The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When, as we saw yesterday, man has reached the stage in the spiritual world in which he has, so to speak, transformed everything which he possessed in the form of capacities and talents acquired during his earthly life, then the time has come for him to prepare for a new incarnation. But we must realise that two things should be dealt with in that which comes towards us from the human being. One thing is that which reproduces itself in the course of physical heredity, and the other is that which the human being brings along into the world from his earlier lives on earth.

To-day we shall have to describe man's descent into the world, but you need not object to the word “descent”, for it is not a spatial descent, but a gradual process of development whereby man comes out of the world which is round about us and enters into the physical world.

Yesterday we saw that the spiritual world should not be sought in a “Beyond”, but that it is also round about us; modern man, however, is not able to perceive this spiritual world.

Out of this spiritual world develops that which we designate as a new embodiment. We saw that from his former life man retains an essence of his etheric and of his astral body, a survey of his experiences, and that he also took with him into the spiritual world that part of his astral body which he had been able to transmute, casting off the unrefined part.

It will be easier to form an idea of reincarnation if we bear in mind a few other things concerning the life after death. We saw that immediately after his physical death man lives for about three and a half days within his etheric body and that his past life rises up before him in these three and a half days like a kind of picture. The etheric body dissolves and then comes the Kamaloka time; this is the time of purification, in which the astrality still requiring purification is cleaned and purged.

But now I must mention another experience. When this memory picture arises immediately after death, man has a significant experience. He has the experience as if he suddenly grew in size, quickly breaking through his own surface and growing out into space. This feeling does not vanish until he is born again. Man feels that he is as large as the whole world to which he belongs, as large as the whole space of the universe. This will enable you to realise that man can look upon his body and experience it as something which does not belong to him, for he sees his passions as if they were outside his body. He has the strange feeling of being spread out over the whole universe.

Then comes something which is more difficult to understand. During the whole time of Kamaloka man feels as if he were really split up into space. You may understand this better if you bear in mind the following: During the time of Kamaloka, when man lives through his life backwards as far as his childhood, in the manner described, he passes through all his experiences as if they were reflected in a mirror. If he once slapped someone's face it is he who now feels the slap, for he feels that he is a part of the world once occupied by the other person. For example, if you died here in Kassel and the other person whom you slapped lives in Paris, then you feel as if one part of your being were in Paris. Thus you feel as if you were split up over, the whole world; parts of you live, so to speak, wherever you have to look for something. But you should understand this in such away that you cannot feel anything in the space between Kassel and Paris. If you thus bear in mind all the events of your life, you really feel split up into many many places during your passage through the period after death.

The following may serve you as a simile: A wasp. consists of two parts, a front and a back part, with a very thin connection. Now imagine that the back part were completely severed, but that the wasp nevertheless, drags it along with it. This is more or less the way in which you can picture to yourself what I have just described: You feel that you consist of single parts and that there is no connection between them. But when the human being enters Devachan, he once more feels as he did immediately after death, namely as if he filled up the whole space of the universe.

Now, when in Devachan man has transformed all his dispositions into talents and capacities, the Ego once more feels attracted towards the physical earth and endeavors to descend to the earth in a physical incarnation. First of all the Ego surrounds itself with an astral body. This process takes place through the fact that Ego attracts everything astral; the astral substance comes shooting towards it, as it were. It is just as if you were holding a magnet in front of iron filings; even as these filings are attracted in definite forms, so the Ego attracts the astral substance. But while passing through the soul and spirit realms the Ego has gained impressions through its experiences and all these form the fundamental forces which help to build up the new astral body. The new astral body thus takes along with it everything that the human being has experienced during his former life and in Kamaloka. All the impressions which he has had there, have a definite influence upon the way in which the new astral body enters into him.

The human being has now acquired an astral body; but he must also have the other members. The astral body has only been formed through its own forces of attraction. Before conception, man is enfolded only by this astral body. The seer therefore continually sees these astral germs of human beings waiting to be born—that is to say, waiting to be conceived. He sees them flying about with a tremendous speed; bell-like shapes move about. through space with enormous speed; distances play no part whatever; they move so rapidly that distances play no part at all.

Now comes the enfolding with an etheric body; but that a process in which the human being does not become enfolded with his own forces alone. His own forces, which lie in him, can no longer care for the etheric body; for that purpose, man needs the help, of certain spiritual Beings who must cooperate in this.

You may have an idea of these Beings if you bear in mind that you sometimes use words which you do not generally connect with any definite thought; for instance, the word Folk-spirit, Folk-soul. To-day we have no definite idea in connection with this word, but only something quite abstract. But the clairvoyant seer connects with it something quite different. There really are Beings of a higher nature, who exist even as we ourselves exist, but who never incarnate in the flesh, and these beings are the souls, or the souls of tribes and races. We do not use a vague expression when speaking of the Folk-soul: The Folk-soul is a real being, except that it does not possess a physical body, for its lowest member is the etheric body. Then the Folk-soul has an astral body, the Ego, Manas, Budhi, Atma, and a still higher member which man does not attain and which Christian Esoterisism calls the Holy Spirit, and which Theosophy generally designates as the Logos.

The clairvoyant seer may therefore address the Folk-Soul even as he addresses other human beings. To-day we have no real conception of such things and believe that this word designates characteristics of single nations. But this is not true—a reality is connected with it. The understanding for such things was necessarily lost through the materialistic conception, but it will be reached again. To-day men are inclined to dissolve such things into empty concepts. This had to come. For this same reason a book had to be published in our modern epoch which constitutes, so to speak, the very opposite of a theosophical conception. This book had to appear and has been greatly admired. It is Fritz Mauthner's “Kritik der Sprache” (The Critique of Language). Mauthner is a thinker who dissolves everything which lies beyond sensory things. Only a radical thinker who had been abandoned by every good spirit, could have the courage to write as Mauthner did, breaking with everything that is spiritual and real. In centuries to come, men will turn to this very book when they wish to know how people used to think at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Folk-Soul is a reality; it spreads out like a mass of fog, and in it are embedded all the etheric bodes of the individual human beings belonging to a definite nation and its forces stream into the etheric bodies of individual men.

Now there are spiritual beings having the rank of these Folk-souls, who cooperate in the building up of the etheric body of the new soul. These spiritual beings bring about the fact that the human being is led towards the nation which is most suited to him. The etheric body does not always fit quite perfectly; all the disharmonies which you often encounter in life often depend upon the fact that man is unable to build up his etheric body through his own forces. A complete harmony will only be reached upon a much later stage of development of the earth.

The enfolding with the etheric body takes place with great rapidity—a speed which you cannot conceive of if you compare it with physical conditions. Still higher spiritual beings then lead man towards the parents who are able to supply him with the substance which he needs for his physical body.

The modern materialist who sees that the son resembles his parents, will not be able to believe that something else is also connected with the body inherited from the parents. Of course, as regards our body we resemble our ancestors, but this does not contradict the facts explained above.

Let us observe a definite case—the family of Bach In the course of two hundred and fifty years, over 29 more or less significant musicians have come out of that family. Materialists will say: This clearly proves that there is such a thing as heredity!—In the same way the family Bernoulli produced eight mathematicians in a short time. How can we explain this? We can understand this best of all if we bear in mind hereditary conditions. As this is easier to grasp in the case of a musician lot us observe the family of Bach.

Let us suppose that a young Bach had lived in Rome during his former incarnation, that he had elaborated his dispositions and was ready to reincarnate. Supposing he had brought with him, as the result of his former incarnations, the greatest musical gifts; he could do nothing with these gifts if he were not able to find a well developed ear. Without such a well developed ear, he would be just as helpless as a great artist without an instrument. Necessarily such an individuality would have to incarnate in a body supplying a good organ for his dispositions. But the external form of the inner and outer organs is hereditary and if this individuality wished to become a musician, a well developed ear would be essential! Where can he most easily acquire such an organ? In a family of musicians. So he is led towards a family where he can find the best organ for his further development and the unfolding of the talents reposing in him. At that time, the best which could be found in that direction were the parents of Johann Sebastian Bach.

And how do matters stand with the brothers Bernoulli? Mathematical thought does not depend upon the structure of the brain (for mathematical logic does not differ from any other), but the mathematical gift is based upon the specially exact development in the structure of the three semicircular canals. This is an organ not larger that a pea, embedded in the middle of the ear and consisting of three semicircular canals, exactly corresponding to the three-dimensional space. If one canal lies exactly horizontally, then the second one stretches from right to left, and the third one from the front to the back.¹ They all face one another in an angle of 90 degrees The essential thing is therefore this exact position: The more exact the right angle is, the better does the organ function. If the organ is in any way injured, giddiness arises; you can no longer orientate yourself in space. The mathematical talent, that is to say, the possibility of using it, is based upon a specially fine elaboration of these canals. And this organ is inherited in the same way as, the musical ear.

The brain forms thoughts concerning space in exactly the same way in which it forms thoughts on philosophy. But the fact of having an understanding for the forms in space depends upon these three semicircular canals. Thus an individuality with highly developed mathematical gifts will incarnate in a family in which this organ has reached the most perfect development and this was the case in the family Bernoulli.

A suitable instrument is also needed in order to be morally efficient. An individuality with a high morality therefore seeks parents who promise to supply the best instrument for this purpose. The proverb, which is often used so superficially and trivially: “one cannot be too careful in the choice of one's parents”, is true in the deepest and most earnest sense, for a child chooses its own parents, so to speak.

Many people might object to this and ask: How can we explain mother-love, if that is so? For mother-love depends on the fact that the mother knows that the child is part of her own self. But viewed in the right light, mother-love does not suffer in any way—on the contrary, we learn to know it better.

Why is a child born to a certain mother? Because its spiritual qualities lead it to a mother who is spiritually related to it, and the child loves its mother even before it is conceived; mother-love is, as it were, the counter-part of this primary love and attraction. Consequently this insight even deepens the idea of mother-love.

Now the occasion for incarnate is essentially dependent on the qualities of father and mother; and there, father and mother work differently. When a human being descends to a new birth, the Ego, which possesses more volitional forces, feels more attracted by the father, and the more astral forces by the mother. The father has a greater influence upon the Ego, the will and character, and the mother has more influence upon the astral body—that is to say, more in the direction of thought. Of course, it is best of all if both parents are suited to the individuality seeking to incarnate.

When man descends, those forces are also active which were impressed upon him when he ascended to the spiritual worlds. All this develops forces of attraction and he is drawn into the sphere which was related to him from the very beginning. He is consequently led towards those human beings with whom he was already connected before.

Let me give you an example based on real fact. It once happened that a man was sentenced to death by a vehmgericht of four or five judges and executed. The former life of these six men was investigated through spiritual science and it appeared that they had formerly all been together on earth, but that the executed man had been their chieftain and that the others had been sentenced to death by him. The last execution was therefore a kind of atonement. This case in particular brings into clear evidence the law of Karma.

Thus the various forces which man attracted during his former life exercise a determining influence when he is born again, both in regard to the structure of his body and the place of birth, and in regard to his later destiny. Disharmonies appear in the physical body even more strongly than in the etheric body.

All these things show how man becomes enfolded by the three bodies when he is born again. And in every incarnation one Ego works upon the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. Later on we shall see how man ascends to this high degree of perfection, for he transforms the astral body and the etheric body more and more. Out of the purified astral body develops Manas, out of the purified etheric body Budhi, and out of the purified physical body Atma. We are therefore able to imagine the ever growing perfection of man from incarnation to incarnation.

This appears most beautifully in the Lord's Prayer. But we can only understand it in the right way if we grasp it in the truly Christian meaning, as it was grasped in the Occult School of St. Paul. In this School the Lord's Prayer was explained according to its true Christian meaning, and the pupils were told: Imagine the higher members of human nature, which develop, through the fact that man more and more refines his three lower members. Early Christianity used to look upon these three higher members (Manas, Budhi, Atma) as man's higher nature. By developing the three higher members more and more, man gradually approaches the Godhead. From this standpoint, the esoteric Christians of the past used to call the three highest members the Divine Nature, and they called the highest Atma, i.e. the Father. This is the deepest divine essence in man: the Father in Heaven.

The Father is the essence towards which all men develop. He is the centre of the world's creation. The creation in the Christian meaning, can be best imagined if we bear in mind the sacrifice. Think of your mirrored-image, and assume that you could be just as selfless as this mirrored image, to the point of being able to sacrifice your own life. This is how we must think of a selfless creative activity: We ourselves must become completely one with the created object.

Now imagine the Father as the centre of a reflecting hollow sphere: The Father's image will in that case be reflected a thousand-fold. The esoteric Christian of olden times said to himself: Look at the world: All the Beings in it are, after all, the reflected images of God. And in their esoterisism they used to call this reflection of the Godhead's own image “the Kingdom”, that is to say: God, reflecting Himself everywhere.

“Continue now to develop your feelings,” was the instruction given to the pupil of esoteric Christianity in olden times, “continue to develop, your feelings. and if you can perceive God in everything, if you have dissolved the Godhead in an infinite number of single objects, and if you wish to distinguish these objects you must give each a name. This name: must be sanctified, it must be hallowed, for every single creature is a mirrored image of' the Godhead.”

In the course of his development, aiming at the attainment of God, man enters into these three elements. But you must not think that man becomes God. Take a drop out of the ocean: In its essence it is akin to the ocean, but it is not the ocean. In the same way the drop of divine nature within us is akin to God, to be sure, but it is not “the Godhead.” By developing the three highest members more and more, man gradually becomes united with the Kingdom; for the spiritual world comes down to him.

Here you have the three first entreaties in the Lord's Prayer: the first place, the appeal to the Father; in the second place, the entreaty that the Kingdom should come to us; in the third place, the Hallowing of the Name.

If we develop those three highest members within us, we shall always endeavour to avoid acting in a way which is not in harmony with the Spirit of the Father, from Whom we descend and to Whom we go in our development.

In contrast to the three higher members esoteric Christianity then considers the four lower members of man which must also become more and more perfect.

The physical body consists of the same substances which are also to be found outside in Nature, and these substances continually go in and out of our physical body. Indeed, if the physical body is to remain healthy, they must continually go in and out.

The etheric body has forces which are inter-related with the whole Folk-soul, even as the physical body's forces are inter-related with the whole of Nature. If the physical body is to remain sound, physical substances must go in and out of it day by day. If the etheric body is to remain sound, it must not develop upon an individual basis, but enter into harmony with the whole Folk-soul and with all the higher Beings.

The word “trespasses” is connected with the word “debts.” Debts clearly show that you do not stand there isolated, but that you live within social connection with your fellow-men.

That which brings disorder into the astral body of man was considered in early Christian esotericism as something connected with man's inclinations, passions, impulses and desires. Everything which can bring disorder into these is expressed by the word “temptation”. “Trespasses” are something which brings man into connection with the social community, whereas “temptation” is something into which every man may fall, in so far as he is an individual being.

If physical substances did not go in and out of our physical body, this body would come into disorder. Hence, we pray: this day our daily bread.

If the etheric body did not enter into a harmonious relationship with the Folk-soul, that is to say, if it did not insert itself harmoniously into the whole social structure, this body too would come into disorder. Hence we pray: Forgive us our trespasses.

If man fell into the error of giving way to every temptation which approaches him, this would bring disorder into his astral body. Hence we pray: Lead us not into temptation.

The Ego can commit errors which we designate as “evil”. Everything which transforms a normal, sound self-consciousness
into to evil, that is to say, into selfishness, belongs to these errors of the Ego (which is our own Self). To these errors belong all the aberrations of selfishness and egoism. Hence we pray: Deliver us from evil.

The physical body can thus develop soundly if we nourish it in the right way with daily bread.

The etheric body can develop soundly, if we bring it into a right harmony with the social structure in which we live.

The astral body can develop soundly, that is to say, it can be purged and purified, if we overcome all temptations.

The Ego can develop soundly, if we endeavour to transform every form of egoism into altruism, every form of selfishness to selflessness. Thus we may see in the Lord's Prayer a prayer encompassing the whole development of man.

Someone might now object—and you will often come across this objection: The Lord' s Prayer is one that was given by Christ Jesus for every man. Of what use are explanations such as the above, since the majority of men knows nothing about them?

The naive' person need not know anything about them. Look at the rose. The greatest wisdom has built up the rose, and yet even the simplest man may rejoice in it! It is not necessary to know anything of the wisdom contained, in the rose. It is the same with the Lord' s prayer. A power goes out from it and influences the human soul, even if the soul in its simplicity does not know this . But the Lord's Prayer could never contain this force had it not been drawn out of the deepest wisdom. Every great prayer, such as this greatest of all prayers, has been drawn out of the deepest wisdom, and the power of such prayers is based upon this fact. If you think that this is simply a thought-out explanation, you will be wrong, for the Being Who gave us the Lord' s Prayer laid into it this deep power.

You may therefore see that only with the help of spiritual science can we understand that which we practice daily the power of which has been experienced by mankind for nearly two thousand years.

Now we have reached a stage in the development of humanity where it is no longer possible to proceed without such a deepening of our understanding. Formerly, that is to say, up to that moment, humanity was able to feel the spiritual forces contained in this prayer without knowing its deeper meaning. But now humanity has progressed so far in its development that it must ask after this meaning, and an answer has to be given now.

The Christian religion will not lose any of its value thereby, but it will, on the contrary, manifest itself in its whole depth. Religious truths will be gained anew through the greatest wisdom. The esoteric explanation of the Lord's Prayer is an example of this. (See Rudolf Steiner's booklet: The Lord's Prayer) It shows us the path which man must tread through many incarnations. If he walks in the spirit of the four petitions referring to the four lower members, they will help him to fulfil the work leading to the development of his higher members, as expressed in the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer.

• 1. In regard to the human head, and the directions “above, below”, “right and left”, “in front and at the back”, the organ as a whole stands like a cubus poised on its point.

It has often been explained that it is not as easy to investigate and describe the realm of the occult as is commonly thought. If one wishes to proceed conscientiously in this domain, one will feel it necessary to make repeatedly fresh investigations into important chapters of spiritual research. In recent months it has been my task, among many other things, to make new investigations into a subject of which we have often spoken here. New aspects emerge as a result of such investigations.

Today we shall deal again with the life between death and rebirth, although it can only be done in outline. This does not mean that what has previously been said has to be changed in any way. Precisely in connection with this chapter this is not the case, but in the study of super-sensible facts we should always consider them from as many points of view as possible. So today we will consider from a universal standpoint much of what has been presented in my books Theosophy or Occult Science more from the aspect of immediate human experience. The facts are the same, but we should not imagine that we are fully conversant with them when they have been described from one point of view only. Occult facts are such that we must move around them, so to speak, and examine them from every point of view. In regard to spiritual science the mistake is all too common that judgments are passed by people who may have heard a few statements about a subject without having had the patience to allow what can be said from other aspects to work upon them. Yet the truths of spiritual research can be understood by sound common sense, as was pointed out in yesterday's public lecture.

Today we shall not pay so much attention to the stage after death where the life in kamaloca begins, but rather consider the point at the end of kamaloca when life in the spiritual proper begins. This period lasts until the soul descends into a new incarnation and re-enters earthly life.

Something can be communicated about these matters because, as you know, clairvoyant vision brings one into the same realm in which a human being dwells between death and rebirth. In initiation one experiences, although in a different way, what takes place between death and rebirth. This accounts for the fact that one can communicate something about this realm.

To being with, I wish to mention two fundamental points of clairvoyant perception that also will help in our understanding of life after death. Attention has often been drawn to the great difference between life in the super-sensible world and life in the physical, material world. For instance, the process of knowledge is totally different in the super-sensible world from what it is on earth. In the physical world objects present themselves to our senses by making impressions of color and light upon our eyes, audible impressions upon our ears and other impressions upon other sense organs. To perceive objects we must move about in the world. To perceive an object at a distance, we must go towards it. Briefly, in the sense world we must move about to perceive things. The opposite holds true for super-sensible perceptions. The quieter the soul, the more everything in the way of inner movement is excluded, the less we strive to draw a thing towards us, the longer we are capable of waiting, the more surely will the perception come and the truer will be the experience we gain from it. In the super-sensible world we must allow things to approach us. That is an essential point. We must develop inner silence. Then things will come to us.

The second point I wish to make is this. The way in which the super-sensible world confronts us depends on what we bring with us from the ordinary sense world. This is important. It may give rise to considerable soul difficulties in the super-sensible world. For instance, it may be exceedingly painful to realize in the super-sensible world that we loved a person less than we ought to have done, less then he deserved to be loved by us. This fact stands before the spiritual gaze of one who has entered the super-sensible world with far greater intensity than could ever be the case in the physical world. In addition, something else may cause great pain to one with clairvoyant consciousness. None of the forces that we are able to draw from the super-sensible world can in any way change or improve a relationship of soul in the physical that we recognize as not having been right. It cannot be made good by forces drawn from the spiritual world. This experience is infinitely more painful than anything we may experience in the physical world. It gives rise to a feeling of powerlessness towards the necessity of karma that can be lived out only in the physical world. These two factors confront the pupil of occult science after only a little progress. They appear immediately in the life between death and rebirth. Suppose that shortly after death we meet a person who died before us. We encounter him, and we feel the total relationships that we had with him here on earth. We are together with the one who died before, at the same time or after us, and we feel that that is how we stood with him in life. That was our relationship to him. But whereas in the physical world when we realize that we have done an injustice to someone in feeling or in deed, we are able to make the necessary adjustment, we are not able to do so, directly, in the life after death. Clear insight into the nature of the relationship is there, but in spite of the full awareness that it ought to be different, we are incapable of changing anything. To begin with, things must remain as they are. The depression caused by many a reproach is due to the fact that one is clearly aware of the way in which a relationship was not right but it must be left as it is. Yet one feels all the time that it ought to be different. This mood of soul should be transposed to the whole of life after death. After death we realize all the more strongly what we did wrongly during our life on earth but we are incapable of changing anything. Things must take their course, regardless. We look back on what we have done and we must experience wholly the consequences of our actions, knowing full well that nothing can be altered.

It is not only with relationships to other human beings, but with the whole of our soul configuration after death, which depends on a number of factors. To begin with, let me portray life after death in the form of Imaginations. If we take the words “Visions” or “Imaginations” in the sense in which I explained them yesterday, no misunderstanding will arise. Man perceives the physical world through his sense organs. After death he lives in a world of visions, but these visions are mirror-images of reality. Just as here in the physical world we do not immediately perceive the inner nature of the rose, but the external redness, so do we not have a direct perception of a departed friend or brother, but encounter a visionary image. We are enveloped in the cloud of our visions, so to speak, but we know quite clearly that we are together with the other being. It is a real relationship, in fact more real than a relationship between one person and another can be on earth.

In the first period after death we perceive a soul through the image. Also after the kamaloca period the visions that surround us, and that we experience, point back, for the most part, to what we experienced on earth. We know, for instance, that a dead friend is there outside us in the spiritual world. We perceive him through our visions. We feel entirely at one with him. We know exactly how we are related to him. What we chiefly perceive, however, is what happened between us on earth. This, to begin with, clothes itself in our vision. The chief thing is the aftermath of our earthly relationship, just as even after the kamaloca period we live in the consequences of our earthly existence. The cloud of visions that envelops us is entirely dependent on how we spent our earthly existence.

In the first period of kamaloca the soul is clothed, as in a cloud, by its Imaginations. At first the cloud is dark. When some time has elapsed after death, Imaginative vision gradually perceives that this cloud begins to light up as if irradiated by the rays of the morning sun. When Inspiration is added to Imaginative cognition we realize that we live, to begin with, in the cloud of our earthly experiences. We are enveloped by them. We are able to relate ourselves only to those who have died and with whom we were together on the earth, or to those still on earth capable of ascending with their consciousness into the spiritual world. What we have characterized for Imaginative cognition as the illumination of the cloud of our visions from one side by a glimmering light points to the approach of the hierarchies into our own being. We now begin to live into the realm of higher spirituality. Previously, we were only connected to the world we brought with us. Now the life of the higher hierarchies begin to shine towards us, to penetrate us. But in order to understand this process, we must gain some insight into the relationships of size perceived through imaginative cognition as the soul draws out of the physical body.

This actually happens as we pass through the gate of death. Our being expands and becomes larger and larger. This is not an easy concept but that is what actually happens. It is only on earth that we consider ourselves limited within the boundary of our skin. After death we expand into the infinite spaces, growing ever larger. When we have reached the end of the kamaloca period, we literally extend to the orbit of the moon around the earth. In the language of occultism we become Moon dwellers. Our being has expanded to such an extent that its outer boundary coincides with the circle described by the moon around the earth. Today I cannot go into the relative positions of the planets. An explanation of what does not apparently agree with orthodox astronomy can be found in the Düsseldorf lectures, Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World: Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos.

Thus we grow farther out into cosmic space, into the whole planetary system, though first into what the occultist calls the Mercury sphere. That is to say, after the kamaloca period we become Mercury dwellers. We truly feel that we are inhabiting cosmic space. Just as during our physical existence we feel ourselves to be earth dwellers, so then we feel ourselves to be Mercury dwellers. I cannot describe the details now, but the following conscious experience is present. We are not now enclosed in such a small fraction of space as during our earthly existence but the wide sphere bounded by the orbit of Mercury is within our being. How we live through this period also depends upon how we have prepared ourselves on earth—on the forces we have imbibed on earth in order to grow into the right or wrong relationship to the Mercury sphere.

In order to understand these facts we can compare two or more people by means of occult research but we will take two. For instance, let us consider a man who passed through the gate of death with an immoral attitude and one who passed through the gate of death with a moral attitude of soul. A considerable difference is perceptible and it becomes apparent when we consider the relationship of one person to another after death. For the man with a moral attitude of soul, the pictures are present, enveloping the soul and he can have a certain degree of communion everywhere with other human beings. This is due to his moral attitude. A man with an immoral attitude of soul becomes a kind of hermit in the spiritual world. For example, he knows that another human being is also in the spiritual world. He knows that he is together with him but he is unable to emerge from the prison of his cloud of Imaginations and approach him. Morality makes us into social beings in the spiritual world, into beings who can have contact with others. Lack of morality makes us into hermits in the spiritual world and transports us into solitude. This is an important causal connection between death and rebirth.

This is true also of the further course of events. At a later period, after having passed through the Mercury sphere, which in the occult we call the Venus sphere, we feel ourselves as Venus dwellers. There between Mercury and Venus, where our cloud of visions is irradiated from without, the Beings of the higher hierarchies are able to approach the human being. Now again it depends on whether we have prepared ourselves in the right manner to be received as social spirits into the ranks of the hierarchies and to have communion with them, or whether we are compelled to pass them by as hermits. Whether we are social or lonely spirits depends upon still another factor. Whereas in the previous sphere was can be sociable only if this has been prepared on earth as a result of morality, in the Venus sphere the power that leads us into community, into a kind of social life, is due to our religious attitude on earth. We most certainly condemn ourselves to become hermits in the Venus sphere if we have failed to develop religious feelings during earthly life, feelings of union with the Infinite, with the Divine. Occult investigation observes that as a result of an atheistic tendency in the soul, of rejecting the connection of our finite with our infinite nature, the human being locks himself up within his own prison. It is a fact that the adherents of the Monistic Union, with its creed that does not promote a truly religious attitude, are preparing themselves for a condition in which they will no longer we able to form any Monistic Union, but will be relegated each to his own separate prison!

This is not meant to be a principle on which to base judgments. It is a fact that presents itself to occult observation as the consequence of a religious or irreligious attitude of soul during earthly life. Many different religions have been established on the earth in the course of evolution, all of them emanating essentially from a common source. Their founders have had to reckon with the temperament of the different peoples, with the climate and with other factors to which the religions had to be adjusted. It is therefore in the nature of things that souls did not come into this Venus sphere with a common religious consciousness, but with one born of their particular creed.

Definite feelings for the spiritual that are colored by this or that religious creed bring it about that in the Venus sphere a man has community only with those of like feelings who shared the same creed during earthly life. In the Venus sphere individuals are separated according to their particular creeds. On the earth they have hitherto been divided into races according to external characteristics. Although the configuration of groups in the Venus sphere corresponds in general to the groupings of people here on earth because racial connections are related to religious creeds, the groupings do not quite correspond because there they are brought together according to their understanding of a particular creed. As a result of experience connected with a particular creed, souls enclose themselves within certain boundaries. In the Mercury sphere a man has, above all, understanding for those with whom he was connected on earth. If he had a moral attitude of soul, he will have real intercourse in the Mercury sphere with those to whom he was related during his earthly life. In the Venus sphere he is taken up into one of the great religious communities to which he belonged during his earthly existence by virtue of his constitution of soul.

The next sphere is the Sun sphere in which we feel ourselves as Sun dwellers for a definite period between death and rebirth. During this period we learn to know the nature of the Sun, which is quite other than astronomy describes. Here again it is a question of living rightly into the Sun sphere. We now have the outstanding experience, and it arises in the soul like an elemental power, that all differentiations between human souls must cease. In the Mercury sphere we are more or less limited to the circle of those with whom we were related on earth. In the Venus sphere we feel at home with those who had similar religious experiences to ours on earth and we still find satisfaction only among these communities. But the soul is conscious of deep loneliness in the Sun sphere if it has no understanding for the souls entering this sphere, as is the case with Felix Balde, for instance. Now in ancient times conditions were such that in the Venus sphere souls were to be found in the provinces of the several religions, finding and giving understanding in them. Because all religions have sprung from a common source, when the human being entered the Sun sphere he had in him so much of the old common inheritance that he could come near to all the other souls in the Sun sphere and be together with them, to understand them, to be a social spirit among them.

In these more ancient periods of evolution souls could not do much of themselves to satisfy the longing that arose there. Because without human intervention a common human nucleus was present in mankind, it was possible for souls to have intercourse with others belonging to different creeds. In ancient Brahmanism, in the Chinese and other religions of the earth, there was so much of the common kernel of religion that souls in the Sun sphere found themselves in that primal home, the source of all religious life. This changed in the middle period of the earth. Connection with the primal source of the religions was lost and can only be found again through occult knowledge. So, in the present cycle of evolution man also must prepare himself for entering the Sun sphere while still on earth because community does not arise there of itself. This is also an aspect of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, of Christianity. Because of it human beings in the present cycle of evolution can so prepare themselves on earth that universal community is achieved in the Sun sphere. For this purpose the Sun Spirit, the Christ, had to come down to earth. Since His coming, it has been possible for souls on the earth to find the way to universal community in the Sun sphere between death and rebirth.

Much could be added in support of the universality that is born of the Christ Mystery when it is rightly understood. Much has been said in the course of years, but the Christ Mystery can ever and again be illuminated from new aspects. It is often said that special emphasis of the Christ Mystery creates prejudices against other creeds, and that is advanced because in our Anthroposophical Movement in Central Europe special emphasis has been laid on it. Such a reproach is quite unintelligible. The true meaning of the Christ Mystery has only been discovered from the occult aspect in modern times. If a Buddhist were to say, “You place Christianity above Buddhism because you attribute a special position to the Christ that is not indicated in my sacred books, and you are therefore prejudiced against Buddhism,” that would be as sensible as if the Buddhist were to claim that the Copernican view of the universe cannot be accepted because it, too, is not contained in his sacred writings. The fact that things are discovered at a later date has nothing to do with the equal justification of religious beliefs.

The Mystery of Golgotha is such that it cannot be regarded as a special privilege. It is a spiritual-scientific fact that can be acknowledged by every religious system just as the Copernican system can. It is not a question of justifying some creed that up until now has failed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, but rather is it a question of grasping the spiritual-scientific fact of Golgotha. If this is unintelligible, it is even more so to speak about an abstract comparison of all creeds and to say that one ought to accept an abstract similarity among them. The different creeds should not be compared with what Christianity has become as a creed, but with the essence that is contained in Christianity itself.

Take the Hindu creed. Nobody is received into this creed who is not a Hindu. It is connected with a people, and this is true of most ancient creeds. Buddhism has broken through this restriction, yet if rightly understood, it too applies to a particular community. But now let us consider the external facts. If in Europe we were to have a creed similar, let us say, to the Hindu creed, we should be obliged to swear allegiance to the ancient god, Wotan. Wotan was a national god, a god connected with a definite racial stock. But what has in fact happened in the West? It is not a national god that has been accepted, but, inasmuch as his external lie is concerned, an alien personality. Jesus of Nazareth has been accepted from outside. Whereas the other creeds essentially have something egoistical about them in the religious sense and do not wish to break through their boundaries, the West has been singled out by the fact that it has suppressed its egoistical religious system—for example, the ancient Wotan religion—and for the sake of its inner substance has accepted an impulse that did not grow out of its own flesh and blood. Insofar as the West is concerned, Christianity is not the egoistical creed that the others were for the different peoples. This is a factor of considerable importance that is also borne out by external happenings. It makes for the universality of Christianity in yet another respect if Christianity truly places the Mystery of Golgotha at the center of the evolution of humanity.

Christianity has not yet made great progress in its development because even now two aspects have still not been clearly distinguished. They will only be distinguished slowly and by degrees. Who, in the true sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, is a Christian? He is one who knows that something real happened in the Mystery of Golgotha, that the Sun Spirit lived in the Christ, that Christ poured His Being over the earth, that Christ died for all men. Although Paul declared that Christ died not only for the Jews but also for the heathen, these words even today are still little understood. Not until it is realized that Christ fulfilled the Deed of Golgotha for all human beings will Christianity be understood. For the real power that flowed from Golgotha is one thing, and the understanding of it is another. Knowledge of who the Christ really is should be striven for, but since the Mystery of Golgotha our attitude to every man can only be expressed as follows. Whatever your creed may be, Christ also died for you, and his significance for you is the same as for every other human being.

A true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha leads to the attitude that we ask ourselves about each person we meet, “How much has he in him of real Christianity, irrespective of his particular beliefs?” Because man must increasingly acquire consciousness of what is real in him to know something of the Mystery of Christ is naturally a lofty ideal. This will become more widespread as time goes on, and to it will belong the need to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But this is different from the concept that one may have of the Mystery of Golgotha, of its universality that holds good for all human beings. Here the essential thing is for the soul to feel that this makes us into social beings in the Sun sphere. If we feel enclosed in some creed, we become hermits there. We are social beings in the Sun sphere if we understand the universality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we can find a relation to every being who draws near to us in the Sun sphere. As a result of the insight into the Mystery of Golgotha that we acquire during earthly life within our cycle of evolution, we become beings able to move freely in the Sun sphere.

Of what should we be capable during this period between death and rebirth?

We come now to a fact that is exceedingly important for modern occultism. Those human beings who lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha—what I am now saying is essentially correct, though not in detail—found the Throne of Christ in the Sun sphere with the Christ upon it. They were able to recognize Him because the old legacy of the common source of all religions was still living in them. But the Christ Spirit came down from the Sun, and in the Mystery of Golgotha He flowed into the life of the earth. He left the Sun, and only the Akashic picture of the Christ is found in the Sun sphere between death and rebirth. The throne is not occupied by the real Christ. We must bring up from the earth the concept of our living connection with Christ in order that through the Akashic picture we have a living relationship with Him. Then it is possible for us to have the Christ also from the Sun sphere and for Him to stimulate all the forces in us that are necessary if we are to pass through the Sun sphere in the right way.

Our journey between death and rebirth progresses still further. From the earthly realm we have derived the power, through a moral and religious attitude of soul, to live, as it were, into the human beings with whom we were together on the earth, and then into the higher hierarchies. But this power gradually vanishes, becomes dimmer and dimmer, and what remains is essentially the power that we derive on the earth from the Mystery of Golgotha. In order that we may find our way in the Sun sphere a new Light-bearer appears there, a Being whom we must learn to know in his primal power. We bring with us from the earth an understanding of the Christ, but in order to develop a stage further so that we may proceed out into the universe from the Sun sphere to Mars, we need to recognize the second Throne that stands beside the Throne of Christ in the Sun. This is possible simply by virtue of the fact that we are human souls. From this other Throne we now learn to know the other Being who, together with the Christ, leads us onward. This other Being is Lucifer. We learn to know Lucifer, and through the powers that he is able to impart to us we make the further journey through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

We expand ever further into cosmic space, but as we move out beyond the Saturn sphere our state of consciousness is changed. We enter into a kind of cosmic twilight. We cannot call it cosmic sleep, but a cosmic twilight. Now for the first time the powers of the whole cosmos can work in upon us. They work from all sides, and we receive them into our being. So after we have expanded into the spheres, there is a period between death and rebirth when the forces of the whole cosmos stream into our being from all sides, from the whole of the starry realms, as it were. Then we begin to draw together again, pass through the different spheres down to the Venus sphere, contact and become ever smaller until the time comes when we can again unite with an earthly human germ.

What kind of a being are we when we unite with this germ? We are the being we have described, but we have received into us the forces from the whole cosmos. What we receive during the outward journey depends on the extent to which we have prepared ourselves for it, and our karma is formed according to the way we have lived together with the human beings we have met during life on earth. The forces by means of which an adjustment takes place in a new earth life are built up as a result of having been together with those human beings after death. That we appear as a human being, that we are inwardly able to have karma imbued with cosmic forces, depends on the fact that we received forces from the whole cosmos during a certain period between death and a new birth. At birth a being who has contracted to the minutest dimensions, but has drawn into itself the forces of the wide expanse of the whole cosmos unites itself with the physical human germ. We bear the whole cosmos within us when we incarnate again on earth. It may be said that we bear this cosmos within us in the way in which it can unite with the attitude that we, in accordance with our earlier earth existence, had brought with us in our souls on the outward journey when we were expanding into the spheres.

A twofold adaptation has to take place. We adapt to the whole cosmos and to our former karma. The fact that there is also an adaptation to former karma that must be harmonized in the cosmos came to me in an extraordinary way during the investigations of the last few months in connection with individual cases. I say, expressly, in individual cases because I do not wish to state thereby a general law. When a person passes through the gate of death he dies under a certain constellation of stars. This constellation is significant for his further life of soul because it remains there as an imprint. In his soul there remains the endeavor to enter into this same constellation at a new birth, to do justice once again to the forces received at the moment of death. It is an interesting point that if one works out the constellation at death and compares it with the constellation of the later birth, one finds that it coincides to a high degree with the constellation at the former death. It must be remembered that the person is born at another spot on the earth that corresponds with this constellation. In fact, he is adapted to the cosmos, members himself into the cosmos, and thus a balance is established in the soul between the individual and the cosmic life.

Kant once said very beautifully that there were two things that especially uplifted him—the starry heavens above him and the moral law within him. This is a beautiful expression in that it is confirmed by occultism. Both are the same—the starry heavens above us and what we bear as moral law within us. For as we grow out into cosmic space between death and a new birth, we take the starry heavens into ourselves, and then in the soul we bear as our moral attitude a mirror image of the starry heavens. Here we touch upon one of the points where anthroposophy can only develop into a feeling for the moral-universal. What appears to be theory is immediately transformed into moral impulses of the soul. Here the human being feels full responsibility towards his own being, for he realizes that between death and a new birth the whole cosmos worked into his being, and he gathered together what he derived from the cosmos. He is responsible to the whole cosmos, for he actually bears the whole of the cosmos within him.

An attempt has been made to express this feeling in a passage of The Soul's Probation, in the monologue of Capesius, where it is said, “In your thinking world-thoughts are weaving . . .” Attention is drawn to the significance for the soul when it feels that it is man's sacred duty to bring forth the forces that one has gathered out of the cosmos, and it is the greatest sin to allow these forces to lie fallow.

Concrete investigations showed that we take the whole cosmos into our being and bring it forth again in our earthly existence. Of the forces that man carries with him, only a few have their origin on the earth. We study man in connection with the forces that work in the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and in the ego. Of course, the forces that play into our physical body come to us from the earth, but we cannot draw directly out of the earth the forces we need for the etheric body. These forces can only approach us between death and rebirth during the period we are expanding into the planetary spheres. If one takes an immoral attitude of soul into these spheres, one will not be able to attract the right forces during the time between death and a new rebirth. A man who has not developed religious impulses cannot attract the right forces in the Venus sphere, and so the forces that are needed in the etheric may be stultified. Here we see the karmic connection that exists between later and earlier lives. This indicates how the knowledge that we obtain through occultism may become impulses in our life of soul and how the awareness of what we are can lead us to rise to an ever more spiritual life.

What was prepared for by the Mystery of Golgotha is necessary in our present cycle of evolution so that man may live in the right way into the Sun sphere between death and a new birth. Spiritual science has to achieve that the human being shall be in a position to grow out even beyond the Sun sphere with the universal-human, spiritually social consciousness that is needed there. Insofar as the Sun sphere itself is concerned, the connection that is experienced with the Mystery of Golgotha suffices. But in order to carry a feeling and understanding of the human-universal beyond the Sun sphere, we must be able to grasp, in the anthroposophical sense, the relation of the several religions to one another. We must grow beyond a narrowly circumscribed creed with its particular shades of feeling and understand every soul, irrespective of its belief. Above all, one thing connected with the Christ impulse is fulfilled between death and rebirth. It is contained in the words, “Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.” The gathering of two or three is not connected by Christ with this or that belief. The possibility of Him being among them is provided inasmuch as they are united in His Name.

What has been cultivated for years, through the performances of the Mystery Plays, and especially the last (The Guardian of the Threshold), should provide a spiritual-scientific understanding for what is essential in our epoch. On the one hand, we have to acquire a relationship to the Christ impulse, on the other, to the Powers that stand in opposition to Him—the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. We must realize that as soon as we emerge from Maya, we have to deal with Powers who unfold forces in the cosmos. The time is drawing ever nearer in the evolution of humanity when we must learn to discern the essential being rather than the teaching. This is nowhere so apparent as in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being is essential, not the mere content of the words.

I should like the following to be put quite exactly to the test. In fact, it is easiest to deal with people who put to the test what is said out of occult sources. There is nothing similar in any of the other creeds to the depths that are revealed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

A particular prejudice still prevails today. People speak as if things should happen in the world as they do in a school, as if everything depended on the World Teacher. But the Christ is not a World Teacher but a World Doer, One Who has fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, and Whose Being should be recognized. That is the point. How little it is a question of the mere words, of the mere doctrinal content, we learn from the beautiful words uttered by the Christ, “Ye are Gods!” (John 10:34). We learn this also from the fact that He indicated repeatedly that man attains the highest when he realizes the divine in his own nature. These words of the Christ resound into the world, “Be conscious that you are like the Gods!” One can say that that is a great teaching!

The same teaching, however, resounds from other sources. In the Bible, where the beginning of Earth evolution is described, Lucifer says, “Ye shall be as Gods!” The same doctrinal content is uttered by Lucifer and by the Christ, “Ye shall be as Gods!” but the two utterances mean the opposite for man. Indeed, shattering calls sound forth in these words uttered at one time by the Tempter and at another by Him Who is the Redeemer, the Savior and the Restorer of the being of man.

Between death and rebirth everything depends upon knowledge of the Being. In the Sun sphere the greatest danger is to take Lucifer for the Christ because both use the same language, as it were, give the same teaching, and from them both the same words resound forth. Everything depends on the Being. The fact that this Being or that Being is speaking—that is the point, not the doctrinal content because it is the real forces pulsing through the world that matter. In the higher worlds, and above all in what plays into the earthly spheres, we only understand the words aright when we know from which Being they proceed. We can never recognize the rank of a Being merely by the word, but only by knowledge of the whole connection in which a Being stands. The example of the words that men are like the Gods is an absolute confirmation of this.

These are significant facts of evolution. They are voiced not on account of their content—and in this case, too, not so much on this account—but on account of the spirit they carry, so that there may arise in souls feelings that ought to be the outcome of such words. If the feelings remain with those who have absorbed such truths, even if the actual words are forgotten, not so much is lost, after all. Let us take the more radical case. Suppose that there were someone among us who would forget everything that had just been said, but would only retain the feeling that can flow from such words. Such a person would, nevertheless, in an anthroposophical sense, receive enough of what is meant by them.

After all, we have to make use of words, and words sometimes appear theoretical. We must learn to look through the words to the essence and receive this into the soul. If anthroposophy is grasped in its essence, the world will learn to understand many things, particularly in connection with the evolution of humanity. Here I want to quote two examples that are connected outwardly, rather than inwardly, with my recent occult investigations. They astonished me because they showed how a truth which was established occultly corresponds to what has come into the world as a result of inspired men and can be rediscovered in what exists already in the world.

I have occupied myself a great deal with Homer. Lately the fact that nothing can be changed after death, that relationships remain the same, came vividly before my soul. For example, if in life one was in some way related to a person and did not love him, this cannot be changed. If, bearing this in mind, one now reads the passages in Homer where he describes the world beyond as a place where life becomes unchangeable, one begins to understand the depth of these words about the region where things are no longer subject to change. It is a wonderful experience to compare one's own knowledge with what was expressed as significant occult truth by the “blind Homer,” the seer, in this epic!

Another fact astounded me, and though I strongly resisted it because it seemed incredible, I found it impossible to do so. Many of you will know the Medici Tombs by Michelangelo in Florence, with the statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici and four allegorical figures. The artistic element in these figures is usually overlooked. They are viewed as barren allegories. Now these figures with one exception, were not quite finished, and yet they do not give the impression of being merely allegorical. In the guide books we are told that the statue of Giuliano stands on one side and that of Lorenzo on the other. Actually, they have been reversed. The statue said to represent Lorenzo is that of Giuliano, and that of Giuliano is the statue of Lorenzo. This is correct, but in almost every history of art manual and in Baedecker, the facts are wrongly given. The descriptions would certainly not tally and apparently the statues were once reversed. They no longer stand where Michelangelo had placed them originally. But I want to speak mainly about the four allegorical figures. At the foot of one of the Medici statues we have the figures of “Night” and “Day;” at the foot of the other, “Dawn” and “Dusk.”

As I have said, to begin with I resisted what I am now going to say about them. Let us start with the figures of “Night.” Suppose one immerses oneself in everything one sees, in every gesture (books comment rather nonsensically that this is a gesture that a sleeping person cannot possibly adopt.) If, having studied every gesture, every movement of the limbs, one asks oneself how an artist would have to portray the human figure if he wished to convey the greatest possible activity of the etheric body in sleep, then he would have to do it out of his artistic instincts exactly as Michelangelo did it in his figure. The figure of “Night” corresponds with the posture of the etheric body. I am not suggesting that Michelangelo was conscious of this. He simply did it.

Now let us look at the figure of “Day.” This is no barren allegory. Picture the lower members of the human being more passive, and the ego predominantly active. We have this expressed in the figure of “Day.” If we were now to express in the posture the action of the astral body working freely when the other members are reduced to inactivity, then we should find this in the so-called allegory of “Dawn.” And if sought to express the conditions where the physical body is not altogether falling to pieces, but becomes limp as a result of the withdrawal of the ego and astral body, this is wonderfully portrayed in the figure of “Dusk.” In these figures we have living portrayals of the four sheaths of man. We can readily understand the once widespread legend about the figure “Night.” It was said that when Michelangelo was alone with this figure it became alive, rose up and walked about. This is understandable if one knows that it has the posture of the etheric or life body, and that in such a position the etheric body can be fully active. If this is perceived, then indeed the figure appears to rise up, and one knows that it could walk about were it not carved out of marble. If the etheric body only were really active there, then nothing would prevent it from moving about.

Many secrets are contained in the works of men and much will become intelligible for the first time when these things are studied with sharpened occult perception. Whether, however, we understand a work of art well or not so well, is not connected with the universal-human. What matters is something quite else. If our eyes are sharpened in this way we begin to understand the soul of another human being, not through occult perception, which, after all, cannot help seeing into the spiritual world, but through a perception quickened by spiritual science. Spiritual science grasped by sound human reason develops knowledge in us of what we meet in life, and, above all, of the souls of our fellow men. We shall attempt to understand every human soul.

This understanding, however, is meant in quite a different way from the usual. Unfortunately, in life love is all too often entirely egotistical. Usually a man loves what he is particularly attracted to because of some circumstance or other. For the rest, he contents himself with universal love, a general love for humanity. But what is this? We should be able to understand every human soul. We will not find excellence everywhere, but no harm is done for actually one can do no greater injury to some souls than by pouring blind love and adulation over them.

We shall speak further on this subject in the lecture the day after tomorrow.

In a series of lectures I have been speaking about occult schools and their ramifications and I think it right today to bring this whole course of lectures to a close before we pass on to a different subject next time. A week from now I shall speak about the meaning of the days connected in the Church Calendar with the Christmas Festival—the less important New Year's Festival and the extremely important Feast of the Epiphany. The lecture today, therefore, will be more in the nature of a conclusion.

The question might be asked: What is the deeper significance of secret societies and of their aims in world-evolution? To such a question my answer would be that they have a real connection with the way in which beings in the world evolve and make progress.

As you know, different kinds of exercises are necessary for self-development, and such exercises are actually available. You have heard of Hatha-Yoga, Rajah-Yoga, and other exercises of different kinds, by means of which societies and brotherhoods connected with occult science have initiated their members. Somebody may say: All this, surely, could be attained without these secret societies. But I can tell you—and in the course of the lecture you will realise it—that the world cannot do without such societies. To put it bluntly, it is quite unjustifiable to speak in public in the style of the manifesto of the Freemasons which I read to you a fortnight ago. That is only one example. Men cannot reach what is usually known as immortality unless they are to some extent familiar with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of course, find their way out into the world along many channels. A great deal of occult knowledge exists in the various religions and all those who participate deeply and sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of immortality in the real sense. But to reach the knowledge of immortality in full consciousness, as a concretely real experience, to have the feeling that one belongs in very truth to the spiritual world—that is a very different matter. All of you have lived many times; but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through these many lives. This consciousness, however, will gradually arise and without it man's life is lived out with incomplete consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to inculcate into men a dim feeling of survival but to impart a clear, fully conscious knowledge of on-flowing life in the spiritual world.

There is a certain law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. It is this: Nothing that a human being does not himself accomplish for the attainment of this consciousness, contributes towards its development. There is a maxim—on the face of it rather perplexing—that whatever is achieved in the way of development of consciousness in the world does something to further the evolution of the consciousness of every single being, even if such a being has not actually worked at the development of his own consciousness.

And now try to think of an example of really objective human action.—An architect builds a house; he does not build this house for himself, but undertakes the task of building it for reasons which he believes to be entirely impersonal. You know well that the reasons are very seldom impersonal. There are many people who, to all appearances, are not working for themselves; and yet in reality are. A lawyer, for example, is to all intents and purposes working for his clients. Part of his work may well be selfless, but the real question is one of earning his living. Whatever men do in business merely for the sake of their own livelihood, to the extent that their business only serves that end, just so much is lost in the way of spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is performed without regard to self, that is connected with the interests of another, helps to intensify and to strengthen our consciousness in the future struggles for existence.—I hope that this is clear.

And now think of the Freemasons. When they were true to their original, fundamental principles, they gave this injunction to their members: The buildings you erect are to contribute nothing at all to your own means of subsistence. What has still survived of the good old Freemasonry takes the form nowadays of charitable institutions and foundations. And although the Lodges have lost their living roots in the ancient wisdom, and the occult knowledge once in their possession, these charitable institutions are evidences of a humanitarianism which, while it is empty of real substance, still persists and is cultivated as tradition. Selfless activity is, in very truth, something that has belonged to Freemasonry. Freemasonry did indeed urge its members to work in the service of humanity, to work in the world objectively and selflessly.

We are living now in the epoch of evolution that may be called the mineral epoch; and our task is to permeate this mineral world through and through with the spirit within us. Think of what this means.—You are building a house. You fetch the stones from a quarry and hew them into the shapes required by the building, and so on. What are you inculcating into this raw material obtained from the mineral kingdom? You are inculcating human spirit into the raw material. If you construct a machine, you have laid the spirit that is part of you, into that machine; the actual machine does, of course, perish and become dust; not a trace of it will survive. But what you have done, what you have achieved, passes into the very atoms and does not vanish without a trace. Every atom bears a trace of your spirit and will carry this trace with it. Whether an atom has at some time been in a machine, or has not been in a machine, is not a matter of indifference. The atom itself has undergone change as a result of having once been in a machine, and this change that you have wrought in the atom will never again be lost to it. Moreover, through your having changed the atom, through the fact that you have united the spirit in you with the mineral world, a permanent stamp has been made upon the general consciousness of mankind; just so much consciousness goes with you into the other world. Occult science well knows in what way the human being can perform selfless actions and how greatly his consciousness will be enhanced by them. Certain men, who have been deeply imbued with this knowledge, have been so selfless that they have taken steps to prevent even their names from going down to posterity! An example of this is the work entitled Theologica Deutsch. Nobody knows who wrote it. On the outside there are only the words: The man from Frankfurt. He, therefore, was one who took care that his very name should be unknown. He worked in such a way that he merely added something to the objective world without asking for honour or for the preservation of his name. And here let it be said that the Masters, as a rule, are not personages known in history; they sometimes are embodied in historical personalities—when it is necessary; but in a certain respect this is a sacrifice on their part. The level of their consciousness is incompatible with work for themselves, and preservation of a name does, after all, involve this. It is difficult thoroughly to understand this rule but it will now be clear to you why the aim of the Freemasons is to work in the world in such a way that their deeds are hidden in social organizations or charitable institutions. For selfless deeds are the real foundations of immortality. In the outer world we see the reflex of such deeds. They need not necessarily be of great account. If someone gives a coin to a poor man, this may be an unselfish deed; but only to the extent that it was absolutely selfless does it find its way to the sphere of immortality—and very few deeds are selfless to this degree. An act of charity may be extremely egoistical when, for instance, it gives rise to a comforting feeling. Charity very often springs from selfish motives. If a poor man living among us has no meat at Christmas and we feel bound to give him some in order that we may feel justified in eating our own Christmas dinner—that, after all, is egoism. In the Middle Ages it would have been impossible to say who had built many of the cathedrals or painted many of the pictures. It is only in our epoch of civilisation that people have begun to attach such value to the human name; in earlier epochs, more spiritual than our own, the individual name was of less importance. Spirituality in those days was directed to reality; whereas our epoch adheres to the delusion of thinking that what is a mere concern of the moment should be preserved.

I have said this in order to indicate the principle by which these secret societies were guided. The members of such societies were at pains to efface themselves altogether as personalities, and to allow what they did to produce its own effects. And this brings us to the heart of the matter. The fact that some particular thing is kept secret is of far less importance than that everyone should keep secret his own share in the work; thereby he secures for himself immortality. The rule is therefore clear and unambiguous: As much as you yourself lay into the world, that much consciousness the world will give back to you. The measure of what you yourself place into the world is the measure of the consciousness that the world will give back to you. This is connected with great and mighty laws of world-existence. Each one of you has a soul, each one of you has a spirit. This soul and [this] spirit are called upon to climb one day to the highest stages of perfection. But the soul and the spirit were already there before your physical body existed; they were present before your first physical incarnation. You existed in physical incarnation in the early Lemurian, Hyperborean and Polarian epochs. Before then, however, you were only beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were part of the world soul; as beings of pure spirit you were part of the universal world spirit. The world spirit and the world soul spread out around you then as nature spreads out around you today. Just as the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are around you now, so were the worlds of soul and of spirit once around you. And what was then outside you, is now your soul; you have taken into yourselves, made inward, what to begin with was outside and around you. What is now your innermost being was once part of an external world. This has become your soul. The spirit, too, once spread out around you. And what is now around you will become your inner life. You will take into yourselves what is now the mineral kingdom and it will become part of your inner being; similarly the plant kingdom. What surrounds you in nature will become your inner being.

You will understand now how this is connected with the first example given. You build a church for others, not for yourself. You can in very truth take into yourselves a world of majesty, beauty and splendour if you experience this world as such. To do something for the higher self does not partake of egoism because it is not done only for the self; the higher self will be united with all the others, so that what is done for the higher self is at the same time done for all.—This is the truth that was known to the Freemasons. When the Freemason was working with his fellow-builders, he knew: In future times the mineral world will be spiritualized; to build means nothing else than to spiritualize the mineral world. He knew that the edifice would one day become the content of his soul.

God once gave us the nature that surrounds us in the kingdoms of the minerals, plants and animals. We take nature into ourselves. That nature exists is none of our doing; all we can do is to make nature part of our own being. But what we ourselves prepare and make ready in the world—that is what will constitute our future existence.

We actually see the mineral world, as such; what we do with the mineral world, that we shall ourselves become in future times. What we do with the plant world, with the animal world and with men, that too, we shall surely become. If you found a charitable institution or have contributed something to its foundation, what you have contributed will become an integral part of you. If a man does nothing with what he can in this way [to] draw into his soul from outside, then his soul remains empty. It must therefore be possible for mankind to spiritualise—as far as this can be achieved—the four kingdoms of nature, of which man is one. To bring spirit into the whole external world—that has been the task of the secret societies of every age.

It will not be difficult for you to understand the following—Think of a child who is learning to read and write. To begin with, all the accessories are around him; the teacher is there, the books are there, and so forth, but nothing is yet within the child. Work continues until what was once outside the child has been instilled into him and he is able to read. And so too is it with nature. In times to come we shall have within us what is now spread out around us. As souls we spring from the world soul and when this world soul was around us we drew it into ourselves. So too the spirit; and so too it will be with nature. We take nature into ourselves from outside and nature will be within us as a power. That is the great thought at the basis of these secret societies.

All progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution is the in-taking, evolution the yield, the out-giving. All states and conditions of world-existence alternate between these two processes. When you see, hear, smell or taste, you breathe nature into yourselves. The act of sight does not pass away without leaving a trace behind. The eye itself perishes, the object seen—that too perishes; but what you have experienced in the act of sight, remains. It will not be difficult for you to realise that in certain epochs it is necessary to make such things understood. We are going forward to an age when, as I indicated recently, men will understand what the atom is, in reality. It will be realised—by the public mind too—that the atom is nothing but coagulated electricity.—The thought itself is composed of the same substance. Before the end of the fifth epoch of culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When the similarity of substance between the thought and the atom is once comprehended, the way to get hold of the forces contained in the atom will soon be discovered and then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working.—A man standing here, let us say, will be able by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to explode some object at a great distance—say in Hamburg! Just as by setting up a wave-movement here and causing it to take a particular form at some other place, wireless telegraphy is possible, so what I have just indicated will be within man's power when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of the same substance is put into practical application.

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not, by then, reached selflessness. The attainment of selflessness alone will enable humanity to be kept from the brink of destruction. The downfall of our present epoch will be caused by lack of morality. The Lemurian epoch was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; our epoch and its civilisation will be destroyed by the War of All against All, by evil. Human beings will destroy each other in mutual strife. And the terrible thing—more desperately tragic than other catastrophes—will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will make good and thus insure their survival in the sixth epoch of civilisation. This tiny handful will have attained selflessness. The others will develop every imaginable skill and subtlety in the manipulation and use of the physical forces of nature, but without the essential degree of selflessness.

In the seventh epoch of civilisation, this War of All against All will break out in the most terrible form. Great and mighty forces will be let loose by the discoveries, turning the whole earth-globe into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass. In a way that cannot be discussed, the tiny handful will be protected and preserved.

And now you will be able to picture, more clearly than was possible when I spoke of the things before, why the “good and proper form” as it has been called, must be sought, and in what sense Freemasonry was aware of its duty to build an edifice dedicated to selfless ends. It is easier to become one of the tiny handful of men who ensure for themselves a place in the life of the future by using the good old forms than by having to struggle out of chaos. People nowadays may be inclined to jeer at “empty forms,” as they say ... but those forms have nevertheless a deep meaning and purpose; they are in line with the structure of our period of evolution, and when all is said and done they are connected with necessary stages in the development of human nature and of the human soul. Just think of it. We are living in the fifth period of the fifth great epoch; we have still to live through two more periods of this great epoch. Then will follow the seven periods of the sixth great epoch and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch. This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has still to climb these sixteen stages. A man who can experience something of the conditions of existence there possible, is to a certain degree initiated. There is a correspondence between the degrees of initiation and the secret of the epochs still to come. In the life of our planet there are seven great epochs, and each of these seven has seven sub-periods—forty-nine conditions, therefore, in all.

Thus there are definite stages for the investigation of the secrets of future phases of evolution. The high Degrees of Freemasonry originally had no other aim or purpose than to be an expression, each one of them, of a future stage of the evolution of humanity. Thus we have in Freemasonry something that has been both good and beautiful. A man who attained one Degree knew how he must work his way into the future; he could be a kind of pioneer. He knew too that one who reaches a higher Degree can accomplish greater things. This arrangement according to Degrees can well be made, for it corresponds with the facts. If, therefore, it were possible to inculcate a new content together with a new knowledge into these forms, much good would accrue, for Freemasonry would then be imbued with real spirit once again. Content and form, however belong to the whole. The state of affairs today is that the Degrees are there but nobody has worked through them in the real sense! In spite of this, however, they are not there without a purpose.

The fifth epoch of culture is a purely intellectual age, an age of egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree and it is the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards through intellect to spirituality before we can picture the spirituality that was once actively at work.

The essential secret, therefore, is this: The human being must know how to keep silence about the paths along which his “ I ” unfolds, and to regard his deeds, not his personal “ I ” as the criterion. The real heart of the secret lies in his deeds and in the overcoming of the “ I ” through deed. The “ I ” must remain concealed, within the deed! Elimination of the interests of the personal “ I ” from the on-streaming flow of human karma—this belongs to the First Degree. Whatever individual karma the “ I ” incurs in the process, is thereby wiped out. Nation, race, sex, position, religion ... all these work upon human egoism. Only when man has overcome them will he be free of egoism. The astral body of every nation, every race, every epoch, has a definite colour ... You will always find a colour which is fundamental in the astral body of a human being who is [a] member of one of these classifications. This specific colour must be eliminated. Anthroposophical spiritual science works to level out the colours of the astral bodies of its adherents. They must be of like colour—alike, that is to say, in respect of the basic colour. This basic colour gives rise to a certain substance called Kundalini which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit. This leveling-out process will bring war and bloodshed in its train—war in the shape of economic strife among nations, pressure for expansion, suppression in every form, strife in the sphere of investment and profit, industrial undertakings, and so forth. And by adopting certain measures it will increasingly be possible to handle vast masses of people by sheer force; the individual will acquire greater and greater power over certain masses of the people. For the course of evolution is leading, not towards greater democracy, but towards oligarchy of the brutal kind, in that the power of the single individual will immeasurably increase. If morals are not ennobled, this will lead to brutality in every possible form. This state of things will come, just as the great water-catastrophe came to the Atlanteans.

To-day we will go rather further in outlining the connections we have tried to understand in the course of our recent studies.

The present time, with its many diverse currents, spiritual and material, is extremely difficult to understand; and the effort ends only in perplexity unless we make up our minds to recognise the causes as lying far, far back in the womb of history. Let us look back, as students of Spiritual Science, at the so-called fourth post-Atlantean period.

This begins, as we know, somewhere about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golotha, and closes with the beginning of the fifteenth century, about 1413 A.D. (The figures are of course to be taken approximately, as always in matters of this kind.) Within this period, as we observe it, we can perceive certain forces, connected with and related to each other, but differing fundamentally from all others working in previous and subsequent epochs. This period, in which the development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in man's being took place, can be divided into three smaller ones: the first, between the year 747 B.C. (which is the real date of the founding of Rome), ends about 27 B.C.; the second runs from 27 B.C. until about the end of the 7th century; (693 A.D.); the third and last from 693 to 1413 A.D. Since this date, since about 1413, we have the time which brings forth, in its own characteristic way, soul-forces already known to you to some extent. Just as this fourth Post-Atlantean epoch can be clearly distinguished from the three preceding ones (the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egypto-Chaldean) and must also be sharply distinguished from what followed it and what is still to come, so within it the growth is marked by noticeable moments, if we consider its progress through these three shorter periods.

From 747 to 27 B.C. the peoples inhabiting the countries around the Mediterranean come chiefly into prominence. We see a distinct form of soul-life developing among them. History hardly mentions it, because history has no neans of creating the ideas and conceptions which would fit it to deal with the really characteristic features. This epoch, which I have marked off, can be characterised by saying that it is the time when, for inner reasons of human evolution as a whole, the souls of men emancipate themselves from their connection with the universal Spiritual world. If we look back into Egyptian and Chaldean times, during the epoch of the Sentient-soul, we find in human consciousness a decided sense of kinship of the soul with the Cosmos. The Sentient-Soul in man's nature was then able to perceive that man is a member of the whole cosnos. We cannot rightly estimate what is characteristic of the Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian stages, unless we take into account the fact that man at that time actually experienced a feeling of kinship with the spiritual Cosmos. Just as the fingers on our hand feel themselves part of us, as it were, so the Egyptian or Chaldean felt himself to be a member of the spiritual Cosmos. A crisis, a veritable catastrophe, overtook mankind in the 8th century before Christ, and in respect of this feeling of kinship with the Cosmos human souls had owed their former feeling of belonging to the Cosmos to the atavistic, dream-like clairvoyance. They did not perceive as we do to-day. In the act of sense-perception they also perceived what profane science ignorantly calls “Animism”—the spiritual, the divine; and through this they felt themselves as belonging to the Spirit of the universe.

This relationship disappeared. The consequences were, on the one hand, numerous phenomena of decadence, but on the other, the whole marvellous culture of Greece, whose civilisation was founded on what man experiences when, as man, he begins to stand alone in the universe. We owe this civilisation to the fact that man no longer felt himself a member of the cosmos, but a totality as man, a being complete in himself. He had in a sense taken his own place in the cosmos, had begun to live a life of his own. If Greek civilisation had retained the soul-constitution for instance, of the Ancient Indian period, with its feeling of connection with the cosmos, it is impossible to imagine that this beautiful Greek civilisation could ever have arisen. All the splendour and glory displayed by Greek civilisation, unequalled elsewhere, developed in the time between the eighth and the first centuries before Christ. Humanity had withdrawn into the citadel of the soul, of the human soul in the true sense. This was the time when humanity began to move towards the Mystery of Golgotha. We must not forget that there is always something in the Mystery of Golgotha which cannot entirely dawn on human understending, even super-sensible understanding. There will always be something unconprehended. It is beyond the power of human conceptions, human feelings, human experiences, fully to grasp what was achieved by the entrance of the Christ into earthly evolution. Therefore the Mystery had, in a sense, so to take place that while it was in progress, human civilisation was not ready fully to share in it; it had to tale its course separately, side by side with ordinary human experience. That is fairly evident, even from history. How much did human civilisation around the Mediterranean notice of what happened in the far-off Jewish province of Palestine, with regard to Christ Jesus? How little did it enter into the consciousness of civilised humanity, even that of Tacitus, who was writing only a century after the Mystery of Golgotha!

On the one hand we have the current of human civilisation, and on the other the stream which brought with it the Mystery of Golgotha: the two run their course side by side. This could happen only because man, civilised man, at the time of the Divine Event, was severed from the Divine, was living a life which had no direct connection with the Spiritual. Thus on the earth itself there took place a spiritual event, which went its way side by side with human civilisation. Such a juxtaposition of outer civilisation with a Mystery-Event is unthinkable in any earlier period. It never had happened before, because in earlier times human civilisation knew and recognised itself as being in connection with happenings in the realm of the Divine-Spiritual. It is very distinctive, very rremarkable, that the secular culture which ran parallel with the Mystery of Golotha was remote from it; man had severed himself from it.

In the second period, which lasted from about 27 B.C. to 693 A.D., mid-European civilisation was not of a kind to enable secular culture to come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This may sound very strange, considering that Christianity had made itself at home in this secular culture and had spread over the civilisation of mid-Europe; but its expansion took place in the way I have described. The Mystery of Golgotha was isolated, was alone. Certainly, it was accepted as outer dogma to this extent: Christ had come, had called Apostles, had accomplished this or that for humanity, had said this or that about man's relation to the Divine. All this was readily accepted in its outer application by secular culture, but this outer recognition does not alter the fact that in reality all those who accepted Christianity in these early centuries were far removed from an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the help of the Gnosis, or of all that had been carried over as treasures of wisdom from the ancient pagan world, they might have come near to facing the question: “What really happened in the Mystery of Golgotha?” They did not do so. They declared everything heresy which might have led to an understanding of it, and tried to accomplish the impossible, to put into trivial forms what never could be confined within such forms, what could be the object only of wisdom's highest aspiration—the Mystery of Golgotha.

Hence the organisations fostered during the early centuries of Christianity were not such as to help people to unite theyeselves with the Mystery; their effect was to encourage in the human soul something very remote from a genuine inner feeling of understanding and partaking in it. The “Church” was an organization rather for the non-understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who follows up what the various councils, and more especially the intrigues of the Church, strove to accomplish, will find that all thse efforts went towards getting certain dogmatic ideas accepted, and towards inducing people co think of everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as law in no real relationship to the life of the human soul. All this led up to a certain point, which can be described, somewhat radically, in the following way. Men tried to accommodate themselves, here on earth, to certain ideas concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and its effects; but the most important thing was not the extent to which they could come to know about it and to absorb it into their souls. It was that they should be able to adopt this belief: “We grasp the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished on its own account, independently of us, and Christ will take care that we are saved!” This tendency gained ground until the reality of spiritual events was relegated to a region quite outside the soul; sacred, spiritual events were not to be thought of as connected with what took place in any human breast; the two were to be as widely separated as possible. Within, this tendency lay the germ of a purpose—unexpressed of course, but active subconsciously—which emerged clearly for the first time at the Council of Constantinople in 869. The aim was to keep the human spirit away from any individual, personal concern with the spiritual, (which was restricted to the Mystery of Golgotha), and therefore from any inclination to understand the Mystery in terms of personal experience. It was to remain incomprehensible. So the Church was able to include more and more people of a purely secular frame of mind, who came to believe that the super-sensible was beyond the range of the human soul, and that human thinking should confine itself to the objects and activities of the physical world. No forces were to be developed out of the human soul which could lead to an independent understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. In certain decrees of this eighth Council of Constantinople it is clearly stated that European humanity might not—because the forces of the human soul were not equal to it—reflect on the realm wherein the life appertaining to the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course.

In this middle period of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, lasting from 27 B.C. until 693 A.D. something was accomplished which may be described as the confirming of humanity in the belief that all human knowledge and experience is adapted, only for the palpable “this life”; the impalpable, supersensible realm the “beyond” as it is called, must be always withdrawn from their ken, inaccessible to direct perception. The entire history of those centuries can be understood only by keeping this cardinal fact in mind: The whole policy of the Catholic Church was directed to bringing men to the belief: “The soul can know only the things of this life; as regards the super-sensible, thou must approach this in a way which has nothing to do with thy intelligence or personal knowledge”. The effect of this was that after the close of this epoch, in the eighth and ninth centuries, a sort of obscurity descended on European humanity as regards the connection of the human soul with the super-sensible. And certain later phenomena, among which that of Bernard of Clairvaux is typical, can be explained only by the fact that such men remained in a sense beyond the physical, in “the other world”, their souls absorbed in what is inaccessible to rational human understanding. This enthusiasm for something which undoubtedly lies beyond all human comprehension must be seen in the entire disposition of soul in a Bernard of Clairvaux, if he is to be understood. In his personality we find many traits which are great and powerful in the it effects, for what is capable of a more or less distorted activity is equally capable of a beautiful, great and glorious one. Bernard had characteristics which clearly show him to be a product of that disposition of soul which developed in Western civilisation in the way I have described, during these particular centuries. Many other men resembled him; he is just a typical figure—as, for instance, when he spoke to his followers (who were very numerous) of all that would be bestowed on humanity by the “Crusade” he contemplated. Then came the failure of the whole attempt. How did this devout man speak of the failure? Somewhat this way: If everything, everything goes wrong, may the blame be on me alone, not on the Divine, which must be always right. Even when such a man was convinced of his connection with what he conceived of as the Divine-Spiritual power behind events, he separated the one from the other and said: “Lay the sin at my door: Providence is something that takes its own course in a realm beyond and apart from that of the human soul.

So, at the beginning of the third period of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, something akin to a darkening descended on humanity—best expressed by saying; that man's horizon no longer extended to the idea of a connection with spiritual currents and impulses. In philosophy of the centuries between the eighth and 15th one finds always the same aim—to prove that human ideas and concept should in no case attempt to grasp the course of spiritual reality, that spiritual reality can only be, and must be, a matter of Revelation, left to the teaching office of the church.—this was reduced to a convenient formula!

Thus had the power of the Church been built up. This power of the Church did not derive purely from theological impulse, but from the fact that man was banished to the physical life of the senses as regards the use of his own forces of knowledge and mental powers, and was not allowed to think of a knowledge of the super-sensible. Hence arose a conception of belief which was not in existence in the early centuries (although it is sometimes antedated), but developed later. It took this form: “Concerning the Divine-Spiritual only faith is possible—not knowledge.” This division between the “truth of Faith” and the “truth of knowledge” was actually made against certain significant historical backgrounds, which should be studied in connection with the things I have indicated.

We have been living since the 15th century, approximately since 1413 A.D., during a period (this will become evident in the third millennium), in which we are concerned in part with the heritage of all that has happened under such influence as I have described. On the one hand stand of the legacies from those days; on the other we have to deal with something coming to view in this, the fifth post-Atlantean period—something entirely new. In the fourth period, when we look back at it, we see that there was then a kind of severance of the human soul from the Divine-Spiritual, a banishment to purely external physical sense-transactions. That was the new thing in the fourth period. It did not exist in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already pointed out. We now have to deal with an analogous novelty in our own epoch, and humanity's task,—having entered on an age in which self-consciousness must play an ever greater and greater part—is to distinguish between what is a legacy from time past, and what is newly added to it from our own time. Let us first look at the inheritance, legacy.

We have seen that it consists in man having been constrained to develop his soul-life apart from the super-sensible. Moreover there is another result of this, the more clearly to be seen the closer the events of history are surveyed; indeed, a searching review shows the facts to be unquestionable, admitting of no doubt whatsoever. This fact is that man, confining his soul-force to the sense-perceptible, was willing to be severed from the super-sensible, and finally—since the 15th century—arrived at rejecting the super-sensible altogether. The eighth Council of Constantinople in 869, is characterized by the wish to keep man and a super sensible apart; and from this separation, sponsored deliberately by the Church, spraying the rejection of the super-sensible—the believe arose that the super-sensible might be only a matter of imagination and have no reality. If one investigates the Genesis of modern materialism from an historical, psychological point of view, the Church must be held responsible for it. Of course the Church is only the outer expression of deeper forces working in man's evolution, but to notice how one thing arises from another enables one to understand the course of events. In the fourth post-Atlantean age, the orthodox man would say: “The human faculty of knowledge is adapted only for understanding what is connected with the realm of the senses. The super-sensible must be left to revelation, which may not be contested; to speak against revelation is heresy and can lead only to delusion.”

The modern Marxist, a modern Social Democrat, true scion of this view—which is nothing but the consequence of the Catholicism of earlier centuries—says: “All knowledge worthy of the name is concerned only with sense-perceptible, physical events; there is no ‘Spiritual Science’ because there is no such thing as spirit. ‘Spiritual’ Science is, at best, Social Science, the science of human communities”. Of course this tendency has come to fruition differently in various parts of the civilized world, but the differences are no more than nuances.

Hence, from the ninth century onwards, in the central and western countries of Europe, it becomes necessary to ensure that human soul-life should occupy itself with the super-sensible by “believing” in it, but should know of it only through revelation. The races and peoples of Central Europe were such that they had to be handled carefully; they could not be treated in the same simple way. To say to people: “Your human capacities are limited to eating and drinking and things of the outer world; the super-sensible is beyond you”—that could not be done in Western Europe; but it was done in Eastern Europe, and that is the reason for the cleavage between the Eastern and Western Churches. In Eastern Europe, people really were confined to the sense-world; that was where their capacities had to unfold. That which finally led to the Orthodox religion was to be developed in the Heights of Mystery-experience, quite untouched by anything to do with the senses. What man brought forth out of his human nature was set sharply apart from the true spiritual world, which lived only in the ritual that hovered loftily above mankind.

What was it that had to develop there? In varying shades, the point of view, the perception, better reality belonged only to the physical world of the senses. One might say that forces towards which man adopts an attitude of repression, do not develop, but atrophy. If, then, humanity was restrained for centuries from spiritually grasping the super-sensible, the power of doing so was bound in the end to disappear completely. It is what we find in the modern socialistic views of life, whose misfortune consists—not in their Socialism!—but in the fact that they entirely reject the spiritual-super-sensible, and are therefore obliged to confine themselves to a social structure which takes account only of the animal side of man's nature. This was prepared for by the paralyzing of man's super-sensible forces; hence it follows that men are driven into saying: “Care for our salvation shall not in any way make us unite our soul's knowledge experience with the stream that lives a life on its own—The stream which includes the Mystery of Golgotha”.—With what is this connected?

With the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Luciferic forces were especially active. They severed man from the cosmos, because their aim is invariably to isolate man in selfishness, to cut him off from the whole spiritual universe, as well as from the knowledge of his connection to the physical one. Hence, when this severance was at its height, there were no natural sciences. This was Lucifer's doing. The activity which separated sense-knowledge from dogma regarding the super-sensible, was therefore a Luciferic one. Over against it stands the Ahrimanic influence; and these two are the great adversaries of the human soul. The fact that the super-sensible forces of humanity have been allowed to atrophy—leading to a purely animal form of Socialism, now due to break over humanity in a devastating and destructive way—is to be traced to Luciferic forces. The new influence, developing in our age, is of a different nature, more Ahrimanic. The Luciferic element would isolate man, cut him off from the spiritual-super-sensible, and lead him to experience the illusion of being a totality in himself. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic element inspires man with fear of the spiritual, keeps him away from it, fosters in him the illusion that the spiritual cannot be attained by mankind. The Luciferic keeping away of man from the super-sensible might be described as of a more educational, cultured kind, whereas the Ahrimanic, founded on fear of the spiritual, is more ‘natural,’ arising in the age which began with 15th century. And as the Luciferic severance from the spiritual came especially to expression under the cover of Orthodox Christianity of the East, so the Ahrimanic fear, the holding back from the spiritual, makes itself felt especially in the culture of the West, and particularly in the element of American civilization.

Such truths may be unpalatable today, but they are truths nevertheless, and we get very little farther by generalizing—however mystically or theosophically—about the connection of the human with the Divine, or whatever it may be called. We can progress only by recognizing the reality as it is. We can reduce our chaos to order only if we recognize the true characteristics of the different currents running side-by-side. These various currents, springing from their several assumptions, spread out locally, and so everything is confused in the hodgepodge called “modern civilization”. What I am now speaking of as “Americanism” (as collective concept, not applying to individual Americans), is fear of the spiritual, the longing to live only on the physical plane, or at most in what improves into that plane as coarse Spiritualism and such-like, which is not in the real sense, spiritual at all. The mark of Americanism is fear of the spiritual; it is by no means confined to America, but there it lives as a social characteristic, not simply a human one. Above all it is predominant in all science. Science has increasingly been founded on “fear of the spiritual”. Nothing in science is called “objective” unless it excludes as far as possible living conceptions engendered in the inwardness of the soul. No idea, no conception, engendered in the inwardness of the soul, is permitted to intrude into the observation of nature. This is allowed to embrace only what is dead, not the living that is spirit-inwoven. If, in the manner of Hegel, Shelling or Goethe—those genuine representatives of Mid-European thought—anyone introduces the “concept” into observation of nature, he is at once thought to be on the road to uncertainty, for no objective reality is ever expected to be attained through spiritual comprehension or experience. It is assumed that this means bringing in personal bias; that an experiment ceases to be objective directly anytime anything subjective enters into it. That is Ahrimanic. Science is universally “American” in so far as it clings to the fundamental axiom, “Everything subjective must be banished from an observation of Nature” . This is the fundamental result of the earlier severance from the spiritual in the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Thus a new element is added to this legacy—a new element which will make itself felt more and more as a destructive force alongside all that has to develop fruitfully—and consciously—in the future. It is essentially of an Ahrimanic nature; it is fear of the spiritual, and it brings havoc and disintegration into human civilization.

At the transition from the fourth to fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and during the fifth epoch, these impulses became more and more noticeable. With the discovery of America, and the transplantation into America of European ways, fear of this spiritual life appeared there, too; but on the other hand there arose what might be called a tension in human souls, for the native forces of the people in Europe were such that they could not fail to some extent to trace their own connection with the spirituality of the universe. A tension arose at the passing of the forth into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, during the centuries in which what is known as “modern history” takes shape. Then came this tension caused by the suppressed spiritual element in the breast of man. Certain people decided that a barrier had to be put up against it, partly because they understood very well what was left of the old inheritance, and partly because they had a very pertinent grasp of the newly approaching Ahrimanic element. This was the genesis of that spiritual current—a much more influential one than most people think, as I mentioned from a different point of view in my last lecture—which tries to perpetuate this keeping of the human soul at a distance from the super-sensible: in other words Jesuitism. Its inner principle is to do everything possible in human evolution to keep man at a distance from any real, conscious connection with the super-sensible. Naturally, this was facilitated by presenting the super-sensible dogmatically as a realm into which human knowledge could not penetrate. But the Jesuit movement knows very well how to reckon with the other side; it wants no such inner relation between modern science and Americanism. In that respect Jesuitism is great: it recognizes the importance of physical science and makes a deep study of it. Jesuits are great spirits in the round of physical, material science, for Jesuitism reckons with the elemental tendency of mankind to fear the spiritual, a fear which must be overcome by leading human nature towards the spiritual world; and accounts on being able to impose this fear on society by saying to people, in so many words: “You cannot and shall not approach the spiritual; we are trustees of the spiritual and we will purvey it to you in the proper way.”

These two currents of thought, Americanism and Jesuitism, play into one another, as it were. This is not something to take casually; and all such matters we must look for the deeper impulses which are active in human evolution. If we try to identify the forces which have brought about the present catastrophe, we shall find it remarkable cooperation between Americanism—in a sense here given—and Jesuitism. And from a wider point of view we see, on the one hand, how the inheritance from earlier times still influences our mental life, and on the other, the advent of something new. If we specify these two impulses as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, we describe precisely the opposition towards that which must be introduced into the development of mankind for its salvation as true spiritual life. Anyone who approaches with inner sympathy such a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a certain sense inclines towards the Luciferic, will take account of the following attitude: “Human knowledge is after all directed only towards the physical-material; therefore we direct the soul to seek the divine-spiritual in the fervor of elemental experience.” This is what kindles enthusiasm in a temperament of that kind. We might say that what lives in human souls as a tendency towards this virtual side, lives on in our own time, but there is also the other tendency—towards the dark and somber side. The 12th century had its Bernard of Clairvaux: ours have such figures as Lenin and Trotsky; as in the former century there was an active inclination towards the super-sensible, so now we find hatred for it, although expressed in different words and substance. That is the dark reverse side of those times: there the pouring of the human soul into the Divine mould, here the pouring of man's being into an animal mould, on which alone the social structure is to be built.

These matters can be understood only if one has a clear grasp of one fact, which is far away from present-day comprehension. Our time is credulous in respect of theories, taking the content of ideas and programms as gospel, as I have often remarked. It is reality that counts, not theories and programms. The modern follower of Marx, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before the world-war, would of course have said: “This is what Marx teaches, Engels teaches, Lassalle teaches, and that is all one needs for salvation.” He was concerned only with the “content” of ideas and programms. In reality it is never a question of that, for ideas are never carried into life in accordance with their content, but by means of forces which are quite distinct from it. No one knows the truth unless he knows that ideas often have so little to do with reality that may arise independently of their content. A splendid programme can be devised, established on a sound scientific basis, fervently longed for as the Marxists longed for theirs, but all to no purpose. For an age as unspiritual as ours, this is playing with fire. Men believe that they are working to realize the content of their ideas, but anyone who knows how things happen in life knows that the reality is quite different. If ideas are not derived from spiritual knowledge they may enter into cultural life as sheer monstrosities—and this applies to the ideas of Marx, which are intended to banish the spirit. However find they may be, they become abortions. It is no use asking in the morning: “Why has it grown light through what has happened on the earth?” One has to turn away from abstract ideas and say: “Daylight has come because the sun is shining”. In going out beyond the Earth one sees the reason for the daylight. Similarly, if we want to understand “to-day”, we must look away from what is happening in the immediate present to what took place in a time long past. Bolshevism cannot be understood except by recognizing it as an after-the fact of the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 A.D. You cannot understand it except as a result of the atrophy of the forces which man once had for apprehending the super-sensible world. In order really to understand the happenings of the outer world, in order to confront them, we must perceive this inner connection. For anyone observing the relations of events in history it is the most fearful thing to see how movements which set out to reform the world are concerned only with the “subject-matter” of ideas, and refuse to reckon with their reality, which exists quite independently of whether there content is beautiful or not. Suppose a child is born, a beautiful child; his mother may be charmed. Mothers are sometimes charmed, even when their children are not beautiful! He becomes a good for nothing, a ne'er-do-well, perhaps even a criminal. Is it therefore untrue to say that he was a beautiful child? Have people no right to say that he was? Does his childish beauty contradict the unforeseen things in his life? Just so there have been in many circles men with admirable ideas through which they wanted to reform the world, and these men were admired; yet the ideas became abortions! For ideas themselves are but dead things; they must be animated by being received into the vigorous life of the Spirit.

In reading modern socialistic publications one finds—if certain differences are left out of account—a great similarity between them and writings which express the standpoint of the Catholic Church, although the latter are differently expressed and deal with different realms. For instance, I recently read to you out of a certain brochure. Notice the kind of thought it expresses, it's thought-forms; compare what is said there with the rabid tendencies, whether cultured or not, which led gradually to Bolshevism; compared with the beginning of a publication byKautsky or Lenin; you'll find the same thoughts. One is the development of the other. Nowhere does one get a stronger feeling of Catholicism than in reading certain dogmatic socialist utterances. But something which Catholicism forbids—philosophizing about certain things—has become a passion, a principle: the principle of declaring that all learning comes from the bourgeoisie, and all spiritual development from class-warfare. This principle is the effect of the Catholic principle. Bolshevism may perhaps, in the form of its inception, have only a short existence: but all mankind will have to reckon long enough with what stands behind. Anyone who knows how it all hangs together would not be surprised that Bolshevism should have donned in the place where this way of thinking, in the bestial course it is followed, proceeded under cover of the Orthodox religion, so that the two streams were entirely separate.

We must fathom all these things if we want to be conscious of the necessity for approaching the spiritual life in the right way. Mystical talk about it is out of place to-day. What is needed to-day is to apply spiritual knowledge so as to look into reality and to discover the connections belonging to it; because from such knowledge alone in the correct grasp of the world's events arise; never from a past inheritance, or from fear, or from this elementary new thing I have described, which can but lead deeply into chaos. In this animalised Socialism we see displayed one result of what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It has a Luciferic element in it; the Luciferic “Original Sin” is within it. But what is now developing is the penalty for that general incapacity of human faculties for turning to the super-sensible. These faculties have become truly impotent, and hatred and rejection of the super-sensible arise in their place. There is not merely hatred and original sin, but punishment for the forsaking of the super sensible. (This applies to much that is happening today).

The impulses active in human evolution take on various nuances, and events can be understood only in this light. The peoples of the Italian and Spanish peninsulas have come under the sway of Christianity, in the course of its expansion, as well as the peoples of modern France and the British Isles. We know something of what has been unfolded amongst them. We know that on the Spanish and Italian peninsulas the Sentient-Soul has blossomed forth, on French soil the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; here in Mid-Europe the Ego; and in Eastern Europe in the same way a civilization of the Spirit-is to be looked for, to be active only in the future and at present existing in germs which are now entirely hidden. Good mankind but look at Western Europe and understand its riddles through Spiritual Science. For instance, the characteristics of Italian regions (not those of single individuals, which of course grow out everywhere beyond the common norm) develop differently from those of French or British humanity. This last is so constituted that the nature of the people has a special connection with the Consciousness-Soul. Through living in the Consciousness-Soul man is banished to the physical plane, although not so strongly in the British Isles as in America. The result is that man, caught off first from the super-sensible by ecclesiastical developments, will be led back to union with the Cosmos; but it is only to the outer Cosmos that he is led by the Consciousness-Soul. Therefore the British people, as Britons, find their union with the cosmos only through economic principles. British thought is essentially economic, framed on economic lines. Anyone who grasps the connection of the Consciousness-Soul with the physical world will see this necessity; also that the French national character (not that of individuals), having an affinity with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, develops chiefly political thinking and feeling; while the Italian and Spanish in the same way have the sensuous side of the mind developed, because the Sentient-Soul is directly connected with the nature of the people. I can only outline this, but it gives an idea of what lies in the characters of the peoples themselves.

If we look on the German essence, developing as it has in the midst of such a tragedy, we see that the Ego dwells within it. The whole of German history becomes clear if we consider this fact, which is disclosed from the super-sensible world. The Ego of man is the principle that is least externally developed; it has remained a man's most spiritual member. Thereby the German, inasmuch as he is connected through the Ego with the spiritual world, is linked with it in the most spiritual way. He cannot achieve any connection with the cosmos economically, politically, or sensuously; he can achieve it only in so far as it manifests in the soul-life of single individuals—as the Ego invariably does—and is then poured out over the people. It comes to expression most characteristically in what may be discerned as the essence of Goethe's genius, of Herder's and Lessing's, as something detached, a state higher than the physical-sensible. Hence comes a certain estrangement from the latter realm, a feeling of not really belonging to matter, when the physical-sensible alone is in question; hence the great amount of “Americanism”, and of the elements which I prefer not to particularise, poured out over Germany during the last decades, have alienated it from the original activity destined for its national Soul.

In a yet higher way Eastern Europe will be connected with the spiritual through its national characteristics—and will develop a still higher civilization and a spiritual sense, as a reaction from what is now taking shape there. But that is a matter of the future; it is not yet in evidence and must first evolve out of the animal character in which it is still confined.

The Western countries of Europe are directly connected by a lawful inheritance, so to speak, with the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Something more recent, but opposed to “Americanism”, lies hidden in the German nature; a certain relation to the spiritual world, sought inwardly in the spiritual itself. The German Soul following its own peculiar nature, has no fear of the spiritual; rather an inclination towards it, such as is to be found, albeit in a higher form, in Goetheanism.—This is plain speaking, of course; but you know that these things are brought forward from knowledge—not from Chauvinism, nor said to please anyone here. You saw in the last lecture that I understand how not to speak flatteringly. One thing, however, must be said: within the German soul—though this is often forgotten in Middle Europe, there is a dormant relation of the human spirit to the super-sensible world which must be cultivated, and which is the exact opposite of everything else now manifesting on the earth. Could we but have recognized this, if only, alas, the last decades had not brought Americanism and Russian thoughts into this realm, how differently the impulse of science in Middle-Europe would have developed! You know for my other lectures that a science of soul and spirit might have flowed from Goetheanism—but it remained a disregarded impulse! Has it really been grasped at all? Not yet—although within its depths lies the true being of Germany, which is, as you will have gathered, a stranger to the others, for they are still to a great extent animated by the legacy of the old, as well as by the new. In Middle-Europe alone has something developed which has more or less emerged from the old and the new.

By many indications we see that Goetheanism is untouched by materialistic science. (Goethe is praised, of course, but an ex-finance Minister—Kreuzwendedich—is made President of the Goethe Society!) What exists in the true, inner element of the German nature will be experienced in other realms as a continual reproach. The easiest way to protect oneself against what by nature one cannot acknowledge, is to slander it. We must look frankly at this. Such a living reproach can be invasively described as “delinquency”. This is a subjective way of escaping from the reproach. Here we touch upon an important psychological fact. The slander will spread further and further, rooted in the uncomfortable feeling that the special relationship of this Ego to the Spiritual does exist. It is necessary, however, to see clearly in these domains, not to shun a clear view of them, as is done to-day. Had we not so much conventionalism and Americanism amongst us, we should discern that German Goetheanism and Americanism are two opposite poles, and we should know that to regard these two currents of the present day with an unprejudiced mind is the only correct attitude to maintain. We should reject all exaggerated patriotism and look facts fully in the face.

Then we should abjure the apotheosis of Americanism in which we have so long and old son, and perceive that this particular element will become more and more active is a real, deep-seeded evil, because fear of the Spiritual is its main characteristic. Those who say otherwise are short-sighted, not judging things in their real setting. Everything arising from the political attitude of the French, from the economic rigidity natural to the British, or from the elemental sensationalism—the so-called “sacred egoism”of the Italian people—all this, in view of the great events now playing their part, is but trivial compared to the especially evil element arising from Americanism.

There are three currents which through their inward relationship had the greatest power of destruction in human evolution, due to their having absorbed the inherited and the new, in different ways. First among them is what I call Americanism, which tends to produce greater and greater fear of the spirit, making the world a mere opportunity for living in the physical. It is quite different when Britain wants to make the world into a kind of commercial mart. Americanism would make it a physical dwelling equipped with all possible comfort, in which man can lead an agreeable and wealthy life. That is the political creed of Americanism, and whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the Spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the earth to an end, destruction dooming it at last to death , because the Spirit will be shut out from it.

The second destructive element is not only that of Catholicism, but all Jesuitism, which in essence is virtually allied to Americanism. If the latter is the cultivation of the impulse to build up fear of the spirit, so the former seeks to awaken the belief that one should not seek contact with the spirit, which it deems impossible; it wishes Spiritual blessings to be dispensed by those who are called into the teaching office of the Catholic Church. This influence seeks to atrophy forces in human nature which incline to the super-sensible.

The particular indications of the third stream can be seen arising in a terrible form in the East: a social state based on a purely animal, physical socialism. Without plastering it with dogmas, we call it “Bolshevism”, and it will not easily be overcome by mankind.

These are the three distinctive elements in the modern development of humanity. To bring knowledge to bear upon them, so that the events of the present day may be met in the right way, it is possible only through Spiritual Science.

As you have probably noticed, our previous discussions have differed not only in their content but also in their entire manner of consideration from what we normally find in anthropology or similar areas. Those unwilling to develop the feeling I spoke of at the end of the last lecture will not immediately recognize how such an understanding of the human being can arise in any way other than that which is currently acceptable. It can, however, arise when we comprehend the entire developing human being, that is, the body, the soul, and the spirit, in terms of lively movement. By comprehending the living human being in movement, by placing ourselves in human nature, we can create within ourselves an understanding that is not dead but alive. This understanding is most appropriate if we are to avoid clinging to external materialistic perspectives or falling prey to illusions and fantasy. What I have presented here can be very fruitful, but only when we use it directly, because its primary characteristics first become apparent through direct use.

I would like to mention a few things about our attempts to make this thinking fruitful in the Stuttgart Waldorf School. That school was created because Emil Molt, the director of a factory in Stuttgart, wanted a school based purely upon spiritual-scientific principles for the children of the factory’s workers. The school has long since grown beyond its initial boundaries, and it is the first attempt at forming a school whose curriculum and learning goals have been based upon a spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being. Of course we need to recognize that we are still in the first year of the Waldorf School, and that we have students from all possible classes of other schools. For that reason certain compromises are necessary in the beginning.

In the curriculum, our concern is not simply to come to terms pedagogically with a single child or even with a small class where we could work with individual children(an idea that is commonly held). We want each teacher to be so permeated with understanding that even when standing before a large class, he can represent this type of education. Each teacher should be permeated by a living comprehension of the human being so that he understands that the heart does not simply pump the blood through the organism, but that the human being is living, and the movements of fluids and the heart result from that aliveness. When a teacher has absorbed this way of thinking, particular forces within him become active in regard to the development of children. This activity can result in significant insights, even in regard to a child who is part of a large class and with whom we have worked for only a few months. If you have trained your spirit in this way, and thus created a strong contact with it, your spirit can look somewhat clairvoyantly at the individual child. It is not so important that we know that the heart is not the cause of the circulation of the blood. What is important is that we develop within ourselves the possibility of presenting such things in a way contrary to our modern materialistic thinking. Those who develop this possibility within themselves, who configure their spirit in this way, make themselves alive in a different way in regard to developing children, even in large numbers. They gain the capacity of reading the curriculum from the nature of the developing child.

In Stuttgart I had to compromise, since under present social conditions it is not possible to develop a school purely on the basis of this kind of education. I said we needed to take three stages into account. We need complete freedom in how we present the curriculum during the first, second, and third grades, but we want the children at the end of third grade to have learned the same things as children in other schools. The same is true until age twelve, that is, the sixth grade, and again when they leave the school. All we could achieve was to present the curriculum in these stages: in the first three school years, the second three, and in the third stage, the last two school years. These are simply things that we must accept as compromises under today’s social conditions. Nevertheless, within these three periods, we have been able to achieve some things. We can, for example, base our work upon the sound principle that we do not begin with the intellectual, as modern instruction generally does. We do not need to begin with this one characteristic of developing human beings—the intellect—instead we can begin with the whole human being.

It is important to first acquire a clear concept of what the whole human being actually is. Today, because people cannot observe how thinking relates to human nature, they believe that we learn to think by logically teaching children how to think. I have to admit that during the first six decades of my life I used to consider people in that way. Those who can observe developing human beings, who can compare the developing human being with what a person becomes, can see certain connections spread out over the various periods of life, which go unobserved if a certain kind of insight has not been developed.

I would like to mention something I often refer to because it shows certain connections in human nature in a textbooklike way. In observing children, you can see how, when those around them relate to them properly, they develop a feeling of respect toward people. If you follow what becomes of these children later in life, you will find that this feeling of respect has so transformed these individuals that, through their words or sometimes simply through the way they look at you, their presence is a deed of goodness. This is simply because when you have learned to respect (or, I could say, to pray) later in life you will have the power to bless. No one can bless later in life who has not learned to respect or to pray in childhood.

We need to look at such things. We need to gain such vision through a living science that can become feeling and will, and not through some dead science such as we have today. Thus we can see how to avoid teaching children mere conventional knowledge, instead taking into account the entire human being.

We have, of course, the task of teaching the children to write, but today writing is a kind of artificial product of culture. It has arisen in the course of human development out of a pictorial writing and has become what we now have today, a purely conventional and abstract writing. If we try to gain a feeling for older writing, for instance Egyptian hieroglyphics, and to understand their basic character, we will see how people originally tended to reproduce the external world in their writing through drawing.

Writing and drawing things in the world are, in a way, also the basis of human speech development. Many theories have been put forward about the development of speech. There is, for instance—I am not making this up, they are called this in the technical papers—there is the so-called Ding-Dong Theory that assumes speech is a kind of model of some inner tonal qualities of our surroundings. Then there is the Bow-Wow Theory,3 which assumes that speech is based upon sounds produced by other beings in our surroundings. None of these theories, however, begin with a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of human nature. A sufficient comprehension of human nature, particularly one based upon a trained observation of children’s speech, shows that human feeling is engaged in a much different way when learning the vowels. They are learned through feeling. If we train our own powers of observation, we will see how all vowels arise from certain human inner experiences that are like simple or more complicated interjections, expressions of feeling. Inwardly, we as human beings live in the vowels. People express external events in consonants. People copy external events through their own organs; nevertheless they reproduce them. Speech itself is a reproduction of external events through consonants, and vowels provide the color. Thus, writing is, in its origins, a pictorial reproduction.

If, as is done today, we teach conventionalized writing to children, it can affect only the intellect. For that reason, we should not actually begin with learning to write, but with an artistic comprehension of those forms that are then expressed through writing or printing.

If you are not very clever, you can proceed by taking Egyptian hieroglyphics or some other pictorial writing, then developing certain forms out of it in order to arrive at today’s conventional letter forms. But that is not necessary. We do not need to hold ourselves to such strict realism. We can try to discover for ourselves such lines in modern letter forms that make it possible for us to give the children some exercises in movements of the hands or fingers. If we have the children draw one line or another without regard to the fact that they should become letters, or allow them to gain an understanding throughout their entire being for round or angular forms, horizontal or vertical lines, we will bring the children a dexterity directed toward the world.

Through this approach, we can also achieve something that is extraordinarily important psychologically. At first we do not even teach writing but guide the children into a kind of artistic drawing that we can develop even further into painting, as we do at the Waldorf School. That way the children also develop a living relationship to color and harmony in youth, something they are very receptive to at the age of seven or eight. If we allow children to enjoy this artistically taught instruction in drawing, aside from the fact that it also leads to writing, we will see how they need to move their fingers or perhaps the entire arm in a certain way that begins not simply from thinking, but from a kind of dexterity. Thereby the I begins to allow the intellect to develop as a consequence of the entire human being. The less we train the intellect and the more we work with the entire human being so that the dexterity of the intellect arises out of the movements of the limbs, the better it is.

If you visit the handwork classes at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, you will perhaps find it somewhat paradoxical when you see that both boys and girls sit together and knit and crochet, and further, that everyone not only does “women’s work” but also “men’s work.” Why is that? The success of this approach can be seen in the fact that boys, when they are not artificially restricted from doing the work, take the same joy in these activities as the girls. Why is that? If we know that we do not develop our intellect by simply going directly to some intellectual education, if we know that someone who moves their fingers in a clumsy way also has a clumsy intellect, has inflexible ideas and thoughts, and those who know how to properly move their fingers also have flexible thoughts and ideas and can enter into the real nature of things, then we will not underestimate the importance of developing external capabilities. The goal is to develop the intellect to a large extent from how we work externally as human beings.

Educationally, it is an enormously important moment when we allow the written forms that are the basis of reading to spring out of what we have created artistically. Thus instruction in the Waldorf School begins from a purely artistic point of view. We develop writing from art and then reading from writing. In that way, we completely develop the children in relation to those forces that slowly want to develop out of their nature. In truth we bring nothing foreign into the child. As a matter of course, around the age of nine the children are able to write from what they have learned in drawing and then go on to reading. This is particularly important, because when people work against rather than with the forces of human nature, they damage children for the rest of their lives. If, however, we do exactly what the child’s nature wants, we can help human beings develop something fruitful for the rest of their lives.

When we turn from external toward more internal things, it is important to see that a child at the age of six, seven, or eight has no tendency whatsoever to differentiate itself from its surroundings as an I-being. In a certain way, we take something away from the healthy nature of the human being when we develop this difference between the I-being and its surroundings too early. You need only observe children as they look at themselves in the mirror. Look at them before the age of nine and then again at ten, and train your eye for their physiological form. Your eye for the physiological form will show that as children pass beyond the age of nine (this is of course approximate, for one child it is one time and for another, another time), something extraordinarily important occurs in human nature. We can characterize this important occurrence by saying that until the change of teeth, human beings develop primarily as imitators. In principle, human beings imitate their surroundings. We would not learn to speak if we were not imitators during that period of our lives. This principle of imitation continues on in the following years until about the age of nine. However, during the change of teeth, a principle begins to develop under the influence of a feeling for authority to validate what respected persons in the child’s surroundings recognize as correct. It is important that we really know how to maintain this feeling of authority, which is certainly justifiable during the period from the change of teeth until puberty, because that is what human nature wants.

Some say we should allow children to judge everything, to decide what they need to learn, but such statements ignore the needs of human nature. They ignore what we will carry into later life. Human beings continue to imitate beyond the age of seven up to the age of nine or so, and this principle of imitation affects the feeling for authority. From the age of nine, this principle of authority develops in a purer form. Beginning at the age of twelve, it is again mixed with something new: the capacity to judge.

It is of fundamental significance for all education that we do not force developing human beings to judge at too early an age. Certainly everything we now call illustrative instruction has a certain, though limited, justification. It has great significance in a limited area. However, when we extend illustrative teaching to the point of presenting children only with what can be understood from direct observation, we are ignoring the fact that there are things in the world that cannot be seen but must be presented.

There are things that cannot be seen, for instance, religious things. The same is true of moral things; they also cannot be seen. At best, we can show the effects of these things in the world, but not those things themselves. Aside from that, there is something else that is important. We need to teach children how to properly accept something because an authority presents it or to believe something because an authority believes it. If the children are incapable of doing this, we take something away from them for the remainder of their lives. Just look at what happens then. If someone at the age of thirty or thirty-five looks back on something they were taught in school, they will recognize that they did not understand it at that time. But because they loved their teacher, they accepted it. Such a person had the feeling that she did not learn but that she experienced. She had a feeling that she needed to honor, to respect the teacher, and since the teacher thought something, she should think it also. Thus, at the age of thirty or thirty-five, a person may recall something she did not understand but accepted out of love. Now, however, that person is more mature and looks at what arises out of the depths of her soul as an older person and realizes the following: what was accepted many years before out of love resurfaces later in life and now becomes clear. We need only consider what that means. It means that through such a resurfacing of something that is now understood for the first time at maturity, a feeling for life—which we need if we are to be useful human beings in social life—increases. We would take a great deal away from people if we took away the acceptance of truths through love, through a justifiable feeling for authority. Children must experience this justifiable feeling of authority, and we need to use all the powers of our souls in practicing education to work toward maintaining that justifiable authority for the child between the change of teeth and puberty.

The fact that we must divide elementary school into three periods gives us the basis of discovering the curriculum and the learning goals. During the first years of elementary school, imitation is affected by the principle of authority. From the ages of nine until twelve, the principle of authority becomes more and more important and imitation recedes. After the age of twelve, the power of judgment awakens. At the age of nine, children begin to separate their I from their surroundings in their inner experiences, and it is the I that awakens the child’s power to judge at about the age of twelve.

In this realm there is a strong connection between the way we think and feel about life and the way we think about the proper way to teach. You have, perhaps, heard of the philosopher Mach, whose views arise out of a natural-scientific perspective. He was a very honest and upright man, but throughout his life he represented the modern materialistic attitude. Because he was so honest, he also lived the inner structure of materialistic thinking. Thus he tells with a certain kind of naive honesty how once, when he was very tired, he jumped onto a bus. Now, just as he entered the bus, at the same time someone who looked like a schoolmaster jumped on the bus from the opposite side. This person made quite a special impression upon him. He first realized what it was after he had sat down. He realized that there was a mirror opposite the entrance to the bus and that what he had seen was himself. That is how little he knew his external form. The same thing happened to him another time. There was a mirror placed behind a display window, and he looked at himself but did not recognize himself. There is a connection between the fact that this man had so little capacity to recognize himself and the fact that he was a fanatical representative of certain pedagogical principles. In particular, Mach was a fanatical enemy of working with children’s youthful fantasy. He did not want any fairy tales told to children, or to teach children anything other than scientific trash about external sense-perceptible reality. That is how he brought up his own children, something he told me with a naively honest openness.

People can think what they want about the spiritual content of external, sense-perceptible reality, but it is poison for developing human beings when, from the ages of six or seven until the age of nine, their capacity for fantasy is not developed through fairy tales. If a teacher is not some radical, then he or she will present everything concerning the surroundings of a human being to a child, everything that is to be taught about animals, plants, or other things in nature to the children in the form of fairy tales. Children do not yet differentiate between themselves and their surroundings; that occurs only later, at the age of nine. If only people would learn what an enormous difference it makes whether children are read fairy tales or if you create such fairy tales yourself. No matter how many fairy tales you read or tell your children, they do not have the same effect as when you create them yourself and tell them to your children. The process of creation within you has an effect upon children; it really is conveyed to them. These are the intangible things in working with children.

It is an enormous advantage for the child’s development when you attempt to teach children certain ideas through external pictures. For example, if I want to teach the child at the earliest possible age to have a feeling for the immortality of the soul, I could attempt to do that by working with all the means at my disposal. I could attempt to do that by showing the child how the butterfly emerges from the cocoon and by indicating that in the same way the immortal soul flies off from the body.

Now certainly that is a picture, but you will only succeed with that picture when you do not present it as an abstract intellectual idea but believe it yourself. And you can believe it. If you genuinely penetrate into the secrets of nature, then what flies out of the cocoon will become for you the symbol for immortality that the creator placed into nature. You need to believe these things yourself. What you believe and experience yourself has a very different effect upon children from what you only accept intellectually. For that reason, during the children’s first years of school, we at the Waldorf School attempt to imaginatively present everything connected to the surroundings of the human being. As I said, a teacher who is not lost in dreamland will not cause the children to become lost in fantasy no matter how many stories about bugs or plants, about elephants or hippopotami they are told.

It is important to begin artistically, with a genuine enthusiasm for artistic writing. Allow writing to develop out of drawing, and for these first years of elementary schools, allow it to have an effect upon the imagination. Everything you teach in the way of scientific descriptions is damaging before the age of nine. Realistic descriptions of beetles or elephants or whatever, in the way we are used to giving them in the natural sciences, are damaging for children before this age. We should not work toward a realistic contemplation, but toward imagination.

We need to genuinely observe students when we stand before a class. It does not seem to me to be so bad if classes are very large as long as they are healthy and well ventilated. What we might call individualization occurs of itself if the teacher’s work arises out of a living comprehension of human nature and the nature of the world. In that case, the teacher is so interesting for the students that they become individualized by themselves. They will become individualized and do it actively. You do not need to work with each individual student, which is a kind of passive individualization. It is important that you always attempt to work with the entire class, and that a living contact with the teacher is present. When you have shaped your own soul to comprehend life, life will speak to those who wish to receive it.

If you develop a genuine talent for observation, you can perceive something when standing even before a large class. You can see that when you artistically present things that will become abstract and intellectualized only later, the physiognomy of the children changes. You will see how small changes in physiognomy occur, and that between the ages of seven and nine the children understand themselves. You can see how their faces express something healthily and not nervously active. It is of enormous import for the remainder of the children’s lives that this takes place. If the physiognomy develops healthily and actively, later in life people can develop a love of the world, a feeling for the world, an inner power of healing for hypochondria and superfluous criticism and similar things. It is terrible if you as teachers do not achieve that, for children after the age of nine have externally a quite different physiognomy than before.

I also think it is best for the teacher to not change classes throughout the entire elementary school period. I believe it is best for a teacher to begin with a class in the first grade of elementary school and continue moving up with the class through the grades until the end of elementary school, at least as far as this is possible. While I am aware of all the objections to this approach, I believe it can create an intimate connection with the students that outweighs all the disadvantages. It will counterbalance all the problems that can occur at the beginning because the teacher is unacquainted with the individuality of the class or the students. The teacher and students will achieve a balance over the course of time. They will grow together more and more with the class and will learn in that connection. It is not easy to see the subtle changes in the physiognomy of the children.

For me it is not important to describe some theoretical basis for following the spiritual and soul forces of human beings in such a way that you can see their connection with the physical body. What is important is understanding that the human being is a unity and actually being able to see this in individual cases. By developing these skills, you can train yourself to observe how people become different. Perhaps you will even develop a talent for observing how a person will listen later in life. You can read in the physiognomy whether people listen as a whole, that is, whether take in what they hear with thinking, feeling, and will, or whether they only allow what they hear to affect their wills, as a choleric might. It is good for teachers to develop such a talent for observation for life in general. Everything we learn in life can help us when we want to teach children. When you see, as I can see at the Waldorf School, how the teacher works in a way appropriate to her own individuality, you will notice how each class becomes a whole together with the teacher. Out of that whole arises the development of the child. This process can be very different with each individual teacher, since these processes can always be individualized. One teacher who instructs nine-year-old boys and girls could do something very well in a particular way and another who teaches quite differently could teach them just as well. In that way there is complete individualization.

I also believe it is possible to determine the curriculum and learning goals for each grade in the elementary school out of the nature of the human being. For that reason it is of great importance that the teacher be the genuine master of the school, if I may use the term “master.” I do not mean that there should be any teaching directives. Instead the teacher should be a part not only of the methods but also of the plans of the school. Whether she is teaching the first grade or the eighth, the teacher should be totally integrated with the whole of the school, and should teach the first grade in the same manner that the eighth grade will be taught.

In my lecture the day after tomorrow, I want to characterize the curriculum in more detail and also justify the learning goals for each year. Today, of course, since we are stuck in a materialistic culture that also has an effect upon our curriculum and learning goals, we can view such things only as an ideal for the future and put them into practice only to a limited degree. If there is a loophole in the law somewhere, as there is in the elementary school law in Württemberg, it is possible to make some compromises. Nevertheless such things need to be taken up since I believe they are connected with what must occur for us to move beyond the misery of the past five or six years.

If an Oriental sage of ancient times—we must return to very ancient times of Oriental culture if we are to consider what I wish to say here—one who had been initiated into the mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his gaze on modern Western civilization, he might say to its representatives, “You are really living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. Everything you do, but also everything you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. Since fear is closely related to hatred, hatred plays a great role in your entire civilization.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean that a sage of the ancient Eastern civilization would speak in this way if he stood again today among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his ancient time. He would make it plain that in his time and his country, civilization was founded on a completely different basis.He would probably say, “In my day, fear played no part in civilized life. Whenever we were to promulgate a world conception, allowing action and social life to spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy that could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself to the world, that then could be enhanced to love.” This is how he would experience it, and he would indicate as a result (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view the most important ingredients, the most important impulses, of modern civilization. If we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we would gain much that we really need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life. Actually, an echo of the ancient civilization still prevails in Asia, though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, aesthetic, scientific, and social life. This ancient civilization is in decline, and when the ancient Oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient Oriental civilization,” then certainly it must be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. One who is able to discern it, however, can see even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy, of delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what afterward has been required of man since the thought resounded that found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” actually entered human historical life only in the ancient Greek culture. The ancient Eastern world conception, comprehensive and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way oriented toward directing man's gaze into his own being.

In this respect the human being is dependent on the conditions prevailing in his environment. The ancient Oriental culture was founded under a different effect of sunlight on the earth, and its earthly conditions were also different from those of the later Western culture. In the ancient East, man's inner gaze was captured, one could say, by all that surrounds the human being as the world, and he had a special Inducement for giving over his entire inner being to the world. It was cosmic knowledge that blossomed in the ancient Oriental wisdom and in the view of the world that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the mysteries of the East there was no actual adherence to the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outward toward the world and try to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the challenge of the ancient Oriental culture would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their gaze to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilization began to spread westward. As soon, indeed, as mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa, but particularly when the mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the West—a special center was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, simply by virtue of the geographical conditions of the Western world and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. Simply because these mystery pupils, when still in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world—knowledge of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply through this, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that actually exists in man's innermost being. In Asia all this could not have been observed at all. The inward-turning gaze would have been paralyzed, so to speak. By means of all that was brought from the East to the Western mystery colonies, however, man's gaze having long been directed outward so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, was now enabled to penetrate into man's inner being. It was actually only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived. Man's inner being actually first came to the consciousness of humanity in these mystery colonies transported from the Orient and founded in Western regions.

One can indeed realize what an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental mysteries if we repeat a saying that was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a saying that was to make clear to them in what kind of mood of soul this self-knowledge was actually to be approached. The saying to which I am referring is frequently quoted. In its full weight it was uttered only in the more ancient mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa, and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every initiate regarding the experiences of man's inner being. The saying runs thus, “No one who is not initiated in the sacred mysteries should discover the secrets of man's inner being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-initiate is forbidden; the mouth uttering these secrets lays the burden of sin upon itself, and the ear burdens itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this saying was uttered from the inner experience that an individual, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the earthly conditions of the West, to knowledge of the human being. Tradition has preserved this saying, and today it is still repeated—without any understanding of its innermost nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West that outwardly still have a great influence. It is repeated only from tradition, however. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who say it do not really know what it signifies. Even in our time, however, this saying is used as a kind of motto in the secret orders of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to people only within the secret societies, for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

One must say that, as time has evolved, many people—not in Central Europe but in Western lands—learn in their secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it actually often flows into action. In more recent centuries, actually since the middle of the fifteenth century, the human constitution has become such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be absorbed only intellectually. One could receive concepts about them, but one could not attain a true experience of them. Individual shad only some intimations of it. Many people could penetrate into this realm of experience through such intimations.

Such people have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as, for instance, Bulwer Lytton, who wrote Zanoni.¹ What he became in his later life can be grasped only if one knows how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, by virtue of his particular, individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. He thereby became estranged from the natural ways of life. Precisely in him it is possible to see what a man's attitude toward life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this “foreign” spiritual world, not merely into his concepts but into his whole mood of soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

It appeared, of course, quite outlandish when Bulwer traveled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young woman who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he always needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a completely formal, conventional way. He would enter in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Something coquettish, in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterizing it in this way at first—was thus introduced into the ordinary world where pedantic human convention has made such increasing inroads, particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century.

Humanity has little idea of the degree of conventionalism into which it has grown; people have less and less idea of it simply because it comes to seem natural. One sees something as reasonable only insofar as it is in line with what is “done.” Things in life, however, are all interconnected, and the dryness and indolence of modern times, the relationship human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man such as Bulwer Lytton, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of more ancient times traveling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. The disparity between one attitude of soul and another need only be seen in the right light; then such a thing can be understood. With Bulwer Lytton, however, something lit up in him that no longer could exist directly in the modern intellectual age but only as tradition.

One must, however, recover the knowledge of the human being that lived in the mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The ordinary human being today is aware of the world around him by means of his outer, physical sense impressions. What he sees, he orders and arranges with his intellect. Then he looks also into his own inner being .Basically this is the world that man surveys and out of which he acts. The sense impressions received from outside, the mental images developed from these sense impressions, these mental images as they penetrate within, becoming trans-formed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with everything that is reflected back into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man weaves and out of which he acts. At most modern man is led by a kind of false mysticism to ask, “What is actually within my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wishes to find the answer in his ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness, however, only emerges from what actually originated in outer sense impressions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-images, of outer life when looking in to one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will,man still does not know how feeling and will actually work. For this reason he often fails to recognize what he sees in his inner being as a transformed mirror-image of the outer world and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine, eternal world. This is not the case, however. What appears to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really wished to look into his inner being, he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror.We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense impressions. We link mental images to them. These mental images are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we arrive only at this mirror (see drawing below, red). We see what is reflected in this memory mirror (red arrows). We are just as unable to gaze into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient path of Oriental wisdom: the teachers and pupils of the mystery centers that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the inner being of man.Out of what they discovered they afterward spoke those words that actually were meant to convey that one had to be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one wished to direct one's gaze to the inner being of man.

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What, then, does one behold within the human being? There, one sees how something of the power of perceiving and thinking, which is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body, into that part of the etheric body that forms the basis of growth but is also the origin of the forces of will. In looking out into the sunlit-space and surveying all that we receive through our sense impressions, there radiates into our inner being something that on the one hand becomes memory images but that also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in quite a special way on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation arises of the material existence that is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter, but this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being,matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very essence of matter is fully destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly,within that sphere that lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the mystery pupils who were led from the East into the mystery colonies of the West, especially Ireland. “In your inner being, below the capacity for memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you could not have developed your thinking, for you must develop thinking by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. An etheric body that is permeated with thought-forces, however, works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter back into chaos and to destroy it.” If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same attitude with which he penetrates as far as memory, he enters a realm where the being of man wants to destroy, to extinguish, what is there. For the purpose of developing the human, thought-filled “I” or ego, we all bear within us,below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in relation to matter. There is no self-knowledge that does not point with the greatest intensity toward this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this source of destruction² in the inner being of man must take an interest in the evolution of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: spirit must exist and, for the sake of the continuance of the spirit, matter should be extinguished.

It is only after humanity has been spoken to for many years about the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that attention can be drawn to what actually exists within the human being. Today we must do so, however, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilization. Within Western civilization man is the sheath for a source of destruction, and actually the forces of decline can be trans-formed into forces of ascent only if man becomes conscious of this, that he is the sheath for a source of destruction.

What would happen if man were not to be led by spiritual science out of this consciousness? Already in the evolution of our time we can see what would happen. What is isolated, separated, as it were, in the human being, and should work only within him, at the single spot within where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates outer human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilization, yes, and to the civilization of the whole earth. This is shown by all the destructive forces appearing today—in Eastern Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world, and in the future man will be able to find his bearings regarding what actually flows into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of the human source of destruction within, which must be there, however, for the sake of the evolution of human thinking. This strength of thinking that man must have in order that he may have a world conception in keeping with our time, this strength of thinking which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thinking into the etheric body, and the etheric body thus permeated by thinking works destructively upon the physical body. This source of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the source of destruction is there without man being able to bring it to consciousness, it is much worse than if man takes full cognizance of this source of destruction and from this stand-point enters into the evolution of modern civilization.

When the pupils of these mystery colonies, of which I have spoken, first heard of these secrets, their immediate response was fear. This fear they learned to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the sensation that a penetration into man's inner being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must instill fear. This fear felt by the ancient mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole significance of the facts. Then they were able to conquer through consciousness what had to arise in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it is still active. Under all kinds of masks it works into outer life. It is suited to the modern age, however, to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of this fear, that the mystery pupils were directed to self-knowlege in the right way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. It thus came about that man was and still is under the influence of this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought, which maintains its legitimacy, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into what is actually eternal in the human soul, and from this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without having the least intimation of this. The modern materialistic world conception is a product of fear and anxiety.

This fear thus lives on in the outer actions of human beings, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the fifteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth century materialistic world conception. Why did these people become materialists, that is, why would they admit only the outer, that which is given in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of the human being.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from his knowledge by saying, “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You establish your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time established the ancient Oriental world conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these people of Asia will never understand one another, because with the Asiatic people, after all, everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

This certainly sounds radical, so I prefer to try to bring the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an ancient Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that such a one could speak in this way were he to return, whereas a modern person might be considered foolish if he put these things so radically! From such a radical characterization of these things, however, we can learn what we really must learn today for the healthy progress of civilization. Humanity will have to know again that rational thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a source of destruction. This source must be recognized, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into outer instincts and thence become a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. The world that manifests as a source of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. The life of modern man, however, takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense perceptions. Just as little as the human being, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to penetrate through all that is spread out before him as sense perception; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world,which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sensory mental images.

Man is no stranger, however, to this world beyond the outer, sensory mental images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he penetrates this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sensory mental images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was actually experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his mysteries. One can experience it, however, only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must hold sway in cognition if one wishes to penetrate beyond the sense impression. It was this love in cognition that prevailed especially in the ancient Oriental civilization.

Why must one have this devotion? One must have this devotion because, if one sought to enter the world beyond the senses with one's ordinary human I, one would be harmed. The I, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up if one wishes to penetrate into the world beyond the senses. How does this I originate? This I is formed by the human being's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This I must be forged and hardened in that world lying within man as a source of destruction. With this I one cannot live beyond the sphere of the outer sense world. Let us picture to ourselves the source of destruction in whole human organism. What I am portraying is to be understood intensively, not extensively, but I would like to sketch it for you. Here is the source of destruction, here the human sheath. If what is inside were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos that is necessary in man's inner being. In this chaos,which must be within man, this necessary source of evil in man, the human I, the human egoity, must be forged. This human egoity cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the I-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it often appears as though estranged or weakened.

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The I, which is actually forged in the source of evil, cannot pass beyond the sphere of the sense phenomena. Hence to the perception of the ancient Oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only through devotion, through love, through a surrender of the I—and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of the weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dispersed.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the I, as it exists in sleep, as it existed in fully conscious cognition for the pupils of the ancient Oriental civilization—it is this Nirvana that would be alluded to by an ancient Oriental such as the one I introduced to you hypothetically. He would say, “With you, since you had to cultivate the egoity, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress the ego, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the I that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the I flowed out lovingly into the entire world.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts, and they are then preserved in a certain way, but for humanity they live as sensations, as feelings, fluctuating and permeating human existence. Such feelings and sensations constitute what lives today on the one hand in the Orient and on the other in the West. In the West, human beings have a blood, they have a lymph, that is saturated by egoity forged in the inner source of evil. In the Orient, human beings have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding strives somehow to draw the blood from the living organism, put it on a slide, place it under a microscope, look at it, and then form ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude, even from the point of view of ordinary experience. This is all that can be said. Do you believe that this method touches the subtly graded distinctions between the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope naturally gives only crude concepts about the blood, about the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. These nuances, however, naturally exist much more intensely between human beings of the East and those of the West, although only a crude picture of them can be gained by the modern intellect.

All this thus lives in the bodies of the human being from Asia, Europe, and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude intellect that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of outer nature, we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to find the balance between East and West, though this balance must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference,³ and discussions will take place there about matters that were summed up by General Smuts,⁴ England's Minister of South Africa, with, I would say, an instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterized by the fact that the starting point for cultural interests, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the regions situated around the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The center of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Humanity stands face to face with this change. People still talk, however, in such a way that their speech emerges out of the old, crude concepts, and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to move forward. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us, and they say to us: until now only a limited trust has been needed between human beings, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. This fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. Now, however, we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world culture. We need a trust that will be able to bring into balance the contrasts of East and West. Here a significant perspective opens up, which we need. People today believe that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how to provide all the trading peoples on earth with free access to the Chinese market, and so on. These problems, however,will not be settled at any conference until people become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one human being in another. In the future this trust can be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer culture will be in need of spiritual deepening. I wished today to look from a different viewpoint at matters we have discussed often before. Tomorrow we shall speak further in this way.

• 1 . Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, 1803–1873.
• 2 . “Source of destruction,” Zerstoerungsherd; -herd suggests a furnace or oven as well as a source.
• 3 . Washington Conference, a disarmament conference held from November 1921 to February 1922.
• 4 . Jan Christiaan Smuts, 1870–1950.

The last few years have shown what intense feelings of hatred and antipathy are capable of flowing through the souls of the peoples of the Earth. In his life of feeling, at any rate, no one can blind himself to the truth that earthly life can never progress fruitfully along such paths. And so it may be useful today to speak of elements which, in the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge, can unite at all events the whole of civilised mankind.

Knowledge and feeling, of course, are two very different matters, but spiritual-scientific knowledge is much more intimately bound up with the whole being of man, with his innermost nature, than are the abstract truths current in the world of materialism. The truths of Spiritual Science are able to kindle ideas, feelings and impulses of will in human beings. Inner strength develops from a spiritual-scientific knowledge of the elements uniting the different peoples of the Earth and this also intensifies feelings of sympathy and mutual love.

Just as it is true that in the course of evolution man has progressed from an instinctive and unconscious to a conscious life, to a full and free understanding of his mission, so, as regards the future it must be said that vague sentimentality alone will not suffice to unite the peoples of the Earth. A conscious and mutual understanding of what the one may expect of the other—that is what is needed.

In another sphere of life it is comparatively easy today to see the necessity for this unification of men all over the Earth, for we have but to look at the disastrous things that are happening in the world of economics. When we seek for the root cause of these disasters and destructive tendencies, we realise that a striving to make the whole Earth into one economic sphere is an unconscious urge in the whole of mankind today. On the other hand, the peoples of the Earth have not yet reached the point of ennobling their national egoisms sufficiently to enable a collective economy of the whole Earth to arise out of the economic values they individually create. One nation tries to outdo the other in matters of economic advantage. Unreal points of view thus arise among the peoples, whereas the new instincts of mankind call out for a common economic life of the whole Earth—in effect an Earth economy. The leading minds of the times are forever laying stress upon this. There is indeed a striving for a uniform Earth economy in contrast to the separate national economies which have existed right up to the twentieth century, and it is this opposition of the national economies to an Earth economy that has caused the present havoc in economic life.

When it is a question of one nation understanding another or assimilating its spiritual riches, it is not enough simply to travel among other peoples or to be led there by destiny. Mere knowledge of everyday dealings between man and man will never bring about mutual understanding between the peoples. To travel and live among other peoples is not enough, any more than cursory observation of a man's gestures and movements enables us to understand his whole being. It is true that if one has a feeling for such things, a great deal may be conjectured about the inner being of another man from his gestures and movements, but if circumstances are such that his speech is understood, the knowledge is much more fundamental, for one can then receive from him what his own inner being wants to communicate. Is it then possible for something akin to this transmission of inner force, of inner being, to arise between peoples and nations? It cannot inhere merely in speech or language or in those things we observe in the daily life of the peoples, for this is but the intercourse between man and man. Something which transcends the individual human element must be revealed by knowing and understanding another man. We are really faced with a difficulty when we want to speak intelligibly of a nation or people as an entity. Is there anything as real as an external object, as real as external life, which justifies us in speaking of a nation or a people as an entity? We can speak of an individual human being merely from sense-perception of him; but for sense-perception a nation or a people is only a totality of so many individuals. Before we can recognise a nation as a reality we must rise to the super-sensible—it is the only way.

Now a man who undergoes spiritual training, who develops those forces of super-sensible knowledge which otherwise lie slumbering in his daily life, will gradually begin to see a nation or a people as a real being—of a super-sensible order, of course. When he perceives the spiritual, a foreign people is revealed to him as a spiritual being, a super-sensible reality, which—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—pervades and envelops the sense-nature of the individuals belonging to it, like a cloud. Supersensible knowledge alone enables us to penetrate into the real being of a nation or a people, and super-sensible knowledge cannot be acquired merely from the observation of daily life. I want to speak in outline today of how Spiritual Science strives to gain a really profound knowledge of the relationships among the peoples of the Earth. And here it is above all necessary to understand the being of man in the light of Spiritual Science. In a previous lecture here, as well as in my book Riddles of the Soul, published a few years ago, I said that man, as he stands before us in daily life, is not a unitary being, but that three divisions or members, clearly distinct from each other, are revealed in his bodily structure.

In the human organism we have, in the first place, all that is related to and centralised in the head system—the so-called system of nerves and senses. By means of this system man has his sense-perceptions, his thoughts and ideas. Today, as the result of an unenlightened science, it is thought that the whole being of Spirit and soul in man is based upon the system of nerves and senses—is, in fact, a kind of parasite upon the rest of the organism. This is not so. If a brief personal reference is permissible, I may say that more than thirty years' study of the nature and being of man—a study which has always tried to reconcile Spiritual Science with the results of natural science—has led me to confirm this threefold nature of the human organism. It is a general assumption of modern natural science that the life of Spirit and soul runs parallel with the life of nerves and Senses. In reality it is only the thought-life of man that is bound to the system of nerves and senses. Sentient life (feeling) is bound up with the rhythmic processes in the human organism. The feeling-life of man is connected directly with the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation, just as the life of thought and perception is connected with the system of nerves and senses. Similarly, the life of will is connected with the metabolic system (digestion and assimilation) in man. The seemingly lowest division of the human organism—the metabolic system (in the sense of a process, of course, and not of substance)—is the bearer of man's life of will.

In his nature of soul and Spirit, man is also a threefold being. The spiritual will, the feeling-life of the soul, the thinking, ideation and perception directed to external material phenomena—these are the three members or divisions of man's nature of soul and Spirit. These three members correspond to the three members of the physical organism—to the system of nerves and senses, to the rhythmic life of blood circulation and breathing, and to the metabolic life.

Now if we observe human beings in any given regions of the earth, we find that in terms of this threefold organisation they are by no means absolutely the same the whole Earth over. Another great error in modern thought is to imagine that one common social programme could be issued for the whole of the Earth and that men could adjust themselves to it. Human beings are individualised, specialized, in the different regions of the Earth. And those who would learn to know the true being of man as he lives on the Earth must be able to develop love not only for an abstract, universal humanity—for that would be merely an ‘idea’ of humanity, a dead, empty idea. Those who would really understand their fellow-beings must develop love for the individual forms and expressions of human nature in the different regions of the Earth.

In the short time at our disposal it is impossible to characterise all the individual peoples. All that can be done is to consider the main types of earthly humanity. We are led, in the first place, to a very characteristic type and also one of the very oldest—to the oriental, as expressed in many different ways in the ancient Indian peoples and in other Eastern races. This oriental type reveals one common element, especially in the Indian people. The man of the East has grown together, as it were, with the Earth which is his own soil. However clearly it may appear that the oriental has received the Spirit with intense devotion into his heart and soul, however deeply oriental mysticism may impress us, if we study the racial characteristics of the oriental, we shall find that the lofty spirituality we so justly admire is dependent, in his case, upon the experiences of the will flowing in the human being, the will that is, in turn, bound up with the metabolic processes. However paradoxical it may appear at first sight, this very spirituality of the oriental peoples, and especially of the ancient Indian, is something that—to use a crude expression—wells up from the metabolic processes. These processes are, in turn, connected with the processes of Nature in the environment of the oriental. Think of the Indian in very ancient times. Around him are the trees and fruits, everything that Nature in her beauty and wonder gives to man. The oriental unites this with the metabolic processes within him in such a way that the metabolism becomes a kind of continuation of all that is ripening to fruit on the trees and living under the soil in the roots. In his metabolic nature, the oriental has grown together with the fertility and well-being of the Earth. The metabolic process is the bearer of the will—hence the will develops in the inner being of man. But that which develops in the innermost being, in which man is firmly rooted and by means of which he relates himself to his environment—this does not enter very vividly into consciousness. A different element streams into the conscious life of the oriental. Into the feeling and thinking life of the oriental—especially of the most characteristic type—the Indian—there streams something that to all appearance is experienced in the metabolic processes in a material sense. In its spiritual ‘mirror-image,’ however, it appears as spiritual life.

Thus when we enter into all that has come forth from the soul and the thought of the really creative peoples of the East, it appears as a spiritual product of the Earth itself. When we steep ourselves in the Vedas that we pervaded by the light of the Spirit and speak with such intensity to our souls, if we respond to the instinctive subtlety of Vedanta and Yoga philosophy or go deeply into such works as those of Lao Tzu and Confucius, or are drawn to devote ourselves to oriental poetry, oriental wisdom, we never feel that it flows in an individual form from a human personality. Through his metabolic processes the oriental grows together with Nature around him. Nature lives and works on, seethes and surges within him, and when we allow his poetic wisdom to work upon us, it is as though the Earth herself were speaking. The mysteries of the Earth's growth seem to speak to mankind through the lips of the man of the East. We feel that no Western or Central European people could ever interpret the inner Spiritual mysteries of the Earth herself in this way.

The highest types of oriental peoples seem to move over the face of the Earth, expressing in their inner life something that really lives under the surface of the Earth. This grows up from below the Earth and bursts forth in blossoms and fruits, just as it does in the Spirit and soul of the man of the East. The inner essence of the Earth becomes articulate, as it were, in the oriental peoples. We can therefore understand that in accordance with their whole being, they have less feeling for the physical phenomena on the surface of the Earth and the external facts of the material world. Their innermost nature is one with the sub-earthly forces of which the external sense-phenomena are the outcome. They are therefore less concerned with what is taking place on the surface of the Earth. They are ‘metabolic-men.’ But the metabolic processes are expressed, in their case, in the life of soul and Spirit.

Now when an ideal arises before the peoples of the East, what form does it take? The injunction given to pupils by oriental sages was somewhat as follows: ‘You must breathe in a certain way; you must enter into the rhythm of life.’ These teachers instructed their pupils in certain rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. The way in which they taught their pupils of the higher life of soul is highly characteristic. The whole organisation of man as we see him in the ordinary life of the East, belonging to an Asiatic people, and especially to a Southern Asiatic people, is based upon metabolism. When he forms a concrete ideal of how he can become higher man, he develops his rhythmic system, by an act of free-will he strives for something that is higher, that is not given him by Nature.

Now the strange thing is that the further we pass from the Asiatic to the European peoples, and especially to those of Middle Europe, we find an outstanding development of the rhythmic system in the ordinary daily life of man. The peoples, not of Eastern or of Western Europe, but of Middle Europe, possess as a natural characteristic that for which the Indian strives as his ideal of a superman. But it is one thing to have to acquire a quality by dint of self-discipline and free spiritual activity, and another to possess it naturally and instinctively. The man of Middle Europe possesses by nature what the oriental has to develop from out of his metabolic life which is inwardly connected with the Earth. Thus, what is for the oriental an ideal, is for the European a natural possession of daily life; his ideal, therefore, must necessarily be different. The ideal of the European lies one stage higher; it is the life of thought bound up with the life of nerves and senses.

There is a quality of unbridled phantasy in the artistic creations of the oriental. It seems to rise from inner Earth activity, just as vapour rises from water into the clouds. The inner, rhythmic ‘wholeness,’ which is the essence of the life of Middle Europe, enabled the ancient Greek people—who accomplished so much for the whole of modern civilisation—to create what we call European Art. The Greek strove for all that makes manifest the inner harmony of earthly man. The material elements and the etheric-spiritual elements are balanced—and the ‘middle’ man is expressed. The creations of oriental phantasy always run to excess in some direction or other. It is in the artistic conceptions of Greece that the human form was first imbued with harmonious roundness and inner wholeness. This was because man realised his true being in the rhythmic system. When the man of Greece set himself an ideal, it was one he strove to reach by dint of inner discipline of soul, by dint of education. He used the organ of thinking just as the oriental uses the organs connected with rhythm in the human being. The Yogi of India endeavours to regulate his breathing according to the laws of Spirit and soul so that it may bear him above the level of ordinary humanity. The man of Middle Europe trains himself to rise above the instinctive processes of the rhythmic system, of the blood circulation, of the breathing, to what makes him truly man. Out of this the life of thought is developed. But these thoughts, especially in the highest type of Middle European, become merely an ‘interpreter’ of the being of man. This is what strikes us when we turn to the productions of European culture after having steeped ourselves in those of oriental humanity. In the highly spiritual creations of oriental culture we see, as it were, the very blossoming of earthly evolution. Human lips give expression to the speech of the Earth herself. It is not so in the man of Middle European nor was it so in the ancient Greek.

When the man of Middle Europe follows the promptings of his own true nature, when he is not false to himself, when he realises that self-knowledge is the noblest crown of human endeavour, that the representation of the human in Nature and in history is a supreme achievement of man—then he will express as his ideal everything that he himself is as a human being. The very essence of the man of Middle Europe is expressed when he gives free play to his own inherent being. Hence we can understand that the wonderful thought expressed in Goethe's book on Winckelmann could arise only in Middle Europe. I refer to the passage where Goethe summarises the lofty perceptions, profound thought and strong will-impulses of this wonderful man into a description of his own conception of the world, for it is like the very sun of modern culture: “In that man is placed on Nature's pinnacle, he regards himself as another entire Nature, whose task is to bring forth inwardly yet another pinnacle. For this purpose he heightens his powers, imbues himself with perfections and virtues—summons discrimination, order and harmony and rises finally to the production of a work of art.” Man's own spiritual nature gives birth to a new being.

This application of all the forces to the understanding of man himself is especially manifest in the man of Middle Europe—when he is true to his own being. It is only in more modern times that this has fallen into the background. The man of Middle Europe has every motive to consider how he should develop this veneration, understanding and penetration of what is truly human.

If we now look at the East and its peoples from a more purely spiritual point of view, we shall find that the oriental peoples, just because they are ‘metabolic men,’ develop the spirituality which constitutes the connection between the human soul and the Divine. If man's nature is to be complete, he must bring forth, in his inner being, those qualities with which he is not endowed by the elemental world; in his own consciousness he must awaken the antithesis of all that he possesses by nature. Thus the oriental develops a spirituality which makes him conscious of the connection between the human soul and the Divine. The oriental can speak of man's connection with the Divine as a matter of course, in a way that is possible to no other race, in words that touch the very heart. Other peoples of the Earth may subjugate and conquer oriental races and try to instil into them their own idiosyncrasies, laws and regulations, but they do, nevertheless, assimilate what the East has to say about the connection of man with the Divine as something which applies to themselves also.

In modern times we have seen how Western peoples, steeped in materialism though they may be, turn to oriental philosophers such as ancient Laotze to Chinese and Indian conceptions of the world, not so much in search of ideas but in order to find the inner fervour which will enable them to experience man's connection with the Divine. Men steep themselves in oriental literature much more in order that their feelings may be warmed by the way in which the oriental speaks of his connection with the Divine than for the sake of any philosophical content. The abstract nature of the European makes it difficult for him really to understand oriental philosophy. Again and again people who have studied the sayings of Buddha, with all their endless repetitions, have expressed the opinion to me that these sayings ought to be abridged and the repetitions eliminated. My only answer could be: ‘You have no real understanding of the true greatness of oriental philosophy, for it is expressed in the very repetitions which you want to cut out.’ When the oriental steeps himself in the sayings of Buddha, with the repetitions which only irritate people of the West, he is on the way to his ideal the rhythmic recurrence of the motif. The same phrase is repeated over and over again. Now, as we have seen, the oriental lives naturally in the processes of the metabolic system. When he gives himself up to the recurring phrases of Buddha, there arises within him a spiritual counterpart of the system of breathing and blood circulation; he has brought this about by dint of his own free endeavours.

If a European really tries to understand all that is great and holy in the oriental nature, he gains a knowledge which will elude him unless he consciously develops it. It is quite natural that the European should want to eliminate the repetitions in the sayings of Buddha, for he lives in the breathing rhythm and his ideal is to raise himself to the element of thought. When the thought is once grasped he wants no repetitions—he strives to get beyond them. If we are to study these oriental repetitions, we must, in effect, develop another kind of quality—not an intellectual understanding but an inner love for what is expressed in individual forms by the different peoples. Our whole attitude should make us realise that the particular qualities which make one people great are not possessed by the others, and we can understand these qualities only when we are able to love the other Peoples and appreciate the full value of their particular gifts.

It is just when we penetrate into the inner nature and essence of the Peoples of the Earth that we find the differences of their individual natures. And then we realise that the all-embracing sphere of the ‘human’ is not expressed in its entirety through any individual man, or through the members of any one race, but only through the whole of mankind. If anyone would understand what he is in his whole being, let him study the characteristics of the different peoples of the Earth. Let him assimilate the qualities which he himself cannot possess by nature, for only then will he become fully man. Full and complete manhood is a possibility for everyone. Everyone should pay heed to what lives in his own inner being. The revelation vouchsafed to other peoples is not his and he must find it in them. In his heart he feels and knows that this is necessary. If he discovers what is great and characteristic in the other peoples and allows this to penetrate deeply into his own being, he will realise that the purpose of his existence cannot be fulfilled without these other qualities, because they are also part of his own inner striving. The possibility of full manhood lies in every individual, but it must be brought to fulfilment by understanding the special characteristics of the different peoples spread over the Earth. It is in the East, then, that man is able to express with a kind of natural spirituality his connection with the Divine.

When we turn to the peoples of Middle Europe, we find that what is truly characteristic of them is hidden under layers of misconception—and these must be cleared away. Think of all the great philosophers who, having thought about Nature and God in a human sense, have with almost no exception raised another question as well. Nearly every great German Philosopher has been occupied with the question of equity, of rights as between man and man. The search for equity, misunderstood and hindered though it be, is a characteristic of the Middle European peoples. Those who do not recognise this have no understanding of the peoples of Middle Europe, and nothing will divert them from the prevailing materialism (which has quite another source) back to what is fundamentally characteristic of true Teutonic stock.

Just as the man of the East is the interpreter of the Earth because his spiritual life is a blossom or fruit of the Earth herself, so is the Teuton an interpreter of himself, of his own being. He faces himself questioningly, and because of this he faces every other man as his equal. The burning question for him, therefore, is that of equity, of right. Wherever Teutonic thought has striven to fathom the depths of the universe, in men such as Fichte, Hegel or Schelling, it has never been a question of adopting the old Roman tradition of equity but of investigating its very nature and essence. The abstract results of these investigations, to be found in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Humboldt, are fundamentally the same thing as we find in Goethe when he seeks along multifarious paths for the expression of the truth, harmony and fullness of man's nature. In this sense Goethe is the representative of the Teutonic, Middle European nature. Just as the oriental faces the Earth, so does the Middle European face man, with self-knowledge.

If we pass to Western Europe and thence to America, we find the figure of the true Westerner expressed in abstract thinking. To use a figure of speech employed, I believe, by that deeply spiritual writer, Rabindranath Tagore, the Westerner is pre-eminently a ‘head-man.’ The oriental is a ‘heart-man,’ for he experiences the process of metabolism in his heart; the Middle European is the ‘breath-man.’ He stands in a rhythmic relationship to the outer world through the rhythmic processes within him. The Westerner is a head-man and Tagore compares him to a ‘spiritual giraffe.’ Tagore loves the Westerner, for when it is a question of describing characteristics, sympathy and antipathy do not necessarily come into play. Tagore compares the Westerner to a spiritual giraffe because he raises everything into abstractions—into abstractions such as gave rise, for instance, to the ‘Fourteen Points’ of President Wilson. Speaking in the sense of spiritual reality, one feels that the Westerner's head is separated from the rest of his body by a long neck and the head can only express in abstract concepts what it offers to the world. A long path has to be trodden before these abstract concepts, these husks of words and ideas, finds their way to the heart, the lungs and the breathing system, and so to the region where they can become feelings and pass over into will.

The characteristic quality of the Western man inheres, then, in what I will call the thinking system. The ideal for which the Middle European strives—which he endeavours to attain as a result of freedom, of free spiritual activity—does not have to be striven for by the Westerner and especially not by the American through this free Spiritual activity, for the Westerner possesses it instinctively. Instinctively he is a man of abstractions. As I have said, it is not the same to possess a quality instinctively as to strive for it by dint of effort. When it has once been acquired it is bound up with man's nature in quite another way. To acquire a quality by dint of free spiritual activity is not the same thing as to possess it instinctively, as a gift of Nature.

Now here lies a great danger. Whereas the Indian in his Yoga philosophy strives upwards to the rhythmic system, and the Middle European to the thinking system, the Westerner, the ‘spiritual giraffe,’ must transcend the merely intellectual processes if he is not to lose his true humanity. As I recently said quite frankly to a gathering attended by a number of Westerners, this is the great responsibility facing the West at the present time. In the case of the Middle Europeans it will be a healthy, free striving that leads them to spirituality, to Spiritual Science. The whole nature of Western man will be lost in an abyss, if, as he strives to rise beyond the thinking-system, he falls into an empty ‘spiritualism,’ seeking for the qualities of soul in a region where the soul does not dwell. Here lies the danger, but also the great responsibility. The danger is that the Westerner may fall into soul-emptiness as he strives to transcend the qualities bestowed on him by Nature; his responsibility is to allow himself to be led to true Spiritual Science, lest by virtue of his dominant position in the world he should lend himself to the downfall of humanity.

It is a solemn duty of the peoples of Middle Europe—for it is part of their nature—to ascend the ladder to spiritual knowledge. But on their path of ascent from the rhythmic, breathing-system to the thinking-system, they gain something else in the sphere of the human. The danger confronting Western peoples is that they may leave the sphere of the human when they set up an ideal for themselves. This really lies at the root of the existence of the many sectarian movements in the West—movements which run counter to the principle of the ‘universal human’ at the present time.

In the oriental, whose metabolic system is so closely related to the Earth, a spiritual activity along the paths or Nature herself arises. The man of the West, with his predominantly developed thinking-system, turns his gaze primarily to the world of sense. It is as though something under the surface of the Earth were working in the oriental; the man of the West seems to pay heed only to what is above the Earth's surface, the phenomena which arise as a result of sun, moon, stars, air, water and the like. The thought-processes themselves, however, have not been derived from what is happening at the periphery. I said in a previous lecture that the spiritual in man cannot be explained by the study of the earthly world around him. The spiritual fruits of the Earth arise in the very being of the true oriental and he knows himself, as man, with the living Spirit within him, to be a Citizen of the whole Cosmos—a member not only of the Earth but of the whole Cosmos. The Westerner, with his more highly developed thinking-system, has been deprived of this Cosmos by modern science, and is left with nothing but the possibility to calculate it in mathematical and mechanical formulae. The Westerner must realise that the origin of his soul is cosmic, that indeed he could not exist as a thinking being if this were not so, and he must also realise cold, barren mathematics is the only science which remains to him for the purpose of explaining the Cosmos. The outpourings of the Earth herself have become part of the very being of the oriental—his poetic wisdom is like a blossom of the Earth. The Middle European has to recognise that his essential human quality is revealed in man and through man. In effect the human being confronts himself.

The qualities of most value in the man of the West are those bestowed not by the Earth, but by the Cosmos. But the only means he has of approaching these cosmic, super-sensible gifts is by mathematical calculation, by equally dry spectral analysis or by similar hypotheses. What the Middle European seeks as an expression of equity between man and man is sought by the Westerner through his dedication to economic affairs, for the human rights he values as an expression of the spirit seem to him to emerge only as the fruit of economic life. Hence it is not surprising that Karl Marx left Germany, where he might have learnt to recognise the nature of man in a Goethean, humanistic sense, and went to the West, to England, where his gaze was diverted from the truly human element and he was misled with the belief that what man can know is nothing but an ideology, a fact of economic life. This is not a truth in the absolute sense, but is fundamental to the nature of the man of the West, just as it is fundamental to the oriental peoples to behold Nature side by side with the being of man and then to speak of the connection of the human soul with the Divine as a self-evident fact. That is why many men of the West who feel the necessity for looking up to the Divine—for, as I have already said, all men feel the need at least to become complete man—are aware of a longing, even when they try to conquer oriental peoples, to receive from them what they have to say about man's connection with the Divine. Whether we apply this to smaller races and individual peoples, or confine ourselves to what is typical everywhere we see that man in his whole nature is not expressed in the members of any one people or race. Full manhood is as yet only an urge within us, but this urge must grow into a love for all humanity, for those qualities we do not ourselves possess by nature but can acquire if we sincerely seek for knowledge of the nature of other peoples of the Earth.

The internationalism prevailing in the age of Goethe assumed this form. It is this kind of internationalism that permeates such thoughts as are found, for instance, in The Boundaries of the State by William Von Humboldt. It is the striving of a true cosmopolitanism which, by assimilating all that can be acquired from a love extended to other races, ennobles and uplifts the individual people; knowledge of one's own race is sought by assimilating all that is idealistic, great and beautiful in other peoples of the Earth. It is because of this that in Germany's days of spiritual prime there arose from out of the rhythmic life of her people a lofty cosmopolitanism which had been sought from among all other peoples. Just think how Herder's search took him among other peoples, how he tried to unravel the deepest being of all peoples of the Earth! How penetrated he was by the thought that permeating the individual ‘man of flesh’ there is another man, greater and more powerful, who can be discovered only when we are able to pour ourselves out over all peoples.

We cannot help contrasting this spirit, which at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the germ of greatness in Middle Europe, with the internationalism of today. In its present form, internationalism is not a living pulse in the world; it is preached throughout the world in the form of Marxism—and Marxism believes only in human thinking. Internationalism nowadays is a more or less weakened form of Marxism. There is no longer any inkling of the differentiation of full and complete humanity over the Earth. An abstraction is set up and is supposed to represent humanity, to represent man. Such internationalism is not the first stage of an ascent but the last stage of a decline, because it is devoid of all endeavours to reach after true internationality, which always ennobles the individual stock. The kind of internationalism which appears in Marxism and all that has developed from it is the result of remaining stationary within a one-sided and wholly unpractical system of thought that is applied merely to the world of sense and has not penetrated to the real national qualities. True internationalism, by contrast, springs from a love which goes out to all peoples and races in order that the light received from them may be kindled in the deeds, concepts and creations of one's own people. Each individual race must so find its place in the great chorus of the peoples on the Earth that it contributes to the full understanding which can alone unite them all in real and mutual knowledge.

In this lecture it has not been my object to speak of matters which might seem to indicate a ‘programme.’ I wanted to speak of the spiritual-scientific knowledge that is kindled in the spiritual investigator as a result of his higher knowledge of the communal life of man on the Earth, for this true communal life is indeed possible.

One can, of course, speak from many different points of view of what is necessary for the immediate future of humanity; one can speak of this impulse or that. But it must be realised that a spiritual comfort flowing from the knowledge I have tried to indicate, more in fleeting outline than in detail, may be added to all that can be said in regard to social, political or educational affairs. It is a comfort that may flow from knowledge of the rhythm, I say expressly the possible rhythm, of the historical life of humanity.

This lecture should show you that the hatred and antipathy in the world today can indeed be followed by international love with healing in its wings. This is indeed possible. But we are living in an age when all that is possible must be consciously, deliberately and freely striven for by men. There must be knowledge of the conditions requisite for uniting the peoples of the Earth, in order that, as a result of this knowledge, each individual people may help to make the waves of love follow those of hatred. Human love alone has power to heal the wounds of hatred. If mankind has no wish for this love, chaos will remain. That is the terrible alternative now facing men who have knowledge. Those who realise its terrors know that the souls of men dare not sleep, for otherwise, as a result of the powerlessness caused by the sleep into which the souls of the peoples have fallen, the healing waves of love will not be able to flow over the waves of hatred.

Men who realise this will acquire the kind of knowledge that flows from a spiritual conception of the relationships between the peoples. They will take this knowledge into their feeling—love for humanity will be born. They will take this knowledge into their will—deeds for humanity will be accomplished. The evolution of the age, with all the terrible paralysis that is appearing at the present time, places a solemn duty before the soul: to gather together all that can unite mankind in love and array it in opposition to the destructive elements that have made their appearance in recent times. This quest for loving unification, for unifying love is not merely a vague feeling. To those who understand the conditions of life today, it is the very highest duty of man.

In the last lecture the endeavour was made to show how necessary it is for men of the present day to turn the eye of the soul towards spiritual science, to those spheres of existence, of reality, in which the rule of the spirit within human evolution is clearly perceptible to anyone who has the faculty of sight in such regions.

As I said, the middle of the fifteenth century brought with it a complete change in the relation of civilized man's soul to the three Hierarchies next above man, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. Hitherto it has been out of their own interests and impulses that they worked in human evolution. In our times, this connection has come to an end. They have for the moment no interest in continuing to work as before on the evolution of man. They will only enter into a new relationship to us when human beings begin to develop an interest in the spiritual worlds, out of free will and of their own accord. If we would not lose all connection with the spiritual worlds, we must occupy ourselves with them in the near future, for the spiritual beings who have been connected with us so far have of themselves no reason to be further interested in us. We can only arouse their interest anew if out of our own souls we again concern ourselves with the spiritual world, fostering thoughts, sentiments, and impulses of will, into which spiritual forces can flow. The question may and must be asked, how can human beings manage so to concern themselves with the spiritual worlds as to maintain their connection with the higher Hierarchies as the Earth evolution proceeds. The answer may deal with things which apparently have little to do with the question; but we shall see that they do provide the foundation on which we can rebuild onwards into the future our, connection with the spiritual world.

The first thing which we must examine is the effect of the various confessions, the creeds, existing among civilized people. Hitherto they were necessary, to guide the heart and, mind to spiritual realms, but in future they will help to detach man from the spiritual world, unless they admit something entirely new into their efforts. Fundamentally speaking, the creeds of the present day are based on the egoism of man, as we shall realize if we put before our souls one question of such great importance that it forms, and always must form, a touchstone for their views, the question of the immortality of the human soul. We can see, from the way in which this question is generally handled by the creeds, that they appeal largely to man's egoistic instincts. Of course there are deeper foundations for their speech, but these we are not discussing today: as a rule the creeds speak of the “continued existence of the soul after death"—that is, the continuation of the life of the human soul.

To deal with the subject of immortality from this point of view is comparatively easy, for human egotism asserts itself there emphatically. Man simply cannot bear—apart from all truth about the question—the thought of utter extinction at death, so that a certain response is always to be found in man’s soul when "life after death" is mentioned. The treatment generally given today to the idea springs from an egoistic interest in people. They would prefer not to die as souls at physical death. Naturally, the soul's continued existence after death will be assumed in all our future discussions on immortality, but the way in which anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of the continued existence of the soul after death is very far from being accepted by the creeds.

But this also is important: that people of our day must hear a very different language about immortality from that to which they are accustomed. One who discusses the question of immortality should not only speak of life after death, but also of that life which is lived here in the physical world between birth and death. For as you know, this life is also a "continuation"; it is a continuation of the life passed between our last death and that birth through which we are now in the physical world. That is the view which men must learn to hold—that the life here is a continuation of the spiritual life before birth. In the growth of a child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, we must notice forces from the spiritual world arising from its inner being, forces which have come with birth and work so as gradually to form the being of man as time goes by. In a sense we lift the veil of the God in man when we enter into the life of the child to develop it. Social relations must take on something of a religious impulse permeating the whole of life between man and man. For this the important, the essential thing is an attitude which never forgets that physical life is a continuation of a pre-natal life, of spirit and soul.

Many things will follow on this. For one thing we shall recognize that our real humanity lies in the depths of our being, gradually emerging. I have referred to ancient times of human evolution, known from an anthroposophical standpoint as the first and second post-Atlantean epochs. People in those days were as capable of development right into their old age as only the young are nowadays. A child goes through a physical evolution about its seventh year with the change of teeth; through another metamorphosis when puberty occurs; but after that what goes on in his evolution is outwardly less noticeable. In olden times this was not so; what man went through in soul and spirit expressed itself into much later stages of life. Nowadays old age sets in at seventeen or eighteen, and we are amazed at its evidences. Here is an example: a short time ago, in Stuttgart, at a meeting of the Cultural Committee where present-day education was discussed from the most varied points of view, a young man got up (let us call him "a young man" though he might equally well be called an "old boy"!) who told us we needed instructing about the true ideals of education! He began by uttering some very high-sounding words, then read out the programme of a modern Educational Society. After much stumbling he finally broke down, and, having no more to say, gathered up the threads with "I must there­fore claim to have proved that old age no longer understands its own youth," and went out. I replied that I quite saw we had not understood him, for the simple reason that his speech and behaviour had been those of an old man; he had in fact enunciated as principles, like an ancient grey-beard, the last word in abstractions. Old age, nowadays, means the limit up to which a man can develop. Up to a particular age a person can absorb all sorts of things, and is not ashamed to develop himself. But at about twenty years of age he feels shame at the idea of developing farther. Seldom nowadays do we find people with grey hair and wrinkles welcoming with joy the dawn of each year because each year brings new possibilities of development to the organism and new knowledge, unattainable before, is within reach. At the inconsiderable age of thirty men are ashamed to make themselves capable of development, or to learn anything more. The point is that we should actually retain the possibility, all through life, of rejoicing in the coming year, because each year charms forth the divine-spiritual content of our own inner being in ever new forms.

I want to emphasize this point. We should really and truly learn to experience our life as capable of development not only in youth, but through its whole span between birth and death. For this a new education will be necessary. We elders find that to look back at our own schooldays evokes few pleasant thoughts. We must manage to shape school­days for the children of today so that to remember them will provide an ever new and invigorating source of life. Now this will bring, as you can see, the possibility of opening for mankind real perception of the soul-spiritual within themselves, of experiencing something extending beyond the everyday life which is stirred and stimulated from without.

Other knowledge will be recognized as necessary. There is a secret, intimately connected with the present stage of human evolution, which is not known today. In earlier times, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to take much notice of it, but today it must be reckoned with. This mystery of life is that man, constituted as he is today in body, soul and spirit, every night looks, to a certain extent, at the events of the coming day, but without always carrying that vision over into full day-consciousness. It is his "Angel" who has that clear consciousness. But what is experienced at night in community with that being whom we call the Angel is a pre-vision of the coming day. This is no subject for human curiosity, but a matter for practical life. Only when the feeling of this fact fills our inner being can we make right decisions and bring right thoughts into the course of daily life. Let us assume that a man has something definite to do, say at noon. This that he has to do has already been arranged by his Angel and himself during the preceding night, though the fact is not necessarily kept in consciousness and human curiosity has no part in it. People should be filled with the conviction that during the day they should realize in a fruitful way what they have arranged at night in co-operation with this Angel being.

Much that has happened of late might draw men's attention with almost shattering force to what I have just said. The last four or five years of agony should have taught men that the consciousness of their association with higher beings through the experiences of the night did not, alas! exist. If the feeling had permeated men that their doings in the day were in harmony with the decisions made with their Angels in the preceding night, how different events would have been! These things must be spoken of now, to point out how man must learn to regard this life between birth and death as a continuation of the life of spirit and soul which was his before birth. It must be made known that man in future should be able to experience throughout his whole life the revelation of the Divine in his own being, and that through all his life in the day this vivid consciousness should persist as: "What I do from morning till evening I have discussed with my Angel, while I slept." Men must turn to feelings which are more concrete with regard to the spiritual world than the modern abstractions of various creeds, which at the same time claim that they appeal to unselfish, not to egoistic human instincts. From such feelings will arise that which will provide the necessary relation to the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who will once more be able to interest themselves on our behalf. Men's attitude to the spiritual world must move in this appointed direction.

Yet again we must observe something. The creeds speak much about "God" and "The Divine." What do they really mean? Surely something of which a vague conscious­ness, at least, exists in the soul of man. After all, it is not, what name is given to a thing that matters, but what it means to a man's soul. Men talk of “God" and of "Christ," but all the time they only mean the "Angel"—the Angel to which they turn because they meet a response in their souls. Whatever the creeds may speak of today, whether of God or Christ or other divine being, the substance of the thought only relates to the Angel Beings who are connected with man, the Angeloi. Higher it cannot rise, since people are disinclined to seek any wider relation to the spiritual world than an egoistic one. The relation to the Archangeloi, the Hierarchy of the Archangels, must indeed be sought in another way. Men's interests today must be considerably widened. I will show you how that extension must take place, so that from making response only to the Angeloi, they may rise in their feelings to the Archangeloi.

They must realize that they have passed through terrible experiences all over the civilized world during the last few years. Many have asked about the "causes" of, these events, with mutual imputations of "guilt " and " innocence ": yet we need only look below the mere surface of things and we shall have little interest in all this talk about “causes " and "war-guilt" or " innocence," simply because we can see that what has come up to the surface in these last four or five years is, like waves of the sea, always there, but brought up from the depths to the surface by the forces below. An upheaval of human forces had been going on; one people after another shared in the enormous folly of those years; one could but say: "Some turmoil of elemental forces is surging upwards into view. The sea of human life has become unquiet—What is it?"

We shall never get things clear if we do not connect this fact of humanity's unrest with the whole period we call "history." We must convince ourselves that the armed struggle of the last few years is only the beginning of events which will take place in quite other spheres, but which have never before existed among us in this particular form. We are not at the end of a stage of evolution—only superficial observation could lead to that conclusion—we stand at the beginning of the greatest conflicts, the greatest spiritual conflicts of the civilized world, and we must put forth our best efforts to be equal to them. Increasing opposition is threatened in the soul-attitude of East and West in the near future, for East and West have developed in two quite different directions. If we would see into these things, we must set before our­selves certain phenomena in their deepest, most fundamental form as riddles to be solved.

For decades we have heard repeated in socialist circles holding the Marxian theory, that everything man experiences as art, religion, custom, law or science is just "Ideology " (I have discussed this at greater length in the first chapter of The Threefold Commonwealth). This means that a view which had been developing amongst the middle classes for the last three or four hundred years, but which they were too timid to admit, has been frankly acknowledged by the socialists of the last half-century. They assert that the genuine reality of social life consists in actual happenings; therefore the real lies only in the economic forces. All conceptions of art, religion, custom, science, law, morality, merely form a kind of vapour rising from true reality, and are mere ideology, with nothing but a semblance of reality. The socialists conclude that it is only necessary to change economic life and all other changes will ensue, since everything else—morality, law, religion and so forth—is only an unreal vapour arising from the events in the economic sphere, which is the "only reality."

If, however, the world be considered in no restricted sense but as a great whole, we shall defend this word "ideology " which, but for their timid dislike of facts, the middle classes might have been using for three or four hundred years. They did feel that the economic life was the "only reality" and what displayed itself as science, art or religion was like a vapour; all life was based on this, and it was reserved for their pupils to carry their reasoning to its logical conclusion. Socialists are, after all, only extreme pupils of the middle-class world. This is the view which, forming in the West, reached its climax in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Other impulses have formed the Eastern view of the world, and an Oriental would say: "I look at what is going on in the external world: I see what my senses convey to me, what I use as an instrument for transforming the world around, what shines down on me from the stars, and what I myself am as to my bodily nature—what is it all? It is Maya! What then is reality, and not illusion? Only what is experienced in the human soul—that is reality!" One who does not translate in terms of a dictionary, but according to the inner meaning, knows that the words "Maya" in the East and "Ideology " in the West mean one and the same thing. For thousands of years the Oriental has regarded the outer world which affects the senses—including economics—as Maya. The Westerner, on the other hand, sees his reality in what for the Oriental is "Maya," and what arises in his soul is for him "Ideology." Both views of the world have developed to a certain point. Talk with the leading men in the socialist parties especially in those places where the first Revolution (known here as the "November " Revolution) has not yet taken place, and it is evident that this revolution altered their ideas somewhat, but not their feelings. You hear the same views as obtained right up to the war, that it is not necessary to con­tribute anything from the will towards trans­forming, revolutionizing the world, but that all that will happen of itself. Something fatalistic has appeared in the West. People are convinced that they need only wait until the means of production are sufficiently developed, and then by a natural metamorphosis all that is concentrated in private capital will pass over into other forms. Thinking of this sort is as sensible as saying: "This room is full of bad air. I cannot breathe. The window could be opened, but I am not going to open it; I am waiting until the air improves of itself."

Fatalism of the West, Fatalism of the East—we know them well. In the East, though not at the very beginning, men fell into complete fatalism, as the philosophy of Maya developed. Every world-philosophy has, in its inner law, the impulse towards fatalism at some time, but we stand today at a point where we must get rid of fatalism. We must pass from mere observation and contemplation to the exertion of will and intention. We must rouse our wills by developing impulses from the truths I have described regarding birth as a continuation of pre-natal life, remaining young notwithstanding white hair and wrinkles, the playing in of the nightly work of the Angel into daily life. Man needs to acquire impulses for his life of will by widening his sphere of interest, by seeing not only what touches his own personal life but what affects the civilized world in manifold forms. Look­ing at the West, to which we ourselves belong, we see the inner world as ideology, the outer world as reality: in the East, ideology, Maya, in the outer world, reality in the inner world alone.  In the interaction of human beings at the present time, we have the task of finding the way of escape from that aspect of these philosophies which has already turned to fatalism. We must look for this way, and we shall only find it if we are in earnest about something which annoys people terribly today.

There was a remarkable example of this once, when my hearers were greatly vexed by something I said in a lecture in a South German town, though it was a truth necessary for the present time. The context of my lecture necessitated the remark that the leading classes of the present day have a decadent physical brain. Such statements are unpleasant both to utter and to listen to, but it is necessary that people should realize this fact. The very people to whom the present con­figuration of our times is due have, in achieving it, acquired a decadent physical brain. It is so, and we are in one sense in the same case as were the people of Europe during the, great migrations and the spreading of Christianity. The Christian impulse came over from the East, by way of Greece and Rome. Naturally the Greek and Roman world was far more highly developed than the. German. The Germans were barbarians. But the brains of the Greeks and Romans were decadent, there­fore the surge of Christianity was not absorbed by them in the same way as it was when it reached the Germans. That is a migration of peoples which went horizontally. today it is "vertical." today a wave of spiritual life is coming from the spiritual world. Just as Christianity was at first reflected from the Greeks and Romans, so the spiritual world is reflected from the bourgeoisie today, and that is decadent. The proletariat are not so yet; they are still able to understand what is meant by the spiritual world. But the others will need preparation through anthroposophy, through that part of the brain which is not yet physical that is the etheric brain. We are at present confronted with the fact that the leading classes are not only menaced with a decadent brain, but with entire decadence, if they do not realize that they must grasp the spiritual view of the world by supersensible means.

The tragedy of the bourgeois system is that it would grasp everything "physically," whereas our task today is to grasp things with the etheric brain, to take spiritual truths into our being. Modern humanity must steer in this direction, and the West must take the lead. Here we must take into account some­thing very important.

Observe the development of language, passing from East to West. Take the German language, today dreadfully misused. If we look back at the language of Goethe, of Lessing, we can see that not so long ago in the very words, through their peculiar quality, it was possible to express what of spiritual life lay within them. today we have dreadfully neglected our language, degraded it into phrases only; but that it can no longer express spirituality is not due to the language alone. The farther West we go as regards language, the more we find in speech, with its tunes and sounds, even with its grammar, a complete rejection of what is really spiritual. From this rejection of the quality of soul and spirit from the Anglo-American idiom follows the mission of the Anglo-American peoples. Their world­ mission consists in this: in learning, maybe instinctively, yet still learning (as they listen to other men, in course of acquiring world dominion), not only to comprehend the sound, but to interpret the gesture of the language, to hear more than the mere physical sound, to hear something which passes from man to man in speech, going beyond the spoken word. That works from etheric body to etheric body. Here lies the secret of the Western languages, that in them the physical tone loses its significance, while the spiritual gains it. It is part of their task to let the spirit filter into speech, not merely to hear physically, but to hear intuitively more than passes over into the sound. In the West, the spiritual must be sought behind language itself.

If we look at the East, we shall notice an ever-increasing urge among the peoples who, as we have seen, sink themselves into their own inner being, not to be bound by the old forms of conception as to "Karma," " Reincarnation," and so forth, but to look out into the world, and in that outer world to perceive something spiritual, even to establish a sort of Philosophy of Nature.

These are only trivial instances through which we can widen our interests from our own personality and our nationality to take in the whole of humanity, saying to ourselves "Here in the West is Ideology, though quite another Ideology from the Eastern one," and seeing how elemental forces are stirred up within earthly humanity as a result, of these antitheses. We learn to take our stand within the whole civilized world, and when we develop such knowledge of our position within it at the same time we build in our souls the means of acquiring feelings which lead higher than the sphere of the Angeloi. Our interests will be so much extended that we shall incline to ideas which ascend to the sphere of the Archangeloi, for all that I have been saying about the opposition of Ideology-Maya, etc., works in its primal force in the sphere beyond that of the Angeloi. We can see from this what is really needful for modern humanity. What will the so-called clever people call anyone who speaks of these things—Maya, Ideology and so forth—as having primal forces which function in the sphere of the Archangeloi? Just a fool, quite naturally, since men are so hide-bound by their acquired spiritual outfit that they feel no concern in the wider interests of mankind. That can only be achieved from a spiritual standpoint, by penetrating into everything which works for the great interests of humanity.

I have given you an idea of how to work up into the sphere of the Archangeloi. It is possible to rise stilt higher, and present-day humanity must learn that also. Our educated classes have, always been taught to look back to Ancient Greece. Young men (and in recent times young women also) have had to go through a certain schooling to absorb Greek culture, and have thus acquired an impulse which was enough to lead them to feel more and more deeply into the Greek world. This has a great significance for our civilization, that in our most important years of development we have learnt what Greece accomplished for the world. The Greeks did otherwise; it never entered their heads to teach their children the Egyptian tongue: they occupied themselves with immediate reality, for which they possessed a clear, sense. We occupy our young people, not with instruction concerning their environment and the impulses of reality, but with those of an olden time. We have no idea what we are really doing. It is not only that we teach our young children (I suppose I should say our "young ladies " and "young gentlemen ") the Greek language: for in a language, in the configuration of its sounds and its grammar, lies also the character of a whole people. In absorbing the Greek language, as is done today, man acquires the same soul-attitude in the world as was held in Greece. There all cultural life was such that only a small top-stratum shared in the culture; the rest were slaves. In Greece no occupation was worthy of a free man but science, politics and—even then in a supervisory capacity agriculture: everything else was a matter for slaves. This is hidden in the language, and when we take Greek culture and language into our own spiritual education, we unite aristocracy with it at the same time. For the Greek it was quite natural to construct his whole social organism in accordance with his intellectual tendency, for in his case that was connected with his blood. There were the ordinary masses: then those people of a higher type, who possessed the higher life of the mind through their blood. This finds expression even in Greek sculpture. Compare the position of nose and ears in the Hermes-type with that of the Zeus- or Athene-type. The Greeks knew perfectly well what they wanted to express when they set the Hermes-type over against the Aryan Zeus-type.

We are permeated with all this more than we think. When we form our views of the world, we really construct ideas still suited to what in the Greeks came through the blood. Our intellectual, our cultural life is saturated with what we absorb from the Greeks. Hellenism intrudes into our times luciferically. Hellenism, in the period which immediately followed it, was metamorphosed into Roman­ism. Compared with the Greeks the Romans were dull, prosaic people, but they did develop other aspects of life. They lived out in an abstract fashion what came to the Greeks from the blood. Unlike the Greeks they made even man into an abstraction, a "citizen of the State." A man, in the Roman sense, is not really "man"; he is a citizen of the State: an incomprehensible thing to the Greeks. To be born a human being did not make him a man, but being registered in some kind of State archives. This sometimes appears today in grotesque fashion. I once had an old friend, sixty-four years of age; one day he said to me that he had saved such and such a sum—he had always been very poor—and that he wanted to marry the love of his youth. He had become engaged at eighteen, but had no money to marry, and the couple had vowed to wait until they could. He returned to his birthplace, now that the way was open, but found that the marriage could not, take place because his community doubted his existence. Years before, the parsonage, with all the parish registers, had been burned down and there was no one alive who could give evidence as to his identity. My friend assumed that his existence was proved by his presence, but he had no "legal evidence." It is true the marriage did eventually take place, but the difficulties had shown him the much greater importance of a "birth-certificate " than of his own personality.

Men then are "citizens." They are what they are in an abstract connection. This view is essentially Roman, as is everything of this sort which we come across in ordinary life. Our education has been taken in hand by the State, which is already abstract, but will become more so under socialist influence. People are not educated today to take their place in the world as free human beings, but to have a professional calling and take their place in that. The State takes young people in hand, not at once, for then they are too “shapeless," so it leaves them for a time to their parents, then, stretching out its talons, it trains them to be useful to it, taking good care that they are so. It gives them an economic life, gives them everything prescribed, and then pensions them off. It means a great deal when a man can assure himself of a pension as well as an income—something substantial, which binds him to the abstract State and affects the rest of his mental attitude. The Roman attitude has passed into men of other times. Say to a man today: "to partake of immortality needs an activity of soul, that thou thyself mayst carry thy soul wide awake through the gates of death"; he will not understand. He has been made wholly un­accustomed to direct his understanding to such a question. Instead of this he is told: "You need only believe in Christ and in what the State does." First he will be looked after by the State, with a pension when he has worked long enough then the Church goes one bit farther; it offers a pension for his soul after death, so that neither in his lifetime need he do anything for his own soul nor when he carries it through the gate of death: A man is "registered " nowadays, and the political essence of Rome, already taken into our own being, will increase.

All sorts of dreadful experiences are possible because of this. Helping with the institution of the Waldorf School at Stuttgart, I have had to look at the various School Regulations. Looking back, I must admit that in the 'seventies and 'eighties of last century, the regulations were very small: they included what had to be studied in each class, the aim and the subject matter being given, but in everything else the teacher was left quite free. Nowadays we get an enormous syllabus with "Official," "Ordinance," written on the first page, and specific instructions as to the manner of teaching. So that what should only work on one living personality from out of another, is set down in rules and orders; it has become "official," it is "decreed "! That is the death of mind and spirit, directly traceable from Central Europe to Ancient Rome. This is the second thing we have absorbed—with Romanism, the politico­legal element.

In addition to this, however, there is some­thing which could not be transplanted from the old life into the new—the economic life, which can only be modern. It is possible to chew the cud of Greek knowledge, to allow the Roman political ideas to influence us, but we cannot "eat" what the Greeks and Romans have eaten. Economic life must be modern. We have gradually woven into our economic life the Greek life of intellect and the Roman life of rights, and our task is to disentangle them again. To understand that these three strata brought out of different epochs have, as it were, been joined together and must be separated means to extend one's interest in time (as, in the East and West in space) down to the present; that means to make ourselves capable of feelings which can raise us to the Archai! How few develop an interest for these things, an impartial interest in how the Zeitgeist (Time-Spirit) acts by thrusting one period into another. I spoke at Stuttgart on the artificial nature of our classical education. It may have been mere coincidence that a few days after there appeared in the papers great announcements signed by all kinds of Zöpfen—professors—(I beg their pardon!) to the effect that a classical education should not be undervalued, seeing that it had contributed to the greatness of the German people, so gloriously displayed in the latter days. This, literally, was to be read as the alleged opinion of educationists in April, 1919—after what happened in October, 1918! And to think that this and other things should be possible in our times!

Unless we reach a stage at which we can see things so as to absorb the impulses which work into our physical world out of the spiritual—unless we realize that man, just as he is connected through his bodily organization with the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, is also connected in his spiritual organization with the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai (Angeloi as the guardians of personal development, Nation Spirits as guardians of development of peoples in space, Spirits of Time as guardians of development through­out the ages)—unless we can understand these things from their spiritual foundations, we can advance no farther. Everything depends on man having courage and force today to look into the spiritual world. We are at the beginning of a hard struggle, in which will be stirred up all the instincts spring­ing from the one half-truth that economic reality is the only reality, that everything belonging to soul and spirit is Ideology; and from the other half-truth that the only reality is the psychic spiritual, all outside it is Ideology, Maya. These contradictions will let loose in human nature such instincts that the spiritual conflict will blaze for long periods in forms of which people at present have no idea. We must grasp this; and, further, learn how we are to raise ourselves, in harmony with our time, to a view of the spiritual world as we conceive it. It is this which the times themselves ordain and demand; to this we must turn our attention.

Let me first of all express regret that I am unable to speak to you in your own language. As this is not possible, I must ask to be allowed to deliver the lecture in German.

To begin with, I want to express my heart-felt thanks for the cordial and friendly words of greeting. I only hope that I shall be able, in some measure, to fulfil the task which lies in front of me. I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity given me by the students here to say something about anthroposophical Spiritual Science. [This lecture was given in answer to an invitation from an association of students in Christiania. It was held in the largest hall — the “Missionhaus” in Christiania, seating some 2,000 people.] After many long years of work in this domain of knowledge, I know well how difficult it is to make Spiritual Science to some extent intelligible to modern civilisation and culture, and I know, too, how easily misunderstandings arise. For these reasons I want to express very special gratitude to the students by whom the invitation was issued. I attach great importance to the fact that here too, as in other countries, students are beginning to pay some attention to anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

The wish was expressed that this lecture should deal with the theme of the reality of the higher worlds. As all my writings for many, many years have been concerned with answering this very question, you will realise that one brief lecture is foredoomed to be both inadequate and incomplete. My endeavour must be to indicate by certain guiding lines, how the higher worlds can become a reality. Obviously I shall be unable to-day — it may be possible to speak more fully elsewhere during the next few days (Cp.: Paths to Knowledge of Higher Worlds 26^th November, 1921) — to bring before you anything in the nature of convincing proof; all that I can do is to indicate the lines and directions along which proof may be found. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science cannot speak of the reality of higher worlds without pointing to the paths leading to this reality, and there is no desire whatever to set these paths in opposition to what has been achieved in so admirable a way by the scientific strivings, the scientific spirit of the last few centuries.

It is the conviction of anthroposophical Spiritual Science that doubts cast from one side or another upon the scientific exactitude of its research are based entirely upon misunderstanding. Anthroposophy does not wish to be a matter of amateurish talk but a path of knowledge along which the higher, super-sensible worlds are approached with the same scientific exactitude the same methodical and disciplined thought with which natural science has for so long approached the laws of Nature.

If, however, the aim is to reach the super-sensible worlds with the same strict exactitude with which natural science reaches its results, it is necessary both in regard to the results themselves and the methods of investigation, to go beyond what is universally recognised as ‘scientific’ today. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is founded upon the same fundamental principles which have helped to make modern science great. Modern science has achieved greatness through scrupulous observation of the material world, through experiment, through the reasoned deliberation of what is yielded by sense-observation and experiment. While going beyond the results as well as the actual modus operandi of authentic scientific research today, anthroposophical Spiritual Science wishes to proceed hand-in-hand with everything that can be learnt from modern research.

This ‘going beyond’ is founded primarily upon the knowledge that man’s power of investigation, in so far as it has developed in the sphere of natural science, comes up against certain boundaries. Every scientific researcher is aware that the great problem concerning the eternal nature of the soul — it is usually known as the problem of immortality, of destiny, in the widest sense, therefore, as the problem of the higher worlds — every scientific researcher is aware that this problem lies beyond the boundaries of modern science. Moreover it is recognised that the whole mode of thinking, the faculty of cognition, the power of knowledge itself, have all been evolved from investigation of the material world of sense and that at a certain point an impassable barrier is reached. Anthroposophy is in complete accord with modern scientists when it is a matter of affirming that these boundaries do indeed exist, so far as the everyday consciousness of man is concerned.

In the realm of philosophy, of course, many endeavours have been made to overstep these boundaries. But nothing that the intellect or the human heart can conjecture about what lies on yonder side of the world of the senses can stand the test of searching examination; the inadequacies of such conjectures are betrayed above all in that they reach into a void. The intellect feels that it is dependent upon what the senses communicate and that whenever it would like to pierce through the tapestry of the material world, no content remains in the field of ordinary consciousness.

Men of deep feeling, who try to justify their needs of soul and spirit before the tribunal of science, who are not content to resign themselves to mere belief but who want to have knowledge of things transcending the temporal — such men are very often apt today to take refuge in a kind of mysticism. They believe that what external science is unable to give them is to be found by plunging into the depths of the life of soul. They believe that evidence of the eternal significance of the human soul, of the links connecting the soul with the world of Divine Spirit can stream up from the deep places of the heart.

But with this kind of mysticism no really profound science of the soul can concur, cognisant as it is of all the hidden paths of the human faculty of remembrance, of memory. The ordinary consciousness has, of course, its stores of memories which it calls up again and again because this is necessary for a healthy life of soul. But deep down, mingling with these memories and remembrances, lie many factors which, in their real nature, cannot be surveyed by the ordinary consciousness. Many a mystic unearths from the depths of the soul, things which he regards as revelations from higher worlds, whereas to one possessed of real knowledge they may be merely impressions made upon a long past childhood by the material world of sense.

A genuine investigator knows that what is absorbed unconsciously in early childhood undergoes many metamorphoses and that it can reappear in later life in a different form. Many a man believes that in mystical experience he has discovered a spark of the Divine within him, whereas what he has drawn up from the depths of his soul is nothing else than stimuli received during childhood, appearing in a different form.

These are the two pitfalls lying ahead of us when, in our longing to find the reality of the higher worlds, we embark upon serious and genuine investigation. The true investigator must be on his guard on the one side against a philosophy which tries merely by intellectual deduction and speculation to pierce through the external world of sense to a kind of “Beyond,” and, on the other, against a form of mysticism which simply calls up memories in a different garb from the depths of the human heart. In both directions he comes up against insurmountable barriers: on the one side the material world of sense which ordinary consciousness cannot break through, and on the other, the human side, the storehouse of memories which must be present in any healthy life of soul and which forms a boundary interiorly — a boundary which again the ordinary consciousness cannot cross except it be through illusions and fantasies.

The aim of anthroposophical research is to avoid both these pitfalls and to attain true and genuine knowledge of the higher, super-sensible worlds. Hence in all honesty and frankness it asserts that the faculties of cognition operating in ordinary life and ordinary science will inevitably come up against these boundaries and are incapable of penetrating through them into the higher worlds. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science therefore sets out to awaken faculties slumbering in the soul of which the ordinary consciousness is unaware, and to embark upon investigation into the reality of higher worlds only when these faculties have undergone due development. This kind of investigation into the things of the Spirit does not take its start from anything that is nebulous or mystical; it takes its start from faculties of ordinary life, but transforms them, makes them essentially different.

The first faculty to which the attention of the bona fide spiritual investigator must be directed is that of remembrance, of memory, within those boundaries and limits of which mention has been made. This faculty of remembrance enables us to call up, either involuntarily or at will, pictures of our life since birth, or rather since a point of time shortly after birth. Unlike ordinary psychology, Anthroposophy takes full account of all the implications here and tries by deliberate efforts of will to bring ideas, mental pictures, concepts, thought-content, into the centre of the consciousness — which, in other circumstances, occurs only by the exercise of the faculty of memory and recollection. Anthroposophy sets out to develop a first, elementary faculty of higher knowledge in this way, by means of certain exercises carried out by the faculty of thinking. Anthroposophy does not, however, content itself with the faculty of thinking which comes to expression in ordinary memory, but goes on beyond this — not to the arbitrary meditation often cited by nebulous mysticism, but to inwardly disciplined, systematic meditation.

My task today is to indicate the principles of this subject: fuller and more precise details are to be found in my books, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, An Outline Of Occult Science, and others. It is only possible now to indicate certain fundamental guiding-lines for a study which will have to be pursued for many years. The point of importance is that the faculty of thinking in man is developed to a greater strength and intensity than it possesses in ordinary life and in ordinary science.

When in some piece of work a muscle has to be constantly exerted, its power is strengthened. The would-be spiritual investigator proceeds in the same way with respect to the forces of the soul. He places some mental picture, idea or set of ideas of which he can maintain a complete survey, deliberately and as a free act of will at the centre of his consciousness, and dwells upon it for a certain length of time. Some people will require more time, others less, according to their faculties and their capacity for concentration.

Please note — for it is a very important point — that I am speaking of pictures of which a complete survey can be maintained. If anything from our store of ordinary memories were to be brought up into this meditation or these exercises of thinking, we should be led astray. For the storehouse of thought contains many reminiscences, many unconscious impressions received from life which would have their effect during the exercises. Nothing whatever must be allowed to work from the Unconscious into true anthroposophical meditation; a complete survey must be maintained and everything must be subject to conscious deliberation. Therefore the demand is sometimes made, and with good reason, that one who aims at becoming an actual investigator in Spiritual Science shall ask already experienced investigators to recommend certain exercises. When such exercises are practised — we may have evolved them ourselves or they may have been given to us — they enter the consciousness as something new — like a sense-experience that is not recollected but enters the soul as something quite new. The point of importance is not that we acquire anything from the actual content of the picture or combination of pictures, but that it comes into our consciousness with all the newness and freshness of a sense-experience and that we dwell upon it with our forces of soul. Just as we execute some piece of work by using a muscle, so do we exert the forces of the soul when we dwell upon the picture or idea with sustained and deliberate concentration. If care is taken to observe all the details of the exercises described in my books, there will be no danger of succumbing to anything in the nature of suggestion or auto-suggestion; every moment of the exercise will be filled with a conscious activity of will and after a time we shall feel that the powers of our soul are being strengthened and enhanced.

It is not necessary to devote a great deal of time each day to these exercises but they must be repeated over and over again. One person will need a lengthy period, another may achieve considerable success in a few months; others again will need years. The principle, however, is the same throughout: the forces of soul, the forces of thought, are inwardly strengthened by the exercises, until finally a point is reached where the advance is made to Imaginative Thinking, Imagination.

I have called this development ‘Imaginative Thinking’ because one becomes aware by degrees that thought is getting free from the abstraction and intellectualism with which it is fraught in ordinary life and ordinary science. Pure thought begins gradually to be lit by a picture-content, warmed through by glowing life, as real in every respect as the pictures and inner vitality produced by external sense-impressions.

It is very important to remember this, for we all of us know that when our attention is directed to external sense-impressions, everything teems, is saturated, has great intensity; our whole being is given up to these sense-impressions. But if, having turned our attention away from these outer sense-impressions, we engage in the kind of thinking that is usual in ordinary life and science, this thought is colourless, has little warmth. There is good reason for speaking of the colourlessness, the ‘pale cast’ of abstract thought. And nearly all the thinking that goes on in ordinary life and science is abstract. Only those thoughts which arise in moments when we are caught up in the outer reality of the world of sense — only those thoughts teem with content. The glowing life and teeming content in what is, at first, a purely inward experience, however, can only be reached by the exercising and strengthening of thought in the way I have indicated. Then we begin, in very truth, to think in pictures, in Imaginations.

But one point must be quite clear. In this Imaginative Thinking we have at first nothing either before us or within us that amounts to external, spiritual reality. The objective significance of this Imaginative Thinking is gradually brought home to us, however, when we grasp the following: —

Everyone knows how in a tiny child the brain develops by degrees into the marvellous organ it eventually becomes in the course of life. It can be said with truth that, to begin with, the brain is a plastic organ, allowing the formative forces of the soul to express themselves in its whole structure, its convolutions and so forth. This process is at work during earliest childhood; it comes to a halt at a certain point — a point reached as a result of natural development and ordinary education. With what has thus been acquired, we try to meet the demands of every-day life, and to make progress in ordinary science. But in that, as children, we have developed from year to year, we have acquired greater and greater capacities.

In striving for Imaginative Knowledge we again become aware of this increasing capacity. We realise that through the activity which consists in the exercising of thought, something that is now plastic within us is being worked upon, elaborated. But we feel, too, that what is thus being worked upon — as it were ploughed and furrowed in the life of soul-and-spirit just like the physical brain in the child — we feel that this is something super-sensible, something of the nature of soul-and-spirit within the human being which transcends the physical body. After a time we feel that the outer and inner boundaries of knowledge can now be faced in an entirely different way. As a spiritual scientist one has to admit that those who speak of such boundaries do so with good reason, but one also feels that little by little these boundaries of knowledge can actually be crossed with the help of newly developed faculties.

When a man has reached this stage, when he actually feels: now I no longer need to come to a halt within the material world of sense, for now, by means of this living, pictorial thinking, I experience something real when I pierce through the material world and also when I gaze into my own being; I experience something that is beyond the range of natural science and that mysticism can only call up in illusory form ... When a man has this experience as a result of genuine inner development, he may be sure that he is treading a path which will lead him to the reality of the higher worlds.

To begin with, nothing that can be said to be an external reality lies before the soul; the old forces have simply been strengthened, intensified. But before long it will be noticed that something very significant is happening in the field of consciousness. An inner tableau arises, encompassing the whole of life since birth. This, indeed, is the first super-sensible reality to be experienced: a man’s own inner life since birth is presented in a tableau of which complete survey can be maintained. And the result is that the relation of the thinking to what is now an objective perception is different from the relation it previously bore both to external actuality and to inner experiences. In everyday life the human being unfolds the activity of thinking. He thinks about something or other; the thoughts themselves are within the soul — they are subjective. The object is outside. A man feels that his thoughts are separated from what is outside. He now has before him the tableau of his own life of soul since birth. But his thoughts enter as it were into the very tissue of which the tableau is woven; he feels himself to be in and part of it. He feels: now for the first time I am beginning to grasp the reality of my own being; I must yield up my thinking to what thus arises objectively before my consciousness. This, to begin with, constitutes an experience that is fraught with pain; but such experiences are essential and the Spiritual Scientist must not be afraid of having to endure them. I shall speak of this again, in a different connection.

To begin with, this tableau of life causes us to feel our innermost Self under a kind of oppression; the lightness and ease with which, in other circumstances, thoughts, ideas, feelings, impulses of will, wishes and the like, arise, seems to have departed and we feel our own being as it were under a load, constricted. But to put it briefly: in this very experience of oppression we begin to be aware of reality. If there is no sense of oppression, we have merely a thought-edifice, not reality at all. But if we bring into the sphere of this oppression all that was previously within us in the form of freely unfolding thought, we are protected from the danger of illusions, visionary experiences or hallucinations in our Imaginative Knowledge.

It is often said that the exercises recommended by anthroposophical Spiritual Science produce nothing but visions and hallucinations, that they simply bring suppressed nerve-forces to the surface, and that nobody can prove the reality of these higher worlds of which Spiritual Science speaks. Yet anyone who pays attention merely to what I have said to-day, will realise that the path taken by anthroposophical Spiritual Science is the antithesis of all the paths which lead to visions, hallucinations, or mediumship.

Everything that leads to mediumship, to hallucinations or visions, proceeds, fundamentally, from diseased bodily organs which as it were breathe their psycho-spiritual content into the consciousness in a pathological way. All these things lie below the level of sense-experience. Imaginative Knowledge, on the contrary, lies in a realm transcending sense-perception and is developed from objectivity, not from pathological inner conditions.

To describe as pathological the methods of anthroposophical research denotes complete misunderstanding, for the very reverse is the truth. Because Imaginative Knowledge is attained in full and free consciousness, it is possible to recognise hallucinations and manifestations of mediumship for what they really are. Nobody will reject these psychopathic manifestations more strongly than one who has not, like the visionary, submerged his life of soul in the body, but who has made it free of the body through the efforts described and who is able to survey his own life back to birth, to begin with, in the tableau of which I have spoken.

In this tableau — as I have said, it is a reality — we know that we have something consisting, not merely of thoughts, but of the living forces which have been working at the upbuilding of our organism since the beginning of earthly life. The Imagination that has here taken shape is actually the sum-total of the forces by means of which we grow, the sum-total of the forces which work, also, in the process of nourishment.

To what is here discovered as an active, super-sensible reality in the being of man, anthroposophical Spiritual Science gives the name of the ether body, or the body of formative forces.

As you see, a higher member of man’s being, a super-sensible member which works at the forming of the earthly body, is discovered methodically and systematically. And because in the tableau that has arisen, our thoughts do not roam hither and thither in the wonted fashion but the oppression makes us feel the reality — because of this we realise that what we are there beholding inwardly is none other than the forces working actively in the organism — in other circumstances, unconsciously.

The super-sensible ether-body or life-body spoken of by anthroposophical Spiritual Science is not an artificial creation of fantasy; neither is it the antiquated and hypothetical ‘life-force’ which scientific thought has rightly abandoned. The ether-body is a reality to the now strengthened and enhanced power of thinking — it is a reality just as the external world of sense is reality. And we are led to it, not by any kind of nebulous mysticism but by a strengthening and energising of the normal faculty of thinking which has been enhanced to the level of a free ‘I.’ Such is the development which brings this first reality before the soul.

But as at this first stage we are simply surveying a tableau of our own earthly life through the flow of time, further progress must be made along the path to the super-sensible worlds. This is achieved through exercises whereby yet other powers slumbering in the soul are brought into operation. You all know that in human life, as well as the faculty of remembrance, the capacity to retain ideas and mental pictures, there also exists the capacity to forget. In ordinary life, to our sorrow, forgetting often comes very easily to us. But a man who lives a great deal in the world of thought knows only too well that thoughts can also torment, that effort is needed to get rid of them. This demands very great efforts in the systematic meditation here described, when we are trying to develop deep, inward thinking.

When the consciousness is focused upon certain images and the forces of this mental presentation are strengthened, the images are loathe to take their departure. They press in upon us and allow themselves to be eliminated only when we train ourselves systematically and consciously to do this. If I may speak rather paradoxically, we must as it were train ourselves in a deliberate forgetting, a deliberate elimination of images which want to remain.

In the books mentioned I have described in detail many exercises for strengthening the power of eliminating mental images. When these exercises have been practised for a long time, the point is reached where, in full waking alertness, we can empty our consciousness entirely.

What has here been said is by no means as unessential as might appear. In ordinary life it is the case that efforts to empty the consciousness altogether send most people to sleep after a short time. Now it is even more difficult to empty the consciousness when, as the result of meditation, it has been filled with intensified images. Nevertheless this must be practised. Thereby we succeed little by little in suppressing not only single images, in emptying them out of our consciousness, but, after sustained effort, in effacing the whole tableau of life of which I have spoken. Practically the whole of our life is presented to us in a tableau, as it were in space that has become time, or time that has become space. The exercises gradually give us the power to eliminate the whole of this tableau from our consciousness; it was there before us but we are able now to empty our consciousness and yet to be fully awake and alert.

This is a very important step on the path to the reality of the higher worlds. For when the consciousness, having first been filled with the tableau of life, with perception of the ether-body, has been completely emptied, we are not confronting a void. True, we recognise that the material world of sense is no longer around us ... it is no more around us than it is in deep, dreamless, sleep ... but a world we have not previously known, a world of super-sensible beings and super-sensible happenings springs up before us. This is what happens after the life-tableau has been eliminated from our consciousness. It is absurd to say that what springs into view after all these efforts may simply be reminiscences of life, or illusions. Anyone who genuinely experiences it knows that reality is before him as surely as he knows that the external, material world is reality.

The essential point, however, is that when a man becomes prone to hallucinations and visions he loses his ordinary, normal consciousness; he lives in his hallucinations and his powers of thoughtful deliberation have departed. A man who has developed his faculties in the way I have described loses nothing at all of his healthy human reason, none of his powers of thoughtful deliberation. All the faculties that were formerly his, remain, and he can at any moment turn his gaze from the vista of the super-sensible worlds before him. Just as he can look back upon a memory, so he can at any moment, and at will, look back to what formed part of his consciousness in ordinary life or in ordinary science. Therefore a man who is developing in this way can fill his whole perception of the super-sensible world with conscious thinking, with his thinking that is now permeated with will. He can speak of the super-sensible world with the same reasoned clarity and intelligibility with which ordinary science speaks of the material world. And because he describes these higher worlds with normal reasoning powers and scientific method, anyone who exercises the faculty of healthy human intelligence can follow what is said, even if he is not himself an investigator in the anthroposophical sense of the word. This is not necessary, because the true anthroposophical investigator brings the faculty of healthy human reason into play in whatever knowledge he unfolds of the higher worlds. The knowledge he communicates must be in a form that is intelligible at every point to ordinary healthy human reason and discrimination. This holds good not only at the stage of Imaginative Thinking, through which, to begin with, the tableau of earthly life is all that rises up, but it also holds good at the further stage of knowledge of which I have just spoken and have called in my books, Knowledge through Inspiration, or Inspired Knowledge.

I would ask you not to allow these terms to be a stumbling block. They contain no element of superstition or antiquated tradition, but are used purely in connection with what I have been describing. I speak of ‘Inspired Knowledge’ because just as the air from the outer world enters the breathing organs as a reality, so does the super-sensible world now flow into the world of the soul. Equipped with this Inspired Knowledge, the spiritual investigator is in the following position. He starts out with a normal content and constitution of soul; having once acquired the faculty of emptying his consciousness, it is possible for him to do so again, at will, no matter where he stands, in time or in space, no matter what the content of his consciousness happens to be.

Something is then revealed of the beings and the happenings of the super-sensible world. It is like an in-breathing, it is an Inspiration. The spiritual world is breathed into the ordinary world.

Again we must be capable of re-asserting normal consciousness, to judge this spiritual world with normal consciousness. There is a continual out-breathing and in-breathing of the spiritual world, and ever and again the return to ordinary consciousness which enables a man to exercise thoughtful judgment in respect, also, of these spiritual worlds.

What I am now going to say merely by way of comparison, may suggest to you that the use of the term Inspiration is justified. The spiritual investigator of today is not in a position to press onward to the super-sensible worlds in the way that was possible during earlier, prehistoric epochs in the evolution of humanity. The methods by which oriental peoples attained access to the higher worlds in olden times have persisted through tradition and even today are still practised over in Asia as a decadent form of Yoga, by men whose bodily constitution differs from ours in the West. Nothing of this kind could be beneficial to the West. It all takes places instinctively, unconsciously, whereas what I have been describing is carried out in full waking consciousness, under complete control of the will.

In a certain respect, nevertheless, something can be learnt from the way in which men strove, in those early epochs of instinctive consciousness, to gain access to the higher worlds and their workings. In the practise of Yoga, the man of ancient India set out to regulate his breathing — to breathe, not in the ordinary way, but deliberately and systematically; he transformed the ordinary mode of breathing, strove all the time to be fully conscious in and with his breathing, whereas of course ordinary breathing is an unconscious, purely organic process. In that he experienced this rhythm: In-breathing — Out-breathing ... In-breathing — Out-breathing ... the pupil of Yoga in olden times was transported into the rhythm of the worlds, of the Cosmos — and in the physical rhythm of the breath he made himself one with the spiritual rhythm of that in-breathing and out-breathing of the spiritual worlds which I have here described in the form in which it is suitable for the West.

In very truth we enter as it were into unison with a rhythm. Our existence as men of Earth can be inspired again and again, continuously, by a higher, super-sensible world. What is this super-sensible world, in reality?

Through Imaginative Cognition we have learnt to know the ether-body, the body of formative forces working in us during earthly existence. This body of formative forces has now been suppressed and a new world discovered. The world of sense is no longer immediately present — it is only a remembrance. In this new world, a higher reality is discovered, that higher reality which permeates and works in and through the ether-body or body of formative forces, just as the ether-body in turn permeates the physical body.

Again as the result of deliberate and systematic steps taken along the path to the higher realities and not of any play of fantasy, anthroposophical Spiritual Science speaks of the astral body of man which is thus discovered and which permeates the body of formative forces although its life lies in other worlds. And when we examine the worlds in which this astral body lives with the ‘I’ — just as man lives as a corporeal being among the things of the material world — we discover the world of soul-and-spirit from which the human being descends when through birth or conception, he unites with the physical substance provided by the father and mother. In direct perception — which, as I have said, will stand the test of healthy human reason — the eternal, immortal core of man’s being is discovered.

Many people take offence today when instead of speaking in generalisations like the pantheists, of an undefined, all-pervading world of Spirit, specific description is given of a world of soul-and-spirit whence man has descended into physical existence through birth and whither he returns on passing through the Gate of Death — a world that is discovered as a reality, not through speculation or nebulous, mystical feeling, but through a strictly disciplined mode of perception. Offence is caused when these worlds are described as I have described them, for example, in my Outline Of Occult Science. Let me try to explain by means of a simple comparison how it is actually possible to describe these worlds.

Think of your ordinary memory, of your remembrance. — What are you experiencing there? One thing or another has happened to you in the course of life. What has long since become the past, has long ago ceased to be an external reality, stands before you in a memory-picture. From this picture you reconstruct the experience. It passed into you, as it were, from the external world, has become part of the content of your soul. Out of the content of the soul it is possible at any moment to reconstruct the whole world of remembrances, the whole world of external experiences with which existence is interwoven. The inner world is laid hold of, comprised within the life of thought, of feeling, of will. In laying hold of the inner life, the world of external experiences is conjured up before the soul. But what is it that is grasped by means of Imagination and Inspiration?

With Imagination and Inspiration we comprehend not merely what has been absorbed during earthly life, but we comprehend man in his whole being. We learn to know how the body of formative forces, remaining as a unity through the whole of life, works in the human organs; how in a world of soul-and-spirit before birth or conception, the astral body bears the eternal core of our being, how this astral body penetrates into and works within us. The whole nature and being of man becomes clearly perceptible. His physical nature is recognised as the product of the Spiritual. Just as we look into our store of remembrances and reconstruct earthly life in pictures, so, when we now look still more deeply inwards, grasping not merely the psycho-spiritual content implanted in the course of ordinary life, but recognising how our organs have been created, how ether-body, astral and ‘I’ are woven into the physical body — then we can transfer ourselves with opened eyes of soul, into the great arena of cosmic experiences, cosmic happenings, just as remembrances bear us into our ether-body. For man was always present in whatever has come to pass in the universe with which his being is united, be it in the realm of spirit, of soul, or in the physical sphere. And when, in the way described, he beholds himself in his own true being and nature, he can recognise the events whereby his evolution through history and within the Cosmos has been made possible.

Those who grasp the full import of these thoughts will no longer consider it peculiar when, in my Outline Of Occult Science, they find descriptions of how the human being, in his primeval forms, was connected not only with the Earth but with planetary worlds which, as earlier metamorphoses, preceded the Earth, and how the very make-up and constitution of the human being points to future transformations of the Earth into other planetary conditions; how it is possible really to penetrate into higher worlds and to recognise the kingdoms around us as men of Earth as the product of higher, spiritual worlds, super-sensible worlds.

It is only right that the strenuous efforts which anthroposophical Spiritual Science must make to achieve these results should be known and understood. There is a very prevalent opinion that what spiritual research says about the reality of higher worlds is merely the result of some form of ‘inspiration,’ so-called, or of subjective, intellectual deduction, or even of pure fantasy. Indeed it is not so. Clinical research, astronomical research, for example, demands specialised and difficult work. But what is acquired inwardly in the way described, learnt as it were from man’s own being by inner experimentation in order to unfold perception of higher worlds — this is an even more difficult task, demanding greater devotion, greater care, greater exactitude and methodical perseverance. What is here described in all seriousness as Spiritual Science is fundamentally different from current forms of Occultism, Mysticism and the like. As science stands in contrast with superstition, so does anthroposophical Spiritual Science stand in contrast with current forms of Occultism which try to acquire knowledge through mediums or by compiling external, sensational data in amateurish fashion. This particular brand of modern superstition is vanquished by nothing more decisively than by genuine spiritual research, with its absolutely scrupulous and exact methods.

When, having acquired Knowledge through Inspiration, a man is able to gaze into the world he left at birth or conception and will enter again after death, he experiences something which in its reflection in the ordinary consciousness seems to be a kind of pessimism. — In the realm of ordinary consciousness, after all, anything super-sensible assumes the form of indefinite, inchoate feelings and the like. — The experiences which come to the spiritual investigator through Inspiration seem to take the form of pessimism. Why pessimism? Because it is actually the case that when the spiritual investigator enters the higher worlds, he experiences something like deep pain, universal privation.

By means of the exercises indicated in my books, we must be armed against this pain, be ready to bear it valiantly and resolutely. What, then, is this pain that is experienced in all reality? It is actually a deep and intense longing, it is none other than experience of that force whereby the soul passes from the spiritual worlds through birth into physical existence. The soul has been living in spiritual worlds, and the last period of this life, before the descent through birth into physical existence, is experienced as a yearning for the physical world. This yearning subsequently becomes the pain experienced by the spiritual investigator. And precisely because experiences in the realm of Spiritual Science are not abstract or theoretical and because the whole being of man is involved, including his feeling and willing, this pain is an essential part of the path leading into the higher worlds.

Theorising is by no means sufficient when it is a matter of treading the anthroposophical path into the spiritual worlds. The experiences which accompany the methods employed by genuine investigation demand, at every stage, due moral preparation. And there is really no better preparation for the moral strengthening of man in body, soul and spirit, than practise of the exercises leading to knowledge of the reality of the higher worlds. They will never reveal themselves to one who merely theorises, but only to one who devotes his whole manhood to quickening in the soul all his faculties of good feeling, of appreciation of beauty in the world, his power of reverent contemplation of the secrets of the Universe. Only he who makes love of men and love of worlds into forces of inner, all-permeating warmth, achieves the moral strength that is necessary in order to press forward to the reality of higher worlds.

Many will admit, therefore, that the exercises I describe for the path to the higher worlds taken by Spiritual Science, have a moral side that is genuinely worthy of recognition. This will be admitted, too, by those who fall away and are not willing to tread the actual path to knowledge of the higher worlds. Yet it is this path alone which, in face of the modern longing for science, can lead into these worlds.

Through Imagination and Inspiration a man reaches his innermost Self. But this innermost Self must also surrender itself to the world around. I have already explained that thinking, even at the stage of Imagination, must flow outwards, into what is objective. Thinking, deliberate and disciplined thinking, is always in operation in our discovery of higher worlds; but we must also be aware that our whole being has, as it were, to be given over to this reality of the super-sensible worlds. After the attainment of Inspiration, however, through the efforts made and the experiences undergone, we become aware of the ‘I,’ the central core of our being, in all intensity. And this is the point at which the harmony, the union between the experience of freedom and that of nature-necessity can be realised and known.

In ordinary life we are enclosed in the web of this nature-necessity. How often we feel that what is living in our impulses of will surges up from subconscious depths, from instincts and natural urges, even when it has worked itself a little way out of the sinful in the direction of the good. It is almost as impossible to survey what is working in the urges and impulses of the will as it is to survey the experiences undergone during sleep. And after all, in the urges and impulses of the will, there is contained much that plays into our life of conscious, moral responsibility.

A man who has achieved Inspiration and Imagination however, has been strengthened by his efforts and exertions. He experiences the ‘I’ in far greater intensity — given over to the world, it is true, yet restored to his keeping. Such a man will not say with those who adhere to prejudiced scientific views: the same nature-necessity which causes the stone to fall to the ground, the stone in turn to be warmed by the sun, the nature-necessity which inheres in electricity, in magnetism, in acoustic and optical phenomena — that same necessity is at work when, as a human being, I act and unfold my impulses of will. Indeed in ordinary science and everyday life men cannot get rid of the gnawing doubts which assail them in connection with this problem.

On the one side there is the reality of human freedom. But the conviction is prevalent that this freedom must be renounced if one is a scientist in the modern sense, believing in the conservation of energy and matter and holding the view that no impulse of the human will, no human action can emanate from free will, since man, in common with all other creatures in the kingdoms of nature, must be subject to the domination of nature-necessity.

But with his true ‘I’ before him in greater strength and intensity, man acquires a kind of knowledge still higher than Inspiration and Imagination. I have called this still higher form of knowledge, true Intuition, for it denotes complete emergence in spiritual reality. At this stage, the fact of man’s repeated earthly lives spoken of by Anthroposophy is filled with meaning. The necessity which seems to be implicit in a man’s actions, in his will, is recognised as the consequence of preceding lives on Earth. Man’s eternal core of being passes through repeated earthly lives, and between these lives — that is to say, between death and a new birth — leads an existence in worlds of soul and spirit. And now comes the knowledge: flowing from life to life there is the factor which entails subjection of the ‘I’ together with its impulses of will ... not, however, to external, nature-necessity but to the necessity which runs through the chain of earthly lives.

To begin with, this necessity is hidden from ordinary thinking. But when truly free, sense-free thinking as described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is unfolded in a single earth-existence — with this kind of thinking we have the real foundation of our freedom, our free spiritual activity. In that we rise, as man, to these moral impulses which are seized by the free power of thought, we become free human beings here on the Earth. And what inheres in our existence in the form of necessity, living itself out as destiny — this is not nature-necessity but the necessity which runs through repeated earthly lives.

This too is revealed to Intuition, the third stage of super-sensible knowledge. There before us, presented in wonderful harmony, is the freedom inherent in a single earthly life, and what we feel to be the necessity of destiny — which is not external, nature-necessity, nor due to the normal constitution of the human body, but which streams in from earlier earthly lives. This no more makes us unfree than does a change of the stage on which our life takes its course, when circumstances are such as to make us still dependent upon the connection between this new life and the old. — If for example, we emigrate from Europe to America, the ship takes us thither and our life proceeds in a new setting. This is destiny; but in spite of having crossed from Europe to America, we remain free beings. Necessity and freedom can be differentiated when we perceive on the one side the necessity inhering in repeated earthly lives and, on the other, the freedom which is implicit in each single earthly life.

To look upwards into the higher worlds gives us security and confidence inasmuch as the purpose and meaning of earthly life become clear. We no longer merely yearn for higher worlds — although that too is necessary for any sense of security on the Earth. Earthly life becomes insecure if we lose our connection with the Divine-Spiritual within us.

True anthroposophical knowledge of the reality of higher worlds does not estrange us from the affairs of the Earth: we know that the descent to the Earth must be made over and over again in order that freedom may become an integral part of man’s estate. Conscious realisation of freedom permeates us in spite of our realisation of the problems of destiny, for we have learnt to understand these problems in their spiritual aspect, in the light of the reality of the higher worlds.

It has only been possible to give a very bare outline of this subject. Abundant literature exists today and is at the disposal of everybody. In one brief lecture I have only been able to indicate certain guiding lines, but what has been said will to some extent show you that anthroposophical knowledge of the super-sensible worlds has not the slightest tendency to be remote from the world, to be unpractical. It does not wish to lead human beings in their egotism into vapid castles in the air; on the contrary, it holds that to alienate a man from the world would be to sin against the Spiritual. The Spirit is only truly within our grasp when the flow of its power makes us practical and capable human beings.

The Spirit is creative; the mission of the Spirit is to permeate, not to escape from material existence. Anthroposophical knowledge of the super-sensible worlds is therefore at the same time a power in practical life. Hence — as I shall show in other lectures here in Christiania — Anthroposophy strives to enrich the several sciences, the life of art, as well the domains of practical life, with all that knowledge of the reality of higher worlds can add to the things of the material world.

As we have heard, Imaginative Knowledge reveals the ether-body, the body of formative forces. When, in the light of this knowledge, we understand the nature of the human bodily organisation, when we understand how the astral body which has descended from worlds of soul-and-spirit, works in man as an earthly being, in lung, liver, stomach, brain, and so forth ... then we understand the nature of health and illness. When this point is reached, our realisation of the higher worlds will have succeeded not merely in satisfying a need of knowledge, but actually in enriching medicine and therapy. In Stuttgart and in Dornach we already have clinics and institutes engaged in the practical application of the contributions which anthroposophical knowledge can make to medicine, to therapy — especially to therapy — but also to pathology. Anthroposophy strives, too, to make this knowledge of higher worlds bear fruit in the realm of art.

In the Goetheanum Building at Dornach, in the High School for Spiritual Science, a new style of architecture was created [See: Ways to a New Style in Architecture (with 12 illustrations of the first Goetheanum), by Rudolf Steiner.], out of anthroposophical principles. This new style of architecture has no sort of tendency towards the symbolic or the allegoric. Not a single symbol, not a single allegorical form will be found there; everything is the product of creative art in the truest sense. Spiritual Science is not theory, it is not a matter merely of the intellect. The element of intellect dragged down into art would produce nothing but barren, allegorical symbolism, Spiritual Science leads to actual perception, to concrete understanding of the spiritual world. The content of the spiritual world can then be woven into the material world. In the highest degree we strive to fulfil Goethe’s demand, namely, that Art should be a manifestation of secret laws of Nature which, without her, could never bear fruit. And we are also endeavouring to develop an art of movement founded on the reality of the formative forces working supersensibly within the human being. This is Eurhythmy, a performance of which is to be given here next Sunday.

Eurhythmy is not an art of dancing, nor anything in the nature of mime; it is an art that has been brought down from the super-sensible into the material domain of man’s being; it gives expression to the intimate connection of the human being with the Cosmos and its laws, showing how in a ‘visible speech,’ secrets of the life of soul and spirit can be made manifest, as well as in audible speech or song.

Similarly, Spiritual Science can flow into the social life, the moral and ethical life. I have tried to show this in my book, The Threefold Commonwealth. The problems of the social life of men can never be adequately solved by Marxian or other materialistic theories. In his innermost existence man is a spiritual, super-sensible being, and as a social being, too, it is his task to give expression to the super-sensible in the domain of his social life. Failing this, the burning social questions of our time can never be fruitfully solved.

Finally, the path to higher worlds which anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives to tread by means of genuine research and not through mere belief — this path is connected with man’s deepest and most inward quest, with the bonds he tries in devotion and piety to forge with the Divine-Spiritual foundations of the Universe. In short, Spiritual Science is bound up with the deepest religious feelings arising in the human heart, with the religious life that must unfold if the true dignity of manhood is to be attained. And so anthroposophical knowledge of the super-sensible worlds is at the same time a quickening, an enrichment of the religious life, of which, as every unprejudiced mind will admit, we stand in dire need to-day.

It is well-nigh incomprehensible to me that again, quite recently, anthroposophical Spiritual Science should have been accused by theological circles of destroying the religious life. It has been said, for example: the life of Anthroposophy betokens the death of religion! Now the life of Anthroposophy is indissolubly bound up with that life of the soul in which the very deepest forces of religion unfold. This search for super-sensible realities cannot betoken the death of religion — at most it might betoken the end of something that is merely regarded as religion and is already dead. If, indeed, this is what has happened to religion, Anthroposophy would simply be opening up a vista of death. By its very nature, however, being a living path to the super-sensible realities, Anthroposophy is a means whereby the religious feelings, the whole-hearted devotion of men to the super-sensible worlds may be enhanced, quickened, pervaded with warmth. [Compare: Jesus or Christ, a lecture given by invitation in the Theolog. Verein, Christiania, 29th November, 1921.]

The goal of Anthroposophy is to work fruitfully in all the different spheres of life, from the secular to the most sacred. In the noblest sense — however far off achievement still lies today — the goal and ideal of Anthroposophy is to promote and be a real factor in the advancing evolution of mankind. And every unprejudiced person who has passed with alert consciousness through the catastrophic period of the second decade of the twentieth century, will admit that many, many spheres of existence today are calling out for new and vitalising impulses.

What I have put before you in such brief outline is connected with the eternal concerns of human life. Anthroposophy can be cultivated in the forum of life, where man does not always seem to demand that inner security which can only be found in consciousness of his eternal being; and it can be cultivated in quietude, away from the hubbub of the forum of life. The human being of every epoch must be in contact with the Eternal within him, if he would be truly Man. Thus Anthroposophy is of universal, vital interest to all men because it concerns the things that are Eternal in human existence. In our days, when the signs of decline are to be seen on every hand, it must surely be admitted, too, that there is need to counter the forces of decline with impulses for the ennobling of Western civilisation. Anthroposophy is worthy of attention today not only because it pays heed to the Eternal but also because of the difficult tasks confronting our times.

In conclusion, let me say this. — Unlike the current tendency to lead the human being to mystical castles in the air and thus to estrangement from the world, the aim of Anthroposophy is to lead him to the reality of the super-sensible worlds in such a way that having seized the Spirit he may take a real hand in the affairs of practical and material life. In very truth man must lay hold of the Spirit, for the reason that if his life is to rest upon sure foundations, contact with the super-sensible worlds and with the Eternal part of his being is all-essential. And nowadays, above all, man needs the Spirit for the solving of the hard and heavy problems which surround him in these catastrophic times.

Preface

[ 1 ] I am convinced that my work, The Philosophy of Freedom, published some five years ago, gives the outline of a world-conception which is in complete harmony with the stupendous results of the natural science of our time. I am also conscious that I did not intentionally bring about this harmony. My road was quite independent of that which natural science follows.

[ 2 ] From this independence of my own way of looking at things in regard to the province of knowledge that is dominant in our day, and from its simultaneous, complete agreement therewith, I believe myself entitled to draw my justification for presenting the position of that monumental representative of the scientific mode of thought, Ernst Haeckel, in the intellectual battle of our time.

[ 3 ] Doubtless there are to-day many who feel the need for clearing up matters with regard to natural science. This need can best be satisfied by penetrating deeply into the ideas of that seeker into Nature who has most unreservedly drawn the full conclusions of scientific premises. I desire to address myself in this little book, to those who share with me a like need in this respect.

Rudolf SteineR
Berlin, January, 1900.

[ 4 ] Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates his position within the world: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.”

From out of this feeling there arises the most important question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be the determination of the position which “man occupies in nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts which he brought forward in 1859 in his work, The Origin of Species, and the principles which he there developed, gave to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way, how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature, “after a thousand animal types, forms a being that contains them all—man.”

To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development, which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book, On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin, which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological sciences.”

Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its full extent this revolution and its significance for the progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames, and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!” Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of the July Revolution, and replied that under the known conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things. I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict concerned the question whether each species in which organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan view, that we “count as many species as different forms were created in the beginning (in principio).” Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate forms.

Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon the three first chapters of A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, he summed up in the sentence: “This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly maintain that all complete organic natures—among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of the last, man—have all been shaped according to one original type, which only inclines more or less to this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793, Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject: “Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some connection with the whole, and if experiences only appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to the goal in that of inorganic nature.¹

How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!”

That the revolution in scientific views brought about by Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified only here and there,” he recognised his own again. Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with him all his important disciples and followers in France. This event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure and movements of the planetary system are related to the discovery by Newton of the law of the universal attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the natural causes, why the common original type of all organic beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the various species.

[ 5 ] The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such communications from him as the following: “When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and their climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago were specifically different, although closely related to one another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one another, and in the course of their descent had undergone modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz., America, from which naturally the colonisation would proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem: how the necessary degree of modification could have been attained.”

As to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding experiments which he tried, after his return home, with pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there lies in organic forms the possibility of continually modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds to bring about the development of such forms of domesticated organisms as correspond with his intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their descendants he again selects for further breeding those which have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The same thing can be done with other characteristics of living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious: that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to develop in his species certain characteristics that answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new characteristics are handed on from one generation to the next.

[ 6 ] The thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to assume that this property of organic forms is confined within certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a totally different one, which in its formation diverges from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most natural inference then, is this, that the organic species have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's development, and which he first published in 1830 in his Principles of Geology. The older geological views, according to which the formation of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's surface.

The followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed that the development of the earth had been accomplished in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one another. At the end of such a period there occurred a catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods of time, by the same processes which still in our time are going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to the earth's surface its present configuration. This view necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually developed themselves out of those whose remains are preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes of artificial breeding that one form can really transform itself into another. There remains only the question, by what means are those conditions for this transformation, which the breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature itself?

[ 7 ] In artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live.

[ 8 ] It is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his Critique of Judgment: “The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences, strengthens the presumption of a real relationship between them in their generation from a common mother through an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another. ... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to its possibility.”

[ 9 ] If we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the organisms—devoid of a purposeful object—comes into being by reason of what is practically natural necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must, in accordance with their capacity for assimilating modifications which have been brought about by artificial breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing available for directly bringing about the change, so that none but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we should soon be able to fill several worlds with them.

This great number of germs is confronted with but a comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of this being a universal struggle for existence among organic beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet—from natural causes—necessary, struggle for existence brings in its train the same results as are attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated organisms: he creates purposeful (useful) organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.” By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism directly productive of all these creatures.

[ 10 ] As Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants, has observed: “We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on their development in opposite directions—the plant finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and activity.”

Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to deduce a conception of the universe entirely in accordance with natural science.

[ 11 ] At the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development, a most simple organic something developed itself, by spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised, right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder, Lamarckianism” (Haeckel, Natural History of Creation). Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism.

[ 12 ] The key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms—in their ontogeny—showing that they really originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the form-development of one of the higher organisms from the earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the different stages are found to present configurations corresponding to the forms of lower organisms.² At the outset of his individual existence man and every other animal is a simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula, which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout their entire existence on a level of development which is equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon: “This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life” (Anthropogenesis). Such a parallelism between the developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of the species.” This sentence gives expression to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher organisms in the course of their development come to forms which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the former have developed themselves out of the latter; that therefore every organism in its individual development shows us one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms from its lower ancestors.

[ 13 ] The simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth, transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms. Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants. All the formations and qualities which an organism exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic forms.

[ 14 ] Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race (phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of the manifold organic forms.³ As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth his view in several grandly designed works—in his General Morphology (1866), in his Natural History of Creation (1868), in his Anthropogenesis (1874)—in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the only attempt to establish critically in detail the zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there has been further added in recent years his three-volumed Systematic Phylogeny.

[ 15 ] It is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature that, after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he at once recognised the full significance for man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his address, The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole. He delivered a widely-embracing Confession of Faith of a Man of Science on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address was printed under the title, Monism as a link between Religion and Science, Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific knowledge towards the answering of the “question of questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines in the address mentioned above, On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man. Herein Haeckel handles afresh the conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true apes.

It has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians, philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless, people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised in his Natural History of Creation, “an instructive fact that this recognition—after the appearance of the first Darwinian work—was in no sense general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first Darwinian book (and among them very famous names) declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism, but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly, Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in which appeared Darwin's work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, in which Darwin himself maintained that inference with great boldness and clearness.

[ 16 ] It was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite another, a different, “higher origin” from all other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are only a special form of those physiological functions which are found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of the vertebrate brain.

[ 17 ] It was not only the men with old conceptions of faith nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to combat.

II

[ 18 ] A bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863, expressed in his volume on Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays: “Thus whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes” (see Man and the Lower Animals, p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which comparative anatomy and physiology, individual developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials, the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask: “Are the phenomena of the individual development of man in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original forms, since every individual runs through this same development from the cell to the fully developed organism?”

[ 19 ] But it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an organism already contains in miniature, but fully and completely formed in advance, all the parts which make their appearance during its development. Thus, development is taken to be not the formation of something new in what is already present, but the unfolding of something that was already there but invisible to the eye because of its minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls, which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ, like those of other species, that they existed in man's ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things, always in the form of organised bodies.”

[ 20 ] The human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator before they actually came into existence. Now, however, the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the arising of something new, of something later, from out of something already present, of something earlier. We are called upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming. That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as something which has always been there.

[ 21 ] How great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's Theoria Generationis, which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the developed organism is present, but that its development consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution. Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite of its small size and awkward language, to the most valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature. ...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one troubled himself about Wolff's Theory of Generation. The few, however, who had read it, held it to be fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact” physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). With so much power did human thinking set itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his Anthropogenesis) remarks: “To-day we can hardly any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory, because we have fully convinced ourselves of the correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any moment with the help of the microscope.”

[ 22 ] How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore endeavours to represent the range and importance of this conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation from what preceded.

Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.”

The connection of such philosophical conceptions with the ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in question, is something that neither these religious doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate in their becoming.⁴ The religious mode of conception has recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless necessity.” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 268.) Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions. They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate theological prejudice which gives the direction to their thoughts.

[ 23 ] Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he says: “Either organisms have naturally developed themselves, and in that case they must all originate from the simplest common ancestral forms—or that is not the case, the various species of organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that case they can only have been created in a supernatural manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural creation of species—we must choose between these two possibilities, for there is no third!” (Free Science and Free Teaching, p. 9.) What has been proffered by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which more or less veils or denies its origin.

[ 24 ] When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man, there are only two answers possible. Either a consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes into being. Haeckel (in Monism as the Link between Religion and Science, p. 21) describes the becoming of the human mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling, willing, and thinking—the sum-total of physiological functions whose elementary organs consist of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand therewith, the very soul itself—as a function of the brain—has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods. Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this ‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings, representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in degree.”

The totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest expression in unitary self-consciousness, corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain,⁵ just as simple feeling and willing do to the organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke, Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the sensations has its apparatus between these four “sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to the discussion of these latest physiological results: “The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening sense-foci, are the true organs of thought, the only real tools of our mental life” (On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man, P-15).

[ 25 ] Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take such results as these into account in their explanations about the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison, misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences, speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be contained in the material processes of the brain that which we class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes in the areas of sense and thought are in no case representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts and feelings through external observation, but only through inner experience, through purely mental self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address Vitalism and Mechanism, p. 12, explains: “In activity—therein lies the riddle of life. But we have not acquired the conception of activity from observation through the senses, but from self-observation, from the observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes from material ones.

[ 26 ] Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its supporters sought to discover the truths of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing mental phenomena as such, but from the results of brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting, however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would then be in a position to show me accurately the physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion ‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I must, just at this moment, write these very lines on paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that this happens because I will to write them down on account of their truth as assumed by me” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself, only utilising the human brain in order to express itself through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that our mental powers are just as much functions of the form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function of a material body” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, pt. ii, p. 853).

[ 27 ] The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism.

[ 28 ] Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews, who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes: “Human works of art, too, are produced in a mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and thus contemplates the entire process as it were from behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means employed” (German Speculation since Kant, vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks about the struggle for existence which renders it possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who is obliged to perform the lower services in its realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones that the master-builder has measured out and typically determined in advance according to their place in the great building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring himself to be the architect of that work of art” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403).

[ 29 ] If these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact, philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind the work of art.

[ 30 ] No scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings outside the world, if he could find within his own consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that soul-activities are functions of the brain, if observation of these activities yielded anything which could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific results would be powerless to refute such knowledge.

[ 31 ] Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence—for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere observation, but must seek the law which determines the direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind the means of explaining that which presents itself to him through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation, if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions—that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself.

[ 32 ] This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception. The point which the supporters of this conception so often emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate connections the facts of observation through logical, mathematical combination, and so on; in other words, through the results of the psychological domain: this fact is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that observation transforms itself into self-observation when we ascend from the scientific into the psychological domain.

If a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or some other spiritual primordial being (for instance, Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences, would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth in the human soul the laws according to which he had previously created the entire world. But then man could only know his own mental activity through observation of the root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation, but only observation of the intentions and purposes of the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner, proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason which has been transferred to the world outside. When the mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he explains the world. Because observation of the manifestations of mind is self-observation, therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason.

[ 33 ] The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself.

[ 34 ] A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with a dualistic natural science. (The further development and detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my =The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.)

[ 35 ] For one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more than casting suspicion upon it.

[ 36 ] Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the general happenings of the world.⁶ It makes that conduct just as little dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that everywhere there exists a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, p. 851 et seq.). It is the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the will independent of such a higher world-order.

The natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments; in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even though later the moral foundations have in man developed themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient, prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social instincts of the animals” (Haeckel, Monism, p. 29).

Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit. Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process. Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question, What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically) predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment, that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my The Philosophy of Freedom, p. 172 et seq.). Dualism demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the forms and occurrences of Nature.

[ 37 ] The philosophical considerations which result from the fact of self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an important complement of the means of proof in favour of the monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and physiology.

III

[ 38 ] The famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow,⁶ has taken up a quite peculiar position towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had delivered his address on The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole at the fiftieth congress of German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the significance of the monistic world-conception for our intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his opponent with the speech: The Freedom of Science in the Modern State. At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say (on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to transform our problems into set formula, to introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction, especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’ yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest dangers for the whole position of science!” One must needs, however, here raise the question—meaningless for every reasonable thinker—Have we more certain proofs for the Church's dogmas than for the “descent-religion?” But it results from the whole tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of the results of comparative zoology. “No zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would consider it possible that man could have descended from the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as Virchow's as empty verbalism.⁷

In combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as soon as natural science discovers anything which is capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal, diseased formations, pathological productions. He even developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape (Pithecanthropus erectus), which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894.

It is true that these remains—the top of the skull, a thigh-bone, and some teeth—were incomplete; and a debate that was most interesting arose about them in the Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape, three that they were those of a human being, while six defended the view that they belonged to an extinct transition form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity, on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed from an illness that had been cured through careful human nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's showing that the same formation existed in a human skull from Santos in Brazil.

[ 39 ] Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator, at the beginning of his career, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, defended the doctrine of the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg, where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat “reverentially at his feet and first heard with enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he constantly emphasises that “definite proof” is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed in addition—as Haeckel remarks—a “philosophical understanding” as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic science arises only through the most intimate interaction and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience” (Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 34, Vortrag). In any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that, fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in general does not bring forward any specific technical objections against the doctrine of evolution.

[ 40 ] Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette.

[ 41 ] His made his appearance in the year 1868 with his Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body. His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to the fully-developed condition can be explained from the evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the generations from which the single organism descends through inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral history. His starts from the view that the germ, conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism results in the course of development. He says: “Take a simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the condition in which the formation must find itself after a certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond to the stages of development which the individual organism runs through from the germ to the perfected condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the consideration of the individual organism in order to understand its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of growth.

“All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows: “Their disposition is determined, like the four corners of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the history of the species, with the following justification: “When the history of development for any given form has thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction, then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this form as an individual form” (cp. His, Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung). In reality, however, nothing whatever has been accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still remains: Why do different forces of growth work at different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through the successive stages of its development because the changes which its forefathers have undergone through long ages continue to operate as the cause of its individual becoming.

[ 42 ] To what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called “rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be explained. These are parts which are present in the organism without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains these organs as being such, to which “up to the present it has not been possible to assign any physiological role, analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress, cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors, in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In the course of many generations the conditions of life of such an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time they have become atrophied, because they have not been used. These rudimentary organs⁸ form one of the strongest means of proof for the natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form, whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible explanation of them, except that in the course of many generations they have gradually fallen into disuse.

[ 43 ] Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by the roundabout road through the history of the species. He deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of form” which must superadd itself to the physical and chemical processes of matter in order to form the living creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875). “The essence of development consists in the complete but gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and we have nothing given us therein which is substantially different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this “law of form,” because he believes that “the individual developmental history of organisms” alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping. Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the individual being are an historical result of its ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of matter.

[ 44 ] Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal formative forces into the developmental history of the individual, is afforded by the achievements of those investigators who have really explained the forms of higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in the history of the species, which have occurred during long ages. A striking example in this respect is the “vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie). The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real causes of the individual development of each organism in its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual creature as formative forces.

[ 45 ] Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems; the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the same conception in another form: “To many another will a prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the universe as a whole.”

[ 46 ] It is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also, through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from another. The characteristics which a given form acquires through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations acquired in this external struggle should be actually transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution is called in question by the view, defended especially by August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring, but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of organisms innumerable possibilities of development are held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in the ancestors.

From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence. Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is specially effective in the battle of competition, then this form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must perish. One sees that here causes operating on the organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for existence selects from among the forms coming into existence from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor. Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development, there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding generations.

We find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive process through which the germs bring about evolution, as a material process. When an organism develops, one portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant, therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents, and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all organisms developing one from another there is maintained an originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of reproduction, among the communal insects—bees, ants, and termites. These workers are not developed from special eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now, it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment.

This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their development, but they actually become rudimentary; they do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves. Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one time queens and at another workers are developed. The external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a stimulus, which brings to development the preformed disposition in the germ.

Through the generalisation of these and similar results, Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available dispositions shall come to development. The real cause, however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself, and these—since they are constantly purposeful—can be referred in their development only to processes of selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection) “alone is the guiding and leading principle in the development of the world of organisms” (Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize, p. 49). The English investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics and the omnipotence of selection.

[ 47 ] The facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs to consider the development of the instincts in the higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a consequence of living together with men, have developed mental capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence, human training, comes to these animals as something wholly external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and we must hope that further investigations will bring the apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his followers into harmony with monism.

[ 48 ] Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism. His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are ideally conceived. For, if they were material processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why these material processes and not those of external happenings should continue to operate in the process of heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more logical than Weismann—namely, J. Reinke, who, in his recently published book, Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage, has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life does not consist in the chemical properties of a combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the possibility of the production of the microscope, so little does the origination of the cell follow from the properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin, Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work). There must be present besides the material forces also spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In the union of the dominants with the energies—the operations of the physical and chemical forces—there unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which they are operative in organic beings.

[ 49 ] Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason, as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But with this statement the kind of conformity to law which expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann.

[ 50 ] Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development, Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and simple mode of explanation of the monistic world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying holds good, that “then it is better to assume the mysterious creation of the individual species” (Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen, p. 30).

[ 51 ] Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena, there are still others⁹ who seek to save the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings.¹⁰ The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech, delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest goal of the scientist the explanation of all world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But, in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems, indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible. Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on. A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental life through these conditions.

“What thinkable connection exists between the definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and, on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move.”

But who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter? The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from the substance. From the simplest forces we see the complicated human mind building itself up in a series of developments; and we understand it from this its becoming. “The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre, p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or spiritual) actions of matter—out of attraction and repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then, make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins, science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of its belief in the “no longer knowable.”

[ 52 ] There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony with the modern doctrine of evolution.

• 1. I have characterised the contrast that exists between Goethe's and Kant's world-conceptions, in the Introductions to my edition of Goethe's Scientific Writings (in Kürschner, Deutsche National-Literatur) and in my book, Goethe's Conception of the World (p. 37 et seq.). It shows itself also in the attitude of the two personalities towards the explanation of organic nature. Goethe seeks for this explanation along the road which modern science has also trodden. Kant holds such an explanation to be impossible. Only one who penetrates deeply into the nature of Goethe's view of the world can acquire a correct judgment as to its position in regard to the Kantian philosophy. Goethe's own testimony is not conclusive, because he never devoted himself to a closer study of Kant. “The portal (of the Critique of Pure Reason) it was that pleased me, into the labyrinth itself I could not adventure: now it was my poetic gift that hindered me, now my commonsense, and I nowhere found myself any the better.” Single passages in Kant's Critique of Judgment pleased him, because he so interpreted their meaning that they agreed with his own view of the world. It is, therefore, only too easily understood why his conversations with followers of Kant appear somewhat peculiar. “They certainly listened to me, but could give me no answer, nor in any way help me on. More than once it happened to me, that one or the other confessed with smiling admiration: it may be something analogous to the Kantian mode of conception, but a rather strange one.” Karl Vorländer, in his essay Goethe's Verhältnis zu Kant in seiner historischen Entwickelung (Kantstudien, i., ii.), has judged this relationship according to the actual words of Goethe's own testimony, and has reproached me with the fact that my conception thereof is “in contradiction with the clear testimony of Goethe himself,” and, at the very least, “strongly one-sided.” I would have left this objection unanswered, because I saw from the explanations of Herr Karl Vorländer that they proceed from a man who finds it quite impossible to understand a mode of thinking which is strange to him; however, it still seemed to me needful not to leave without answer a remark which he couples thereto. Herr Vorländer belongs to those men who regard their own opinion as absolutely right, and therefore as proceeding from the highest possible insight, and who therefore stamp every other view as a product of ignorance. Because I think otherwise about Kant than he does, he gives me the sage advice to study certain portions of Kant's works. Such a mode of criticising other people's opinions cannot be too strongly repudiated. Who gives anyone the right, not to criticise me for an opinion differing from his own, but to schoolmaster me? I have therefore told Herr Karl Vorländer my opinion as to his school-mastering in the fourth volume of my edition of Goethe's Scientific Writings. Thereupon, in the third volume of Kantstudien, he has discussed my book, Goethe's Conception of the World, in a fashion which not only far surpasses in point of form what he had previously said against me, but which is also full of objective untruths. Thus he speaks of an “isolated and embittered opposition “in which I find myself against the whole of modern philosophy (naturally exclusive of Nietzsche) and science. There at once one has three objective untruths. Anyone who reads my writings—and whoever, like Herr Vorländer, pronounces judgment upon me, should at the least read them—will perceive that I do indeed criticise technically particular views of modern science and endeavour to deepen others philosophically; but that to talk of an embittered opposition is simply absurd. In my Philosophie der Freiheit I have expressed my conviction to the effect that in my views is given the philosophical completion of the structure which “Darwin and Haeckel have erected for Natural Science” (p. 186). That I am the one who has sharply emphasised the fundamental deficiency in the world of Nietzsche's ideas is indeed known to the Frenchman Henri Lichtenberger, who observes in his book La Philosophie de Nietzsche: “R. Steiner is the author of Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom. In the latter work he completes Nietzsche's theory on an important point.” He emphasises the point which I have shown that Nietzsche's Superman is not that which he ought to be. The German philosopher, Karl Vorländer, has either not read my writings, and none the less passes judgment upon me; or else he has done so, and still writes the above and other similar objective untruths. I leave it to the judgment of the competent public to decide whether his contribution, which was found worthy of acceptance in a serious philosophical review, is a proof of his complete lack of judgment or a dubious contribution to the morality of German scholarship.
• 2. Fundamental Biogenetic Law. Haeckel has proved in a series of works the general validity and far-reaching significance of the fundamental biogenetic law. The most important explanations and proofs will be found in his Biology of the Corals (1872) and in his Studies in the Gastrula Theory (1873–84). Since then other zoologists have extended and confirmed this doctrine. In his latest work, Die Welträtsel (1899), Haeckel is able to say of it (p. 72): “Although this doctrine was at the outset almost generally rejected, and for some ten years fiercely combated by numerous authorities, yet, at the present time (for about fifteen years past), it has been accepted by all well-informed specialists in the subject.”
• 3. In his recently published book, Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien über Monistische Philosophie (Bonn, Emil Strauss, 1899), Haeckel has given without reserve the” further development, proof, and completion of the convictions” which throughout a full generation he has represented. To anyone who has absorbed the scientific knowledge of our time, this work must appear as one of the most important manifestos of the end of the nineteenth century. It contains in ripened form a complete analytical discussion of the relations of modern science with philosophical thinking from the mind of the most original, far-sighted investigator of our time.
• 4. Those who would willingly cling in faith to the existence of purposes in Nature, are constantly emphasising the fact that Darwin's views do not by any means exclude the idea of purpose, but rather make full use thereof, inasmuch as they show how the linking of causes and effects of necessity by themselves lead to the arising of the purposeful. The important point, however, is not whether or no one admits the existence of purposeful formations in Nature, but whether one assumes or rejects the idea that the purpose, the goal, co-operates as a cause in the development of these formations. Anyone who makes this assumption defends teleology, or the doctrine of purpose. Whoever says, on the contrary, purpose is in no way whatever operative in the production of the organic world; living creatures come into existence according to necessary laws just as do inorganic phenomena, and purposefulness is only there because that which is not purposeful cannot maintain itself; it is not the cause of what happens, but its consequence: he makes confession of Darwinism. No heed is paid to this by anyone who asserts, like Otto Liebmann, “Charles Darwin is one of the greatest teleologists of the present day” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. i, p. 113). No, he is the greatest anti-teleologist, because he would show to such minds as Liebmann, if they understood him, that the purposeful can be explained without assuming the action of operative purposes.
• 5. Organs of Thought. Quite recently Paul Flechsig has succeeded in proving that in one portion of the human organs of thought, complicated structures are found which are not present in other mammalia. These obviously are the organs of those mental activities by which man is distinguished from the animal.
• 6. Human and Animal Psychology. The merit of having proved that there is no real contrast between the soul of man and that of animals, but that the mental activities of man are linked to those of animals as a higher form thereof in a perfectly natural chain of development, belongs to George Romanes, who, in a comprehensive work, Mental Evolution in Animals (vol. i) and Mental Evolution in Man and the Origin of Human Faculties (vol. ii), has shown, “that the psychological barrier between animal and man has been surmounted.”
• 6. See note on Virchow and Darwin, below.
• 7. On 3rd October, 1898, Virchow delivered the second of the Huxley Lectures in the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, in London, wherein he said: “I venture to assume that such a duty would not have been assigned to me if those who did so had not known how deep the feeling of veneration for Huxley is in my soul, if they had not seen how I have recognised his achievements from the first pioneer publications of the deceased master, and how greatly I have valued the friendship which he bestowed upon me personally.” Now, these pioneer publications of Huxley's mean precisely the first great step towards the building up of the theory of man's descent from the ape, which Virchow combats, and about which, moreover, in his Huxley address, The more recent Advances of Science, he has nothing more to say than a few words, which are wholly meaningless in face of the present position of this question: “One may think as one chooses about the origin of man, the conviction as to the fundamental coincidence of the human and the animal organisation is at present generally accepted ...” etc.
• 8. Purposeless organs. As to these organs Haeckel observes in his book Die Welträtsel, p. 306: “All higher animals and plants, indeed all those organisms whose bodies are not quite simply built, but are composed of several organs working purposefully together, reveal on attentive examination a number of useless or ineffective, yes, even of dangerous and harmful, arrangements. ... The explanation of these purposeless arrangements is quite simply given by the theory of descent. It shows that these rudimentary organs are atrophied, and that by want of use. ... The blind struggle for existence between the organs conditions just as much their historical destruction, as it originally caused their arising and development.”
• 9. Other opponents of Haeckel. Here we can only speak of such objections to Haeckel's doctrines as are, to a certain extent, typical and have their origin in antiquated, although still always influential, circles of thought. The numerous “refutations” of Haeckel, which present themselves merely as variants of the main objections cited, have to be left unnoticed equally with those which Haeckel himself has disposed of in his book on Die Welträtsel, by saying to these valiant warriors, “Acquire by a diligent five years' study of natural science, and in particular of anthropology (especially the anatomy and the physiology of the brain!), that indispensable empirical prior knowledge of the facts, which you still lack entirely.”
• 10. Limits of knowledge. In my Philosophie der Freiheit I have shown the misunderstanding upon which is based the assumption of limits of knowledge.