the soul. This tendency toward a psychological observation becomes a lasting and characteristic trait in the development of the English world conception.

Outstanding personalities within this development are William Hamilton (1788–1856), Henry Mansel (1820–71), William Whewell (1794–1866), John Herschel (1792 – 1871), James Mill (1773–1836), John Stuart Mill (1806 – 73), Alexander Bain (1818–1903) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). They all place psychology in the center of their world conception.

[ 23 ] William Hamilton also recognizes as truth what the soul from the beginning feels inclined to accept as true. With respect to fundamental truths proofs and comprehension ceases. All one can do is observe their emergence at the horizon of our consciousness. In this sense they are incomprehensible. But one of the fundamental manifestations of our consciousness is also that everything in this world depends on something that is unknown to us. We find in this world in which we live only dependent things, but not absolutely independent ones. Such independent things must exist, however. When a dependent thing is found, an independent thing is assumed. With our thinking we do not enter the independent entity. Human knowledge is meant for the dependent and it becomes involved in contradictions if its thoughts, which are well-suited to the dependent, are applied to the independent. Knowledge, therefore, must withdraw as we approach the entrance toward the independent. Religious belief is here in its place. It is only through his admission that he cannot know anything of the essential core of the world that man can be a moral being. He can accept a God who causes a moral order in the world. As soon as it has been understood that all logic has exclusively to do with the dependent, not the independent, no logic can destroy this belief in an infinite God.

Henry Mansel was a pupil and follower of Hamilton, but he expressed Hamilton's view in still more extreme forms. It is not going too far to say that Mansel was an advocate of belief who no longer judged impartially between religion and knowledge, but who defended religious dogma with partiality. He was of the opinion that the revealed truths of religion involve our knowledge necessarily in contradictions. This is not supposed to be the fault of the revealed truths but has its cause in the limitation of the human mind, which can never penetrate into regions from which the statements of revelation arise.

William Whewell believed that he could best obtain a conception concerning the significance, origin and value of human knowledge by investigating the method through which leading men of science arrived at their insights. In his History of the Inductive Sciences (1840), he set out to analyze the psychology of scientific investigation. Thus, by studying outstanding scientific discoveries, he hoped to find out how much of these accomplishments was due to the external world and how much to man himself. Whewell finds that the human mind always supplements its scientific observations. Kepler, for example, had the idea of an ellipse before he found that the planets move in ellipses. Thus, the sciences do not come about through a mere reception from without but through the active participation of the human mind that impresses its laws on the given elements. These sciences do not extend as far as the last entities of things. They are concerned with the particulars of the world. Just as everything, for instance, is assumed to have a cause, such a cause must also be presupposed for the whole world. Since knowledge fails us with respect to that cause, the dogma of religion must step in as a supplement. Herschel, like Whewell, also tried to gain an insight into the genesis of knowledge in the human mind through the observation of many examples. His Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1831.

[ 24 ] John Stuart Mill belongs with those thinkers who are deeply imbued with the conviction that one cannot be cautious enough in determining what is certain and uncertain in human knowledge. The fact that he was introduced to the most diversified branches of knowledge in his boyhood, most likely gave his mind its characteristic turn. As a child of three he received instructions in the Greek language, and soon afterwards was taught arithmetic. He was exposed to the other fields of instruction at a correspondingly early age. Of even greater importance was the method of instruction used by his father, James Mill, who was himself an important thinker. Through him vigorous logic became the second nature of John Stuart. From his autobiography we learn: “Anything which could be found out by thinking I was never told until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.” The things that occupy the thinking of such a person must become his destiny in the proper sense of the word. “I have never been a child, I have never played cricket. It is, after all, better to let nature take its own course,” says John Stuart Mill as one whose destiny had so uniquely been to live almost exclusively in thinking. Because of his development, he had to experience to the fullest the problems concerning the significance of knowledge. How can knowledge, which for him was life, lead also to the source of the phenomena of the world? The direction in which Mill's thought developed in order to obtain clarity concerning these problems was probably determined early by his father. James Mill had proceeded by starting from psychological experience. He had observed the process by which idea is linked to idea in man's mind. Through connecting one concrete idea to another we obtain our knowledge of the world. We must then ask ourselves: What is the relation between the order in which the ideas are linked and the order of the things in the world? Through such a mode of conception our thinking begins to distrust its own power because man can associate ideas in a manner that is entirely different from the connection of the things in the external world. This mistrust is the basis of John Stuart Mill's logic, which appeared in 1843 as his chief work under the title, System of Logic.

[ 25 ] In matters of world conception a more pronounced contrast is scarcely thinkable than that between Mill's Logic and Hegel's Science of Logic, which appeared twenty-seven years earlier. In Hegel we find the highest confidence in thinking, the full assurance that we cannot be deceived by what we experience within ourselves. Hegel experiences himself as a part, a member of the world, and what he experiences within himself must also belong to the world. Since he has the most direct knowledge of himself, he believes in the content of this knowledge and judges the rest of the world accordingly. He argues as follows: When I perceive an external thing, it is possible that the thing shows only its surface to me and that its essence remains concealed. This is not possible in my own case. I understand my own being. I can then compare the things outside with my own being. If they reveal some element of my own essence on their surface, I am justified in attributing to them something of my own nature. It is for this reason that Hegel expects confidently to find outside in nature the very spirit and the thought connections that he finds within himself.

Mill, however, experiences himself not as a part of the world but as a spectator. The things outside are an unknown element to him and the thoughts that man forms concerning them are met by Mill with distrust. One observes men and learns from his observations that all men die. One forms the judgment that all men are mortal. The Duke of Wellington is a man; therefore, the Duke of Wellington is mortal. This is the conclusion the observer comes to. What gives him the right to do so? This is the question John Stuart Mill asks. If a single human being would prove to be immortal, the whole judgment would be upset. Are we justified in supposing that, because all men up to this time have died, they will continue to do so in the future? All knowledge is uncertain because we draw conclusions from observations we have made and transfer them to things we cannot know anything about, since we have not observed them directly. What would somebody who thinks like Hegel have to say about such a conception? It is not difficult to imagine the answer. We know from definite concepts that in every circle all diameters are equal. If we find a circle in the real world, we maintain that its diameters, too, are equal. If we observe it a quarter of an hour later and find that its diameters are unequal, we do not decide [ 26 ] that under certain circumstances the diameter of a circle can also be unequal. But we say that what was formerly a circle has for some reason been elongated into an ellipse.

If we think like Hegel, this is the attitude we take toward the judgment, all men are mortal. It is not through observation but through an inner thought experience that we form the concept of man. For the concept of man, mortality is as essential as the equality of the diameters is for the concept of the circle. If we find a being in the real world that has all the other characteristics of man, we conclude that this being must also have that of mortality, in the same way that all other properties of the circle allow us to conclude that it has also that of the equality of diameters. If Hegel came across a being that did not die, he could only say, “That is not a man.” He could not say, “A man can also be immortal.” Hegel makes the assumption that the concepts in us are not arbitrarily formed but have their root in the essence of the world, as we ourselves belong to this essence. Once the concept of man has formed within us, it is clear that it has its origin in the essence of things, and we are fully justified in applying it to this essence. Why has this concept of mortal man formed within us? Surely only because it has its ground in the nature of things. A person who believes that man stands entirely outside of the order of things and forms his judgments as an outsider can argue that we have until now seen men die, and therefore we form the spectator concept: mortal men. The thinker who is aware that he himself belongs to the order of things and that it is they that are manifested within his thoughts, forms the judgment that up to this time all men have died; to die, then, is something that belongs to their nature, and if somebody does not die, he is not a man but something else. Hegel's logic has become a logic of things: For Hegel, the manifestation of logic is an effect of the essence of the world; it is not something that the human mind has added from an outside source to this essence. Mill's logic is the logic of a bystander, of a mere spectator who starts out by cutting the thread through which it is connected with the world.

[ 27 ] Mill points out that the thoughts, which in a certain age appear as absolutely certain inner experiences, are nevertheless reversed in a later time. In the Middle Ages it was, for instance, believed that there could not possibly be antipodes and that the stars would have to drop from the sky if they did not cling to fixed spheres. Man will, therefore, only be capable of the right attitude toward his knowledge if he, in spite of his awareness that the logic of the world is expressed in this knowledge, forms in every individual case his judgment through a careful methodical examination of his conceptual connections guided by observation, a judgment that is always in need of correction.

It is the method of observation that John Stuart Mill attempts to determine with cool detachment and calculation. Let us take an example. [ 28 ] Suppose a phenomenon had always occurred under certain conditions. In a given case a number of these conditions appear again, but a few of them are now missing. The phenomenon in question does not occur. We are forced to conclude that the conditions that were not provided and the phenomenon that failed to occur stood in a causal relationship. If two substances have always combined to form a chemical compound and this result fails to be obtained in a given case, it is necessary to inquire what condition is lacking that had always been present before. Through a method of this kind we arrive at conceptions concerning connections of facts that can be rightly considered as being grounded in the nature of things. Mill wants to follow the methods of observation in his analysis. Logic, which Kant maintained had not progressed a single step since Aristotle, is a means of orientation within our thinking itself. It shows how to proceed from one correct thought to the next. Mill's logic is a means of orientation within the world of facts. It intends to show how one obtains valid judgments about things from observation. He does not even admit mathematics as an exception. Mathematics must also derive its basic insights from observation. For example, in all observed cases we have seen that two intersecting straight lines diverge and do not intersect again. Therefore we conclude that they will never intersect again, but we do not have a perfect proof for this statement. For John Stuart Mill, the world is thus an alien element. Man observes its phenomena and arranges them according to what they announce to his conceptual life. He perceives regularities in the phenomena and through logical, methodical investigations of these regularities he arrives at the laws of nature. But there is nothing that leads him to the principle of the things themselves. One can well imagine that the world could also be entirely different. Mill is convinced that everybody who is used to abstraction and analysis and who seriously uses his abilities will, after a sufficient exercise of his imagination, have no difficulty with the idea that there could be another stellar system in which nothing could be found of the laws that have application to our own.

Mill is merely consistent in his bystander viewpoint of the world when he extends it to man's own ego. Mental pictures come and go, are combined and separated within his inner life; this is what man observes. He does not observe a being that remains identical with itself as “ego” in the midst of this constant flow of ideas. He has observed that mental pictures emerge within him and he assumes that this will continue to be the case. From this possibility, namely, that a world of perceptions can be grouped around a center, arises the conception of an “ego.” Thus, man is a spectator also with respect to his own “ego.” He has his conceptions tell him what he can know about himself. Mill reflects on the facts of memory and expectation. If everything that I know of myself is to consist of conceptual presentations, then I cannot say: I remember a conception that I have had at an earlier time, or I expect the occurrence of a certain experience, but I must say: A present conception remembers itself or expects its future occurrence. If we speak, so Mill argues, of the mind as of a sequence of perceptions, we must also speak of a sequence of perceptions that is aware of itself as becoming and passing. As a result, we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to say that either the “ego” or the mind is something to be distinguished from the perceptions, or else we must maintain the paradox that a mere sequence of perceptions is capable of an awareness of its past and future. Mill does not overcome this dilemma. It contains for him an insoluble enigma. The fact is that he has torn the bond between himself, the observer, and the world, and he is not capable of restoring the connection. The world for him remains an unknown beyond himself that produces impressions on man. All man knows of this transcendent unknown is that it can produce perceptions in him. Instead of having the possibility of knowing real things outside himself, he can only say in the end that there are opportunities for having perceptions. Whoever speaks of things in themselves uses empty words. We move on the firm ground of facts only as long as we speak of the continuous possibility of the occurrence of sensations, perceptions and conceptions.

[ 29 ] John Stuart Mill has an intense aversion to all thoughts that are gained in any way except through the comparison of facts, the observation of the similar, the analogous, and the homogeneous elements in all phenomena. He is of the opinion that the human conduct of life can only be harmed if we surrender to the belief that we could arrive at any truth in any way except through observation. This disinclination of Mill demonstrates his hesitation to relate himself in his striving for knowledge to the things of reality in any other way than by an attitude of passivity. The things are to dictate to man what he has to think about them. If man goes beyond this state of receptivity in order to say something out of his own self about the things, then he lacks every assurance that this product of his own activity has anything to do with the things. What is finally decisive in this philosophy is the fact that the thinker who maintains it is unable to count his own spontaneous thinking as belonging to the world. The very fact that he himself is active in this thinking makes him suspicious and misleads him. He would best of all like to eliminate his own self completely, to be absolutely sure that no erroneous element is mixed into the objective statements of the phenomena. He does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that his thinking is a part of nature as much as the growth of a leaf of grass. It is evident that one must also examine one's own spontaneous thinking if one wants to find out something concerning it.

How is man, to use a statement of Goethe, to become acquainted with his relation to himself and to the external world if he wants to eliminate himself completely in the cognitive process? Great as Mill's merits are for finding methods through which man can learn those things that do not depend on him, a view concerning man's relation to himself and of his relation to the external world cannot be obtained by his methods. All these methods are valid only for the special sciences, not, however, for a comprehensive world conception. No observation can teach what spontaneous thinking is; only thinking can experience this in itself. As this thinking can only obtain information concerning its own nature through its own power, it is also the only source that can shed light on the relation between itself and the external world. Mill's method of investigation excludes the possibility of obtaining a world conception because a world conception can be gained only through thinking that is concentrated in itself and thereby succeeds in obtaining an insight into its own relation to the external world. The fact that John Stuart Mill had an aversion to this kind of self-supporting thinking can be well understood from his character. Gladstone said in a letter (compare Gompertz: John Stuart Mill, Vienna, 1889) that in conversation he used to call Mill the “Saint of Rationalism.” A person who practices thinking in this way imposes rigorous demands on thinking and looks for the greatest possible precautionary measures so that it cannot deceive him. He becomes thereby mistrustful with respect to thinking itself. He believes that he will soon stand on insecure ground if he loses hold of external points of support. Uncertainty with regard to all problems that go beyond strictly observational knowledge is a basic trait in Mill's personality. In reading his books we see everywhere that Mill treats such problems as open questions concerning which he does not risk a sure judgment.

[ 30 ] The belief that the true nature of things is unknowable is also maintained by Herbert Spencer. He proceeds by asking: How do I obtain what I call truths concerning the world? I make certain observations concerning things and form judgments about them. I observe that hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions combine to form water. I form a judgment concerning this observation. This is a truth that extends only over a small circle of things. I then observe under what circumstances other substances combine. I compare the individual observations and thereby arrive at more comprehensive, more general truths concerning the process in which substances in general form chemical compounds. All knowledge consists in this; we proceed from particular truths to more comprehensive ones. We finally arrive at the highest truth, which cannot be subordinated to any other and which we therefore must accept without further explanation. In this process of knowledge we have, however, no means of penetrating to the absolute essence of the world, for thinking can, according to this opinion, do no more than compare the various things with one another and formulate general truths with respect to the homogeneous element in them. But the ultimate nature of the world cannot, because of its uniqueness, be compared to any other thing. This is why thinking fails with regard to the ultimate nature. It cannot reach it.

[ 31 ] In such modes of conception we always sense, as an undertone, the thinking that developed from the basis of the physiology of the senses (compare above to the first part of this Chapter). In many philosophers this thought has inserted itself so deeply into their intellectual life that they consider it the most certain thought possible. They argue as follows: One can know things only by becoming aware of them. They then change this thought, more or less unconsciously, into: One can know only of those things that enter our consciousness, but it remains unknown how the things were before they entered our consciousness. It is for this reason that sense perceptions are considered as if they were in our consciousness, for one is of the opinion that they must first enter our consciousness and must become part of it in the form of conceptions if we are to be aware of them.

[ 32 ] Also, Spencer clings to the view that the possibility of the process of knowledge depends on us as human beings. We therefore must assume an unknowable element beyond that which can be transmitted to us by our senses and our thinking. We have a clear consciousness of everything that is present in our mind. But an indefinite consciousness is associated with this clear awareness that claims that everything we can observe and think has as its basis something we can no longer observe and think. We know that we are dealing with mere appearances and not with full realities existing independently by themselves. But this is just because we know definitely that our world is only appearance, that we also know that an unimaginable real world is its basis. Through such turns of thought Spencer believes it possible to arrange a complete reconciliation between religion and knowledge. There is something that religion can grasp in belief, in a belief that cannot be shaken by an impotent knowledge.

[ 33 ] The field, however, that Spencer considers to be accessible to knowledge must, for him, entirely take on the form of natural scientific conceptions. When Spencer himself ventures to explain, he does so in the sense of natural science.

[ 34 ] Spencer uses the method of natural science in thinking of the process of knowledge. Every organ of a living being has come into existence through the fact that this being has adapted itself to the conditions under which it lives. It belongs to the human conditions of life that man finds his way through the world with the aid of thinking. His organ of knowledge develops through the adaptation of his conceptual life to the conditions of his external life. By making statements concerning things and processes, man adjusts himself to the surrounding world. All truths have come into being through this process of adaptation, and what is acquired in this way can be transmitted through inheritance to the descendants. Those who think that man, through his nature, possesses once and for all a certain disposition toward general truths are wrong. What appears to be such a disposition did not exist at an earlier stage in the ancestors of man, but has been acquired by adaptation and transmitted to the descendants. When some philosophers speak of truths that man does not have to derive from his own individual experience but that are given a priori in his organization, they are right in a certain respect. While it is obvious that such truths are acquired, it must be stressed that they are not acquired by man as an individual but as a species. The individual has inherited the finished product of an ability that has been acquired at an earlier age.

Goethe once said that he had taken part in many conversations on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and that he had noticed how on those occasions the old basic problem had been renewed, “How much does our inner self contribute to our spiritual existence, how much the external world?” And Goethe goes on to say, “I had never separated the two; when I was philosophizing in my own way on things, I did so with an unconscious naïveté and was really convinced that I saw with my eyes my opinion before me.”

[ 35 ] Spencer looks at this “old basic problem” from the point of view of natural science. He believed he could show that the developed human being also contributed to his spiritual existence through his own self. This self, is also made up of the inherited traits that had been acquired by our ancestors in their struggle with the external world. If we today believe we see with our eyes our opinions before us, we must remember that they were not always our opinions but that they were once observations that were really made by our eyes in the external world. Spencer's way of thinking, then, is, like that of John Stuart Mill, one that proceeds from psychology. But Mill does not go further than the psychology of the individual. Spencer goes from the individual back to his ancestors. The psychology of the individual is in the same position as the ontogenesis of zoology. Certain phenomena of the history of the individual are explainable only if they are referred back to phenomena of the history of the species. In the same way, the facts of the individual's consciousness cannot be understood if taken alone. We must go back to the species. We must, indeed, go back beyond the human species to acquisitions of knowledge that were accomplished by the animal ancestors of man. Spencer uses his great acumen to support this evolutionary history of the process of cognition. He shows in which way the mental activities have gradually developed from low stages at the beginning, through ever more accurate adaptations of the human mind to the external world and through inheritance of these adaptation. Every insight that the individual human being obtains through pure thought and without experience about things has been obtained by humanity or its ancestors through observation or experience. Leibniz thought he could explain the correspondence of man's inner life with the external world by assuming a harmony between them that was pre-established by the creator. Spencer explains this correspondence in the manner of natural science. The harmony is not pre-established, but gradually developed. We here find the continuation of natural scientific thinking to the highest aspects of human existence. Linnaeus had declared that every living organic form existed because the creator had made it as it is. Darwin maintained that it is as it is because it had gradually developed through adaptation and inheritance. Leibniz declared that thinking is an agreement with the external world because the creator had established this agreement. Spencer maintained that this agreement is there because it has gradually developed through adaptations and inheritance of the thought world.

[ 36 ] Spencer was motivated in his thought by the need for a naturalistic explanation of spiritual phenomena. He found the general direction for such an explanation in Lyell's geology (compare in Part 2 Chapter I). In this geology, to be sure, the idea is still rejected that organic forms have gradually developed one from another. It nevertheless receives a powerful support through the fact that the inorganic (geological) formations of the earth's surface are explained through such a gradual development and through violent catastrophes. Spencer, who had a natural scientific education and who had for a time also been active as a civil engineer, recognized at once the full extent of the idea of evolution, and he applied it in spite of Lyell's opposition to it. He even applied this idea to spiritual processes. As early as 1850, in his book, Social Statistics, he described social evolution in analogy with organic evolution. He also acquainted himself with the studies of Harvey and Wolff in embryonic development (compare Part I, Chapter IX of this book), and he plunged into the works of Karl Ernst von Baer (compare above in Part II Chapter II), which showed him that evolution proceeded from the development of a homogeneous uniform state to one of variety, diversity and abundance. In the early stages of embryological development the organisms are very similar; later they become different from one another (compare above in Part II Chapter II). Through Darwin this evolutionary thought was completely confirmed. From a few original organic forms the whole wealth of the highly diversified world of formations has developed.

From the idea of evolution, Spencer wanted to proceed to the most general truths, which, in his opinion, constituted the aim of all human striving for knowledge. He believed that one could discover manifestations of this evolutionary thought in the simplest phenomena. When, from dispersed particles of water, a cloud is formed in the sky, when a sand pile is formed from scattered grains of sand, Spencer saw the beginnings of an evolutionary process. Dispersed matter is contracted and concentrated to a whole. It is just this process that is presented to us in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of world evolution. Dispersed parts of a chaotic world nebula have contracted. The organism originates in just this way. Dispersed elements are concentrated in tissues. The psychologist can observe that man contracts dispersed observations into general truths. Within this concentrated whole, articulation and differentiation take place. The original homogeneous mass is differentiated into the individual heavenly bodies of the solar system; the organism differentiates itself into the various organs.

[ 37 ] Concentration alternates with dissolution. When a process of evolution has reached a certain climax, an equilibrium takes place. Man, for instance, develops until he has evolved a maximum of harmonization of his inner abilities with external nature. Such a state of equilibrium, however, cannot last; external forces will effect it destructively. The evolutionary process must be followed by a process of dissolution; what had been concentrated is dispersed again; the cosmic again becomes chaotic. The process of evolution can begin anew. Thus, Spencer sees the process of the world as a rhythmic play of motion. [ 38 ] It is certainly not an uninteresting observation for the comparative history of the evolution of world conception that Spencer, from the observation of the genesis of world phenomena, reaches here a conclusion that is similar to one Goethe expressed in connection with his ideas concerning the genesis of life. Goethe describes the growth of a plant in the following way:

May the plant sprout, blossom or bear fruit, it is always by the same organs that the prescription of nature is fulfilled in various functions and under frequently changing forms. The same organ, which at the stem expands as a leaf and takes on a most differentiated shape, now contracts again in the calyx, spreads out in the petal, epitomizes in the organs of reproduction and finally once more swells as fruit.

If one thinks of this conception as being transferred to the whole process of the world, one arrives as Spencer's contraction and dispersion of matter.

[ 39 ] Spencer and Mill exerted a great influence on the development of world conception in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigorous emphasis on observation and the one-sided elaboration of the methods of observational knowledge of Mill, along with the application of the conceptions of natural science to the entire scope of human knowledge by Spencer could not fail to meet with the approval of an age that saw in the idealistic world conception of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel nothing but degeneration of human thinking. It was an age that showed appreciation only for the successes of the research work of natural science. The lack of unity among the idealistic thinkers and what seemed to many a perfect fruitfulness of a thinking that was completely concentrated and absorbed in itself, had to produce a deep-seated suspicion against idealism. One may say that a widespread view of the last four decades of the nineteenth century is clearly expressed in words spoken by Rudolf Virchow in his address, The Foundation of the University of Berlin and the Transition from the Age of Philosophy into that of Natural Science (1893): “Since the belief in magic formulas has been forced back into the most backward circles of the people, the formulas of the natural philosopher have met with little approval.” And one of the most significant philosophers of the second half of the century, Eduard von Hartmann, sums up the character of his world conception in the motto he placed at the head of his book, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results Obtained by the Inductive Method of Natural Science. He is of the opinion that it is necessary to recognize “the greatness of the progress brought about by Mill, through which all attempts of a deductive method of philosophy have been defeated and made obsolete for all times.” (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik, 2 part, page 479.)

[ 40 ] The recognition of certain limits of human knowledge that was shown by many naturalists was also received favorably by many religiously attuned souls. They argued as follows: The natural scientists observe the inorganic and organic facts of nature and they attempt to find general laws by combining the individual phenomena. Through these laws processes can be explained, and it is even possible to predetermine thereby the regular course of future phenomena. A comprehensive world conception should proceed in the same way; it should confine itself to the facts, establish general truths within moderate limits and not maintain any claim to penetrate into the realm of the “unknowable.” Spencer, with his complete separation of the “knowable” and the “unknowable,” met the demand of such religious needs to a high degree. The idealistic mode of thought was, on the other hand, considered by such religiously inclined spirits to be a fantastic aberration. As a matter of principle, the idealistic mode of conception cannot recognize an “unknowable,” because it has to uphold the conviction that through the concentrated penetration into the inner life of man a knowledge can be attained that covers not merely the outer surface of the world but also its real core.

[ 41 ] The thought life of some influential naturalists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, moved entirely in the direction of such religiously inclined spirits. Huxley believed in a complete agnosticism with regard to the essence of the world. He declared that a monism, which is in general agreement with Darwin's results, is applicable only to external nature. Huxley was one of the first to defend the Darwinian conceptions, but he is at the same time one of the most outspoken representatives of those thinkers who believed in the limitation of that mode of conception. A similar view is also held by the physicist Johaan Tyndall (1820–93) who considered the world process to be an energy that is completely inaccessible to the human intellect. According to him, it is precisely the assumption that everything in the world comes into existence through a natural evolution that makes it impossible to accept the thought that matter, which is, after all, the carrier of the whole evolution, should be no more than what our intellect can comprehend of it.

[ 42 ] A characteristic phenomenon of his time is the personality of the English statesman, James Balfour (1840–1930). In 1879, in his book, A Defense of Philosophical Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, he expressed a credo that is doubtless similar to that held by many other thinkers. With respect to everything that man is capable of explaining he stands completely on the ground of the thought of natural science. For him, there is no other knowledge but natural science, but he maintains at the same time that his knowledge of natural science is only rightly understood if it is clear that the needs of man's soul and reason can never be satisfied by it. It is only necessary to understand that, in the last analysis even in natural science, everything depends on faith in the ultimate truths for which no further proof is possible. But no harm is done in that this trend of thoughts leads us only to belief, because this belief is a secure guide for our action in daily life. We believe in the laws of nature and we master them through this belief. We thereby force nature to serve us for our purpose. Religious belief is to produce an agreement between the actions of man and his higher needs that go beyond his everyday life.

[ 43 ] The world conceptions that have been discussed under the title, “The World as Illusion,” show that they have as their basis a longing for a satisfactory relationship of the self-conscious ego to the general world picture. It is especially significant that they do not consciously consider this search as their philosophical aim, and therefore do not expressly turn their inquiry toward that purpose. Instinctively as it were, they permit their thinking to be influenced by the direction that is determined by this unconscious search. The form that this search takes is determined by the conceptions of modern natural science. We approach the fundamental character of these conceptions if we fix our attention on the concept of “consciousness.” This concept was introduced to the life of modern philosophy by Descartes. Before him, it was customary to depend more on the concept of the “soul” as such. Little attention was paid to the fact that only a part of the soul's life is spent in connection with conscious phenomena. During sleep the soul does not live consciously. Compared to the conscious life, the nature of the soul must therefore consist of deeper forces, which in the waking state are merely lifted into consciousness. The more one asked the question of the justification and the value of knowledge in the light of clear and distinct ideas, however, the more it was also felt that the soul finds the most certain elements of knowledge when it does not go beyond its own limits and when it does not delve deeper into itself than consciousness extends. The opinion prevailed that everything else may be uncertain, but what my consciousness is, at least, as such is certain. Even the house I pass may not exist without me; that the image of this house is now in my consciousness: this I may maintain. But as soon as we fix our attention on this consciousness, the concept of the ego inevitably grows together with that of the consciousness. Whatever kind of entity the “ego” may be outside the consciousness, the realm of the “ego” can be conceived as extending as far as the consciousness. There is no possibility of denying that the sensual world picture, which the soul experiences consciously, has come into existence through the impression that is made on man by the world. But as soon as one clings to this statement, it becomes difficult to rid oneself of it, for there is a tendency thereby to imply the judgment that the processes of the world are the causes, and that the content of our consciousness is the effect. Because one thinks that only the effect is contained in the consciousness, it is believed that the cause must be in a world outside man as an imperceptible “thing in itself.” The presentation that is given above shows how the results of modern physiological research lead to an affirmation of such an opinion. It is just this opinion through which the “ego” finds itself enclosed with its subjective experiences within its own boundaries. This subtly produced intellectual illusion, once formed, cannot be destroyed as long as the ego does not find any clues within itself of which it knows that they refer to a being outside the subjective consciousness, although they are actually depicted within that consciousness. The ego must, outside the sensual consciousness, feel a contact with entities that guarantee their being by and through themselves. It must find something within that leads it outside itself. been said here concerning thoughts that are brought to life can have this effect. As long as the ego has experienced thought only within itself, it feels itself confined with it within its own boundary. As thought is brought to life it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is, to be sure, experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process. This breaks the “ego” loose from everything that it can feel only as subjective.

So we see that also the conceptions for which the world is illusion move toward a point that is reached when Hegel's world picture is so transformed that its thought comes to life. These conceptions take on the form that is necessary for a world picture that is unconsciously driven by an impulse in that direction. But in them, thinking still lacks the power to work its way through to that aim. Even in their imperfection, however, these conceptions receive their general character from this aim, and the ideas that appear are the external symptoms of active forces that remain concealed.

The matters which we are now discussing are connected with a fact that sounds strange at first hearing but which corresponds to a deep and significant truth—namely, man wanders over the earth but has in reality no true understanding of himself. One could say that this statement applies particularly to our own time. We know that once in ancient Greece the great and significant inscription ‘Know thyself’ stood on Apollo's temple as a challenge to those who sought for spiritual things. Nor was this inscription on the Delphic temple ‘Know thyself’ merely a phrase at that time, as we know from our various studies. For even in this Grecian age it was still possible to bring about a deeper knowledge of man than is possible at the present time. This present time, however, is also a challenge to us to strive again for a real knowledge of man, for a knowledge of what man on the earth actually is.

Now it seems as if the things that must be said in connection with this question are difficult to understand. In reality they are not, in spite of the fact that they sound as if they were difficult. They are only so for the present day because people are not accustomed to let their thinking and feeling flow into such currents as are necessary for a right understanding of something of this nature. The point is, that what we call understanding at the present day is actually the result of our always seeking to understand through abstract concepts. But one cannot understand everything through abstract concepts. Above all one cannot understand the human being through abstract concepts; one requires something different for the understanding of man. One must put oneself in the position of taking man as he wanders about over the earth, as a picture, as a picture which expresses something, which discloses something, which wants to reveal something to us. One must revive the consciousness that the human being is a riddle that wants to be solved. We shall not, however, solve the riddle of man if we are content to continue to be so indolent, so theoretic in our thinking as we now prefer. For you see, the human being is—this we have stressed again and again—a complicated being. Man is more, vastly more than the physical form that wanders about before our eyes as man—far, far more is man. But this physical structure that wanders round before our eyes as man, and all that belongs to it, is none the less an expression for the whole comprehensive being of man. And one can say: Not only can one recognize in the human form, in the physical man that goes about among us, what man is between birth and death here in the physical word, but, if one only will, one can also recognize in the human being what he is as immortal, as eternal being of soul. One must only develop a feeling that this human form is a complexity. Our modern science, which is made popular and so can reach everyone, is not fitted to call forth a feeling of what a miraculous structure this human being actually is, who wanders about on earth. One must regard man quite differently.

You have assuredly all seen a human skeleton—remember then that the human skeleton is actually twofold, if one disregards everything else. One could speak much more exactly, but if one disregards all the rest, the skeleton is a duality. You can easily lift up the skull from the skeleton; it is really only set upon it, and then the rest of the human being remains skull-less. The skull is very easily lifted off. The rest of the man without the skull is still a very complicated being, but we will now grasp it as a unit and leave aside its complexity. But we will first consider the duality which we see when we look at a human being, as, let us say, head-man, and for the rest trunk-man. And so too is the complete flesh and blood man a duality, though it is there less clearly shown.

Now in spiritual science we need not be so fond of comparisons as to treat them as absolute, develop them metaphysically—that we will not do. But by employing comparisons we wish to make various things clear. And so it is very natural, since it actually corresponds to what we see, to say: man in respect of his head is above all ruled by the spherical form. If one desires to express in a diagram what the human head is, we can say: man is ruled by the spherical form (see diagram).

If we wish to have a diagrammatic picture for the rest of man, we should naturally have to pay attention to the complications, only we will not do that today. You will, however, easily see that disregarding certain complications, just as schematically one can picture the human head as a sphere, so one can picture the rest of man in such a form as this (see diagram: moon form), only, of course, the two circles must be placed in varied positions according to the corpulence of each individual.

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But we can, as it were, really conceive of man so—as spherical form and as moon-form. This has a deep inner justification; however we will not discuss this, but only think of the fact that the human being falls into these two members.

Now, man's head is in the first place a true apparatus for spiritual activity, for all that man can produce by way of human thoughts, human feelings. The head, the apparatus ... but, if we were committed to the thoughts, the feelings, that the head as apparatus can supply, we should never be in the position of really understanding the being of man. If we were committed to use the head alone as an instrument of our spiritual life, we should never be in the position of really saying ‘I’ to ourselves. For what is this head? This head is in truth, as it meets us in its globular form, an image of the whole cosmos, as the cosmos appears to you with all its stars, fixed stars, planets and comets; even meteors—irregularities, as we know—make their appearance in many heads. The human head is an image of the macrocosm, an image of the whole world. And only the prejudice of our time—I have indicated this in another connection—knows nothing of the fact that the whole world has a share in the coming about of a human head. But now, if through heredity, through birth, this human head is transposed to the earth, it can be no apparatus for comprehending the being of man himself. We have been given in our head an apparatus, as it were, which is like an extract of the whole world, but which is not competent to comprehend man. Why? Well, by reason of the fact that man is more than all that we can see and can think through our head. Many people say nowadays ‘there are limits to human knowledge, one cannot get beyond these limits!’ But this is only because they merely reckon with the wisdom of the head, and the wisdom of the head, it is true, does not get beyond certain limits. This wisdom of the head, my dear friends, has also made what a few days ago we described as the Greek Gods. The Greek Gods have proceeded from the wisdom of the head. They are the upper Gods; they are therefore only Gods for all that the head of man can encompass with its wisdom.

Now I have often brought to your attention that besides this external mythology the Greeks had their Mysteries. The Greeks revered in the Mysteries other Gods as well as the celestial Gods, namely, the Chthonic Gods. And of one who was initiated in the Mysteries one could say with truth: he learns to know the upper and the lower Gods, the Upper and the Lower Gods. The upper Gods were those of the Zeus-circle; but they only have rulership over what is spread out before the senses, and what the intellect can understand. The human being is more than this. Man is rooted with his being in the kingdom of the lower Gods, in the kingdom of the Chthonic Gods.

But it is no good, my dear friends, if one only looks at the part of man which I have drawn here in the sketch. If one is to turn one's mind to the rooting of man in the kingdom of the lower Gods then one must complete this drawing and make it so: one must also, as it were, include the unillumined moon. (See drawing below.) In other words, one must regard the head of man differently from the rest of the organism. With the rest of the organism one must far more have in mind what is spiritual, what is super-sensible and invisible. The head of man as it confronts us is externally complete. All that is spiritual has formed for itself an image in the head. In the rest of man that is not the case; the remaining part is only a fragment as physical man, and it is not enough for the rest of man if one takes this bodily fragment which wanders visibly about on earth.

Now this already shows us that we must accept man as complicated. But, does what I have just said ever come before us in life? What I have just said seems to be abstract, it seems paradoxical and hard to understand, but yet the question

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must arise: does it ever come before us in life? That is the important thing: it appears in life quite clearly. The head is the instrument of our wisdom; it is so strongly the instrument of our wisdom, that our immediate wisdom is connected with its development. But even external anatomical physiological observation—look how a head develops, how a man grows up—shows that the head goes through a quite different development from the rest of the organism. The head develops quickly, the remaining organism slowly. The head in a child is relatively already quite finished, it develops very little further. The rest of the organism is still little perfected and goes slowly through its stages. This is connected with the fact that in life as well we are really a duplex being. Not only does our skeleton show the head and the remaining organism, but life itself shows this twofold nature: our head develops quickly, the rest of our organism slowly. At our present time the head develops practically up to our twenty-eighth or twenty-seventh year, the rest of the organism needs the whole of life up to death to do this. One can in fact only experience in a whole lifetime what the head acquires in a relatively short time. This is connected with many mysteries.

The spiritual investigator has a special knowledge of these things if he is able to observe a fatal accident... again it sounds strange but it expresses the full truth, in a fatal accident. Imagine that a person is struck down, dies by an accident. Let us suppose that a man is struck dead in his thirtieth year. To outer physical observation such a sudden death is a kind of accident: but from a spiritual science outlook it is simply absurd to regard such an affair as accidental. For in the moment when from outside, from any external cause, a man suddenly meets with death, an immense amount rapidly takes place. Think to yourselves: this same man who has been killed at the age of thirty would have become in the ordinary course of things perhaps seventy, eighty, ninety years old. If he had still lived from thirty to ninety years he would slowly have gone through, one after another, many life experiences. What he would thus have experienced during sixty years of life, he now goes through rapidly, it might even be in half-a-minute, if he is killed at the age of thirty. When it is a matter of the spiritual world, time relationships are different from what they seem to us here on the physical plane. A sudden death caused by external circumstances—one must treat the matter quite exactly—can cause the experience, I say the experience, the life-wisdom of the whole life that might still have been lived, to be passed through under certain circumstances very rapidly.

One is in this way enabled to see how a man assimilates life-wisdom, life-experience all his life through. And one can study through it the relation between what the head can provide with its short development, and what the rest of the human being can furnish with its long development in the social life. It is really true that during his young days a man takes in certain ideas and concepts that he learns; but he then only learns them. They are then head-knowledge. The rest of life that runs more slowly, is destined to transform the head-knowledge gradually into heart-knowledge—I now call the other man not the head-man, I call him the heart-man—to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge, knowledge in which the whole man shares, not only the head.

We need much longer to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge than to assimilate the head-knowledge. Even if the head-knowledge is an especially clever knowledge, one needs today the time into the twenties, is it not so? then one is a quite clever person, academically quite clever. But in order to unite this knowledge fully with the whole man, one must keep flexible one's whole life through. And one needs just as much longer to change head-knowledge into heart-knowledge as one lives longer than to the twenty-seventh or twenty-sixth year. In so far is the human being also of a twofold nature. One quickly acquires the head-knowledge and can then in the course of life change it into heart-knowledge.

It is not quite easy to know what this actually signifies. And, perhaps I may venture to instance an experience of the spiritual investigator through which something may be more easily known concerning these things than through other results of spiritual research. If one makes oneself acquainted with the speech which the human souls speak who have gone through the gate of death, who live in the spiritual world after death, one understands to some degree the speech of the dead, the so-called dead, one can then make the experience that the dead express themselves in a very special way upon many things connected with human life. The dead have a speech today that we who are living cannot yet quite understand. The comprehensions of the dead and the living lie somewhat far apart from one another today. The dead have a thorough consciousness of how man develops quickly as headman and slowly as heart-man. And if the dead wish to express what really happens when the quickly gained head-knowledge lives itself into the slower course of the heart-knowledge, they say there wisdom-knowledge is transformed through what ascends from man as heart-warmth or love. Wisdom is fructified in man by love. So say the dead.¹

And that is in fact a profound and significant law of life. One can acquire head-knowledge rapidly, one can know a tremendous amount precisely in our age, for natural science—not the natural-scientist—natural science has made very great advances in our time and has a rich content. But this content has remained head-knowledge, it has not been transformed into heart-knowledge because people—I pointed this out yesterday—no longer pay attention to what approaches in life after the twenty-seventh year, because people do not understand how to become old—or I could say, to remain young in growing old. Because men do not keep the inner livingness their heart grows cold; the heart warmth does not stream up to the head; love, which comes from the rest of the organism, does not fructify the head. The head-knowledge remains cold theory. There is no necessity for it to remain cold theory, all head-knowledge can be transformed into heart-knowledge. And that is precisely the task of the future; that head-knowledge shall gradually be transformed into heart-knowledge. A real miracle will happen if head-knowledge is transformed into heart-knowledge! One is completely right if one vigorously declaims today against the materialistic natural science, or, really, natural-philosophy—one is completely right, but all the same, something else is true. If this natural science which has remained mere head-knowledge in Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, etc. and is therefore materialism, became heart-knowledge, if it were absorbed by the whole man, if humanity were to understand how to become old, or younger in old age as I showed yesterday, this science of today would become really spiritual, the true pursuit for the spirit and its existence. There is no better foundation than the natural science of the present day, if it is transformed into what can flow to the head from the rest of man's organism, that is to say from the spiritual part of the organism. The miracle will be accomplished when men also learn to feel the rejuvenation of their etheric body so that the materialistic natural science of today will become spirituality. It will the sooner become spirituality the greater the number of people who reproach it with its present materialism, its materialistic folly.

But together with this will be linked a complete transforming which can be felt by one who has but a slight feeling for what is taking place at the present time: linked with it will be a complete transforming of the nature of education and instruction. Who could deny, if he has an open eye for the social, moral, historical conditions of the present, who could deny that mankind as a whole is not in a position—though it sounds grotesque—to give children an adequate education, especially an adequate instruction? We can, to be sure, make children officials, industrialists, we can even make them pastors, etc. etc., but we are but little in a position to make children today into complete human beings, into all-round developed men. For it is a deep demand of the time that if man is to be a complete all-round developed organism of soul and spirit, he must be in the position to transform all his life through what he took in quickly, rapidly as a child. The whole life through must the human being remain fresh in order to transform what he has absorbed.

For what do we really do today in later life? (These things are not looked on unprejudicedly [?] enough). We have learnt a certain amount in youth, the one more, the other less; we are proud, are we not, that we have no more illiterates in Western Europe? One learns much, another less, but all have learnt something in youth. And what do we do in later life with what we learnt, no matter whether it was much or little? It is all of such a nature that one only remembers what one has learnt, it is present in man in such a way that one can remember it. But what do men work on there? It is not conveyed to the human soul so as to work in the soul, so that heart-contents may arise from head-knowledge. It is in no way fitted for that. Much water must still flow down the Rhine, if what we can give to youth today—(let us observe it only in one field, but it is applicable in all fields) is to be something that is fitted really to be transformed into heart-knowledge. What must that be? We have in fact today no possibility at all of giving our children anything that could really become heart-knowledge. For that we lack two conditions, and only Spiritual Science rightly understood can bring about these two conditions.

Two conditions are lacking for really giving to children today something that refreshes life, something which throughout life can be a source of joy in life and a supporting of life. Two things are lacking. The one is that, from all the current ideas that we have today, that modern culture can give us, man can gain no conception of how he stands in relation to the universe. Just think of all that is conveyed to one in school. It is imparted even to the smallest children—at least, what they are told is put into such words as contain what I am now expressing to you. Reflect that the human being grows up today under these ideas: there is the earth, it swings with such and such a velocity through universal space, and beyond the earth there are the sun, planets, fixed stars. And then what is said of the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, is at most a kind of cosmic physics—it is no more—cosmic mechanics, cosmic physics. What the astronomer says today, what our general culture today says about the structure of the universe, has that anything to do with this human being who walks about here below upon the earth? Most certainly not! Is it not true that for the natural scientific idea of the world, man goes about as a somewhat more highly developed animal; he is born, dies, is buried, another comes, is born, dies, is buried, etc. etc. and so it goes from generation to generation. Out in the great cosmic space events take place which are calculated purely mathematically as in a great world machine. But for the modern clever men what has all that takes place out there in the universe to do with the fact that here on earth this somewhat more highly evolved animal is born and dies? Priests, pastors, know no other wisdom to put in place of this comfortless wisdom. And since they do not know that, they say that they do not occupy themselves in any way with science, but that faith must have an entirely different origin.

Well, we need not enlarge on this. But they are two utterly different things that are spoken of by atheistic science and by the so-called religious faith of this or that Confession at Church, feebly upholding the theistic element. It was essential that for a certain time in humanity's evolution the present world conception should take the place of the earlier ideas. We need not go back very far—only people don't think of it today—and men were then still aware that they did not wander on the earth as higher animals who were just born and buried. Rather did they bring themselves into connection with the star-world, with the whole universe, and knew in their own way, in a different way from that in which it must be striven for now, of the connection with the universe. But one must therefore also conceive of the universe differently.

You see, such a world conception as is imparted even to children today would be unthinkable in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries; they could not in the least imagine having such an opinion of the world of the stars. They looked up to the stars, to the planets as we do today, but they did not merely calculate, as the modern mathematical astronomer does, the orbits of the planets, and believe that up there is a globe which passes through world space—the science of the Middle Ages saw in each globe the body of a spiritual being. It would have been simply a piece of folly to represent a planet as a mere material globe. Read about it in Thomas Aquinas.² You will find everywhere that in each planet he sees an Angelic Intelligence. And so in the other stars. Such a universe as modern astronomy fabricates was not imagined. But for a certain length of time, in order to progress, one must drive the soul, as it were, out of the universe, in order to conceive the skeleton, the pure machinery of the universe. The Copernicus, the Galileo, the Kepler world conceptions had to come. But only the foolish see them as something valid for all time. They are a beginning, but a beginning that must evolve further.

Many things are known already to Spiritual Science which official astronomy does not yet know. But it is important that just these things which Spiritual Science knows and official astronomy does not yet know, should pass over into the general consciousness of humanity. And although these concepts may seem difficult today they will become something that one can impart to the children, they will be an important possession for the children, to keep the soul full of life. We still have to speak of these things, however, in difficult concepts. For as long as Spiritual Science is received, as it is at present by the external world, it has no opportunity of pouring things into such concepts and such pictures as are needed if they are to become the subject of children's education.

There is something, for instance, of which modern astronomy knows nothing. It knows nothing of the fact that the earth speeding through the universe, speeds too fast. She rushes too fast, the earth! And since she rushes too fast, since the earth moves quickly, we also have our head-development quicker than we should have if the earth were to move as slowly as to correspond with our whole life's duration. The rapidity of our head-development simply depends on the fact that the earth races too quickly through universal space. Our head takes part in this speed of the earth, the rest of our organism takes no part in it, the rest of our organism withdraws itself from cosmic events. Our head which, as a sphere, is an image of the heavens, must also participate in what the earth performs in celestial space. Our remaining organism which is not formed on the model of the whole universe, does not participate, it makes its development more slowly. Were our whole organism to participate today in the speed of the earth, were it to develop in correspondence to the speed of the earth, then none of us could ever be older than twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years would be the average life of man. For in fact our head is finished when we are twenty-seven years old; if it depended on the head, man would die at the age of twenty-seven. Only because the rest of man is planned for a longer life time, and continually sends its forces to the head after the twenty-seventh year, do we live as long as we do. It is the spiritual part of the remaining organism which sends its forces to the head. It is the heart portion that exchanges its forces with the head.

If humanity knows some day that it has a twofold nature, a head-nature and a heart-nature, then it will know too that the head obeys quite other cosmic laws than the rest of the organism. Then the human being takes his place again within the whole macrocosm, then man can do no other than form concepts that lead him to say ‘I do not stand here upon earth as merely a higher animal, to be born and to die, but I am a being formed from out the whole universe. My head is built up for me out of the whole universe, the earth has attached to me the rest of my organization, and this does not follow the movements of the cosmos as my head does.’ Thus, when we do not look at man abstractly, as modern science does, but regard him as picture in his duality, as head-man and heart-man in connection with the universe, then the human being is placed again into the cosmos. And I know, my dear friends, and others who can judge such things know it also: if man can make heart-warm concepts of the fact that when one looks at the human head it is seen to be an image of the whole star-strewn space of the world with its wonders, then there will enter the human soul all the pictures of the connection of man with the wide, wide universe. And these pictures become forms of narrative which we have not yet got, and which will bring to expression, not abstractly, but linked with feeling, what we can pour into the hearts of the youngest children. Then these hearts of young children will feel: here upon earth I stand as human being, but as man I am the expression of the whole star-strewn universal space: the whole world expresses itself in me. It will be possible to train the human being to feel himself a member of the whole cosmos. That is the one condition.

The other condition is the following: when we are able to arrange the whole of education and instruction so that man knows that he is an image of the universe in his head, and in the remaining organism is withdrawn from the universe, that with his remaining organism he must so work upon what falls down like a rain of the soul—the whole universe—that it becomes independent in man here upon earth, then this will be a particular inner experience. Think of this two-fold human being, whom I will now draw in this curious fashion.

When he comes to know that from the whole universe there flow unconsciously into his head, stimulating its forces, the secrets of the stars, but that all this must be worked upon his whole life through by the rest of his organism, so that he may conserve it on earth, carry it through death back again into the spiritual world—when this becomes a living experience, then man will know his twofold nature, he will know himself as head-man and heart-man. For what I am now saying means that man will learn to solve his own riddle, to say to himself: inasmuch as I become more and more heart-man, inasmuch as I remain young, I view in later years through what my heart gives me, that which in childhood and youth I learnt through my head. The heart gazes

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up to the head and will see there an image of the whole starry heavens. The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man. The human being will feel as regards his education: To be sure, I can learn all sorts of things with my head. But as I go on living, as I live on towards death that is to bear me into the spiritual world, what I learn through the head is fructified in the future through the love ascending from the rest of the organism and becomes something quite different. There is something in me as man that is only to be found in me as man; I have to await something. Very much lies in these words and it means very much when man is so educated that he says: I have something to await. I shall be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old, and as I grow older from decade to decade, there comes towards me through growing older something of the mystery of man. I have something to await from the fact that I live on.

Imagine if that were not mere theory, if it were life-wisdom, social life-wisdom. Then the child is educated in such a way that he knows ‘I can learn something; but he who teaches me possesses something that I cannot learn; I must first be as old as he before I can find it in myself. If he relates it to me, he gives me something which must be a sacred mystery for me, since I can hear it from his mouth, but cannot find it in myself.’ Just think what a relationship is created again between children and their elders, which is entirely lost in our age—if man knows that age offers something that is to be awaited. If I am not yet forty years old, that sum of mysteries cannot lie in me that can lie in one who is already forty years old. And if he imparts it to me, I receive it just as information, I cannot know it through myself. What a bond of human fellowship would be formed, if in this way a new earnestness, a new profundity came into life!

This earnestness, this depth, is precisely what is lacking to our life, what our life does not possess. Our present life only values head-knowledge. But true social life will in this way die out, approach dissolution, for here on earth men wander about who have no idea what they are, who really only take seriously what there is up to the age of twenty-seven, and then employ the remainder of life in carrying about the corpse in them, but not in transforming the whole man into something which can still carry youthfulness through death.

Because people do not understand this, my dear friends, because an age has come that could not understand this, everything that refers to spiritual things remains so unsatisfying, as I had to say yesterday concerning Friedrich Schlegel. He was a gifted man, he had understood much, but he did not know that a new revelation of the spirit was necessary, he thought that one could simply take the old Christianity. In many respects he could even express right ideas with ringing words—I will read you a passage from the last lecture by Friedrich Schlegel in the year 1828. He sought to prove, as he said, ‘that in the course of world-history a divine guiding hand and disposition is to be recognized, that not merely earthly visible forces are co-operating in this evolution, or opposing and hindering it, but that the conflict is in part directed under divine assistance against invisible powers. I hope to have established a conviction of this, even I though it is not proved mathematically, which would here be neither proper nor applicable, and that it will nevertheless remain active and vigorous.’

He had a presentiment, but not a living consciousness that man, by living through history, has to become familiar in history with divine forces, and together with these divine forces fights against opposing spiritual powers—he says expressly, ‘opposing spiritual powers’. For in certain respects people flee from the real science of the spirit. Since the third century of our era, when in the West the prejudice as it was called, arose against the persuasion of the false gnosis (so they called it: the persuasion of the false gnosis!) people have gradually begun to turn aside from all that can be known of the spiritual worlds. And so it came about that even religious impulses prepared materialism, and that these religious impulses could not prevent the fact that we have really nothing to give to youth. Our science does not serve the young; in later life one can only remember it, it cannot become heart-wisdom.

In the religious field it is just the same. Man has finally come, one might say, to two extremes. He seems to have forgotten how to conceive of the super-sensible Christ and desires to know nothing of that cosmic power of which spiritual science must speak again as the power of Christ-Jesus. On the other hand there is the quite delightful, really lovely and charming picture which developed in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times through poets and musicians—a charming poetic picture which has developed round the Infant-Jesus. But pictures and ideas related to the dear Jesus-Babe cannot satisfy a man religiously his whole life through! It is in fact characteristic that a really paradoxical love for the sweet little Jesus is expressed in countless songs and so on. There is nothing to be objected to in this, but it cannot remain the only thing.

That is the one aspect, where man, in order to have at least something, has clung to the smallest, since he cannot raise himself to the great. But it cannot fill up life. And on the other hand the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’, as at Christmas we learnt to know him in Heinrich Heine's words, the ‘bon citoyen’ Jesus, who is divested of all divinity, the God of the liberal pastors and liberal priests. Now do you believe that he can really grip life? Do you believe in particular that he can take youth captive? He is from the outset a dead theology-product, not even a theology-product, but a theology-history-product. In this sphere, however, mankind is far removed from directing its gaze to what is spiritual power in history.

Why is this so? Simply because for a time mankind must go through a stage of gazing into the world purely from a materialistic standpoint. The time has also come when modern natural science which is so fitted for spirituality must be transformed into heart-knowledge. Our natural science is either execrable, if it remains as it is, or it is something quite extraordinarily grand, if it changes into heart-knowledge. For then it becomes spiritual science. The older science which is involved in all sorts of traditions had already transformed head-science into heart-science; the modern age has had no gift for transforming into heart-science the science it has acquired up to the present, and so it has come about that head-science, especially in the social field, has performed the only real work, and has thus brought about the most one-sided product it is possible to have.

You see, man's head can know nothing at all of the being of man. Hence when man's head ponders over the being of man and his connection with the social life, it has to bring something quite foreign into the social common life. And that is the modern socialism, expressed as social-democratic theory. There is nothing that is such pure head-knowledge as the Marxist social-democracy. This is only because the rest of mankind has shirked any concern in world problems, and in the Marxist circles they have only occupied themselves with social theories. The others have only—no, I will be polite—let themselves be prompted by professorial-thoughts, which are purely traditional. But head-wisdom has become social theory. That is to say, people have tried to establish a social theory with an instrument which is least of all capable of knowing anything about the human being. This is a fundamental error of present-day mankind, which can only be fully disclosed when people know about head-knowledge and heart-knowledge. The head will never be able to refute socialism, Marxist socialism, because in our times the head's task is to think out and devise. It will only be refuted through Spiritual Science, since Spiritual Science is head wisdom transformed through the heart.

It is extraordinarily important that one should realize these things. You see why even such a man as Schlegel suggested unsuitable means—since he was willing to accept the old, although he realized that man must re-acquire vision for the invisible that goes about amongst us. But our age is a challenge to direct the gaze to what is thus invisible. Invisible powers were always at hand as Schlegel divined: unseen powers have taken part in working upon what is being accomplished in mankind. Humanity, however, must evolve. Up to a certain degree it did not matter so much if people in the last few centuries gave no thought to the super-sensible, invisible forces, for instance, in social life. That will not do in the future. In the future, in face of the real conditions, that won't do! I could quote many examples to show this; I will bring forward one.

In the course of the last decade and a half I have spoken of this from other points of view. Anyone who observes the social state of Europe, as it has developed since the 8th, 9th centuries, knows that many different things have worked into the structure of European life, into this complicated European life. In the West it has retained the Athanasian Christianity, it has thrust back eastwards (as I said here a few weeks ago) an older Christianity, originally linked with Asiatic traditions, the Russian Christianity, the Orthodox Christianity. It has developed in the West the various European members of this European social totality—inasmuch as it has gradually created a member out of the preserved Roman element with the newly revived German and Slav elements in Europe—altogether a complicated organism. One could find one's way about in it up to now, if one disregarded what lives there unseen; for the configuration of Europe has much force in its structure. But an essential and important force in this structure is, among others, the relation in which France has stood to the rest of Europe. I do not now mean merely the political relation, I mean the whole relation of France to the rest of Europe, and by this I mean all that any European could feel in the course of centuries, since the 8th, 9th centuries, with regard to anyone belonging to the French nation. There is this peculiarity, my dear friends, that, so far as the relation of the rest of Europe to France is concerned, it comes to expression in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. We have to do with sympathy and antipathy, and hence purely with a phenomenon of the physical plane. One can understand the human relationship coming into play between France and the rest of Europe if one studies what hearts, what human souls live out on the physical plane. What has developed for France, at any rate outside France, is to be understood through physical plane conditions. Hence it did no harm—there were similar relationships in Europe in the last centuries—it did no harm if people neglected to see the super-sensible powers playing into things, since the sympathies and antipathies were caused by relations of the physical plane.

Much of what has thus played its part for centuries will become different. We are standing before mighty revolutions, even in regard to innermost relations that are coming over the European social structure. One need not believe it to have been lightly spoken if I have once again stressed the fact that things are to be taken more earnestly than men nowadays are inclined to take them. We are standing before mighty revolutions—and it will be necessary in the future for men to turn their eyes—the eyes of the mind—to spiritual relationships; for it will no longer be possible merely from physical plane relations to understand what is going on. It can only be understood if one can take spiritual relations into consideration.

What took place in March—the fall of the Czar—has a metaphysical character. One can only understand it if one has in mind its metaphysical character. Why then was there a Czar at all? The question can be grasped in a higher sense than in the external trivial-historical sense. Why was there a Czar at all? If one disregards individual pacifist cranks who have seen something serious in the tomfoolery of the Czar's Peace-Manifesto, then one must say: even those who from all sorts of reasons have ranged themselves with the Russian realm have not loved Czardom. And in those who loved it, the love was certainly not very genuine. But why was there a Czardom? There was a Czardom—my dear friends, I will now express it paradoxically, somewhat extremely:—so that Europe had something to hate. It was necessary to provoke those forces of hatred. There was a Czardom, and the Czardom behaved as it did, so that Europe had something to hate. Europe needed this hate as a sort of fresh impetus to something else. The Czar must be there in order in the first place to serve as the point on which the hatred concentrated; for a wave of hatred was prepared, as may now even be seen externally. What is now taking place will be transformed into powerful feelings of hatred. It will no longer be possible to understand these, as the sympathy and antipathy of former times were to be understood—from the aspect of the physical plane. For, my dear friends, not mere human beings will hate. Central and Eastern Europe will be hated, not by men, but by certain demons which will dwell in men. The time will certainly come when Eastern Europe will perhaps be hated even more than Central Europe.

These things must be understood and they must not be taken lightly. They can only be understood if men lift themselves to seek a connection with the spiritual world. For what has already been to some extent divined by such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, will certainly come to pass, though they have not seen the foundations and the roots. Things must be grasped without prejudice in the eye of the soul, so that man can look back over the last centuries and what they have brought ... and then they will be able to co-operate in what must be founded.

Among the fine passages that occur from time to time in Schlegel's addresses there is this: ‘In the evolution of mankind all depends on the inner being of the soul and on the sincerity in the soul, and harmful above all is every kind of political idolatry.’ That is a fine passage of Friedrich Schlegel's. This political idolatry, how it has laid hold of our time! How it rules our time! And the political idolatry has created a fine symptom for itself, by which one is able to recognize what is there.

But one must look through circumstances! Yes, my dear friends, one must perceive what is living in our times. We have no possibility today, if we do not deepen knowledge through the heart, of giving children what they need in order to keep young and fitted for life all their life through. We have not yet this possibility³—and we understand that as soon as we look at the true nature of the head-man and heart-man. It must be established, it must come. If we want to put things in a few words we can say: Schoolmastering is utterly and entirely unable to fulfil its mission today. What ranks as Schoolmastering is completely foreign to the true being of man. But the world threatens to be ruled by a schoolmaster,⁴ revered through political idolatry. Schoolmastering, the least of all fitted for guiding men in the modern epoch, is supposed to be high politics.

At least some few people ought to realize these things. For they are things which are profoundly connected with the deep knowledge which man can only gain if he seeks a little to penetrate the secrets of humanity. The world today can neither be grasped nor in any way governed through desires and instincts, through Chauvinism and nationalism, but solely through the good will which tries to penetrate into true reality.

• 1. See also ‘The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth’.
• 2. Compare ‘The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas’.
• 3. The first of over eighty Waldorf Schools was not founded until 1919.
• 4. Woodrow Wilson.

From what I have said as to the way. in which we should teach the child about Nature, about plant and animal, I think you will have realized that the aim of the Waldorf School is to adapt the curriculum exactly to the needs of the child's development at the successive stages of growth. I have already spoken of the significant turning-point occurring between the ninth and tenth years. Only now does the child begin to realize himself as an individual apart from the world. Before this age there is in his life of thought and feeling no sense of separation between himself and the phenomena of the outer world. Up to the ninth year, therefore, we must speak of plants, animals, mountains, rivers and so on in the language of fairy-tales, appealing above all to the child's fantasy. We must make him feel as if his own being were speaking to him from the outer world, from plant, mountain and spring.

If you will bear in mind the way in which after this age we lead on into botany and zoology, you will realize that the aim of the teaching is to bring the child into a true relationship with the world around him. He learns to know the plants in their connection with the earth and studies them all from this point of view. The earth becomes a living being who brings forth the plants, just as the living human head brings forth hair, only of course the forms contained in the earth, the plants, have a much richer life and variety. Such a relationship with the plant world and with the whole earth is of great value to the well-being of the child in body and soul. If we teach him to see man as a synthesis of the animal species spread over the earth, we help to bring him into a true relationship with other living beings standing below him in the scale of creation. Until the age of eleven or twelve, the mainspring of all Nature-study should be the relationship of the human being to the world.

Then comes the age when for the first time we may draw the child's attention to processes going on in the outer world independently of man. Between the eleventh and twelfth years, and not until then, we may begin to teach about the minerals and rocks. The plants as they grow out of the earth are in this sense related to stone and mineral. Earlier teaching about the mineral kingdom in any other form than this injures the child's mobility of soul. That which has no relationship with man is mineral. We should only begin to deal with the mineral kingdom when the child has found his own relation to the two kingdoms of nature which are nearest to him, when in thought and feeling he has grasped the life of the plants and his will has been strengthened by a true conception of the animals.

What applies to the minerals applies equally to physics and chemistry, and to all so-called causal connections in history and geography, in short, to all processes that must be studied as only indirectly related to the human being in the sense of which I spoke yesterday. The teaching of all this should be postponed until the period lying between the eleventh and twelfth years.

The right age for a child to begin his school life is when he gets his second teeth, i.e. at about the seventh year. Until then, school is not really the place for him. If we have to take a child before this age, all kinds of compromises are necessary. I will however, explain certain basic principles When the child first comes to school, we teach him in such a way that as yet he makes no distinction or separation between himself and the world at large. Between the ninth and tenth years we begin to awaken a living understanding through a knowledge of the plants, and to strengthen his will through a knowledge of the animals. In mineralogy, physics, and chemistry we can only work through the intellect, and then as a necessary counterbalance art must be introduced. (I shall be speaking more of this in tomorrow's lecture.) From the eleventh or twelfth year onwards we shall find that the child is able to form a rational, intellectual conception of cause and effect and this must now be elaborated by physics and chemistry. These processes which should gradually lead into the study of astronomy must not however be explained to the child before he has reached the age of eleven or twelve. If we describe simple chemical processes—combustion for instance—before this age, our descriptions must be purely pictorial and imaginative. Abstract reasoning from cause to effect should not be introduced until the child is between eleven and twelve years of age. The less we speak of causality before this time the stronger, the more vital and rich will the soul become; if, on the other hand, we are constantly speaking of causality to a younger child, dead concepts and even dead feelings will pass with a withering effect into his soul.

The aim of the Waldorf School has been on the one hand to base the whole curriculum upon the actual nature of the human being; thus we include in the curriculum all that answers to the needs of the child at each of the different life-periods. On the other hand, we strive to enable the child to take his rightful part in the social life of the world.

To achieve this we must pass on from physics and chemistry to various forms of practical work when the child has reached the fourteenth and fifteenth years. In the classes for children of this age, therefore, we have introduced hand-spinning and weaving, for these things are an aid to an intelligent understanding of practical life. It is good for boys and girls to know the principles of spinning and weaving, even of factory-spinning. They should also have some knowledge of elementary technical chemistry, of the preparation and manufacture of colours and the like.

During their school life children ought to acquire really practical ideas of their environment. The affairs of ordinary life often remain quite incomprehensible to many people to-day because the teaching they receive at school does not lead over at the right moment to the practical activities of life and of the world in general. In a certain direction this is bound to injure the whole development of the soul. Think for a moment of the sensitiveness of the human body to some element in the air, for instance, which the organism cannot assimilate. In the social life of the world of course conditions are not quite the same. In social life we are forced to put up with many incongruities, but we can adapt ourselves if at the right age we have learnt in some measure to understand them.

Just think how many people nowadays get into a train without having the least idea of the principles governing its motion, its mechanism. They see a railway every day and have absolutely no notion of the machinery of an engine! This means that they are surrounded on all hands by inventions and creations of the human mind with which they have no contact at all. It is the beginning of unsocial life simply to accept these creations and inventions of the mind of man without understanding them. At the Waldorf School therefore when the children are fourteen or fifteen years old, we begin to give instruction in matters that play a role in practical life. This age of adolescence is nowadays regarded from a very limited, one-sided point of view. The truth is that at puberty the human being opens out to the world. Hitherto he has lived chiefly within himself, but he is now ready to understand his fellow-men and the social life of the world. Hence to concentrate before puberty on all that relates man to Nature is to act in accordance with true principles of human development, but at the age of fourteen or fifteen the children must be made acquainted with the achievements of the human mind. This will enable them to understand and find their right place in social life. If educationalists had followed this principle some sixty or seventy years ago, the so-called “Social Movement” of to-day would have taken a quite different form in Europe and America. Tremendous progress has been made in technical and commercial efficiency during the last sixty or seventy years. Great progress has been made in technical skill, national trade has become world trade, and finally a world-economy has arisen from national economies. In the last sixty or seventy years the outer configuration of social life has entirely changed, yet our mode of education has continued as if nothing had happened. We have utterly neglected to acquaint our children with the practical affairs of the world at the time when this should be done, namely, at the age of fourteen or fifteen.

Nevertheless at the Waldorf School we are not so narrow-minded as to look down in any way on higher classical education, for in many respects it is extremely beneficial; we prepare pupils whose parents desire it, or who desire it themselves, both for a higher classical education and for final certificates and diplomas. But we do not forget how necessary it is for our age to understand the reason that induced the Greeks, whose one purpose in education was to serve the ends of practical life, not to spend all their time learning Egyptian, a language belonging to the far past. On the other hand, we make a special point of familiarizing our boys, and girls too, with a world not of the present but of the past. What wonder that human beings as a rule have so little understanding of how to live in the world of the present.

The world's destiny has grown beyond man's control simply because education has not kept pace with the changing conditions of social life. In the Waldorf School we try to realize that it is indeed possible to develop the human being to full manhood and to help him to find his true place in the ranks of humanity.

Our endeavour to develop the child in such a way that he may later reveal the qualities of full manhood and on the other hand be able to find his true place in the world is more especially furthered by the way in which languages are taught.

So far as the mother-tongue is concerned, of course, the teaching is adapted to the age of the child; it is given in the form I have already described in connection with other lessons. An outstanding feature of the Waldorf School, however, is that we begin to teach the child two foreign languages, French and English, directly he comes to school, at the age of six or seven. By this means we endeavour to give our children something that will be more and more necessary in the future for the purposes of practical life. To understand the purely human aspect of the teaching of languages we must remember that the faculty of speech is rooted in the very depths of man's being. The mother-tongue is so deeply rooted in the breathing system, the blood circulation, and in the configuration of the vascular system, that the child is affected not only in spirit and soul, but in spirit, soul and body by the way in which this mother-tongue comes to expression within him. We must realize however that the forces of languages in the world permeate man and bring the human element to expression in quite different ways. In the case of primitive languages this is quite obvious; that it is also true of the more civilized languages often escapes recognition.

Now amongst European languages there is one that proceeds purely from the element of feeling. Although in the course of time intellectualism has tinged the element of pure feeling, feeling is nevertheless the basis of this particular language; hence the elements of intellect and will are less firmly implanted in the human being through the language itself. By a study of other languages then, the elements of will and intellect must be unfolded. Again, we have a language that emanates particularly from the element of plastic fantasy, which, so to say, pictures things in its notation of sounds. Because this is so, the child acquires an innately plastic, innately formative power as he learns to speak. Another language in civilized Europe is rooted chiefly in the element of will. Its very cadences, the structure of its vowels and consonants reveal that this is so. When people speak, it is as though they were sending back waves of the sea along the out-breathed air. The element of will is living in this language.

Other languages call forth in man to a greater extent the elements of feeling, music, or imagination. In short each different language is related to the human being in a particular way.

You will say that I ought to name these various languages, but I purposely avoid doing so, because we have not reached a point of being able to face the civilized world so objectively that we can bear the whole impersonal truth of these things!

From what I have said about the character of the different languages, you will realize that the effects produced on the nature of man by one particular “genius of speech” must be balanced by the effects of another, if, that is to say, our aim is really a human and not a specialized, racial development of man. This is the reason why at the Waldorf School we begin with three languages, even in the case of the very youngest children; a great deal of time, moreover, is devoted to this subject.

It is good to begin teaching foreign languages at this early age, because up to the point lying between the ninth and tenth years the child still bears within him something of the quality characteristic of the first period of life, from birth to the time of the change of teeth. During these years the child is pre-eminently an imitative being. He learns his mother-tongue wholly by imitation. Without any claim whatever being made on the intellect, the child imitates the language spoken around him, and learns at the same time not only the outer sounds and tones of speech, but also the inner, musical, soul element of the language. His first language is acquired—if I may be allowed the expression—as a finer kind of habit which passes into the depths of his whole being.

When the child comes to school after the time of the change of teeth, the teaching of languages appeals more to the soul and less strongly to the bodily nature. Nevertheless, up to the ages of nine and ten the child still brings with him a sufficient faculty of fantasy and imitation to enable us to mould the teaching of a language in such a way that it will be absorbed by his whole being, not merely by the forces of soul and spirit.

This is why it is of such far-reaching importance not to let the first three years of school-life slip by without any instruction in foreign languages. On purely educational principles we begin to teach foreign languages in the Waldorf School directly the child enters the elementary classes.

I need hardly say that the teaching of languages is closely adapted to the different ages. In our days men's thinking, so far as realities are concerned, has become chaotic. They imagine themselves firmly rooted in reality because of their materialism, but in point of fact they are theorists. Those who flatter themselves on being practical men of the world are eminently theorists; they get it into their heads that something or other is right, without ever having tested it in practical life. And so, especially in education and teaching, they fall with an utterly impracticable radicalism into the opposite extreme when anything has been found wrong. It has been realized that when the old method of teaching languages, especially Latin and Greek, is based entirely on grammar and rules of syntax, the lessons tend to become mechanical and abstract. And so exactly the opposite principle has been introduced simply because people cannot think consistently. They see that something is wrong and fall into the other extreme, imagining that this will put it right. The consequence is that they now work on the principle of teaching no grammar at all. This again is irrational, for it means nothing else than that in some particular branch of knowledge the human being is left at the stage of mere consciousness and not allowed to advance to self-consciousness. Between the ninth and tenth years the child passes from the stage of consciousness to that of self-consciousness. He distinguishes himself from the world.

This is the age when we can begin gradually of course to teach the rules of grammar and syntax, for the child is now reaching a point where he thinks not only about the world, but about himself as well. To think about oneself means, so far as speech is concerned, to be able not merely to speak instinctively, but to apply rational rules in speech. It is nonsense, therefore, to teach languages without grammar of any kind. If we avoid all rules, we cannot impart to the child the requisite inner firmness for his tasks in life. But it is all-important to bear in mind that the child only begins to pass from consciousness to self-consciousness between the ages of nine and ten. To teach grammar before this age, therefore, is absolutely irrational.

We must know when the change occurs between the ninth and tenth years in order to lead over gradually from an instinctive acquiring of language to the rational element of grammar. This applies to the mother-tongue as well. Real injury is done to the child's soul if he is crammed with rules of grammar or syntax before this eventful moment in his life. Previously the teaching must appeal to instinct and habit through his faculty of imitation. It is the task of speech to inaugurate self-consciousness between the ninth and tenth years and generally speaking the principle of self-consciousness comes to light in grammar and syntax. This will show you why at the Waldorf School we make use of the two or three preceding years in order to introduce the teaching of languages at the right age and in accordance with the laws of human development.

You see now how Waldorf School education aims, little by little, at enabling the teacher to read, not in a book and not according to the rules of some educational system, but in the human being himself. The Waldorf School teacher must learn to read man—the most wonderful document in all the world. What he gains from this reading grows into deep enthusiasm for teaching and education. For only that which is contained in the book of the world can stimulate the all-round activity of body, soul and spirit that is necessary in the teacher. All other study, all other books and reading, should be a means of enabling the teacher ultimately to read the great book of the world. If he can do this he will teach with the necessary enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone can generate the force and energy that bring life into a classroom.

The principle of the “universal human,” which I have described in its application to the different branches of teaching, is expressed in Waldorf School education in that this school does not in any sense promulgate any particular philosophy or religious conviction. In this connection it has of course been absolutely essential, above all in an art of education derived from Anthroposophy, to remove from the Waldorf School any criticism as to its being an “anthroposophical school.” That certainly it cannot be. New efforts must constantly be made to avoid falling into anthroposophical bias, shall I say, on account of possible over-enthusiasm or of honest conviction on the part of the teachers. The conviction of course is there in the Waldorf teachers since they are anthroposophists. But the fundamental principle of the Waldorf School education is the human being himself, not the human being as an adherent of any particular philosophy.

And so, with the various religious bodies in mind, we were willing to come to a compromise demanded by the times and in the early days to confine our attention to principles and methods to be adopted in a “universal human” education. To begin with, all religious instruction was left in the hands of the pastors of the various denominations, Catholic teaching to Catholic Priests, Protestant teaching to Protestant Priests. But a great many pupils in the Waldorf School are “dissenters,” as we say in Central Europe, that is to say they are children who would receive no religious instruction at all if this were limited to Catholic and Protestant teaching. The Waldorf School was originally founded for the children of working-class people in connection with a certain business, although for a long time now it has been a school for all classes of the community, and for this reason a large majority of the children belonged to no religious confession. As often happens in schools in Central Europe, these children were being taught nothing in the way of religion, and so for their sake we have introduced a so-called “free religious instruction.” We make no attempt to introduce theoretical Anthroposophy into the School. Such a thing would be quite wrong. Anthroposophy has been given for grown-up people; one speaks of Anthroposophy to grown-up people, and its ideas and conceptions are therefore clothed in a form suitable for them. Simply to take what is destined for grown-up people in anthroposophical literature and introduce that would have been to distort the whole principle of Waldorf School education. In the case of children who have been handed over to us for free religious instruction, the whole point has been to recognize from their age what should be given to them in the way of religious instruction.

Let me repeat that the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School—and a certain ritual is connected with it—is not in any sense an attempt to introduce an anthroposophical conception of the world. The ages of the children are always taken into fullest account. As a matter of fact the great majority of the children attend, although we have made it a strict rule only to admit them if their parents wish it. Since the element of pure pedagogy plays an important and essential part in this free religious teaching, which is Christian in the deepest sense, parents who wish their children to be educated in a Christian way, and also according to the Waldorf School principles, send them to us. As I say, the teaching is Christian through and through, and the effect of it is that the whole School is pervaded by a deeply Christian atmosphere. Our religious instruction makes the children realize the significance of all the great Christian Festivals, of the Christmas and Easter Festivals, for instance, much more deeply than is usually the case nowadays. Also the ages of the children must always be taken into account in any teaching connected with religion, for infinite harm is wrought if ideas and conceptions are conveyed prematurely. In the Waldorf School the child is led first of all to a realization of universal Divinity in the world.

You will remember that when the child first comes to school between the ages of seven and ten, we let plants, clouds, springs, and the like, speak their own language. The child's whole environment is living and articulate. From this we can readily lead on to the universal Father-Principle immanent in the world. When the rest of the teaching takes the form I have described, the child is well able to conceive that all things have a divine origin.

And so we form a link with the knowledge of Nature conveyed to the child in the form of fantasy and fairy-tales. Our aim in so doing is to awaken in him first of all a sense of gratitude for everything that happens in the world. Gratitude for what human beings do for us, and also for the gifts vouchsafed by Nature, this is what will guide religious feeling into the right path. To unfold the child's sense of gratitude is of the greatest imaginable significance. It may seem paradoxical, yet it is nevertheless profoundly true that human beings should learn to feel a certain gratitude when the weather is favourable for some undertaking or another. To be capable of gratitude to the Cosmos, even though it can only be in the life of imagination, this will deepen our whole life of feeling in a religious sense. Love for all creation must then be added to this gratitude. And if we lead the child on to the age of nine or ten in the way described, nothing is easier than to reveal in the living world around him qualities he must learn to love. Love for every flower, for sunshine, for rain this again will deepen perception of the world in a religious sense. If gratitude and love have been unfolded in the child before the age of ten, we can then proceed to develop a true sense and understanding of duty. Premature development of the sense of duty by dint of commands and injunctions will never lead to a deeply religious sense. Above all we must instil gratitude and love if we are to lay the foundations of morality and religion.

He who would educate in the sense of true Christianity must realize that before the age of nine or ten it is not possible to convey to the child's soul an understanding of what the Mystery of Golgotha brought into the world or of all that is connected with the personality and divinity of Christ Jesus. The child is exposed to great dangers if we have failed to introduce the principle of universal divinity before this age, and by ‘universal divinity’ I mean the divine Father-Principle. We must show the child how divinity is immanent in all Nature, in all human evolution, how it lives and moves not only in the stones, but in the hearts of other men, in their every act. The child must be taught by the natural authority of the teachers to feel gratitude and love for this ‘universal divinity.’ In this way the basis for a right attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha between the ninth and tenth years is laid down.

Thus it is of such infinite importance to understand the being of man from the aspect of his development in time. Try for a moment to realize what a difference there is if we teach a seven-or-eight-year-old child about the New Testament, or, having first stimulated a consciousness of universal divinity in the whole of Nature, if we wait until he has reached the age of nine or ten before we pass to the New Testament as such. In the latter case right preparation has been made and the Gospels will live in all their super-sensible greatness. If we teach the child too early about the New Testament it will not lay hold of his whole being, but will remain mere phraseology, just so many rigid, barren concepts. The consequent danger is that religious feeling will harden in the child and continue through life in a rigid form instead of in a living form pervaded through and through with feeling for the world. We prepare the child rightly to realize from the ninth and tenth years onwards the glory of Christ Jesus if before this age he has been introduced to the principle of universal Divinity immanent in the whole world.

This then is the aim of the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School to an ever-increasing number of children whose parents wish it. The teaching is based on the purely human element and associated moreover with a certain form of ritual. A service is held every Sunday for the children who are given this free religious instruction, and for those who have left school a service with a different ritual is held. Thus a certain ritual similar in many respects to the Mass but always adapted to the age of the child is associated with the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School.

Now it was very difficult to introduce into this religious instruction the purely human evolutionary principle that it is our aim to unfold in the Waldorf School, for in religious matters to-day people are least of all inclined to relinquish their own point of view. We hear a great deal of talk about a ‘universal human’ religion, but the opinion of almost everyone is influenced by the views of the particular religious body to which he belongs. If we rightly understand die task of humanity in days to come, we shall realize that the free religious teaching that has been inaugurated in the Waldorf School is a true assistance to this task.

Anthroposophy as given to grown-up people is naturally not introduced into the Waldorf School. Rather do we regard it as our task to imbue our teaching with something for which man thirsts and longs: a realization of the Divine, of the Divine in Nature and in human history, arising from a true conception of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This end is also served when the whole teaching has the necessary quality and colouring. I have already said that the teacher must come to a point where all his work is a moral deed, where he regards the lessons themselves as a kind of divine office. This can only be achieved if it is possible to introduce the elements of morality and religion into the school for those who desire it, and we have made this attempt in the religious instruction given at the Waldorf School in so far as social conditions permit to-day. In no sense do we work towards a blind rationalistic Christianity, but towards promoting a true understanding of the Christ Impulse in the evolution of mankind. Our one and only aim is to give the human being something that he still needs, even if all his other teaching has endowed him with the qualities of manhood. Even if this be so, even if full manhood has been unfolded through all the other teachings, a religious deepening is still necessary if the human being is to find a place in the world befitting his inborn spiritual nature. To develop the whole man and deepen him in a religious sense; this we have tried to regard as one of the most essential tasks of Waldorf School education.

We have been endeavouring in these lectures to understand something of the course of mankind's evolution; we have sought to follow up the deeper foundations of such Myths as the Osiris-Isis Myth; we have further sought to find our way again, from a certain aspect, in the world of the Greek Gods. We have lightly touched upon the inner meaning of the concepts which perhaps do not come to clear expression, but which underlie the poetic myths of Egypt and Greece, and have sought to study, at any rate to indicate, the connection between the basis of these myths and the Old Testament doctrines. These Old Testament doctrines have sprung from a different spirit from that of the mythology of the Egyptians and the Greeks. We have seen that the Egyptian and Grecian mythologies in the manner of their structure, are derived from certain ancient experiences of mankind. They are based on a certain consciousness that humanity once possessed atavistic clairvoyance, and through the atavistic clairvoyance had stood in the same inner relation to the spirit pervading Nature, as later on man is related between birth and death to the things of the senses. We have seen that for this old atavistic knowledge the far-reaching world-conception, which was an inner experience, signified more than the mere sense-perception knowledge of the transitional humanity to which we still belong.

All that had arisen as pictures in the Egyptian and the Greek mythology, or better to say, contemplation of the Gods, is to be found in the Old Testament as actual doctrine, with the key-note of morality. In fact, the day before yesterday, as I spoke of the important difference between the mythology of Egypt and Greece and the Old Testament, I told you that the divine spiritual Beings who stand at the beginning of the Old Testament, the Elohim, Jahve, can only be thought of as together creating mankind. We can only think of them as producing through their deeds what we call earthly humanity. In fact the whole evolution of earthly man is only accomplished according to the fundamental deed of the Elohim, of Jahve. I said that that is not the case in Egyptian or Greek mythology. There men looked back into ancient times and said to themselves: the Gods Osiris, Isis, Zeus, Apollo, Mars, Pallas, who are now connected with the guidance of human destiny, they have arisen from other generations of Gods, but men were already in existence. The Egyptian and the Greek mythology traced man back to older times in which those Gods were not yet creating and ruling who were recognized in their own times. Thus men in Egypt and Greece ascribed to themselves a greater antiquity than that of the Gods then in power.

This is so fundamental and significant a difference that one must bear it well in mind. In the course of these studies we shall see to what an infinitely important and significant fact this conception points. In the Old Testament doctrine the Gods who were revered were at the same time the Gods who created the human race. Only because the Old Testament doctrine makes the Divine the creator of man, only through this was it possible for the Old Testament doctrine to insert at the same time the moral element, moral impulse, into the divine order and hence into the whole ordering of mankind, into Providence, one might say.

This is important for an understanding of the present-day world conception. For the world concepts of today are not derived in any very definite way from a uniform source; they have very different origins, and we bear much within us in which we believe, which we profess as modern men, that is directly rooted in Greek ideas. We bear much within us, especially the immediate present bears much in it, that points back to the Old Testament. The search of many human beings to find their right way among these often contradictory concepts and ideas, comes through the impulse that proceeds from the Mystery of Golgotha. This all lies as yet in our programme and we shall have to build it up in the time we are still vouchsafed to be together.

It is above all important that we can lay one thing as a foundation; I have already referred to it yesterday. We have often related that we are living, since the 15th century, in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, and in a certain connection, I said, certain impulses of the third Post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean must reappear in the fifth, just as in the sixth Post-Atlantean epoch, certain impulses of the second, the Zarathustra, the Old Persian epoch will light up, and as in the last Post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh, certain impulses of the original Indian epoch will light up again. That is a law in the course of human evolution which points in a significant manner to the essentials standing spiritually before mankind up to the new catastrophe that is to come—like a catastrophe of nature.

Now we have seen in part what immense depth of human consciousness in ancient times is expressed in the fact that these ancient ages evolved the Osiris-myth. We have seen that this early age meant to say: there once lived a perception among men through which man could still directly experience the spiritual in his natural surroundings in his atavistic imaginations. That was the age in which Osiris ruled. But the new perceptions, the Typhon perceptions, those perceptions that have made the letter-script from the picture-script, those perceptions which from the primeval sacred language which men used to speak in common have formed the individually sounding languages, these perceptions of Typhon, they have slain what lived in humanity as the Osiris-impulse. So that since then Osiris is a Being at the side of men only when they are between death and a new birth.

We have then followed the Osiris-Isis Legend in its essentials, have seen how Osiris was regarded as a primeval ruler of Egypt who brought the Egyptians the most important of their arts, who ruled in Egypt throughout long ages, who also traveled from Egypt into other lands, and not by the sword but by persuasion brought them the benefits of the arts taught in Egypt. During his absence upon journeys, as he conferred on other lands the benefits with which he had instructed the Egyptians, Typhon, his wicked brother, introduced innovations into his own land of Egypt. And then as Osiris returned he was slain by Typhon despite the watchfulness of his consort Isis. Then Isis sought everywhere for Osiris. Through boys—so says the legend—it was revealed to her that the coffin had been carried away by the sea; she discovered it then in Byblos in Phoenicia and brought it back to Egypt. Typhon cut up the corpse into fourteen pieces. Isis collected the pieces; with the use of spices and by other means she was able to give each piece the appearance of Osiris again. She then induced the priests to accept a third of the land from her, and by being in possession of a third of the land, on the one hand they should keep the grave of Osiris secret, on the other hand institute the Osiris cult—that is to say, a memorial service of the ancient Osiris-time, to keep in memory that there had once been a different perception in humanity. This remembrance was thenceforward to be preserved and all sorts of secrets surrounded it. The time in which Typhon had slain Osiris was indicated to be the time in the November days of autumn when the sun sets in the seventeenth degree of Scorpio, and opposite in Taurus the moon appears in the Pleiades as full-moon.

Then it was related that Osiris once more betook himself from the Underworld, where he rules over the dead and judges them, to the Upperworld in order to instruct his son Horus, whom he had had by Isis. It is further related by the legend that Isis let herself be induced to set free Typhon, whom she had held imprisoned. Her son Horus, instructed by Osiris, grew so angry at this that he came in conflict with Isis his mother and seized the crown from her. Then it is related that either he himself, or, in other versions, Hermes, set cow-horns upon her head in place of the crown, and since then she has been portrayed with these.

Now you see Isis in ancient Egyptian myths standing there at the side of Osiris. And for the feeling of the old Egyptians she was not only a mysterious deity, a mysterious spirit-being who stood in inner relation with the ordering of the world, but one could say that Isis was the epitome of all the deepest thoughts the Egyptians were able to form about the archetypal forces working in nature and in man. If the Egyptian was to look up to the great mysteries in his surroundings, then he must look up to Isis who had a statue in the temple at Sais which has become famous. Beneath this statue, as is well known, stood the inscription that should express the being of Isis: ‘I am the All, I am the Past, the Present and the Future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil.’

Especially in the later period of the Egyptian civilization that was a central thought. And in gazing at the mysteries of Isis, one remembered the other mysteries of the ancient Osiris age. And in connection with Isis, with the Isis at the sight of whom the pious Egyptian trembled when he let the words work upon him: ‘I am the All, I am the Past, the Present and the Future, no mortal has yet lifted my veil;’ when these words worked upon him the Egyptian remembered at the same time that Isis was once united with Osiris, when Osiris still wandered upon earth. The laity looked at it as legendary. In the mysteries the Priests explained that the ancient Osiris time was that in which the old clairvoyance united man with the spirit of nature all about him.

For an understanding of the Osiris-Isis legend or myth at the present day, one must view it with the sensations and feelings which were in the soul, in the heart, of the Egyptian. We have done so in a few characteristic features to begin with. And through these characteristic features there is to stand before our soul's gaze that which once sounded over from ancient times into newer times, which lost its meaning through the Mystery of Golgotha, but must be again unriddled today—precisely for the better understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. There must stand before our soul's gaze all the mystery that at first could only be divined when the Egyptian felt the words that gave the description of Isis: ‘I am the All, I am the Past, the Present and the Future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil.’ For, my dear friends, we will set opposite this Osiris-Isis myth another Osiris-Isis myth, quite another one. And in the relation of this other Osiris-Isis myth I must count upon your freedom from prejudice, your impartiality in the highest degree, in order that you do not misunderstand it. This other Osiris-Isis myth is in no way born out of foolish arrogance, it is born in humility; it is also of such a nature that perhaps it can only be related today in a most imperfect way. But I will try to characterize its features in a few words.

It is in the first place left to each one—though that can only be provisionally—to fix the time when this Osiris-Isis myth was related in a way that I can only relate today approximately, superficially, even banally. But, as I said, I will try to relate this other Osiris-Isis myth disregarding as much as possible many prejudices and calling upon your unbiased understanding. This other Osiris-Isis myth then has somewhat—I say ‘somewhat’—the following contents. ‘It was in the age of scientific profundity, in the midst of the land of Philisterium. Upon a hill in spiritual seclusion was erected a Building which was considered to be very remarkable in the land of Philisterium.’

(I should just like to say that the future commentator here adds a remark that by ‘the land of Philisterium’ not merely the very nearest environment is meant.)

If one wanted to use the language of Goethe one could say that the Building represented an ‘open secret’. For the Building was closed to none, it was open to all, and in fact everyone could see it at convenient times. But far the greater number of people saw nothing at all. Far the greater number of people saw neither what was built nor what this represented. Far the greater number of people stood—to use Goethe's words again—before an ‘open secret’, a completely open secret.

A statue was intended to be the central point of the Building. This statue presented a Group of beings: the Representative of Man, then—Luciferic and Ahrimanic figures. People looked at the statue and did not know in the age of scientific profundity in the land Philisterium that the Statue, in fact, was only the veil for an invisible statue. But the invisible statue was not noticed by people, for it was the new Isis, the Isis of a new age.

Some few persons of the land of scientific profundity had once heard of this remarkable connection between what was visible and what, as Isis-image, was concealed behind what was open and evident. And then in their profound allegorical-symbolical manner of speech they had put forward the assertion that this combination of the Representative of Man with Lucifer and Ahriman signified Isis. With this word ‘signified’, however, they not only ruined the artistic intention from which the whole thing was supposed to proceed—for an artistic creation does not merely signify something, but is something—but they completely misunderstood all that underlay it. For it was not in the least the point that the figures signified something, but that they already were what they appeared to be. And behind the figures was not an abstract new Isis, but an actual, real new Isis. The figures ‘signified’ nothing at all, but they were in fact, in themselves, that which they made themselves out to be. But they possessed the peculiarity that behind them there was the real being, the new Isis.

Some few who in special circumstances, in special moments, had nevertheless seen this new Isis, found that she is asleep. And so one can say: the real deeper-lying statue that conceals itself behind the external statue is the sleeping new Isis, a sleeping figure—visible—but seen by few. Many persons then turned in special moments to the inscription, which is plainly there at the spot where the statue stands in preparation, but which also has been read by few. And yet the inscription stands clearly there, just as clearly as the inscription once stood on the veiled form at Sais. In fact the inscription stands there: ‘I am Man, I am the Past, the Present and the Future. Every mortal should lift my veil.’

Another figure, as a visitor, once approached the sleeping figure of the new Isis, and then again and again. And the sleeping Isis considered this visitor her special benefactor and loved him. And one day she believed in a particular illusion, just as the visitor believed one day in a particular illusion: the new Isis had an offspring—and she considered the visitor whom she looked on as her benefactor, to be the father. He regarded himself as the father, but he was not. The spirit-visitor, who was none other than the new Typhon, believed that he could acquire a special increase of his power in the world if he took possession of this new Isis. So the new Isis had an offspring, but she did not know its nature, she knew nothing of the being of this new offspring. And she moved it about, she dragged it far off into other lands, because she believed that she must do so. She trailed the new offspring about, and since she had trailed and dragged it through various regions of the world it fell to pieces into fourteen parts through the very power of the world.

Thus the new Isis had carried her offspring into the world and the world had dismembered it in fourteen pieces. When the spirit-visitor, the new Typhon, had come to know of this, he gathered together the fourteen pieces, and with all the knowledge of natural scientific profundity he again made a being, a single whole, out of the fourteen pieces. But in this being there were only mechanical laws, the law of the machine. Thus a being had arisen with the appearance of life, but with the laws of the machine. And since this being had arisen out of fourteen pieces, it could reproduce itself again, fourteen-fold. And Typhon could give a reflection of his own being to each piece, so that each of the fourteen offspring of the new Isis had a countenance that resembled the new Typhon.

And Isis had to follow all this strange affair, half-divining it; half-divining she could see the whole miraculous change that had come to her offspring. She knew that she had herself dragged it about, that she had herself brought all this to pass. But there came a day when in its true, its genuine form she could accept it again from a group of spirits who were elemental spirits of nature, could receive it from nature elementals.

As she received her true offspring which only through an illusion had been stamped into the offspring of Typhon, there dawned upon her a remarkable clairvoyant vision: she suddenly noticed that she still had the cow-horns of ancient Egypt, in spite of having become a new Isis.

And lo and behold, when she had thus become clairvoyant, the power of her clairvoyance summoned—some say Typhon himself, some say, Mercury. And he was obliged through the power of the clairvoyance of the new Isis to set a crown on her head in the place where once the old Isis had had the crown which Horus had seized from her, that is to say, on the spot where she developed the cow-horns. But this crown was merely of paper—covered with all sorts of writings of a profoundly scientific nature—still it was of paper. And she now had two crowns on her head, the cow-horns and the paper crown embellished with all the wisdom of scientific profundity.

Through the strength of her clairvoyance there one day arose in her the deep meaning, as far as the age could reach, of that which is described in St. John's Gospel as the Logos. There arose in her the Johannine significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this strength the power of the cow-horns grasped the paper crown and changed it into an actual golden crown of genuine substance.

These then are the main features, my dear friends, that can be given of the new Osiris-Isis Legend. I will not of course make myself the commentator who explains this Osiris-Isis Legend. It is the other Osiris-Isis Legend. But it must set one thing definitely before our souls: Even though the power of action which is bound up with the new Isis statue is at first only weak, exploring and attempting, it is to be the starting point of something that is deeply justified in the impulses of the modern age, deeply justified in what this age is meant to become and must become.

In recent days we have spoken of how the Word has withdrawn, as it were, from the direct soul-experience from which it originally gushed forth as from a spring. We have seen how we live in the age of abstractions, where men's words and concepts have only an abstract meaning, where man stands far away from reality. The power of the Word, the power of the Logos, however, must be laid hold of again. The cow-horns of the ancient Isis must take on quite a different form.

It is difficult to say such things with the modern abstract words. For such things it is better if you try to bring them before the eye of your soul in such Imaginations as have been brought before you, and to work over these Imaginations as Imaginations. It is very important for the new Isis, through the power of the Word which is to be regained through spiritual science, to transform the cow-horns, so that even the paper crown which is written upon in the new deeply profound scientific method, that even the paper crown will become a genuine golden crown.

‘So one day someone came before the provisional form of the statue of the new Isis, and up above at the left was placed a figure of humorous deportment, which in its world-mood had something between seriousness, a serious idea of the world and, one might say, even a chuckling about the world. And lo and behold! as once upon a time someone stood opposite this figure in a specially favourable moment, the figure became alive and said quite facetiously: Humanity has only forgotten the matter, but centuries ago something was placed before the new humanity about the nature of the new humanity, in so far as this new humanity is still only master of the abstract word, the abstract concept, the abstract idea and is far removed from the reality. This new humanity keeps well to words and always asks: Is it a pumpkin or is it a flask? ... when it happens that a flask has been made from a pumpkin ... always clings to definitions, always stops short at words! In the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries—so said the chuckling being—mankind still had self-knowledge about this peculiar situation of taking words in a false sense, not relating them to their true reality, but taking them in their most superficial sense. Today, however, men themselves have already forgotten what was put before them for the benefit of their self-knowledge, in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries.’

And the being went on chuckling and said: ‘What modern humanity should take as a real recipe for its abstract spirit is depicted on a tombstone in Mölln in the Lauenburg district. Because a tombstone stands there and on this tombstone is drawn an owl (Eule) which holds before itself a looking-glass (Spiegel). And it is related that Till Eulenspiegel, after he had wandered through the world with all sorts of buffoonery and pranks, was buried there. It is related that this Till Eulenspiegel existed, that he was born in the year 1300, went to Poland, even reached Rome and in Rome even had a wager with the Court-jesters over all sorts of odds and ends of wisdom, and committed all the other Till Eulenspiegelisms, which indeed are to be read in the literature about Till Eulenspiegel himself.’

Learned men—and the men who are scholars, are indeed very learned today and take everything with extraordinary gravity and significance—these have naturally discovered—they have discovered various things: for example, that there was no Homer, etc.—the scholars have naturally also discovered that there never was a Till Eulenspiegel. One of the chief reasons why the actual bones of the actual Till Eulenspiegel, who was only the representative of his age, are not supposed to lie beneath the tombstone in Lauenburg, on which is depicted the owl with the looking-glass, was because another tombstone had been found in Belgium upon which there was likewise an Owl with a mirror. Now the learned men naturally have said—for that is logical is it not, and logical are they all—how does it go in Shakespeare—for they are all honourable men—all, all, all!—logical are they all! They have said: if the same sign is found in Lauenburg and Belgium then naturally no Eulenspiegel existed at all.

Generally in life if one finds a second time what one has found a first time, one takes this as a reinforcement—but it is logical, is it not, in these things to take matters so. Well, we say, if I have one franc, then I have one franc. I believe it. So long as I only know that I have a franc, I believe it! But then I get another and I now have two. Now I believe that I have not one at all!—that is the same logic. This is the logic in fact that is to be found in our science—if I were to recount to you how everywhere it is to be found wry frequently! But what is the essential point of the Eulenspiegel-buffoonery? Read it up in the book: the essential thing of the Till Eulenspiegel-buffoonery always consists in the fact that Eulenspiegel is given some sort of commission, and that he takes it purely literally and naturally carries it out in the wrong way. For obviously if, for instance—to exaggerate somewhat—one were to say to Eulenspiegel (whom I now take as a representative figure) ‘Bring me a doctor,’ he would take the word literally and would bring a man who had graduated as doctor from a University. But he would perhaps bring a man who was—excuse the strong language—a perfect fool, he only went by the sound of the word. All the fooleries of Till Eulenspiegel are like this, he only goes by the wording. But this makes Till Eulenspiegel precisely the representative of the present age. Eulenspiegelism is a keynote in our modern times. Words today are far removed from their original source, ideas are often still farther removed, and people do not notice it, but behave in an Eulenspiegel way to what civilization happens to serve up. It was therefore possible for Fritz Mauthner in a philosophical dictionary to take all the philosophical concepts that he could find and convince one that all these philosophical concepts are actually merely words, that they no longer have a connection with any kind of actuality. People have no notion how far they are removed from reality in what today they call ideas, and even ‘ideals’. In other words: mankind does not know at all how it has made Eulenspiegel into its patron saint, how Eulenspiegel is still wandering through the different lands.

One of the fundamental evils indeed, of our time, rests on the fact that modern humanity flees from Pallas Athene, that is, from the Goddess of Wisdom, and clings to the symbol, the owl (Eule). And mankind no longer has the least idea of it—but it is true, as I have often shown, that the foundation of external knowledge is only a reflection—but, my dear friends, in a mirror one sees that which one is! And so the owl ... I mean the modern scientific profundity, sees in the glass, in the world-maya illusion just simply its own face.

Over such matters as these the being at the left above the modern Isis Statue chuckles and sniggers, and over many other matters which, out of a certain courtesy towards mankind, shall not be mentioned at the moment.

But, a feeling should be called forth that with the peculiarity of this presentation of human mysteries through the real existence of the Luciferic, Ahrimanic, in connection with the Representative of humanity itself, a state of consciousness is to be roused in mankind which wakes those very impulses in the soul which are necessary for the coming age.

‘In the Primal Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.’ But the word has become phrase, it has withdrawn from its beginning. The word sounds and resounds, but its connection with reality is not sought for; there is no endeavour among men to investigate the primary forces of what goes on around them. And one can only investigate these fundamental forces, in the sense of the present age, if one realizes that the essentiality which we call Luciferic and Ahrimanic, is really bound up with the microcosmic forces of man. And one can only understand reality today for the man living between birth and death, if one can form a few ideas of the other reality, which indeed we have often studied, that lies for man between death and a new birth. For the one reality is only the pole of the other reality, the inverted pole of the other reality.

We have spoken of how in ancient times, when human beings entered on the age of maturity, they not only experienced a change such as still occurs today in the change of voice or some other part of the bodily organism, but they also underwent an alteration of the soul. We have indicated how the ancient Osiris-Isis myth was in fact connected with the vanishing of the alteration of the soul. What then arose in humanity through those essences and forces of which we spoke yesterday, must come again differently, inasmuch as men experience the force of the word, the force of the thought, the force of the idea in a new form. It must not now be as if something arises through the forces of nature from the depths of the bodily organization—as in the change of voice in the boy—something which embellishes man with the power of the animal organization and functions invisibly upon his head as cow-horns. No, there must be a conscious grasping by man of what is meant by the Mystery of Golgotha, by the true power of the Word. A new element must draw into the human consciousness. This new element is radically different from the elements which people still enjoy describing today. This new element, however, has its significance for the social life, for the pedagogy of humanity, when pedagogy, or the theory of Education, comes out of the tragic state in which it exists today.

What does the deeply profound Eulenspiegelism—I should say ‘natural scientific profundity’—speak of principally when it speaks of man? Of what does even a great part of modern fiction speak? It speaks of the physical origin of man in connection with physical beings of the line of descent. Fundamentally the so-called modern, the much renowned modern theory of evolution is nothing but a conception placing the doctrine of physical descent in the centre. For the idea of heredity plays far the greatest role in the theory of evolution. It is a onesidedness. Men are thoroughly satisfied with such onesidedness, for people think nowadays that in this way one can be very learned. So one can, with quite arbitrary explanations of things, drawn apparently from deep logic, but in reality from misty vagueness.

Yesterday we saw an example of how whole literatures are written because men have lost the connection of a concept with the original experience from which the concept proceeded: the Cross-symbol. A whole literature has been written about it, the cross has been related to everything imaginable. We saw yesterday to what it must be related. The same has been done in regard to many other things and people think themselves very profound when they do it.

I will remind you of one case, my dear friends. Just think how infinitely important many men think themselves nowadays when they believe that they are speaking as we have spoken here today! There are a fair number of people who say—in fact they very frequently use the words—Oh, one can read it any moment in the papers (with respect be it spoken)—‘the Letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’. And with this, one thinks one has said something most profound. But one should inquire about the origin of such a saying. It goes back to those times when one had living concepts which indeed still had a connection with what had been undergone and experienced. When one talks today there is little connection—especially between the word and its place of origin. If you want to have a right connection between words and sentences and their origins, then I advise you to read the little book in which ‘Swiss-German Proverbs’ have now been collected. For one still finds in these popular proverbs an original harmonizing of what is said with the direct experience. The letter ... by this is meant, as you know, the letter-script in contradistinction to the ancient kind which the Imaginative life drew out of the spirit, as we described yesterday. This ancient spirit gave life, and the livingness in that epoch of human evolution resulted in the Imaginative atavistic clairvoyance. But there was a consciousness that this epoch must in turn be succeeded by another, that the letter must come which kills the ancient livingness.

And now bring that into connection with all that I have said about the actual nature of consciousness in connection with death. For it is the letter that kills but that also brings the consciousness which must be overcome again through another consciousness. The sort of disdainful rejection that modern journalistic folly attaches to the proverb ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ is not what is meant, but the sentence is connected with impulses of man's evolution. It implies approximately: In ancient times, Imaginative times, Osiris times, the spirit kept the human soul in a state of dulled livingness, in later times the letter called forth consciousness. That is the interpretation of the sentence, that is what it originally meant. And in many instances, Just as in this one, men today are very ready with opinions, with arbitrary explanations, because they do not connect anything with them.

This does not prove that it is false what the modern profound scientific method has to say about the idea of heredity, it is only that the other pole must be added when one speaks of heredity. If man points to his childhood, and back from childhood to birth, if he asks himself ‘What do I carry within me?’—then the answer is: what parents and ancestors have carried within them and transmitted to me! There is, however, another way of looking at the human being which present-day man does not as yet practise, which the man of the future must practise, and which must be put in the centre of pedagogy, the art of Education. This is not the looking back at having been younger, but the right consideration of the fact that with every day in life one becomes older. As a matter of fact modern mankind only understands that one has once been young. It does not really understand how to grasp realistically that one gets older with every day. For they do not know the word that must be added to the word heredity when one sets the becoming-older opposite the having-been-young. If one looks to one's childhood one speaks of what one has inherited; in the same way, when one looks towards the getting-older one can speak of the other pole; as of the Gate of Birth, so one can speak of the Gate of Death. There arises the one question: What have we gained through our forefathers by entering this life through the Gate of Birth? There arises the other question: What perhaps do we lose, what becomes different in us through the fact that we are approaching coming times, that we get older with every day? What is it like when we consciously experience the becoming-older-with-every day?

That, however, is a demand on our age. Humanity must learn to become older consciously with every day. For if man learns consciously to become older with every day, then this really means a meeting with spiritual beings, just as it means a descent from physical beings, that one is born and possesses inherited qualities.

I will speak next of how these things are connected: of that important inner impulse which must draw near the human soul, if the soul is to find what is so necessary for the future, what alone can round out and complete the one-sided teachings of Natural Science.

Then you will see why the new Isis Myth can stand beside the old Osiris-Isis Myth, why both together are necessary for the men of today; why other words must be combined with the words which resound from the Statue of Isis at Sais in ancient Egypt: ‘I am the All; I am the Past, the Present, the Future; no mortal has lifted my veil’ ... Other words must sound into these; they may no longer echo one-sidedly into the human soul today but in addition must resound the words: ‘I am Man, I am the Past, the Present and the Future. Every mortal should lift my veil.’

Today I have set before you more riddles than solutions. We will, however, speak of them further and the riddles will then be solved in manifold ways.

My intention is to give a series of lectures which will enable you to understand the present time and the immediate future in some aspects at least. It should be a coherent whole, but it may sometimes be necessary to go a long way back. There will be a continuous thread through it all, but I would ask you to see the parts always in the context of the whole. I will sometimes go far and wide to collect the material we need to understand the present time, and some of it may seem remote.

When I say ‘the present time’ I mean quite a long period of time, going back several decades and also looking decades ahead. It is important to realize that it will be necessary to present truths based on the science of the Spirit that in many respects go utterly against current and generally accepted beliefs. The world holds opinions that not only differ but often are the direct opposite of the truths that have to be spoken out of anthroposophy. It is only to be expected, therefore, that people will consider these truths to be incredible, warped and downright foolish.

When truths which differed from generally accepted views had to be said in the past, in order to open up a road to the future, the difference between those truths and common opinion was probably never as marked as it inevitably is today. This may not be absolutely the case, but, relatively speaking, it is so, for people are tremendously intolerant in their hearts today and less able to accept views which differ from their own.

In the immediate future, people will feel more strongly than ever before that the new and different views presented to them are fanciful and absurd. Nevertheless, truths that until now were closely guarded by small groups of people, with strict silence demanded of anyone to whom they were made known, must increasingly be made public. It does not matter how public opinion and those who hold it react to these truths; nor do the prejudices and counter-currents matter that are provoked by them.

The reason for this will be discussed later on in these lectures. To begin with, I must speak of some of the ways in which people will react to truths today and in the immediate future. People believe they have long since outgrown the illusions and superstitions of the past, yet in some respects they are entirely given up to illusion. There is a growing tendency to live in illusion concerning some important and essential aspects of the great scheme of things, and this to such an extent that these illusions become powers that rule the world, nations and, indeed, the whole earth. It is important to realize this, for illusory ideas are a major element in the chaos in which we find ourselves today; in fact, they make it a chaos.

Let me tell you of one common illusion which exists today and is closely bound up with the materialistic trends of the age. It is the growing tendency to form utterly wrong opinions about what in the science of the spirit is called the physical plane. And the New Testament words that are fundamental in this respect: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,¹ are increasingly less understood today. They are misunderstood in so far as the leading personalities of the outer world are caught up in the illusion that their kingdom should be very much of this physical world.

What do I mean to say? Anyone who is able to see the reality, and to see through it, knows that this world on the physical plane can never reach perfection. Yet people who think materialistically have the illusion that perfection can be achieved on the physical plane. This is the source of many other illusions, and particularly and characteristically the socialist illusion of the present age.

People's illusions come in all shades of meaning; they are coloured by party politics and so on. People who take a liberal view of the world and of life have constructed their own ideal of the physical world and believe that if they realize this we shall have paradise on earth. All that the socialists are able to think of is how to arrange things on this physical plane so that everybody can live what they consider to be the good life, the same for everybody, and so on. Their vision of the future on this physical plane is of a wonderful paradise. Do examine the programmes put forward by people who see themselves as belonging to the many different socialist parties and you will see for yourselves.

They are not the only people, of course, who have such views and opinions. Teachers also do, for instance. Today, every educational agitator and writer is absolutely convinced that it is up to him to establish the best possible educational system, the best principles of education one can think of. And in an absolute sense they really are the best, one cannot imagine anything better.

To go against such endeavours must seem sheer madness to people. The way things are today, people simply must consider anyone who does not want things to be the best possible in the world to be evil-minded. One can understand people feeling this way. Yet it is not evil-mindedness that stops us from thinking their way but a clear vision of the truth. It tells us that it is illusory to think such levels of perfection can be achieved in the physical world. And if it is a law that there never can be perfection in the physical world, just as it is a law that the three angles in a triangle add up to 180°, then people will simply have to face such a truth boldly and not shrink from it.

So there you have the kind of illusion which arises from entirely materialistic premises. Many say they believe in the world of the spirit, but with many of them this is mere words, nothing but hot air. In their innermost hearts, in their feelings and unconscious impulses, lives something different—the inclination to think materialistically. However much people may pretend to themselves that they believe in something else, in reality they believe only in the physical world. And since they do not believe in anything more than just the physical world around them, the only ideal they can possibly have is to arrange things in the physical world in such a way that it becomes a paradise; otherwise the whole world would make no sense to them. Until materialists are prepared to say that the world makes no sense at all, they can only live in the illusion that, however imperfect this physical world may be, it will be possible to create conditions that will put an end to imperfection and let perfection take its place.

Everything coming to the fore today in this respect—in general terms, with all kinds of political, social and other agitators making great words about it, or in specific instances, such as in education—is based on illusion because people are unable to see the connections between the physical world and the other spheres of the world. In no way can they gain an idea of what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and why Jesus Christ did not want to bring a kingdom of perfection to realization here in the physical world. There is nothing in the gospels to show that Christ intended to reform this outer kingdom of the physical world and make it into one of perfection. He certainly did not cherish that illusion. But he made up for this lack of desire to establish paradise in the physical world by giving people something which is not of this world: to let impulses enter into their souls which are always alive in the world but are not of this physical world.

Illusions of this kind dominate the human race today in the widest possible sense, and this creates an unhealthy climate. People are free individuals and therefore free to live in illusion. In more down-to-earth contexts their illusions would immediately be seen to be illusions. When we are dealing with physical objects, fools who invent things which merely work in theory are instantly seen to be under an illusion. It is not immediately obvious, however, in the vast field of social and political life.

The following story is one I have told before. When I was a young fellow of 22 or 23, one of my fellow students came to me one day, his head aglow, absolutely fired with enthusiasm, and told me he had just made an important, epoch-making invention. Oh, I said, that is nice; what are you going to do with it? Well, he said, I'll have to go and see Ratinger—our professor of mechanical engineering at the university—and tell him about it. No sooner said than done, and off he went. Ratinger was not free at the moment and so the student came back; he had been given an appointment for later on. So I said to him: Why don't you tell me about it in the meantime? We have some time to spare. Tell me about your invention. It was a very clever thing. He had invented a steam engine that needed just a very small amount of coal to heat it up; after that no more coal would be needed, for a special mechanism kept it going of its own accord. One merely had to start it up. This was certainly epoch-making! You will be wondering why we do not have it today. I got him to explain it all to me and then told him: You know, that is really clever; but if one looks at the whole thing it is no different from wanting to get a railway truck going by getting into it and pushing as hard as you can from inside. Someone standing outside can, of course, get it to move, but anyone inside will not get it to move a millimetre, even if they apply the same amount of energy. This is what it all came down to.

Things can be extremely logical and clever, developed by applying all kinds of technical principles, and they may still be nonsense, having been thought up without taking account of reality. What matters is not to be merely clever, or logical, but to relate to reality. In the end the student never went to see the professor.

When one is dealing with physical matter and mechanics, such a thing will soon be obvious. But in social and political affairs, and with reference to what in its widest sense may be defined as making everyone happy, it will not be immediately obvious. You can easily put forward ideas of exactly this kind; people will be impressed and believe you. Yet it is all a matter of being inside the truck and pushing from there. A time will come when a certain basic characteristic of the present time may actually be labelled with a particular name, a name that will typify a way of thinking which at heart is utterly illusory and unreal. I am very sure that in future people will speak of early twentieth century ‘Wilsonianism’. For Wilson's ideas are typical of those of someone who wants to push a railway truck from inside.

All the basic ideas of ‘Wilsonianism’ which make such an impression today are utterly unreal, though they also have a major influence on people for other reasons. They are powerful for the very reason that they cannot be realized. Any attempt to implement them it would soon show them to be meaningless. But people are able to imagine they could be implemented. If we were able to implement Wilsonian ideas, world philistinism would be realized throughout the world. Woodrow Wilson² really deserves to be made the universal saviour of general philistinism. Of course, philistines would not actually do all that well in a world organized by Wilson, which anyway cannot be realized, but at least they imagine that if Wilson's ideas were to conquer the world we would be able to live according to our ideals.

A time will come when people say: At the beginning of the twentieth century a peculiar ideal arose, which was to make the world into a perfect image of philistine, or bourgeois, ideals. Wilson's ideas will be analysed one day and presented as typical of the early twentieth century.

You see, we have not only small but also big examples of illusory ideas in our time. These illusions and unreal ideas are held not by otherworldly sects, but by groups whose beliefs spread far and wide.

Important and vital genuine truths must now be proclaimed to the world. For the reasons and because of the kind of conditions we have been discussing, they will show little relationship to the general opinions of today. Different conditions have to be created to enable people to grasp the truth. The truths which must inevitably come up are repulsive to many people today; they are thoroughly uncomfortable. The truths people like and ask for are convenient truths, for that is the way people are today.

Some of these uncomfortable truths will have to be presented in the course of these lectures. They need to be made known out of a feeling of responsibility, and above all they must relate not only to the physical plane. They must cut across the illusions people have of the physical plane and offer reality rather than fantasy. The most unrealistic and fantasy-ridden people today are those who consider themselves to be more or less entirely realistic. One makes the strangest discoveries in this respect.

I was recently sent a kind of lexicon listing the names of writers.³ It purports to list the names of all writers who have a connection with Judaism and anything which seeks to bring Judaism to realization in this world. I am one of the writers listed in the book, the reason being that, according to the author of the lexicon, I have many similarities with Ignatius de Loyola who is stated to have founded the Jesuits precisely because of his Judaism. Furthermore, I come from a border region between Germans and Slavs—which is where I happen to have been born, though my family certainly do not come from there—and apparently the fact that I come from there indicates that I am Jewish in origin—I have no idea why. This does not really surprise me, for I think you will agree that even odder things are published today. But the lexicon also includes Hermann Bahr as someone who is promoting Judaism—I was merely leafing through the book. Yet he is an out-and-out Upper Austrian. It is really and truly impossible to think of any way in which he can be connected with Jewish blood or the like. Nevertheless, this literary lexicon quotes a well-known literary historian as saying that Hermann Bahr definitely had Jewish traits.

Well, when I was said to be Jewish on one occasion—these things are not new—I had a photograph of my certificate of baptism made. Hermann Bahr also had to jump through those hoops, because a literary historian had said he was Jewish.⁴ Bahr wanted to establish the truth. The literary historian then said: Well, his grandfather may have been a Jew. But it simply is not possible to find anything in Bahr's family which is not absolutely Upper Austrian German. This was of course an embarrassment for the literary historian, but he would stick to is opinion. He went so far as to say that if Hermann Bahr were actually to present the certificates of baptism for the last twelve generations to show that he did not have a drop of Jewish blood rom anywhere, then he, the historian, would believe in reincarnation if forced to do so. So you see, the reason for believing in reincarnation is a highly peculiar one in the case of this renowned and widely-read literary historian.

There are times today when it is really difficult to take what is said by famous people at all seriously. It is a pity, of course, that it is so difficult to convince the wider public of this. People are rather in the habit of believing in authority, despite the fact that modern people do not believe in authority at all, of course! Such, at least, is their opinion. Yesterday we were able to learn something about the opinions people have of themselves.

Today, when people's basic instincts sometimes take them so far from the truth, it is extremly difficult to accept the truths relating to the region which borders immediately on the physical world. To characterize anything relating to this region one has to appeal to healthy, incorrupt minds, and this presents the greatest difficulties one can imagine. For when it comes to the truths which must now be made known, the whole constitution of the human soul will be affected even if people merely get to know them, let alone gain direct perception of them.

External knowledge about the physical world has a certain effect—let us say on the human head. But truths which go deep, even if only to the depth where they relate to the world immediately next to the physical world, touch the whole human being and not only the head. To proclaim such truths one must be able to depend on a sound, incorrupt mind.

In many spheres of life today a sound, incorrupt mind is almost a rarity, whilst unsound, corrupt minds are far from uncommon. And the way individuals accept truths today strongly reveals the particular nature of their life of instincts and drives, the whole constitution of their souls, and their state of mind. People with corrupt instincts who are unwilling to apply some degree of discipline to their life-styles quickly tend to take an attitude which is completely determined by the base mind, particularly when the truths to be accepted relate to the world bordering on the physical world. This happens only too easily. If people do not take a healthy objective interest in what goes on in the world, if they are essentially only interested in anything that relates to themselves, this will often corrupt their mind and attitudes to such an extent that they do not have the right instincts for occult truths and particularly for truths relating to the world bordering on the physical world.

With respect to the physical world and anything relating to it, and to all the great advances humanity has made, I think I can say that physical nature makes sure this corruption does not go too far in human minds. People are confined within the Limits imposed by physical nature; they cannot get very far with their instincts and have to obey the laws of nature. When we move from the physical world into the one bordering on it, we are no longer on those leading reins; guidance has to take another form and a different, inner certainty is needed. This is only possible, however, if the mind is incorrupt as we go beyond the physical level; otherwise we lose all control in that other region where we are no longer controlled by physical nature, nor by social and traditional prejudices. We are suddenly quite free and cannot bear such freedom. For instance, the physical world has many ways of preventing people from lying: If someone were to say at 6 o'clock in the evening that the sun had just come up, nature would soon demonstrate this to be wrong. It is like this with many things relating to the physical world. If people insist on talking nonsense about things relating to the higher worlds, even if it is only the one immediately next to our own, the physical world will not immediately show them to be wrong. This, then, is the reason why people may lose all control if they rush to escape the discipline which is imposed in the physical world.

Here we have one of the great problems which may arise when truths relating to the non-physical world are presented. Yet the answer always has to be that it is simply necessary to present these truths today. We must not forget that truths relating to the non-physical world cannot be received in the same frame of mind as truths relating to the physical world. To take them in we must slightly loosen the etheric and astral bodies; otherwise we shall only hear words. The state of mind has to be such—and with reference to the phenomena of the subjective inner life it merely is a state of mind—that for any real understanding of the things of the spirit one has to loosen the etheric and astral bodies a little. This loosening should only be a means of gaining understanding of the world of the spirit. It must not become an end in itself; this would be a very serious matter.

Imagine—to take an extreme case—someone comes to an anthroposophical lecture, not in order to gain insight into the realms of the spirit, which would be the right thing, but because he thinks this is truly mystical. As he listened he would let the words flow through him, as it were, because this would slightly loosen the ether body and the astral body. People certainly do come to lectures of this kind, sometimes also to those on pseudospiritual science, and listen in a kind of sleepy ecstasy; they are not really interested in the content, but more in the feeling of voluptuous pleasure which comes when the ether body and the astral body go partly outside the physical body. There may be other situations in life when to be thus ‘given up’, or ‘warm’, is a good thing; it is no good at all when it comes to revealing the truths relating to things of the spirit.

This must be properly understood. If spiritual truths are rightly understood, and if people are in all seriousness following the lines of thought used to develop concepts which may make the world of the spirit accessible to our understanding, their humanity will be enhanced and they will learn the things which have to be known at the present time for the salvation and further development of humanity. People who take these truths into themselves in the right way will also find their drives and instincts ennobled and raised to a higher level. By merely listening to spiritual truths they go through a development that is for the good.

Anyone who is not willing to accept anthroposophical truths in this sense but is perhaps doing so from some kind of purely personal interest—let us say he wants to belong to a society and has not found another one which suits him as well as the Anthroposophical Society does—anyone who comes to this Society with personal interests may indeed find that spiritual truths will first of all activate low instincts, and perhaps even the lowest of the low. It therefore does not come as a surprise that people who really should not be members but nevertheless do come and hear such things, find their lowest instincts brought to life. It is something that cannot be avoided at this time, for these things have to be made public and it is difficult to draw the line. The right way will only be found if those who have the inner justification to be part of such a movement use their wide-awake judgement and take themselves to task. People who in any way bring personal interests to bear, before or after leaving the Society, merely show that they never should have been members. And I think it is not really difficult to distinguish between personal interests and interest in objective understanding.

But it is not surprising that in the situation which has arisen because it is now necessary to make things generally known, it happens again and again that some of the instincts of the lower human nature come to the fore. The potential dangers must be consciously and clearly considered and ways must be found to correct them. If we take the right attitude to these dangers we shall certainly be able to meet them. This is very much a time—it is part of the chaotic situation we are in—when aberrations of this kind are far from uncommon. The tragic situation of today makes tremendous demands on the powers of many people. It is true to say that people who were not in the habit of working hard in the general rather than merely personal interest really have learned to work hard in the last three years. Many people have learned to work and to acquire general interests.

People who rightly belong to our movement will have come to it out of more than personal interest. Nevertheless, the present age does offer enormous opportunities for a kind of lazy outsider attitude. The specific constellation created by the war means that some people have really nothing to occupy them. If they are part of our movement they will also be aware of it. Before the war we had many lecture tours; a whole raft of people would get together and travel from one lecture to the next. Outer interest may have been lacking, but excitement could be found, and if this did not come from outside, people created their own excitements. This has now become difficult. It cannot be done. However, some people have not found a way of occupying themselves usefully. And that is why a lazy outsider attitude is to be found in our ranks exactly at this time, with people whiling away the time by creating all kinds of opposition. Being unable to get the excitement of travelling from lecture cycle to lecture cycle they find other ways of entertaining themselves. This merely shows the true nature of the interest that formerly made them travel from lecture cycle to lecture cycle.

When there is an inner obligation to represent anthroposophical truths before the world, in all seriousness and with dignity, you also know that more than fifty out of an audience of a hundred may well become opponents. That is a law; it is the way it is. If these fifty per cent of such people do not actually become opponents, there will be a reason for this, but it will not be because they are consistent. For reasons which have already been given and others that will be given, this is how matters are. Someone who represents anthroposophical truths is therefore not in the least surprised if there is opposition. We might take up the points that these opponents keep coming up with all the time, things they generally know better than anyone else to be untrue—for they do of course know that they are not true—but it would be much more useful to consider the sources from which such Opposition has Sprung.

All kinds of peculiar things will happen when we do so, and we shall then no longer feel inclined to take up the points that our opponents want us to take up. Instead, we are going to discover their true reasons. This can sometimes be more of an effort than to take up the points the opposition is making. Think of all the years in which lectures have been given here and how it has been necessary over and over again to say the same things I am also saying today, though this is always pointed out. But it is necessary to consider them with profound seriousness and dignity, and to consider them in a way which is fitting for an anthroposophical movement.

Believe me, I have more important things to do, if I am to lead this movement and be fully responsible for it, than to take account of the fact that three or four people, or even more if you will, get together and invent all kinds of gossip. I have more important things to do and never feel the inclination to go into such matters. But unfortunately this is so little understood! Even within this Society, there is more interest in excitement and sensation than genuine scientific interest. From the scientific point of view it is, for instance, interesting to study not only useful but also poisonous plants, but one has to find the right point of view. Very few of those who profess to follow anthroposophical spiritual science have even the least notion of the immense seriousness and importance of what it really should be. Forgive me for saying this. If there were the right seriousness and if the importance of this were really understood, people's attitudes would in many respects be very different from what they are. Of course I am not saying that people should turn their attention elsewhere. Rather the opposite: We should not turn our attention away from the phenomena which go hand in hand with the will to destroy this anthroposophical movement. But we have to find the right approach.

People may, for instance, write volumes in the way in which I have contradicted myself in my written works and with reference to all kinds of other things. One way of countering this would be to say that Luther was shown to have contradicted himself in hundreds of ways, not just a few dozen. His answer was: These asses are talking of contradictions in my works. I wish they would make the effort to try and understand just one of the things that appears to be in contradiction to other things!⁵ So one way would be to point out something like this. But there is no need for this. For when people speak in opposition today it is not because they are interested in finding and revealing contradictions but for quite a different reason.

Someone⁶ offered a manuscript to Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,⁷ for instance. The publishing house was unable to use it and therefore returned it to the author. From this moment the author, who until then had been running after me wherever I went, became an opponent. The real reason was not that he had found contradictions. If that were the real reason we might use Luther's words. But we cannot do that, for the individual concerned can only be seen in his true colours if we know he is giving vent to his spleen because the publishing house was not able to publish his book. This was the real reason. So if we simply listen to the things people say, we shall have little opportunity for getting at the truth—just as little, perhaps, as the literary historian who would convert to reincarnation if this allowed him to continue in the belief that Hermann Bahr had Jewish connections. Conversion would be necessary if he were to be shown certificates of Christian baptism for Hermann Bahr's ancestors down to the twelfth generation.

Much is said about the courage which people are showing today. To assert the truths humanity needs today, in the sense I have spoken of, will need quite a different kind of courage—inner courage. But the place where this courage should be in the soul is occupied by cowardice, reluctance to take action, and this is tremendously widespread. In many respects it is due to this cowardice that anthroposophical spiritual science finds it so difficult to make its way today. It will make its way. But one should not sit back and accept; one should not think that things will go the right way without human involvement. One thing you will have to get used to—and it will be different from what you have been used to so far—is that I myself will have to be a lot less lenient in some respects than I have been until now. Do not think this is because I have changed my will and intention; you must look for the reasons in the existing situation.

You will have to understand that I cannot let the movement which I have to represent before the world go to the dogs in any old way. Forgive the expression. Higher duties are involved than people may dream of. I cannot be involved in whatever excitements or sensations some group or set may be desiring. Consideration must be given to many general and more important interests and impulses than to the purely personal ambitions which rule one set of people or another. To find the right way of presenting anthroposophy we simply must be able to set aside the purely personal element which for many is about the only thing that interests them today.

And so I must conclude here today with something which I have also been saying in all the other places where I have been speaking these days. There are many members of our anthroposophical science of the spirit who are truly dedicated and who have a clear idea of the seriousness of our work. But again and again there are others who do not belong and who behave in a way that simply would not happen if membership of the Society were limited to those who rightfully belong to it. Things keep coming up among members which are far removed from what is really intended; some of these can only be said to relate to what is really intended if one takes a totally distorted view.

Things are said by groups of people who have to be ignored—for our real interests go far beyond giving one's attention to the ambitions which are alive in those groups—things are said there, and people are beginning to believe them, which have no more to do with our true intentions than a dung beetle has to do with a pendulum clock. It is quite impossible to see how they go together. Yet fantastic stories created out of base instincts that are left to run riot are set in circulation. And this despite the fact that the people who generate them know full well that not a word is true. Such things can be explained in natural science, but we must also draw the logical conclusion and take the necessary actions. In the first place I am going to impose two rules an myself. Anyone who is going to speak of the one rule without the other, will be saying something which is not true. I have made these two rules known in all the places where I have been giving lectures in recent months.

In principle, I shall no longer continue to give private interviews to members of the Anthroposophical Society. For all those private interviews have led to reports which are full of lies. I have better things to do than refute the tales told by people who let their imaginations run riot, and so there is no other way but to discontinue these private interviews. Some individuals have a true esoteric impulse, and I will find other ways of making sure they are able to progress; it will just take while. The measure should not prevent anyone from progressing in esoteric development. But, generally speaking, all private interviews must now stop. This, then, is the first rule. Do not come to me, as people have done in some local groups, and say it is a harsh rule. No, do not come to me, go to those who are responsible.

The second thing is that I release everyone who has ever had a private interview with me from the promise not to talk about it, if they wish to do so. Anyone can tell anything they like about what has happened or been said in those private interviews—that is, in so far as they wish to do so. I am not going to prevent anyone from telling the whole truth about anything ever discussed with me in a private interview.

These two rules go together. The one does not apply without the other. And, as I said, if you think they are harsh, go to those who are responsible. Unless I am less lenient in these matters than I have been until now, the problems I am speaking of will not stop. As I said, I shall find other ways to make sure this does not harm anyone's esoteric development. Ways and means will be found. But, people being as they are today, it is not possible to establish such a science without things going badly astray on occasion, with people always jumping to the wrong conclusions. This is why there will have to be these rules.

People who take a serious and dignified approach to our spiritual-scientific development may find it difficult to understand how such things could come about, but they will accept the two rules as inevitable. From now on, everything will be entirely in the open. For there is nothing there which needs to shun the light! This is what is so shameful about it all: The truth and the whole truth could be told by everybody without leaving the least stain on our movement. But people have grown attached to something which has survived in our work as a continuation of earlier practices: to have individual interviews. 1f talking to individuals had not resulted in lies, the rule would not have been necessary. But everything ever said to any member can be truthfully told. Our movement can only gain from the truth—go and tell as much as you like. The truth will not be affected by the lies which are told; but it must not even appear to be affected, for it is important for humanity that anything presented out of a background of spiritual science is presented in a serious and dignified way.

So let me repeat once more: Without causing any loss to those who are seriously seeking esoteric development, I will generally no longer give private interviews for members. Everyone is free to tell everything they want about the interviews which have been given, but it must be the truth. I release everyone from whatever vow of silence there may be. But it should only be because individuals want to tell others for their own sake; they do not have to do it for my sake. And I have no objection to people spreading it about far and wide that these rules exist and are characteristic of our movement. Then the world will realize the infamous nature of the things that are so often said, especially about our Society.

• 1. John 18:36. The German for ‘kingdom’ in this sense is Reich (Trans.).
• 2. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), President of the United States 1913–1921. (Wilson propagated ‘open’ diplomacy but refused to permit publication of his discussions at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. His Fourteen Points were to be the basis for the armistice in November 1918. Trans.)
• 3. Semi-Kuerschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers, Geldleute, Schauspieler, Kunstler, Musiker, Offiziere, Rechtsanwlte, Revolutionre, Frauenrechtlerinnen, Sozialdemokraten usw. jdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland ttig oder bekannt waren (Semi-Kuerschner or literary lexicon of authors, poets, bankers, financiers, physicians, actors, artists, musicians, officers, lawyers, revolutionaries, women's rights activists, social democrats, etc., who were Jewish by birth or marriage and were active or known in Germany from 1813–1913), published by Philipp Stayff, Berlin 1913. The passage about Hermann Bahr reads as follows: ‘It is said, and people have assured me over and over again, that Hermann Bahr is not a Jew, but I believe in the adage: ‘Tell me who your friends are’ (Bahr's first wife was Jewish), and would maintain that Bahr is of Jewish origin even if he were to show me the certificates of baptism of his forebears for the last ten generations, and indeed if really pushed into a corner I would rather subscribe to belief in the transmigration of souls.’
• 4. Adolf Barthels in his Kritiker und Kritikaster, Leipzig 1903.
• 5. Martin Luther (1483–1546) religious reformer who led the German Reformation. He translated the Bible into the vernacular to make it accessible to everyone and wrote many works, their vigour still much appreciated today. The actual quote is: ‘How can these asses form an opinion on contradictory elements in our doctrine if they don't understand any aspect of those contradictory elements?’ From Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube, 10. Brief (translates as ‘10th letter’).
• 6. Max Seiling (1852–1928), Austrian poet and writer.
• 7. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is the publishing house established by Marie von Sivers in 1913 in Berlin for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's works. It moved to Dornach in November 1923.

When we set out today to speak about Anthroposophy and the Threefold Movement with its various consequences—which indeed arise out of Anthroposophy, and must really be thought of as arising out of it,—then we must first of all hold before our souls that it is difficult to make oneself understood. And, without this feeling—that it is difficult to make oneself understood—we shall hardly be able to succeed as lecturers for anthroposophical Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it, in a way satisfying to ourselves. For if there is to be speaking about Anthroposophy which is appropriate, then this speaking must be entirely different from what one is accustomed to in accordance with the traditions of speaking. One has often fallen into the habit of speaking also about anthroposophical matters in the way one has become used to speaking in the age of materialism; but one is more apt thereby to obstruct the understanding for Anthroposophy, rather than to open up an approach to it.

We shall first of all have to make quite clear to ourselves what the content of the matter is that comes towards us in Anthroposophy and its consequences. And in these lectures I shall deal as I said yesterday, with the practice of lecturing, but only for anthroposophical and related matters, so that what I have to say applies only to these.

We must now make clear to ourselves that primarily it is the feeling for the central issue of the threefold order that must at first be stirred in our present humanity. It must after all be assumed that an audience of today does not begin to know what to do with the concept of the threefold order. Our speaking must slowly lead to the imparting first of a feeling for this threefold order in the audience.

During the time in which materialism has held sway, one has become accustomed to give expression to the things of the outer world through description. In this one had a kind of guidance in the outer world itself. Moreover, objects in the outer world are, I would say, too fixed for one to believe that, in the end, it makes much difference how one speaks about the things of the outer world; one need only give people some guidance on the way for perceiving this outer world. Then, in the end it comes to this: if, let us say, one delivers somewhere a popular lecture with experiments, and thereby demonstrates to people how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how the substance reacts in the retort. And whether one then lectures this way or that way—a bit better, a bit less well, a hit more relevantly, a hit less relevantly—in the end makes no difference. And gradually it has tended to come to the point that such lectures and such talks are attended in order to see the experimenting, and what is spoken is just taken along as a kind of more or less agreeable or disagreeable side noise. One must express these things somewhat radically, just in order to show the exact direction in which civilization is moving in regard to these things.

When it is a matter of what to stimulate in people for doing, for willing, one is of the opinion that one must just “set up ideals”. People would have to accustom themselves to “apprehend ideals”, and thus one gradually glides more and more over into the utopian, when it is a matter of such things as the threefold order of the social organism.

So it has also happened in many an instance that many people who lecture about the threefold idea today absolutely call forth the opinion, through the manner in which they speak, that it is some utopia or other that should be striven for. And, since one is always of the opinion that what should be striven for in most cases cannot be expected to come in less than fifty or a hundred years—or many extend the time even further—so one also allows oneself, quite unconsciously, to approach speaking about things as if they would first ripen in fifty or a hundred years. One glides away from the reality very soon, and then talks about it thus: How will a small shop be set up in the threefold social organism? What will be the relation of the single person to the sewing machine in the threefold social organism?—and so on. Such questions are really put in abundance to any endeavor such as the threefolding of the social organism. As regards such an endeavor, which with all of its roots comes out of reality, one should not at all speak in this utopian fashion. For one should always evoke at least this feeling: the threefold order of the social organism is nothing which can be "made" in the sense that state constitutions can be made in a parliament—of the kind for example, that the Weimar National Assembly was. These are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of making the threefold social organism.

Just as little can one speak of "organizing" in order to produce the threefold order. That which is an organism, this one does not organize; this grows. It is just in the nature of an organism that one does not have to organize it, that it organizes itself. That which can be organized is no organism. We must approach things from the start with these feelings, otherwise we shall not have the possibility of finding the appropriate expression.

The threefold order is something which indeed simply follows from the natural living together of people. One can falsify this natural living together of people—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—by extending the characteristic features of one member, the states-rights member, to both others. Then these two other members will simply become corrupted because they cannot prosper, just as someone cannot get on well in an unsuitable garment, that is too heavy, or the like.

It is in the natural relation of people that the threefold order of the social organism lives, that the independent spiritual life lives, that the rights or states life, regulated by the people's majority, lives, that the economic life, shaped solely out of itself, also lives. One can put strait jackets on the spiritual life, on the economic life, although one does not need them; but then its own life asserts itself continually nevertheless, and what we then experience outwardly is just this self-assertion. It is hence necessary to show that the threefolding of the social organism is implicit in the very nature of both the human being and the social life.

We see that the spiritual life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. This we have on the one hand.

On the other hand, until about the same period, we have free economic rule that found its true, middle-European expression in the free economic village communities. As the free spiritual life slipped into the universities, which are localized at first, and which later find shelter in the state, so does that which is the economic organization first receive a certain administration in the “rights” sense, when the cities emerge more and more. Then the cities, in the first place, organize this economic life, while earlier, when the village communities were setting the pace, it had grown freely. And then we see how increasingly, that which was centralized in the cities seeks protection in the larger territories of the states. Thus we see how the tendency of modern times ends in letting the spiritual life on the one hand, the economic life on the other, seek the protection of states which increasingly take on the character of domains constituted according to Roman law. This was actually the development in modern times.

We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. It is just the same with the economic life.

Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the civilized world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on.—Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself inwardly with these things, and to develop a feeling for the historical turning point at which we stand today.

But, just as in an organism every detail is necessarily formed as it is, so is everything in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, to be formed as it must be in its place in the sense of the whole. You cannot imagine, if you think realistically, that your ear lobe could be formed the very least bit differently from what it is, in conformity with your whole organism. Were your ear lobe only the least bit differently formed, then you would also have to have quite a different nose, different fingertips, and so forth. And just as the ear lobe is formed in the sense of the whole human being, so must also the lecture in which something flows be given—in the sense of the whole subject—that lecturing which is truly taking on new forms.

Such a lecture cannot be delivered in the manner which one could perhaps learn from the sermon-lecture. For the sermon-lecture as we still have it today, rests on the tradition which really goes back to the old Orient,—on a special attitude which the whole human being in the old Orient had toward speech. This characteristic was continued, so that it lived in a certain free way in Greece, lived in Rome, and shows its last spark most clearly in the particular relationship which the Frenchman has to his language. Not that I want to imply that every Frenchman preaches when he speaks; but a similar relationship, such as had to develop out of the oriental relationship to language still continues to live on in a definite way in the French handling of speech, only entirely in a declining movement.

This element which we can observe here in regard to language came to expression when one still learned speaking from the professors, as one could later, but now in the declining phase—professors who really continued to live on as mummies of ancient times and bore the title, “professor of elocution”. In former times, at almost every university, in every school, also in seminaries and so on there was such a professor of elocution, of rhetoric. The renowned Curtius [Note 1] of Berlin actually still bore the title “professor of elocution” officially. But the whole affair became too dull for him, and he did not lecture on elocution, but only demonstrated himself as a professor of elocution through being sent out by the faculty council on ceremonial occasions, since that was always the task of the professor of elocution. Nevertheless, in this Curtius made it his business to discharge his duties at such ceremonial occasions by paying as little regard as possible to the ancient rules of eloquence. For the rest, it was too dull for him to be a professor of elocution in times in which professors of elocution did not fit in any more, and he lectured on art history, on the history of Greek art. But in the university catalog he was listed as “professor of elocution”. This refers us back to an element that was present everywhere in speech in olden times.

Now, when we consider what is quite especially characteristic in the training of speech for the middle European languages, for German, for example, then indeed everything denoted in the original sense by the word “elocution” has not the least meaning. For something flowed into these languages that is entirely different from that which was peculiar to speaking in the times when elocution had to be taken seriously. In the Greek and Latin languages there is elocution. In the German language elocution is something quite impossible, when one looks inwardly at the essential.

Today, however, we are living definitely in a time of transition. That which was the speech element of the German language cannot continue to be used. Every attempt must be made to come out of this speech element and to come into a different speech element. This also is the task, in a certain sense, to be solved by him who would speak productively about Anthroposophy or the threefold idea. For only when a fairly large number of people are able to speak in this way, will Anthroposophy and the threefold idea be rightly understood in public, even in single lectures. Meanwhile, there are not a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and pseudo-avowal for these.

If we look back on the special element in regard to speaking which was present in the times out of which the handling of elocution was preserved, we must say: then it was as if language grew out of the human being in quite a naive way, as his fingers grow, as his second teeth grow. From the imitation process speaking resulted, and language with its whole organization. And only after one had language did one come to the use of thinking.

And now it transpired that the human being when speaking to others about any problem had to see that the inner experience, the thought experience, to a certain extent clicked [einschnappte] into the language. The sentence structure was there. It was in a certain way elastic and flexible. And, more inward than the language was the thought element. One experienced the thought element as something more inward than the language, and let it click into the language, so that it fitted into it just as one fits the idea of a statue or the like into marble. It was entirely an artistic treatment of the language. Even the way in which one was meant to speak in prose had something similar to the way in which one was to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and elocution had rules which were not at all unlike the rules of poetic expression. (So as not to be misunderstood, I should like to insert here that the development of language does not exclude poetry. What I now say, I say for older arts of expression, and I beg you not to interpret it as if I wanted to assert that there can be no more poetry at all today. We need but treat the language differently in poetry. But that does not belong here; I wanted to insert this only in parenthesis, that I might not be misunderstood.)

And when we now ask: How was one then supposed to speak in the time in which the thought and feeling content clicked into the language? One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Hence, one can really only learn to speak beautifully today when one immerses oneself in the old way of speaking. There was beautiful speaking. And speaking beautifully is definitely a gift which comes to man from the Orient. It might be said: There was speaking beautifully to the point that one really regarded singing, the singing of language, as the ideal of speaking. Preaching is only a form of beautiful speaking stripped of much of the beautiful speaking. For, wholly beautiful speaking is cultic speaking. When cultic speaking pours itself into a sermon, then much is lost. But still, the sermon is a daughter of the beautiful speaking found in the cult.

The second form which has come into evidence, especially in German and in similar languages, is that in which it is no longer possible to distinguish properly between the word and the grasping of the thought conveyed—the word and the thought experience; the word has become abstract, so that it exempts itself, like a kind of thought. It is the element where the understanding for language itself is stripped off. It can no longer have something click into it, because one feels at the very outset that what is to be clicked in and the word vehicle into which something is to click are one.

For who today is clear, for example in German, when he writes down “Begriff” [concept], that this is the noun form of begreifen [to grasp; to comprehend] be-greifen (greifen with a prefix) is thus das Greifen an etwas ausfuehren [the carrying out of the grasping of something]—that “Begriff” is thus nothing other than the noun form for objective perceiving? The concept “Begriff” was formed at a time when there was still a living perception of the ether body, which grasps things. Therefore one could then truly form the concept of Begriff, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the ether body.

But, in order to hear Begreifen in the word Begriff it is necessary to feel speech as an organism of one's own. In the element of speaking which I am now giving an account of, language and concept always swim through one another. There is not at all that sharp separation which was once present in the Orient, where the language was an organism, was more external, and that which declared itself lived inwardly. What lived inwardly had to click into the linguistic form in speaking; that is, click in so that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it clicked was the outer form. And this clicking-in had to happen in the sense of the beautiful, so that one was thus a true speech artist when one wanted to speak.

This is no longer the case when, for example, one has no feeling any more for differentiating between Gehen [to go] and Laufen [to run] in relation to language as such. Gehen: two e's—one walks thither without straining oneself thereby; e is always the feeling expression for the slight participation one has in one's own activity. If there is an au in the word, this participation is enhanced. From running (Laufen) comes panting (Schnaufen) which has the same vowel sound in it. With this one's insides come into tumult. There must be a sound there that intimates this modification of the inner being. But all this is indeed no longer there today; language has become abstract. It is like our onward-flowing thoughts themselves—for the whole middle region, and especially also for the western region of civilization.

It is possible to behold a picture, an imagination in every single word; and one can live in this picture as in something relatively objective. He who faced language in earlier times considered it as something objective into which the subjective was poured. He would as little not have regarded it so, as he would have lost sight of the fact that his coat is something objective, and is not grown together with his body as another skin.

As against this, the second stage of language takes the whole organism of language as another son' skin, whereas formerly language was much more loosely there, I should like to say, like a garment. I am speaking now of the stage of language in which speaking beautifully is no longer taken into first consideration, but rather speaking correctly. In this it is not a question of rhetoric and elocution, but of logic. With this stage, which has come up slowly since Aristotle's time, grammar itself became logical to the point that the logical forms were simply developed out of the grammatical forms—one abstracted the logical from the grammatical. Here all has swum together: thought and word. The sentence is that out of which one evolves the judgment. But the judgment is in truth so laid into the sentence that one no longer experiences it as inherently independent. Correct speaking, this has become the criterion.

Further, we see a new element in speaking arising, only used everywhere at the wrong point—carried over to a quite wrong domain. Beautiful speaking humanity owes to the Orient. Correct speaking lies in the middle region of civilization. And we must look to the West when seeking the third element.

But in the West it arises first of all quite corrupted. How does it arise? Well, in the first place, language has become abstract. That which is the word organism is already almost thought-organism. And this has gradually increased so much in the West, that there it would perhaps even be regarded as facetious to discuss such things. But, in a completely wrong domain, the advance already exists.

***

Humanism and pragmatism. The need for developing a true ethics of speaking.

You see, in America, just in the last third of the 19th century, a philosophical trend called “pragmatism” has appeared. In England it has been called “humanism.” James [Note 2] is its representative in America, Schiller [Note 3] in England. Then there are personalities who have already gone about extending these things somewhat. The merit of extending this concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense is due to Professor MacKenzie [Note 4] who was recently here.

To what do these endeavors lead?—I mean now, American pragmatism and English humanism. They arise from a complete skepticism about cognition: Truth is something that really doesn't exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them fundamentally in order to have guide-points in life. To speak about an “atom”—one cannot raise any particular ground of truth for it; but it is useful to take the atom theory as a basis in chemistry; thus we set up the atom concept! It is serviceable, it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in useful, life-serviceable concepts. “God,” if he exists or not, this is not the question. Truth, that is something or other which is of no concern to us. But it is hard to live pleasantly if one does not set up the concept of God; it is really good to live, if one lives as if there were a God. So, let us set it up, because it's a serviceable, useful concept for life. Whether the earth began according to the Kant-Laplace theory and will end according to the mechanical warmth theory, from the standpoint of truth, no human being knows anything about this—I am now just simply reporting—, but it is useful for our thinking to represent the beginning and end of the earth in this way. This is the pragmatic teaching of James, and also in essence,the humanistic teaching of Schiller. Finally, it is also not known at all whether the human being now, proceeding from the standpoint of truth, really has a soul. That could be discussed to the end of the world, whether there is a soul or not, but it is useful to assume a soul if one wants to comprehend all that the human being carries out in life.

Of course, everything that appears today in our civilization in one place spreads to other places. For such things which arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something more conceptual, that permits of being more easily seen through conceptually; and from this the “As If” philosophy originated: whether there is an atom or not is not the question; we consider the phenomena in such a way “as if” there was an atom. Whether the good can realize itself or not, cannot be decided; we consider life in such a way “as if” the good could realize itself. One could indeed quarrel to the end of the world about whether or not there is a God: but we consider life in such a way that we act “as if” there were a God. There you have the “As If” philosophy.

One pays little attention to these things because one imagines: there in America James sits with his pupils, there in England Schiller sits with his pupils; there is Vaihinger, who wrote the “As If” philosophy: there are a few owls who live in a kind of cloud-castle, and of what concern is it to other people!

Whoever has the ear for it, however, already hears the “As If” philosophy sounding everywhere today. Almost all human beings talk in the sense of the “As If” philosophy. The philosophers are only quite funny fellows. They always blab out what other people do unconsciously. If one is sufficiently unprejudiced for it, then one only seldom hears a human being today who still uses his words differently, in connection with his heart and with his whole soul, with his whole human being, who speaks differently than as though the matter were as he expresses it. One only does not usually have the ear to hear within the sound and the tone-color of the speaking that this “As If” lives in it,—that fundamentally people over the whole of civilization are seized by this “As If.”

Whereas things usually come to be corrupted at the end, here something shows itself to be corrupted at the beginning, something that in a higher sense must be developed for handling of speech in Anthroposophy, in the threefold order and so on. These things are so earnest, so important, that we really should speak specially about them. For it will be a question of elevating the triviality, “We need concepts because they are useful for life,” this triviality of a materialistic, utilitarian theory, of raising it up to the ethical, and perhaps through the ethical to the religious. For, if we want to work in the sense of Anthroposophy and the threefold order, we have before us the task of learning good speaking, in addition to the beautiful speaking and the correct speaking which we can acquire from history. We must maintain an ear for good speaking.

Until now, I have seen little sign that it has been noticed, when, in the course of my lectures I have called attention to this good speaking—I have done it very frequently. In referring to this good speaking I have always said that it is not only a question today that what is said be correct in the logical-abstract sense, but it is a matter of saying something in a certain connection or omitting it, not saying it in this connection. It is a question of developing a feeling that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its connection—that it can be either good in a certain connection or bad in a certain connection. Beyond rhetoric, beyond logic, we must learn a true ethics of speaking. We must know how we may allow ourselves things in a certain connection that would not be at all permitted in another connection.

Here I may now use an example close to hand, that could perhaps have already struck some of you who were present lately at the lectures: I spoke in a certain connection of the fact that, in reality, Goethe was not born at all. I said that Goethe for a long time endeavored to express himself through painting, through drawing, but that nothing came about from it. It then flowed over into his poetic works, and then again in the poetic works, as for example Iphigenia, or especially in Naturliche Tochter [“Daughters of Nature”], we have indeed poetic works not at all in the sentimental sense. People called these poems of Goethe's “marble smooth and marble cold,” because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had genuine capacities which really did not become human at all; he was actually not born.—You see, in that connection in which I spoke lately, one could quite certainly say it. But imagine, if someone were to represent it as a thesis in itself in the absolute sense! It would be not only illogical, it would be of course quite crazy.

To speak out of an awareness of a life connection is something different from finding the adequate or correct use of a word association for the thought and feeling involved. To let a pronouncement or the like arise at a particular place out of a living relationship, that is what leads over from beauty, from correctness, to the ethos of language—at which one feels, when a sentence is uttered, whether one may or may not say it in the whole context. But now, there is again an inward growing together, not with language, but with speaking. This is what I should like to call good speaking or had speaking; the third form. Aside from beautiful or ugly speaking, aside from correct or incorrect speaking, comes good or bad speaking, in the sense in which I have just presented it.

Today the view is still widespread that there can be sentences which one forms and which can then be spoken on any occasion, because they have absolute validity. In reality, for our life in the present, there are no longer such sentences. Every sentence that is possible in a certain connection, is today impossible in another connection. That means, we have entered upon an epoch of humanity's development in which we need to direct our view to this many-sidedness of living situations.

The Oriental who with his whole thinking lived within a small territory, also the Greek still, who with his spiritual life, with his rights life, with his economic life, lived on a small territory, poured something into his language that appears as a linguistic work of art must appear. How is it though in a work of art? It is such that a single finite object really appears infinite in a certain realm. In this way beauty was even defined, though one-sidedly, by Haeckel, Darwin and others: It is the appearance of the idea in a self-contained picture.—The first thing which I had to oppose in my Vienna lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics,” was that the beautiful is “the appearance of the idea in outer form.” I showed then that one must mean just the reverse: that the beautiful arises when one gives to form the appearance of the infinite.

And so it is with language, which in a certain way also acts as a limited territory—as a territory which encloses the possible meaning within boundaries. If that which is actually infinite in the inner soul- and spirit-life is to click into this language, it must there come to expression in beautiful form.

In correct speaking the language must be adequate; the sentence must fit the judgment, the concept, the word. The Romans were compelled to this, especially as their territory became ever larger and larger; their language transformed itself from the beautiful into the logical. Hence the custom has been retained, of conveying logic to people precisely in the Latin language. (You have indeed learned logic quite well by it.)

But we are now once again beyond this stage. Now, it is necessary that we learn to experience language with ethos—that, to a certain extent we gain a kind of morality of speaking in our lecturing, while we know that we have in a certain context to allow ourselves something or to deny ourselves something. There, things do not click-in, in the way I described earlier, but here we make use of the word to characterize. All defining ceases; here we use the word to characterize. The word is so handled that one really feels each word as something insufficient, every sentence as something insufficient, and has the urge to characterize that which one wishes to place before humanity from the most varied aspects—to go around the matter to a certain extent, and to characterize it from the most varied aspects.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes ever more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence; and what works among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into, so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the ear-lobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

I have often emphasized that this must be Anthroposophy's manner of presenting things. I have often emphasized that one should not indeed believe that one is able to find the adequate word, the adequate sentence; one can only conduct oneself as does a photographer who, in order to show a tree, takes at least four views.

Thus a conception that lives itself out in an abstract trivial philosophy such as pragmatism or humanism, must be raised up into the realm of the ethical. And then it must first of all live in the ethos of language. We must learn good speaking. That means that we must experience as regards speaking something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, moral philosophy.

After all, the matter has become quite clear in modern times. In the speaking of theosophists we have an archaism simply conditioned through the language—archaic, namely as regards the materialistic coloration of the last centuries: “physical body”—well, it is thick; “ether body”—it is thinner, more nebulous; “astral body”—once again thinner, but still only thinner; “I”—still thinner. Now, new members of the human being keep on coming up: they become even thinner. At last one no longer knows at all how one can reach this thinness, but in any case, it only becomes ever thinner and thinner. One does not escape the materialism. This is indeed also the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And it is always the hallmark that appears, when these things are to be spoken about, from theoretical speaking, to that which I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris, (I believe it was in 1906). A lady there who was a real rock-solid theosophist, wanted to express how well she liked particular lectures which had been given in the hall in which we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!” And one perceived from her that this was really thought of as something which one might sniff. Thus, the scents of the lectures which were left behind and which one could sniff out somehow, these were really meant.

We must learn to tear language away from adequacy. For it can be adequate only for the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual, in the sense of the present epoch of development of humanity, then we must free it. Freedom must then come into the handling of language. If one does not take these things abstractly, but livingly, then the first thing into which the philosophy of freedom [spiritual activity] must come is in speaking, in the handling of language. For this is necessary; otherwise the transition will not be found, for example, to the characterization of the free spiritual life.

Notes:

Note 1.Ernst Curtius, 1814–1896, archeologist and historian.

Note 2.William James. 1842–1910, American philosopher.

Note 3.F. C. S. Schiller. 1864–1937. Representative of pragmatism in England which he combined with humanism.

Note 4.S. MacKenzie, born 1860. Professor in Cardiff.