The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have had the honor of addressing you from this very spot about subjects related to spiritual science or, as it has become customary to call it, theosophy. Those of you in the audience who have attended several lectures over the past years will have seen that the basis of spiritual science as represented here is such that one can say: Spiritual science or Theosophy should not be considered merely as a dreamy, idle occupation of a few people who are far removed from life, but should rather shine more deeply into the tasks and riddles of life.

On the one hand, it is true that this spiritual-scientific world view is intended to direct our gaze up into the spheres of the spiritual foundations of the world, to convey knowledge of these spiritual foundations of the world; but on the other hand – and it need only be recalled here to the lecture on the education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science, which has been given here — on the other hand, this spiritual-scientific world view has the task of making life understandable, of giving guidelines and guiding stars to action and work in practical life, of providing orientation in the broadest sense precisely about what is going on around us before our eyes and ears, and of giving a deeper understanding of it by drawing precisely this understanding from the deeper, spiritual causes. What we are to deal with today can be considered a contribution in this direction.

What can initially confuse people, what initially causes people all kinds of conflict, is when their world view, when the affairs of life confront them with important personalities, with their opinions, with their thoughts, and when these personalities contradict each other so often. Many of you will have already felt how Theosophy or spiritual science, by broadening one's view, leads precisely to a harmonization of opinions through understanding.

Today we will deal with two contemporary personalities whose work is taking place right among us, whose opinions, so to speak, are going around the world from east to west and from west to east. These are personalities who are so well suited to leading us to the deep contradictions that run through our lives – for perhaps you will not find two personalities who are so opposed in all that they think and feel, in all that they express as being the right thing to do for our needs today – on the one hand we have Tolstoy, the much-mentioned, the effective one, a personality of whom one might say that no term is sufficient to properly encompass what he actually is for the present day; it will hardly suffice to say that Tolstoy is a moralist, if one believes a reformer in certain areas , if one wanted to use the term prophet or the like, but whoever pronounces the name of this personality will always be aware that something very inner to human nature is struck in this, that something lives in this personality that seems to emerge from other depths of the soul than those that move on the surface of existence today – and the other personality that is to be contrasted with it, so to speak, is the American millionaire Carnegie.

Why is Carnegie being contrasted with this personality today? Just as Tolstoy is trying to find a satisfactory solution to life and the riddles of life from the depths of his soul, so Carnegie, in his own way, is also seeking to gain principles of action and direction from the depths of our time, from his practical, one might say, “fundamentally intelligent” view of life. Perhaps one could say – but it sounds almost trivial – that just as idealism and realism have confronted each other in all ages – but with these shades as radically pronounced as possible – so do Tolstoy and Carnegie confront each other.

The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte once said: “What one's worldview is depends on what kind of person one is.” He was pointing out how a person's worldview is sometimes more subtly and sometimes more coarsely intertwined with their unique character and temperament, with their entire life. And if we first look at the life, the character traits, and the personality traits of the two people we want to talk about, we already have the greatest possible contrast.

The rich Russian aristocrat, who was born into the opulence of life, so to speak, who is virtually forced by his social position in life not only to get to know all sides of this life down to the most superficial outbursts of our present day, but to live with them and savor them, we see how, oversaturated to these contents of life, which are offered on the surface today, he takes refuge in the highest moral ideals, which seem to fly over life endlessly, and of which most people, even if they admire them, will be convinced today that they may be beautiful, but that they can only realize a little in life.

On the other hand, we see Carnegie, born, one might say, out of need and misery, at least educated out of need and misery, familiar with all kinds of privation, with the necessity of doing the most menial of work, endowed with none of the things that life offered to someone like Tolstoy on the surface of today's social order, endowed with an honest will to work, with an one might say, idealistically colored certain ambition to become a whole human being, he worked his way up; Carnegie works his way up through this sphere to a kind, one might say, of realistic idealism, also to a kind of moralism that counts on what is immediately apparent, what can be directly experienced in practical life.

We see how Tolstoy, in the most radical way, throws down the gauntlet, so to speak, to today's social order, how his criticism becomes not only harsh when he speaks of the current social order, but how it seeks to intervene, so to speak, in a devastating way in current thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will.

Carnegie sees how life has developed historically up to our present time and, for his soul, has the one word, so to speak, that expresses everything in relation to his first, most direct relationship to life: Yes, he says to everything that the present has brought us – a full satisfaction with what is around us! He sees how the gap between rich and poor has grown, how the ways of earning a living have changed, and everywhere he is permeated by the judgment: It does not matter whether we find this good or bad, but that it must be so, that we just have to reckon with it, and yet, working his way through – this is the characteristic feature of this personality – working his way through from a realistic view to a kind of idealism that sets itself the great goal of providing guidelines for a good life within these existing conditions, for a life that serves human progress in the most beautiful way, and for a social order that serves human progress and development.

Our consideration should not take sides with one or the other school of thought; it should be clear from the conditions of human development how such contradictions could have arisen. And if Theosophy has a task in relation to such phenomena as these two personalities present, then it is precisely to understand, from the deep foundations of existence, preferably of spiritual development, where such phenomena come from. It is not my intention to teach anything biographical about either of these personalities, only to say what the souls of both can reveal to us so that we can then penetrate to a deeper understanding of them.

From the outset, Tolstoy is a person who does not have to struggle with the external hardships of life, but is born into wealth and abundance, so to speak. He could easily have done so if he had harbored a superficial soul, as so many thousands and thousands more do, lost in wealth and abundance. But his individuality was not suited to that. From the very beginning, from childhood on, what could have an effect on this soul was always that which touched the deepest questions of the soul, of the world view. At first, he accepts life as it presents itself to him. As a boy, he is not yet able to think critically about what is going on around him; what later emerged in him in a monumental way as a critique of today's way of life is far from that. As a boy, he takes for granted what is around him and going on.

But there is already something in the boy like a lightning strike in his soul. One of his childhood friends once came home from high school with a strange message. He said something like, “Yes, someone – maybe a teacher – has made a new discovery, namely that there is no God.” This was something that struck like lightning into this young soul, which had actually taken for granted not only everything external but also the religious life as it played out around him.

That something like this is possible, that presented itself together with another thing to this youthful mind. You only have to put yourself in a child's shoes for once, and you will be able to know that a child's soul could actually believe that such a discovery could possibly be made. And such events have been incorporated again and again into this soul life. And we could give a long description of how Tolstoy, during his military service, in his dealings with the social classes to which he belongs, gets to know all the misery of today's life, how he becomes weary of it, how he the most diverse thoughts, how he, after he had got to know the misery of war and its social history, the literary life in Petersburg, how he became tired of what life is today in other areas of Europe. We could describe all this – it is well known today – but what can interest us are the questions that arose for Tolstoy.

First of all, the question increasingly and more sharply arises in his soul: What is actually a certain center of life in the face of all the confusing circumstances around us, where can a center be found? Gradually, religion becomes an important question for him, and this question becomes all the more significant for him as he is unable to break away from external customs for a long time. But the religious question becomes something deeply incisive for him. More and more clearly and distinctly he asks himself: What exactly is religion for man? And for a long time he is not really clear about how that connecting bond of the soul with some higher world, with an unknown spiritual source, what that bond looks like, where it goes from the soul, etc. Above all, the people he has met in his circles seem to him to be so detached from the religious mood of the soul, so parched in relation to the living source of life.

Not, as I said, to take sides, but only to describe this mood of the soul as clearly as possible. And then, in my opinion, he sees himself as a soldier in the Caucasus, during the siege of Sevastopol, among the lower classes of the population. He gets to know their souls; he delves into such souls in an intimate way. He finds that there is something original in such souls, that they are even less torn away from the original ground, and the problem arises before his soul as to whether there is not more truth and authenticity in the naivety of the existence of lower, subordinate social classes than in the circles in which he had to live. And lo and behold, here too, one mystery after another presents itself to him and he cannot solve any of them. You only need to read something like his unfinished novel “Morning Hours of a Landowner” to see how he wrestled with the question: Yes, now I have seen the people who have broken away from the original source of existence, who have withered away on the periphery; I have sought a path to religious depth from the soul of primitive people, but an answer to this question fails because today's so-called educated people can never communicate with these primitive original states of the soul. In short, there is no answer to the burning questions that existed for him either.

And so it goes on, and so he comes to see all the contradictions and contradictions in life more and more clearly, and one need only go through his original artistic work: “War and Peace”, his novellas, “Anna Karenina” and so on, and one will see how, although the artistic form is always the most important thing at first glance, these works are permeated by the desire to understand life in all its contradictions, and above all to understand the contradictory nature of human character, because that is what confronts him as contradictory. You feel how true it is, what he says later, when he has already turned to a kind of moral writing: “It has caused me unspeakable torment, and I know that it has caused many of my colleagues in literature just as much torment, to depict an ideally psychologically constructed character that is true to reality. It torments him that there can be such a contradiction between what one must imagine as ideal if there is to be salvation and order in the world, and what presents itself to his spiritual eyes in reality. That always tormented him as long as he was still artistically active.

There was something else. Tolstoy was not just an objective observer during the whole period in which the mental torments took place; he experienced life and took part in everything. He also experienced these things inwardly; he could feel the intimate pangs of conscience, the intimate reproaches that a person must make to himself when he suddenly realizes in a certain respect that he was born into certain circles and must take part in everything that happens there, and yet it seems contradictory to him when he judges it. Those personalities who felt this were driven to the brink of suicide; one need only sense what is going on inside such people. Man learns infinitely more through the opportunities he has to criticize himself than through criticism of his surroundings.

And so Tolstoy's view broadened more and more, until he went from a survey of the immediate circumstances to an overview, so to speak, of the entire developmental history of humanity, and there it became clear to him to what extent great and significant, namely religious impulses of humanity have come into decline. Thus, without any intention of being critical, he was confronted with the depth and intensity of feeling of the great impulse given to the world by Christ Jesus, and alongside it the Roman world, the Roman Caesaranism, which had completely subjugated Christianity to the service of power of things that do not serve the salvation of humanity, as the Christian impulse was to and could do, but which bring humanity into the confusion that presented itself to it, and so his view became more and more a criticism of everything that existed, and it is harsh enough. From his historical perspective, he believed that he had to perceive the contradictions of people as the most difficult. On the one hand, the greatest wealth, on the other, the most terrible poverty, which was particularly evident in the stunted development of the souls, so that people in this stunted development of spiritual matters are not able to find their way out of what they experience to the great spiritual treasures, especially to those that can be found in original Christianity, to which they must penetrate!

Thus, the most comprehensive problem for him was the contrast between the ruling upper class of society, with its power and luxury, and the downtrodden masses, oppressed in mind and body. This presented itself to him in the most comprehensive way. And he became a critic, perhaps in a more comprehensive way than any before him, who never tires of describing more and more the way things are, and who is so skilled at describing that the mere description can sometimes inspire shudder.

It is perhaps quite characteristic if we highlight a symptomatic feature from his view of the world, which will immediately show us how he approached the tasks of life. He once said that he would have liked to write a fairy tale with something like the following content: A woman had learned something very bad about another woman and had developed the deepest antipathy towards her as a result. She wanted to do something to her that could not really be compared to anything in terms of evil. She went to a magician and asked for advice. She stole a child from her enemy. The magician told her that she could satisfy her hatred in the most intense way if she could bring this child, who she had stolen from a woman living in the poorest of circumstances and who would have ended up in need and misery there, to a rich house. And indeed, she succeeds in bringing the child to a rich house. The child is adopted. It is cared for in every way in the manner of the rich – it is pampered, and has it pretty good, so to speak. The woman who had brought the child to the rich woman is furious when she finds out; because that is not how she had imagined the child would fare. She goes to the magician and complains that he has given her such bad advice. He, however, says she should just wait. More and more, the child is embedded in luxury. The woman says: The magician has deceived me. But he replied: Just wait. It is the worst thing you have done to your enemy.

The child continued to develop. It becomes conscious and feels an inner contradiction to the external situation. It says to itself: “Everything I long for must be in an unknown world; but I cannot find it. I know that the way I have been cared for has made me too weak to make the decision to take any reasonable path to the foundations of existence. All this becomes the worst inner torment for the developing human being.

Tolstoy knew well how such psychological experiences appear; he wanted to show how this human being was driven to the brink of suicide by this inner turmoil. You can see symptomatically from such a thing how Tolstoy thinks. Much more than from definitions, we can see from Tolstoy's will about social order how he thought about social order. This was the attitude of one of the two personalities we are dealing with today towards the world.

Now let us add the opposite: Carnegie. He is the child of a master weaver. His father has some work as long as there are no large factories. Carnegie's childhood falls precisely during the boom of big industry in this area. His father no longer receives orders. He has to emigrate from Scotland to America. He can only earn the barest necessities with difficulty. The boy had to work in a factory as a schoolboy. He recounts it himself, and one senses the tone of such a description if one has previously delved into the psychological experiences that we have just explored in Tolstoy. He himself describes what an event it was when he received a wage of one dollar and twenty cents for his work for the first time. He later became one of the richest personalities of the present day, one of those who, as we shall see shortly, actually had to find ways of investing their millions; but he can say, and this is significant: No income later, no matter how large it was – and a lot of money passed through his hands – no income gave me as much joy as that first dollar.

And so it goes on. He works in this way for a long time and contributes to the family's upkeep. There is something in him like a hidden strength that works towards him becoming what, in the circles in which he now moves, is called a “self-made man”. This satisfies him, that as a twelve-year-old boy he had the feeling: Now you will become a man, because he feels that you are a man when you can earn something. That was the thought of his soul. Later he will go to another factory, work in an office, and later become a telegraph operator and earn more.

He recounts: “A telegraph operator in America had the task of knowing all the addresses by heart. I was worried about losing my job.” — He quickly learned all the names of an entire street. So he was a “made man” again. Now he sneaks into the office with other messengers before official duty begins. They practice telegraphing. His highest ideal is to become a telegraphist himself. He actually finds employment as such. Now his greatest joy is to find a patron from whom he can borrow a book every Saturday. He waits longingly for such a book.

Now events occur that are significant for him. A higher-ranking railroad official, who has played a major role, gives him the task of working his way out by taking shares in a certain enterprise. With great effort, he raises the $500 that is necessary; he has been contributing to the family's upkeep in the most arduous way for some time. It is only through the efforts of his mother that he is able to raise the $500 to buy ten shares. And now – again, we have to feel what this means emotionally – there comes a day when he receives the first small dividend corresponding to his shares. It strikes him as a mystery, like the solution to a mystery, which he could not have grasped before: that money can make money. The concept of capital dawns on him. This was now as important to him as any idealistic problem is to some thinker. Before that, he only knew the possibility of getting a wage in return for work. That capital can generate money now dawned on him.

And now it is interesting to see the intensity with which such experiences can be absorbed by such a soul. He is making progress. The right thing dawns on him at the right moment. When the problem of the sleeping car arises, he is ready to take part. Step by step, he advances until he finally knows how to exploit the situation in the right way. When the time came to change from building bridges of wood to bridges of iron, he adjusted himself to the new trend, grew richer and richer, and finally became the steel king, who must seek ways - and now he has a practical sense of morality - how he, in relation to his practical sense of morality, must behave with his wealth.

For him, as I said, there is none of what Tolstoy felt: no criticism of life, but an acceptance of life as a matter of course. What Tolstoy found so contradictory is what Carnegie imagines: If we look back at older phases of human feeling, we see that, in primitive conditions, princes do not differ particularly in terms of their lifestyle from those living around them. There is no luxury, no wealth in today's sense, but also none of the things that bring wealth; there is no contrast between rich and poor. In primitive times, however, as development was, this had to develop, and the contrasts became more and more pronounced. It is good, he says, that there are palaces next to the hut; because there is a lot in it that is supposed to be there, we have to understand its necessity.

But he notices how, in primitive conditions, there is a personal, human relationship between master and servant, how everything becomes impersonal in our relationships, how the employer stands in relation to the employee without knowing him, without knowing anything about the servant's spiritual needs, how hatred and so on must develop as a result; but that's how we have to accept it, that's just how it is. So an absolute yes to all outer life!

And when we consider how he is a thoroughly practical and sober-minded thinker of his kind, how he views this life, how he knows all the different chains that capital takes precisely because he is inside it, how he knows many a healthy things to say when you see that, then you have to say: this man, too, has tried to enlighten himself about life, and there is something complacent in him towards Tolstoy; and his practical morality – I use the word deliberately – it presents him with the question: How should our life be shaped if what has developed as a necessity is to have meaning? He says: Well, old conditions have led to wealth being inherited from ancestors to descendants. Is this still possible in our conditions, where capital shoots from capital in such an eminently necessary way? He asks himself this question vividly. He looks at life with penetrating meaning and says: No, it can't be done that way, and by considering all things, he comes to a peculiar view. He comes to the following conclusion; he says to himself that the only way this whole life of the rich man can make sense is if the rich man regards himself as the steward of wealth for the rest of humanity, that the owner of the wealth says to himself: I should not only acquire the wealth, not only have it and perhaps bequeath it to my family members, but rather, I should use what I have acquired, since I have used mental and other powers to bring it together, since I have poured industriousness into it, I should in turn use this industriousness to administer this wealth for the benefit of humanity.

Thus it actually becomes an ideal for him that man, while acquiescing in the conditions of the time, acquires as much wealth as possible, but leaves no wealth behind, but applies it for the good of mankind. Now he comes to a sentence that is characteristic of this world view; the sentence is: 'Died rich dishonored!' So, the ideal he sets for himself is that one may indeed become rich in order to gain the opportunity through wealth to work with it for the benefit of humanity, but he imagines that one must be done with the work of putting wealth at the service of humanity by the time of one's death. He says: It is honorable to leave nothing behind when one dies. Of course, this “nothing” is not to be taken pedantically; the daughters, for example, are to inherit enough to live on, but in radical terms he says: getting rich is a necessity, dying rich is dishonorable. For him, an honest man is one who, so to speak, comes to terms with life and does not leave to some uncertainty what he has acquired through his own hard work.

And now we have to feel the contrast between two such opposing personalities as Tolstoy and Carnegie are. Carnegie himself feels the contrast and he speaks out: Oh, Count Tolstoy wants to lead us back to Christ, but in a way that no longer fits with our lives. Instead of wanting to lead us back to Christ, it would be better to show what Christ would advise people to do today, under today's conditions. In his sentence: He who dies rich is dishonored, he finds the real expression of the Christian idea and lets it be known that he believes that if Christ were to speak audibly to people today, he would agree with him and not Tolstoy.

At the same time, however, we see that this man, Carnegie, is truly a noble nature, and not, as many are who accept circumstances and do not reflect on them, a lazy one. He has not only said what I have presented as the main point; he has sought the most diverse ways to use his wealth and more. It does seem strange at first when life can confront us with such contradictions, when two personalities arise in the same era who, from what one may call an objective world view, come to such different points of view, and the may be quite difficult for the human being, and it is not at all to be criticized from the outset if someone were to say today: Oh, my whole soul goes to where Tolstoy preaches his great ideals; how sublime this personality appears. But I also have to think about the practical demands of life, and if a person is not an abstract dreamer and idealist, but really goes through the thought processes of such a person with a realistic mind, as Carnegie offers them, then you have to say: that is perfectly justified. But it shows me how, for the person who lets the practical demands of life affect him, it is impossible to truly do justice to the ideals, to truly believe in the fulfillment of the great ideals. And so a new conflict can arise for such a person, as it did for Tolstoy.

And now let us try, I would like to say, to delve a little deeper into these two personalities, now from the perspective of the science of the soul. Tolstoy does indeed succeed in fully defending what he believes to be the original Christian teaching; he tries to criticize in the harshest possible way everything that has become of Christianity, that has emerged here and there, and he seeks to find the great impulses of Christianity. Tolstoy presents these impulses of Christianity in a relatively simple way. He says: When man understands these impulses, it is clear that he has within himself a spark of an eternal divine power that permeates the world. And the second thing that becomes clear to him is that this spark contains the essence of his own immortality and that, if he has understanding, he can no longer do anything other than seek a deeper human being in the ordinary earthly human being. And when he follows this feeling, when he realizes that he has to seek a deeper person in himself, then he cannot help but overcome what lies in his lower nature, and so he becomes a strict demands of the other nature, the development of the higher person in himself, the person who follows the Christ. How would a person - I will not say Carnegie himself, but someone who considers what might follow from Carnegie's view of life - how would such a person relate to Tolstoy's position on Christ? He would say: Oh, it is great and powerful to live in Christ, to let Christ come alive in oneself. But he would say to him: In the external circumstances, this cannot be realized. How should the state's circumstances be shaped if one lives according to this strict Christian demand?

Even if the question has not been asked from a different angle, Tolstoy gives the answer as definitely as possible. He says: “What such a view leads to in the external order, for the state, for external historical events, I do not know, that is beyond my knowledge; but that one must live in the spirit of this Christian faith, that is a certainty for me.” And so for Tolstoy the words: “The kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:21) into a deep and significant view of the kind of certainty that a person can have about the highest things. The view of an inner certainty gradually takes shape in him, and so he seeks to find this foundation stone in the soul, which makes it possible for the soul to become ruthlessly certain about certain things, about this or this soul says to itself: however strange it may seem, what will become of it if only the outer world view is maintained, because this inner certainty is the only one, it must be fulfilled. It eludes my observations what may follow, but they must be good because under certain circumstances they must arise from the eternal good source of all things.

Perhaps in no other contemporary personality is there such a strong reliance on inner certainty and the firm belief that, in this reliance, whatever may come, good must come. Perhaps in no other contemporary personality is this belief as intense as in Tolstoy. Therefore, no other personality with such a personal, individual share, with such inner truth, has professed such a world view.

And here we have another opportunity to illustrate the state of mind of both. Carnegie reflects: How should people behave towards each other, how should the rich behave towards the poor? And then the thought goes through his mind: It is not always good to give something to someone who begs for it; because it is possible that you might make the beggar lazy - says Carnegie; maybe you are not doing any good by doing so. You should look at the people you support. Actually, only those who have the will to work should be supported. And Carnegie implements this in a whole system. He says he understands very well that the man who gives something just to get rid of the beggar does more harm than the miser who gives nothing at all.

We do not want to judge such things, we want to characterize them, but let us look at a similar situation in Tolstoy: He meets a person who becomes his friend. This friend does not form a worldview, but feelings within himself. Tolstoy sees a peculiar behavior in him – many people today cannot believe such things; but they are true nonetheless. His friend is robbed. Thieves steal sacks from him; they leave one behind. What does the friend do? He doesn't chase after the thieves, but carries the one sack to them as well and says: They certainly wouldn't have stolen if they hadn't needed the things. And in other circumstances, Tolstoy sees this friend – and he becomes his admirer, he understands this very clearly. There you have the view of people who are considered parasites, so to speak, on one side and on the other. Life views intervene in life in this way, and the symptoms on the surface can characterize the mood of the soul.

But now we have to say: Tolstoy is not only a harsh critic of life in relation to all that we have mentioned; but by grasping the fundamental source of human certainty, he is also led to a remarkable point in his soul development, and that is where Tolstoy actually appears to us in his full greatness for the first time – for those who can appreciate such greatness. One thing that flows from this view of certainty, which one cannot admire enough, is Tolstoy's position on the value of science, contemporary science, and then a certain world of ideas about life and other important problems and questions flows out. Because he tried so hard to look inside the human being, he was able to see through all the futility in the methods of our worldly sciences. Of course, it is easy to understand what these sciences achieve, to follow the paths they take, but what these sciences – and here I am speaking entirely in the spirit of Tolstoy – can never do is answer the question: How do these various external, chemical-physical processes fit into life? What is life?

And now we come to what must actually be meant here. Tolstoy comes to a peculiar way of exploring a deep, scientific problem, the problem of life. Please, my dear attendees, look around you at our Western science, where life is spoken of, and make only one comparison to that, which Tolstoy uses in relation to this riddle of life. He says: “People who try to solve the riddle of life in the sense of today's science seem to me like people who want to get to know the trees in their uniqueness and do it this way: they are in the middle of the trees, but don't look at them, but take a telescope and point it at distant mountain slopes, where, as they have heard, there should be trees whose essence and nature they want to explore. “That's how people strike me who carry their soul, the source of their life, within themselves, who only need to look within themselves to see through the mystery of life, but what do they do? They make instruments for themselves, build methods for themselves and try to dissect what is around them, and there they see even less what life is. Through such a comparison, a thinker like Tolstoy - an eminent thinker - shows us that he feels what is important in relation to this question. Those who work their way into this side of Tolstoy's worldview know that what his book “On Life” has to say about the exploration and evaluation of life is worth more than entire libraries of Western Europe written from the standpoint of today's science on the problem of life. And then one also learns to feel what it means to have such spiritual experiences as Tolstoy, what it means to think about certainty as he did. One then learns to admire how things that one, when one is, so to speak, in the scientific method of our present time, has to go through with long-folded trains of thought, has to write whole books, as Tolstoy's are completed in five lines. The value of such a book as this one about the life of Tolstoy cannot be overestimated. Today's scientist may find it to be mere feuilleton; but anyone who is able to adapt their way of thinking to the spirit of these discussions will find a solution to the problem of life that is not available elsewhere.

And so we see, as this observation shows more and more, how Tolstoy's spirit becomes something that concentrates more and more, that with a few strokes is able to conjure up and solve great problems not in many words, but with radiant words of power, in contrast to the long discussions of a scientific and philosophical nature that are otherwise common. Here we are confronted with the very depths of Tolstoy's soul, and only when we know him from this point of view can we begin to understand the profound spiritual reasons why a person can become someone like Tolstoy on the one hand or someone like Carnegie on the other, who seems very plausible to us and is an important personality. We shall understand the spiritual foundations that lead to Tolstoy on the one hand and to Carnegie on the other if we now characterize from the point of view of spiritual science how this spiritual development takes place and is expressed in certain personalities.

The spiritual researcher sees something quite different from the ordinary in the course of human development. Just as spiritual science sees a multi-faceted being in the person standing before us, and sees in the physical body only one facet, only the effect of higher spiritual facets, with the etheric, astral and ego bodies behind them, so she also sees in what confronts us in the social order, in human life, what confronts us externally visible as a people, as a tribe, as a family, the physical body, the physical body of the people, the physical body of the tribe, the physical body of the family, a spiritual reality behind it. When one speaks of the spirit of the people, the spirit of the time, in today's science, these are words that do not mean much. What is the person thinking who speaks of the German, French or English national spirit? For the modern thinker, it is really only the sum of so and so many people; they form the reality, and the national spirit is a complete abstraction, something that one forms in one's mind when one seeks the concept from the many details. People have no idea that what appears to us as so many people is just as much the expression of an etheric body, an astral body and an ego as it is of the human body, and that it is truly also the expression of a spiritual. Today we have lost what we used to possess; it is no longer easy to explain how this spiritual reigns behind the sensual.

An old friend of mine, a good Aristotelian, tried to make his audience understand how the spiritual can be objectified in the sensual appearance by means of a simple example. Vincent Knauer – that was the man – tried to make it clear that spirit prevails in form, by saying: Let us consider a wolf that eats nothing but lambs for a whole lifetime for my sake; it then consists of nothing but lamb matter; but it has not become a lamb because of that. It does not depend on the matter, but on the fact that there is something in the wolf, which stands behind it as the spiritual, which is the essential, which structures and builds up the matter. This is a very real thing, something that one must know, otherwise all study of the external world moves in the insubstantial. No matter how much you examine in the sensual world, if you do not penetrate to the spiritual, then you do not come to the essential.

But it is the same with terms such as 'popular spirit' or 'zeitgeist'. For the spiritual researcher, a group of people is not just what can be observed in the physical world; there is something spiritual living behind it. And so, for the spiritual researcher, there is a spiritual reality, a real spiritual reality, not a mere, insubstantial abstraction in the Christian development, for example. Besides the Christian, there is a spirit of Christianity, which is a substantial reality. Such a spirit works in a very peculiar way; it works in such a way that we can make it understandable in the briefest way by means of a parable. Imagine that a farmer has brought in some kind of harvest and is now dividing it up. He sells one part, one part goes aside to be consumed, one part he keeps back; this is to form the next sowing. It then comes to light again as something new. It would be bad if nothing were kept back; what lies within would die. This is a comparison that leads us to a real law in human development. Development takes place so rapidly that at a certain point in time certain impulses are given; these must become established and spread. If at a certain point in time a spiritual impulse such as Christianity were given, it would become established in the outer world and take on this or that form, but it would dry up and die in the same way that the outer parts of a tree merge into the bark. These outer forms are destined to gradually wither away, no matter how fruitful the impulse is. However, just as the farmer retains something, something of the spiritual impulses must remain, flowing as it were through underground channels and then reappearing with original strength as a fertilizing influence in the development of mankind. Then personalities appear to us in whom such an impulse, perhaps going through centuries, is embodied. Such personalities appear to us in strong contrast to the environment; they must indeed stand in contrast because the environment is what is withering away. Such personalities are often inclined not to take the environment into account at all. From a spiritual point of view, Tolstoy is such a personality in whom the Christian impulse has been kindled for our time. And things are happening powerfully in the world so that they can achieve far-reaching effects. If we seek them out at their source, they appear radically; for they must radiate. And we will no longer be surprised when we know such a law that such personalities appear to us in this one-sidedness, and on the other hand, not be surprised at personalities who cannot have anything at all in them of these central currents, who are completely within the peripheral effects of the world. One such personality is Carnegie. He can see the whole picture and think out the best way to find one's way in it. Carnegie does not see what is pulsating through humanity as the spiritual. Tolstoy, because he seeks inner certainty so strongly, can seek the kingdom of God within, but because that which has spread as a real current under the surface is embodied in him, he can, to a certain extent, have no heart or mind for what is happening around him as it dies away. And so we see such contradictions that cannot come together. We have an external material aspect, and the observer, who is important to us, does not see the spiritual that prevails in it; we have the spiritual that wells up powerfully from the depths of a personality, and we cannot grasp how this can be realized in the external world. Humanity would increasingly come to such contradictions if another spiritual current did not also arise, a spiritual current that can look equally at underlying spiritual causes and at what these spiritual causes become in external reality. And if we follow theosophy from this point of view, it leads into the deepest depths of spiritual life; it does not seek this merely in such powerful impulses that do not organize themselves into ideas and facts, it seeks to get to know this spiritual life in concreteness. Thus it can see how the spiritual flows into reality; it is able to build the bridge between the most spiritual and the most material, and in this way can bring these points of view together in a higher balance. — We shall see another example of this coming together tomorrow.

Today we want to present such contrasts in two personalities and learn to understand them from the point of view of spiritual life. Thus, Theosophy appears to be called upon not only to preach tolerance in an external way, but to find that inner tolerance that looks with admiration into a soul that gives great impulses from the center of life, which today must seem improbable, impossible, and radical because it contains in a concentrated way what must be spread out over a whole area in the future, and what must then look quite different.

Theosophy can see this; it can also look at reality objectively and do justice to another personality like Carnegie. Life is not a monotonous phenomenon, life is a many-voiced phenomenon, and it is only through the expression of all contrasts that it can develop in its richness. But it would be bad if these did not find their harmonious balance. Man's nature will tend to crystallize one or other of the contradictions, and so it must be, but in order that people may not lose their way in human life, there must also be a central world-view that can, in a sense, identify with all contradictions and thereby gain understanding for what appears to be so contradictory.

If Theosophy works in this sense, harmonizing souls in their contradictions, then it will be able to truly establish what external harmony in the world should be. External harmony can only be the reflection of the inner harmony of the soul. If Theosophy can achieve this – and that is its real goal in relation to cultural life – then it will find the proof it seeks. It does not want theoretical proofs, it does not want to be called crazy; it wants to establish what it has to say, to introduce it into life, and then to see how life becomes harmonious and blissful as a result, as what it has to say becomes established in life as guiding principles. When Theosophy can see in life how what it incorporates is reflected back to it and how it makes life appear in such a way that it becomes harmoniously balanced within despite the contradictions, then it sees this as the proof of its principles, its true evidence.

It is still considered in many circles today to be a sign of a particularly enlightened mind to reject the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual, into the supersensible world, through human knowledge. It can be said that in some circles, especially in the scientific way of thinking, a front is already being made against this so-called enlightenment. But however much may be said from this side about spirit and the supersensible world from this or that point of view, it cannot be said that a really satisfactory way into the world of spirit is already being tried or striven for in wider circles.

That there is the possibility of penetrating into the supersensible world, not merely through an indefinite, scholastic belief, but through a genuine and true continuation of that way of thinking which has made modern scientific thinking so great, to penetrate into the supersensible world, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, which - as I already said here a few weeks ago - is to find its external representation through the Goetheanum in Dornach, as a proof to be presented to the world, to be fathomed through the experience of the spirit.

If I am to explain the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from a different perspective than the one I have already presented in numerous lectures here, I would like to begin today by talking about something that seems rather abstract and perhaps far-fetched to some.

It is no coincidence that the Goetheanum takes its name from Goethe. In a certain respect, Goethe's entire world view, his entire way of thinking, forms the starting point for a more recent spiritual-scientific endeavor. And even if one can say that what one finds in Goethe still presents itself as a beginning, it is perhaps best to illustrate the fundamental principles by starting from certain simple thoughts or ideas of Goethe's. Well known in wider circles, but unfortunately still too little appreciated today, is what Goethe called his metamorphosis doctrine, in which we also find his idea of the primal plant.

By this archetypal plant, Goethe does not mean a simple, tangible plant structure, as a modern natural scientist would say, but rather something that can only be grasped and experienced in the mind. At the same time, however, he means by this archetypal plant something that is not found in any single plant, but that can be found in every single plant in the wide plant kingdom of the earth. He therefore assumes that, I would say, within every plant that can be perceived by the senses there is a primal plant that can be grasped supernaturally and experienced in the spirit.

He also imagines the same, although he has not explained it so clearly, for the others, for the non-plant organisms. And even if Goethe, partly out of his artistic attitude, developed this idea of the primal plant, it must be said that his main aim was to find something scientific in the very best sense through something like the primal plant, something that can be a guide for man as an idea, a spiritual guide through the whole vast world of plants.

When Goethe traveled through Italy to clarify and mature his world view, he once wrote to his friends in Weimar, who were well aware of what he actually wanted with his primal plant, that the image of the primal plant had emerged for him again, particularly in the rich, abundant plant world of Italy. To begin with, in abstract terms – we need not, as we shall see in a moment, adhere to the abstract – to begin with, in abstract terms, he says: such a primal plant must exist, for how else could one find in the whole manifold plant kingdom that each individual being is really a whole plant? – As I said, that is expressed in abstract terms, but Goethe expresses himself about this primal plant in much more definite, much more forceful terms. For example, he says: “When one has grasped this primal plant in one's mind, then one can, from the living image of this primal plant, create images of individual real plants that have the possibility of existing.”

One must only look in the right sense at what is actually being said with such words. Goethe wants to arrive at an idea of the nature of plants in his mind, and he wants to be able to form a spiritual image of a plant from his Primordial Plant. This plant is a single plant, not like a plant that he sees with his senses, but rather, he invents a plant that is added to the plants that exist in the senses. This plant does not exist in the senses, but it would have the possibility of existing in the senses if the conditions were right. What does this actually point to? It points to the fact that man, through his soul, can become so immersed in the sensual reality and, in this immersion in the sensual reality, can experience the spiritual that is within the sensual reality in such a way that he grows completely together with this spirit, which lives and weaves everywhere in nature, creating.

The greatness of Goethe's world view is that it aims at this immersion in reality, and that it is convinced that, to the extent that one immerses in this reality, one comes upon the spiritual reality, so that one spirit of reality, which can then be one's guide through the entire confusing diversity of the sensual world itself.

Now, what Goethe strove for can be extended to the entire world surrounding man and to man himself. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has set itself the task of extending this way of thinking to everything that confronts man from outside and from within. It is thus the opposite of all unclear obscurantism, the opposite of all unclear mysticism. It strives for what Goethe claimed for his world view: to delve into the spiritual world with mathematical clarity and transparency.

This spiritual science now feels completely in harmony with modern science, although it goes far beyond the science of modern times. One has only to have passed through this natural science to realize how this spiritual science must spring from this natural science itself. Let us take a look at what this newer natural science is actually striving for. It sees its real goal as finding a knowledge of the things surrounding man, of the mineral, vegetable and animal world, and even of man himself, in which nothing is said about any subjective feelings or ideas of man himself. This natural science, in particular, from its newer point of view, that of experiment, to which it has rightly placed itself as a natural science, seeks to explore nature in such a way that the individual phenomena and processes of nature themselves reveal their essence, their laws, so that man does not weave anything into what he calls knowledge of nature, from what he finds within himself.

This is how what has been presented as natural science for three to four centuries, but particularly in the 19th century, differs from the knowledge of nature in earlier times. Anyone who has studied the way in which nature was understood in earlier times knows that people took what they formed in their imaginations and projected it onto natural phenomena, and to a certain extent they extracted from natural phenomena what they had first projected into them. That this does not happen, that man allows nature to speak to him quite impartially, that is the endeavor of modern natural science.

But one cannot help but let the spirit do the research when researching nature. One cannot help but apply that which one has within oneself as a life of thoughts and ideas, and which is of a spiritual nature, to the context of natural phenomena. Now one can take one of two paths. The ordinary scientific worldview of recent times has taken one path; but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to take the other.

When science develops its ideas, these ideas, which pure as I have described them, are to be gained from nature, then with these ideas, I might say, science can contemplate itself; then it can ask itself: What is the nature, what is the value of the ideas that we apply to external nature? – This is not done by the newer natural science. Modern natural science is limited to discovering everything about nature that does not answer the question: What is the human being actually? That is the characteristic feature of all, one might say, insightful natural scientists, the emphasized point, that they say: Yes, we can explore much about the physical world outside and within us - but this does not answer the question: What is the human being itself? And again and again we must emphasize: in its efforts to understand nature, natural science sets up a picture of the world in which the human being is not included as soul and spirit. Natural science, honestly based on the present standpoint, has no answer to the question of soul and spirit.

The question as to why this is so must be answered historically. Natural science itself does not know why it does not advance to the knowledge of soul and spirit, why it stops despite its admirable results on the outer nature before soul and spirit, why again and again natural scientists arise who say: Yes, if natural science were to speak of soul and spirit, it would transgress its limits. - One believes to speak about nature without prejudice. One does not speak without prejudice, because what has become established over the centuries as a certain way of thinking weighs heavily on natural science, actually on the way of thinking of modern natural science. And this pressure consists in the fact that certain confessional currents have claimed a monopoly on the truths of soul and spirit.

If we go back a few centuries, we find precisely in the period in which modern science had its early days, how religious denominations claim their monopoly on dictating the truths about soul and spirit. In the face of this claim to monopoly, modern science recoiled. Natural science of modern times has penetrated with magnificence into the outer nature; but not because one would have recognized through this penetration into the outer nature that one could not ascend to soul and spirit, one has refrained from this ascent, but because it was so firmly rooted in the unconscious human views that the monopoly claim of the confessional religions must be taken into account. That is why this belief was transformed into an apparent proof that it is impossible to penetrate the soul and spirit.

Anyone who has seriously studied the scientific research methods of modern times, and who has then inwardly processed that that arises as ideas about external nature with the exception of the actual essence of man, knows that the other path, which is taken by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, must be further pursued into the future of humanity. If natural science understood itself, if it did not live under the pressure hinted at, then, precisely because it strives to be a natural science that disregards the subjective element of the human being, it would come to the Goethean principle of growing together with the spirit that is spread out in the phenomena and facts and beings of nature. And if it understood itself, modern natural science would choose of its own accord precisely that which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as a continuation of the natural science direction, must claim for itself.

Indeed, what must be essentially supported is that which can be cultivated through natural science in terms of inner imagination, of thinking power, through careful inner spiritual methods. And it is on the training of such inner spiritual methods that everything through which the spiritual science referred to here wants to find its way into the supersensible, into the spiritual world at all, is based.

Today, people perhaps imagine far too lightly what is meant here by this path into the supersensible world. One thinks that it means something like an inner spinning, a surrender to all sorts of ideas, through which one weaves out all sorts of things that the nature of things should be. One might imagine that this is easy compared to the difficulty of the experimental method or compared to the methods used in observatories and clinics. But if you read something like I have tried to present in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science”, you will see that it is not just any kind of spinning around in inner ideas, but a strictly lawful, inner soul work of the spirit into the spirit. For true spiritual science can never be the view that one can penetrate into the spirit through external methods of experimentation, but true spiritual science must uphold the view that only the spirit in man can find the spirit of the world.

What man has to accomplish in his inner being, I have often referred to here in these lectures and in my books as meditation, as concentration. Today I would just like to point out that this work of concentration, this meditation work, is a purely inner soul work. But what is the goal of this inner soul work? What is the goal of this work with only the inner soul forces, this devotion to the pure workings of the soul and spirit in the inner being of man?

You know that we perceive the world through our senses as we live in it, and then we process this world. This is also how science works. We then process this world by reflecting on it, by revealing its laws, by forming ideas about it. But you also know that this process of forming ideas leads to something else, to something that is intimately connected with the health of our personal human being. This process of forming ideas about the world is connected with the fact that we can retain impressions of the world, as we say, through our memory, through our power of recollection. People so easily overlook this power of memory, this memory of the human being, because it is something so everyday for them. But that is precisely the peculiar thing about the real pursuit of knowledge: that which is often everyday for people must be understood precisely as that in relation to which the most important, the most significant questions must be raised.

When we perceive the world of the senses, form ideas about it, and after some time seemingly bring these forth from our inner being again, so that we remember events we have experienced, then there is much that is unconscious in these memories, in this memory process. Just think how little you are actually in control of your memory with your will, how little you can command, so to speak, your power of remembrance. Consider above all how little you are able to think of this memory while you are perceiving outwardly. Or is it the case that when a person looks out into the world with his eye, when he hears sounds with his ear, he simultaneously ensures that representations are present that make reminiscence possible? No, for that to happen the human being would have to consciously exercise another power alongside perception and the inner workings of the senses. In reality, this does not happen in ordinary life. I would like to say that memory with its power runs alongside the outer life. But it is the one that works subconsciously, so to speak, that helps determine all life in the outer world of the senses, so that we support this life through our memory through life. This power must be brought up from the unconscious. In other words, we cannot bring up from the depths of our soul what we unconsciously practise in our power of remembrance by merely remembering our experiences, but by trying to bring the power, which we otherwise do not know at all, which, as I said, runs alongside, I have said, to such a conscious clarity as otherwise only the external sensory perception is, by bringing this power up from the subconscious depths and weaving and living in what is otherwise in the subconscious of memory. If we use the power of recollection not for memory, not for remembering, but to make ideas and images that are otherwise only kept alive by the power of recollection consciously present in our mind, we strengthen something in our mind that, when the necessary time comes, allows us to experience a very different awakening from the one we experience every morning. If you consciously work again and again in the way that otherwise only memory works, then you experience something of a new awakening in the soul. One experiences something like the appearance in the soul of a completely different person than the one who otherwise walks through the world of the senses. One cannot reach the spirit through theorizing. Every philosophical argument that wants to reach the spirit through mere reasoning has nothing else in mind than the word or words about the spirit. The spirit wants to be experienced. And it can only be experienced by our raising up what would otherwise remain in the subconscious, in the deeper layers of our human soul, so that it lives in us with the same luminous clarity as what we see through our eyes, what we hear with our ears, and that in this brought-up conscious will lives in such a way as the conscious will lives when I direct the eye from this wall over to that wall, in order to turn the gaze away from what I see here and to look at what I can see there. By availing myself of my senses, the conscious will lives in this availing of the senses. This will must fully penetrate

this inner soul work, then one comes to something that is a continuation of the ordinary soul activity of man, which relates to the ordinary soul activity of man just as the waking day life relates to the life of sleep, from which at most the dream speaks .

That there is something in human nature that can be brought up and becomes a new organ of knowledge, that becomes what Goethe calls the soul eye, the spiritual eye, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to demonstrate through gradual familiarization with such inner soul work. In this way it will express what natural science is unable to express because it lives under the pressure I have indicated. But this pressure must, because humanity longs for it - one can notice this longing if one is only unbiased enough to do so - this pressure must fall away from the knowledge of humanity.

So you see that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to be some kind of false mysticism, some kind of obscurity, but a truly genuine continuation of what is known in natural science. And especially those who have enjoyed a scientific education will find it easier to concentrate and meditate on thoughts, because they are accustomed to methods and ways of research that disregard the subjective side of the human being and enter completely into the objective. If we now apply what we have been trained in to natural science, especially to meditation, then we eliminate all human arbitrariness, then we bring something into meditation, into the inner work of the soul, which is an objective lawfulness, like that of nature itself. It is precisely by taking the way of thinking and imagining of natural science into the human being that the chaotic, unclear self-knowledge, which is striven for with many a complicated and wrong mysticism, where one only wants to brood over one's own inner being, is overcome. Working in one's own inner being, which proceeds in every step of this work in the same way that only the most conscientious natural scientist proceeds, by extending his power of judgment over that which unfolds before his eyes or before his instruments, stands in opposition to this uneducated brooding into one's own inner being.

That is one side of it. I would like to say that it is the side that points to the awakening of special powers of knowledge. The ordinary power of memory will certainly not be there in those moments when one wants to explore the spiritual directly, because this power of memory itself has undergone a metamorphosis. It has become a spiritual eye that can perceive the spirit. With the usual conclusions that today's popular logic has, one cannot penetrate to the real spirit. Whoever wants to speak of a real penetration to the spirit must point to the real existing forces that lead to this spirit. And one such real existing force is the power of remembrance. But this power of remembering must be transformed, it must become something quite different. Every other penetration into the spirit leads at the same time into the dark, because human will is thereby eliminated, and with it the most important part of the human being itself. Just as we regard as fantastic what arises from, I might say, organic foundations of our mind, and as we do not call what we have no control over a true memory, so the true spiritual researcher will accept no soul-content for his spiritual research that he does not completely permeate with the light of his will.

So much for one side, the life of imagination, as used in spiritual research. But something else in man can be used and must be used if one really wants to find the way into the supersensible, into the spiritual world. And just as spiritual science has been challenged by the spirit of natural science through the way of thinking of modern times, so on the other hand spiritual science has been challenged by human life in modern times. Anyone who follows the development of the human soul through the last few centuries without prejudice, not with the preconceptions of today's historian, but just without prejudice, can see that a tremendous change occurred in the state of human souls around the middle of the 15th century, admittedly only within the civilized world, but just within this civilized world. It is a mere prejudice to believe, merely by looking at the external historical facts, that a human soul in the civilized world in the 8th or 9th century A.D. had the same inner makeup as the human souls of today. Of course, there are still backward human souls today who more or less still stand on the standpoint of the 8th or 9th century; but they are instructive precisely because they also lead us outwardly back to that time. But on the whole we can say: One need only look at human life in accordance with experience. A tremendous change has taken place, which has become ever more pronounced since the mid-15th century. If we want to describe it in more detail, we have to say that if we go back to that point in time, we find that people's relationship to one another was very different from what it is today and from what unconscious human forces are striving for in the future of humanity. Whatever may be said against it out of certain prejudices, something is being striven for in relation to the relationship between human beings that has its beginning at the time referred to. In earlier times, people were close to one another through blood ties, through tribal ties, through everything that made them related to other people through their organism, or what made them related to other people through the organic connection that manifests itself, for example, in sexual love. Do we not see, if we only want to see, that in place of the old blood relationship, in place of the old clan relationship, the old family relationship, the old tribe relationship, there is more and more that works from person to person in such a way that it passes from the soul, from the willing soul of one person to the willing soul of another person? Do we not see that the development of modern times makes it more and more necessary for man to approach another human being through something quite different from his mere physical organism? We see that since the time indicated, the sense of personality has grown, that the human being has become more and more inward-looking and inward-looking, and thus also more and more lonely and lonely. Since that time, I would say that the human being lives more and more isolated in himself with his soul life. The soul life closes itself off from the outside world. The blood no longer speaks when we are face to face with our neighbor. We must make our inner life active. We must live ourselves over into the other. We must merge spiritually into the other. What may be called the social principle, the social impulse of modern times, is very much misunderstood, especially in those circles that today rightly believe themselves to be socialist. One sees the social impulse emerging, but even today only a few circles know what it actually consists of.

It consists in the fact that more and more in the lonely human being the impulse awakens to live himself over into other people, spiritually and inwardly through his will, so that the neighbor becomes the one who becomes it through our consciousness, not through our blood, not through our organic connection. There we stand face to face with people and have the necessity to live ourselves into them. What we call goodwill today, what we call love today, is different from what was called by that name in times gone by. But by living ourselves into other people in this way, it is as if everything that pulsates in us, that lives in us as will, would take up the will of the other. We enter completely into the other with our soul. We go out of our body, as it were, and enter into the body of the other. When this feeling increasingly takes over, when this feeling, permeated by love, I would say, as modern love of one's neighbor, spreads among people, then something arises from this shared experience of the will, of the entire soul life of the other person, which is a real life experience. Today, many people could already have this life experience if they did not allow it to be clouded by prejudices. Where it occurs, it is rejected with truly unsound reasons. One need only remember a person like Lessing. At the end of his life, when everything that he could produce in the way of human greatness had passed through his soul, he still wrote his “Education of the Human Race,” which culminates in the acknowledgment of the fact of repeated human lives on earth. There are higher philistines, as there are higher daughters, and they have their judgment ready for such a thing. They say: Yes, Lessing was clever all his life; but then he became decrepit and came up with such complicated ideas as those of repeated lives.

But these repeated lives are not a fanciful not a fanciful idea; they are what we experience when we do not stand before another human being merely by virtue of blood relationship or organic belonging, but when we can truly live our way into what lives in his soul. There, in response to what is approaching us, the spirit of one person meets the spirit of another person, and from this arises, as we know from experience, that which can be said: what is forming a bond here for your soul, for your spirit, with the other person, did not come about through this life. What arises in the blood has come about through this life. But what arises in the spirit as a necessity has come about through something that preceded this life. Anyone who really follows the development of modern human life since the middle of the 15th century – it is still shrouded in mystery for the widest circles of humanity – will come to the idea of repeated earthly lives through living with people. And what comes to light then occurs, I might say, like a dream. I say “like a dream” for the following reason: When we fall asleep, we fall asleep into an unconscious. Then, out of this unconscious, this or that emerges as a dream. One can compare this falling asleep into the unconscious with submerging into the souls of our fellow human beings, as I have just characterized it. Then, out of this immersion, I would like to say, not figuratively, but very literally, out of this sleeping into our fellow human beings, something also emerges at first, like the dream of repeated earthly lives, and draws our attention to the fact that something like this must be sought in order to understand life, in order to find the way through the world of the senses. And what shines out like a dream from our social life becomes a complete certainty when we train the human will in the same way as I have described for memory. But just as memory must become a fully conscious power, so the will must, on the other hand, discard what completely directs it in ordinary life.

What then directs our will, our desires, our longings in ordinary life? If our desires did not arise out of the organic life of our body, the will would, so to speak, have nothing to do with them. He who, through experience, has penetrated to the will, knows that this will is based on desire. But we can also detach that which is the actual power of the will from our desires. To a certain extent we do detach it in our social life. But that only draws our attention to what is actually important. We detach it in social life by loving our neighbor, by being absorbed in our neighbor, not desiring him like a piece of meat. We do not love our neighbor out of our desires, but rather it is an application of a desireless will. But this disinterested will can also be developed through a special training. This happens when we do not merely want what can be achieved in the outer world, what one or the other desire is after, but when we apply the will to our human being and his development itself. We can do that. We all too often abandon ourselves to the way life carries us. But even after we have outgrown school, that is, when others are no longer providing the education, we can still practice continuous self-education and self-discipline. We can take our own spiritual being into our own hands, we can set out to achieve this and that. One can resolve, if life has led one in a certain direction up to a certain point, to become knowledgeable in this or that area of life, to transfer one's judgment to another area of life. In short, one can turn one's will around. While otherwise the will always works from the inside out, as desire dominates the outside, the will can be turned around, turned inward. By practising self-discipline through our will, by trying to make ourselves better and better in one direction or another, we apply the actual dispassionate willpower. And what you find in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, aims, in addition to the other thing I have already characterized, to show that man applies such a culture of the will to himself, so that he penetrates more and more, I might say, with his will into himself. But then, when these two forces work together, the power of remembrance brought out of the unconscious, which then seizes the human will, then the human being knows himself inwardly as spirit, then he knows that he has seized the spirit inwardly in a purely spiritual way, then he knows that he does not do this through the organs of the body. Then he knows what spiritual action in the spirit is like, then he knows what it means: soul and spirit are independent of the body.

One cannot prove that the soul and the spirit are independent of the body, because in ordinary life they are not. In ordinary life, the spirit and soul are entirely dependent on the body. But there lives in us another human being who is independent, and we can bring him up from his depths. Only then does that which reigns in man as the eternal reveal itself to us.

You see, there is nothing wrong or complicated about mysticism in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is in it thoroughly that which can be expressed in a completely clear way, but which one only comes to when one really explains it inwardly and does not just say: You shall develop your inner being, you shall look into yourself, you shall find the God in your own nature. In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, reference is made to very specific forces that are to be disciplined in a very specific way. That is what is important here. In this respect, however, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is a continuation of modern scientific and social endeavors. In the field of science, one can no longer completely ignore the spirit. And so it has come about that, because one did not want to eliminate the pressure that I characterized at the beginning, one wants to use the same methods with which one, I might say, ducks under the characterized pressure, to also prove today that there is something in man like a spirit, like a soul. And that is what has occurred in those who do not see the whole situation in the cultural development of the present.

We owe all the hopes that are based on certain justified grounds to this striving for the spirit, but which moves in the wrong direction. that are based on certain legitimate grounds, the hopes that many a naturalist has with regard to hypnotism, with regard to the possibility that one human being may suggest some idea to another when their consciousness is dulled. We owe to this quest the hopes that many place in the study of the dream life and the like, and we owe to this quest, to get to the spirit – because man cannot help but seek the spirit after all – the whole error of spiritualism.

What is actually being sought in this area? Well, take something like what happens in the case of hypnotism or mediumship. What actually happens there? There, that which is normal human consciousness, through which man is firmly grounded in ordinary life, is subdued. When a person is hypnotized, that which is his conscious ability in ordinary life is subdued. In a sense, other forces then take effect on the unconscious or semi-conscious or quarter-conscious person, which may come from the person next to him or from others. There, without doubt, all kinds of interesting things come to light. Of course, all kinds of interesting things also come to light through mediumship; but what comes to light is achieved on the basis of a dimming, a lulling of the ordinary consciousness. This is never the aim of the research methods of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The research method of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science says: Man has advanced in his development to the consciousness that he has in ordinary life through his senses in the waking state; if one wants to recognize something new about man that is beneficial, one should not paralyze this consciousness, one should not dampen it down, but on the contrary, one should develop it further, as I have indicated. One should increase clarity, guide sensory perceptions into the power of memory by applying the will, which otherwise arises only from dull desire, to self-discipline. Because one does not go this way, because one has not the courage and the perseverance for this way, one belittles the will and believes that in this way one will arrive at a knowledge of the soul, of the spiritual in man.

But what does one arrive at by taking away man's other abilities? By putting people to sleep, one arrives at an external way of looking at people that does not show them as spiritual-soul beings, but shows them precisely in their subhumanity, in that which makes them more like animals than they are in ordinary life. It must be strictly emphasized that through all these sometimes well-intentioned research methods, the human being is led down into the subhuman. If I hypnotize someone and give him a potato, but by the power of suggestion make it clear to him that it is a pear, and he bites into the potato with the consciousness of biting into a pear, then I darken his higher consciousness in such a way, I act on him in such a way as is done to the instinct of the animal. The only difference is that even in his subhuman aspects, man is not entirely an animal, but that his animal nature expresses itself in a different way. That is the essential point. And if one seeks to find any kind of thought-transference in a state of sopor or in a diminished consciousness, then one is dealing with an instinctive activity that has been translated into the human, that is to say with something subhuman. Anyone who lumps together what wants to be anthroposophically oriented spiritual science with these things defames anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For here it is not a matter of leading man down from his ordinary state of consciousness into something subhuman, but of leading him beyond himself, so that the ordinary consciousness continues to have an effect and a higher consciousness is added to this ordinary consciousness.

This is precisely what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science shows through its research method: that the human being we have here in the sense world is based on an animal, subhuman instinct; and this can be evoked and demonstrated by putting ordinary consciousness to sleep. When it expresses itself differently than in ordinary consciousness, the spiritual science just meant here can follow this other expression. It characterizes this other expression, which always takes place in hypnosis, in the mediumistic state, as a subhuman, as a descent into animality. But at the same time it shows that what lives in man as animality is not the same as in the ordinary animal. The method of research of which I have spoken here, as of the spiritual science meant here, knows that what comes to light through such experiments as in hypnotism and mediumship is something that still lives in man today from earlier human conditions. It is precisely because this spiritual science does not arrive at a subjectively colored, but at an objective self-knowledge, that it can gain a judgment about what it actually is that occurs through hypnosis and through mediumship. This is something that does not belong to this earthly world.

If we follow the development of the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms in the earthly world with the means of spiritual science, and follow it in its relation to man, then we find that man, as he is now, is adapted to the earth precisely because he has his present consciousness. The states of consciousness that occur in sleep, in hypnosis, and in mediumship are not states of consciousness, are not human powers that could arise from man being adapted to the earth; that arises from such an adaptation that was peculiar to man before the earth became earth. And it is precisely through such states that research into the conditions of the earth itself is rejected, but these preceded the present state of the earth.

If one now investigates further how the present state of the earth is connected with the animal and plant world, one sees that man carries something within himself that does not make him appear adapted to today's earthly existence, but that the animal and plant world is adapted to today's earthly existence. From this we can see that man certainly existed in primitive conditions, which, if brought about today, would have nothing but a deadening effect on his consciousness, before the present-day animals existed in their present form. So that we have to say: Man did not ascend from the animal world, but man was, albeit with such states of soul and spirit as we bring up, as they occur in animal-like ways in the characterized states, present before the earth came to this present planetary state.

I cannot go into the details for you today, which you can read about in my books. But I wanted to at least hint that precisely by observing certain things on which hopes are pinned today for knowledge of the present nature of man, a way is shown to gain insight into pre-earthly times and into the nature of man in such times. But in the same way, the fact that we can evoke states of consciousness that lie above the present state of consciousness adapted to the earth indicates how we will live in these higher states of consciousness when the earth is no longer our dwelling place.

These things open up to the inner eye. One cannot say: These things cannot be proved, just as little as you can prove that camels exist. You must have seen them, or someone must have seen them, and then you know that camels exist. In this way one cannot prove the supersensible with the ordinary power of judgment, which is valid only for the ordinary world. One must show how one comes to see the supersensible. From this vision of the supersensible, that which indeed has an effect on the sense world but can never be seen in the sense world itself, arises.

So, of course, it could now be said: Yes, you show us how some people succeed in making the spirit their guide through a supersensible vision through the sense world and into the supersensible world. But can all people see into the supersensible world in this way? The situation is as follows: if you allow the inner training and inner development that I have described in the books already mentioned to take effect in you, and which you undertake for your soul, you will inevitably come to recognize, through your own powers of judgment and your own healthy human understanding, which is then developed, what spiritual researchers can discover in the spiritual world. But just as there are individual researchers in the physical world who investigate one thing or another, and we have to accept what they have found, so in the future development of humanity there will be individual spiritual researchers who investigate this or that in the spiritual world. Whether they can research something depends on whether, in certain moments of life, for which they have been waiting, without their having done anything to bring it about (for one can only become a waiting being through the development of the soul), that which presents itself as a spiritual fact becomes recognizable. One could say, using a religious expression, that this must come about through grace. This grace will intervene for the man as a spiritual researcher just as, let us say, this or that experience in the material world intervenes for one person and not for another. It will be so, because certain facts will always bring individual people from the spiritual world.

In order to bring these facts to light, various things are necessary; it is not only necessary to have gone through what is written in the books mentioned, to be able to fully understand what the spiritual researcher expresses, but something is needed that can be described as a quality of the human being as “fearless” to a very high degree in the face of the spiritual world. People are so reluctant to enter the spiritual world because they are actually afraid of the unknown, as a person is always afraid of the unknown. The spiritual researcher must become fearless. And on the other hand, he must acquire the quality of being able to suffer, to feel pain; because a real discovery from the spiritual world cannot be achieved without a certain pain, without a certain suffering. You will understand that this must be so if you simply imagine that the state of spiritual vision is not adapted to ordinary earthly conditions, is basically just as little adapted as our soul is adapted to our diseased organism, which hurts. If one really places oneself with the developed soul in the facts of the spiritual world, then one is in a world for which one is not initially organized. One penetrates into a world that cuts, that burns. This must be experienced. And one only penetrates to the facts if one really approaches them with the attitude that consists in applying everything that the soul can develop, but that one then waits until, in certain, I would like to say once more, gracious moments, the spiritual facts approach

This should not be imagined as something that approaches one like a fantasy idea, but rather as an experience of a profound intensity in relation to the inner being of the human being. I will just take this simple fact, which I have already mentioned, which can actually only arise through spiritual research today before the human soul, the fact that in the middle of the 15th century the whole human race in the civilized world experienced a turnaround – a simple fact. That it may be stated as a scientific fact can only come from the fact that one has worked on one's soul, diligently worked, not wanting to conquer the spirit by arbitrariness, but by working one has put oneself in an expectant state, until that which reveals itself as such an apparently simple truth has come.

Then something else is necessary. There are people, I am just mentioning the philosopher Schelling or others, who, through special moments of grace, received one or the other impression from the spiritual world. What did they do? They could not be quick enough to build up a worldview when they received an impression from the spiritual world. They draw conclusions from some impression they receive from the spiritual world. They have received an impression, then they make a whole system out of it, a whole worldview. This is what the real spiritual researcher must completely refrain from doing. The real spiritual researcher must stop at this single fact that is revealed to him, and he must wait to see if another fact is revealed to him. For example, if one has become acquainted with the fact that the earth was preceded by pre-earthly conditions in which man already lived, one must not derive a whole scientific system from it about the evolution of the Earth, but must accept such a fact as an isolated, individual fact and allow other equally isolated, individual facts to be approached, so that fact after fact presents itself, more or less comprehensive. But one must wait for each individual fact; that is what matters. Even though spiritual revelations are definitely what underlies spiritual research, these spiritual revelations only occur when the destiny of man predestines him to them. Just as one must not draw conclusions from the northern hemisphere of the earth about what is in the southern hemisphere of the earth, but must research separately what is in the southern hemisphere of the earth, so one must not draw conclusions from one corner of the spiritual world to the other, but must learn to wander around in the spiritual world, to grasp the details in their isolation. From this you can see that people will be given what they can research from the spiritual world; they can indeed learn many things.

Now you could say: Yes, but isn't there a danger that those to whom such spiritual facts are revealed will now become haughty among people, that they will consider themselves special creatures that stand out above the rest of humanity? That is already taken care of. The first thing that must precede real spiritual research is absolute modesty, especially intellectual modesty. Without developing this modesty towards all of humanity, one cannot progress in the field of spiritual research. The spiritual researcher may indeed know how to communicate individual facts from the spiritual world to his fellow human beings, but the fact that he has the grace to communicate something that is revealed to him is at the same time due to the way he approaches his fellow human beings. The spiritual researcher is one who treats even the smallest child with true reverence when it babbles something from the spirit and the soul hidden within man, even if it only asserts itself screaming from a child's throat. The spiritual researcher is glad when he hears this or that from the experience of the individual person. The experiences that people share with him are his school. He completely subordinates himself to it. He knows only one thing: he knows that what people experience, even if they are at the most primitive levels of education, is infinitely valuable, that only what is usually man's power of judgment does not follow from it. If people would judge what they have experienced correctly, they would bring forth treasures of soul and spirit from their inner being and from the depths of their being. It is these that the spiritual researcher looks for. For him, every person is an equal being with sacred mysteries in the soul, except that the consciousness, the power of judgment, sometimes does not correspond to what is in the depths of the soul. Thus the spiritual researcher in particular becomes a modest person because he always has the spiritual equality of people in mind in this regard, and because he knows that he only has what he researches in the spiritual world because he is a human being among humans. Thus he is predestined to work in the spirit for other people, who in turn can develop their souls through meditation and concentration to such an extent that they can receive what the spiritual researcher says.

You may reply that it is not very well organized that people should live side by side in such a way that they should learn from individuals what they can understand but cannot discover for themselves. I can answer that in two ways. One is that this is a fact that has to be accepted like many other facts of life, even if some people might wish otherwise. That is the first thing I can say. But the other thing is that anyone who foresees such a future for humanity, a future in which there are people among us who can see into the spiritual world and reveal intimate matters to people from this spiritual world, so that in this way other people can experience from their own understanding what they can gain in the way suggested, also knows that the most intimate relationships will develop from person to person. And he also knows that it is precisely through this that the social impulses pass from soul to soul and that the real social life is brought about in the spirit, which today one believes can only be achieved through external means. Just think how people will be brought together, how they will present a social structure in their living together, when people will face each other in such a way that one person accepts what the other is investigating as a most important, intimate matter for him. It is precisely in this way that people in the future will come close to each other in the desirable way, that spirit will work in the soul of the next person in the way that has been indicated. Those who can explore the spirit will be felt to be a necessity for other people. On the other hand, the spiritual researcher will also feel that the whole of humanity is rooted in it, without which he cannot live, without which he himself would not have the slightest meaning with his spiritual research.

Even if today the social question has been made into something that is merely understood in an outwardly materialistic way, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, when viewed inwardly, shows that when the spirit becomes the guide through the world of the senses and out of the world of the senses into the supersensible world, the structure is thereby also brought about in the social life of people, through which the human being can become for the human being in the future what he is actually meant to become.

In this way, I have tried to characterize to you today, from a different point of view than in the numerous previous lectures, how anthroposophy attempts to penetrate the spirit and how this penetration is based on developing the inherent powers of the human soul. I have been trying to do this for almost two decades in what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is still said in many circles that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represents something of a striving for Buddhism or something similar. In my last lecture here, I already hinted at how precisely this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which works from the essence of the human being, from the present essence of the human being himself, abhores that weakness of people who do not want to strive from what is there, not from what we have acquired in modern natural science, but who want to go to the Orient, to India, for my sake, and take there that which was adapted for a completely different age and no longer fits into our present. We experience it again and again. A few days ago, here in Switzerland, it could be experienced again that people say: Anthroposophism, as they express themselves, also represents some kind of escape to India. When this is said in particular by people who call themselves 'Christian', then I would like to remind these Christians of something that they may know: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor'. Because it is nothing less than bearing false witness against one's neighbor when one speaks of what is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science, as if it were something obscure, as if it were something for humanity that has become purely passive and the like. Because humanity has become passive, because humanity can no longer come to action through what has been traditionally imparted to it through the centuries, a new spirit must be sought as a guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world.

Those who always only speak of warming up the old spirit and loathing, as one loathed natural science at the time of Galilei, that which appears as spiritual science, to them should be said above all, especially when they want to speak from the Christian spirit: Those who take Christianity seriously need have no fear that the Christ Impulse in its true significance, the religious worship of man, will suffer any impairment through any discovery, even if it be a spiritual discovery. On the contrary, religious life will be given a higher radiance by the fact that people will once more know what spirit and soul are, that they will not allow themselves to be dictated to about what spirit and soul are, that they will seek within the soul the way to experience the spirit and the soul. But this is what is striven for in the movement that has its external representation outside in Dornach at the Goetheanum.

The movement strives for that which lives unconsciously as a longing in numerous souls without their knowing it. It will not be possible to extract it from these souls by mere decree or dictate, but it will live in the souls as a striving, even if one were to bring about the actual representation of this striving. For just as man would die if he ceased to absorb new life forces at the age of thirty-five, just as he could not continue to live from that point on if he did not supply himself with new material life forces, so humanity cannot continue to live if it only only wants to assimilate what is old and traditional, if a new spirit does not arise in due time, weaving itself into the evolution of mankind.

For that is what this spiritual science wants to make clear and unambiguous, not obscurantism, not complicated mysticism. That is what it wants to make clear and unambiguous: that the spirit is the living element, the true guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world. Without the spirit we become directionless in the world of the senses. But if we develop the spirit as a guide through the world of the senses, then it proves not to be an abstract spirit of ideas alone, but to be the living spirit in us. And then we would have to clip its wings, through which it wants to strive into its actual homeland, into the homeland of the spirit, if we, after having chosen it as a guide through the world of the senses, do not want to ascend through it, through its guidance, into the supersensible world. For the spirit is alive. And if the belief can spread that the spirit, in contrast to matter, is not an independent living entity, what is the cause of this? The only cause is that man has deadened the spirit within him through his will, and so the dead spirit cannot grasp the living spirit. But if the spirit in man is quickened, then the living spirit in man grasps the living spirit in the world.

From our considerations of yesterday you will have seen how easily the whole course of human evolution can be misunderstood and how it is particularly misunderstood from many sides today to the detriment of present knowledge as well as of the present social striving of mankind. (see Z-7.) Today we will for once call up before our souls some results of Spiritual Science of such a nature that they can throw light, it may be said, from another side on what becomes so enigmatical if looked at from the points of view holding good at present. Now I have told you that man can come to terms with this present time only if he makes up his mind to find his real bearings by starting on the path to the spirit. He must decide to look for a new relation to external nature since the old means to this end no longer suffice, and also find his way to a new relation to his fellow men, the old relation no longer being suitable, so that he sees what impulses are necessary for the modern social structure of mankind. If we wish to be successful in this, we must earnestly keep before our souls the following—that as man is placed in the world today, in earthly existence between birth and death, he sees but the outer manifestation of his own essential being and enters into actual relationship with merely the outer manifestation of his fellowmen. Life takes on a different form for the different epochs of mankind's evolution, and we exert ourselves really to study these things just in their relation to men of the present time. For the present age is a very critical one for men on earth. Up to the fifteenth century, and, since things do not change in a flash, one might say on into the present time, man is still actually more or less dominated by inherited concepts and impulses of the past. This fifth post-Atlantean epoch is indeed in a certain sense rather out of the ordinary where the evolution of men is concerned. For you certainly know that taking earthly evolution as a whole it divides itself into seven great successive epochs, of which the fourth was the Atlantean epoch and the fifth, our present one, the post-Atlantean. The sixth and the seventh should then follow.

In the Atlantean period there was a kind of crisis. For up to that time the whole of the earth's existence was a recapitulation of the earlier existence of Saturn, Sun and Moon. During the Atlantean period there was a kind of crisis but it is true only the beginning of a crisis. There was merely a preparation of things that were actually to be developed in the following evolution of the earth. So that up to Atlantean times man was really only what he had been in his different forms as man on Saturn, Sun and Moon. In Atlantean times, however, he had only intimations of what he was supposed actually to become as man of the earth; then he continues on, and now we are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. In the post-Atlantean period, throughout the old Indian end old Persian development, and so on, ever more definite relations were arising. But the Greco-Latin time, the fourth post-Atlantean period, gives us again even though in another form merely a kind of repetition of what existed on another level of existence in Atlantis. It is only now in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the time since the fifteenth century, that man stands within his whole evolution in such a way that new impulses arise—impulses which are perceptible in his very being. Previously they were not so noticeable; now they appear in his being noticeably, nevertheless there are still only intimations of their presence. The terrible, catastrophic events of our time, the consequences of which—one can already foresee—will be shattering to mankind, are the expression of how new relations are making their way into mankind's evolution. I have already indicated how from a certain aspect these new relations can be described by pointing to the way in which an on-rolling spiritual wave is clearly perceived, arising from, as it were, a surging up into evolution of the Spirits of Personality.

Now we notice it after the manner of Spiritual Science we keep in mind this particular state of soul in which modern man is found here on earth, it is markedly noticeable today, according to the outlook of Spiritual Science, how man when he perceives or is outwardly active in his willing is really surrounded only by manifestations of the being of nature, and the being of his fellow men. He is not surrounded by the real beings into whom he must, as it were, grow in the course of evolution, into whom he will have grown at a later stage of evolution. As you know, man's position in the world is such that—to describe it broadly—he perceives the surrounding world in the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom and in his own human kingdom. This is what is visible around man. And in the visible human kingdom there is played out what comes from the will and what should find a certain ordering for the social structure.

Now people have reflected a great deal about man's attitude to his environment, though insufficient thought has gone into their reflections. But the result of these reflections has been worked into various theories of knowledge. We get very little, however, from these theories of knowledge. And what in schoolmaster fashion is given in these theories today to the young people, who are then supposed to speak to the world as philosophers, is really perfectly inadequate nonsense. For a true insight into what is really revealed in man's surroundings, a real insight, can only be gained when the matter is observed according to the way of Spiritual Science. You see, on one side man can look upon the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom; on the other side he can look on the animal kingdom and the kingdom of man himself. Both—mineral kingdom and plant kingdom as well as human kingdom and animal kingdom—unveil themselves to him in such a way that if now in a theoretical sense he is honest, in this unveiling, in this revealing, he notices contradictions. He is unable to make anything of the way in which on the one hand the mineral kingdom and plant kingdom, and on the other hand the animal kingdom and human kingdom reveal themselves to him. And when people believe they can succeed in doing so this comes from a certain dullness. Because they take life too easily they are unwilling to go into all the doubts which arise from observing the kingdoms of Nature. But now, when one presses on to knowledge, when one trains oneself in the direction given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, then to a certain extent a change takes place in our contemplation of the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as in our view of the connection with the animal and human kingdoms. Unconsciously men already have, to a high degree today, a feeling for this change, even if it does not enter consciousness. It remains indeed in the unconscious—just as I told you that today in the natural course of evolution man passes by the Guardian of the Threshold unconsciously. It is actually a certain fear of the truth which always unconsciously holds men back from really pressing on so that they come to this change. I am speaking in Imaginations, my dear friends, in Imaginations translated into words. In reality these things cannot be appropriately described in any other way. For when man brings to life within him what can be made living, when he applies himself to what is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, looking at the mineral and plant kingdoms with this transformed power of cognition, he will always experience something like fear. But you should not have to shudder nor get gooseflesh at the description of these conditions. People avoid them because they are afraid. From this you ought to understand that of course when picturing these conditions one can indeed get gooseflesh to a certain degree, and on that account people just get frightened. When such knowledge is acquired, on looking at the mineral and plant kingdoms, one always experiences something like the smell of a corpse; there is a corpse-like smell which characterises as if in a vivid feeling what is living in the mineral and plant kingdoms. On the contrary, When with transformed cognition we look at the animal kingdom and the kingdom of man, there is always a sensation that can be described by saying: actually (you will forgive me, I know, for putting this Imagination into words) actually so long as they are in a physical body men remain—even the most advanced of them—where what in reality is hidden within them is concerned, always children, thorough children. The simple truth is that far more lies hidden in a man between birth and death than he can develop outwardly, can bring to manifestation out of himself.

Therefore, because in supersensible knowledge there is always a gradual ascent from semblance to actual reality, you see that when looking at, observing the outer world as it now is, we actually have to do with semblance alone. For the corpse-like smell of which I have spoken and, forgive me, the childishness of men, are veiled. The corpse-like smell finds, if I may say so, too dull a nose in our physical men, the etheric nose not being sufficiently developed. And the childishness of men does not allow us to confess its presence because , as men, we are too conceited to do so. Yet this is how the matter stands. My explaining what I have just been describing one points at the same time to there being far more hidden in in man than can be given practical proof. The question may now be asked: If man does not perceive the reality in minerals nor plants, if he perceives no reality in animals either—not even in his own being as man, where then is his right setting on earth? Strange as it may seem we find him placed among beings who belong neither to the mineral and plant kingdoms, nor to the animal and human kingdoms, but lie between them. He bases his being upon a kind of plant-animal, or animal-plant. were there a being here on earth neither wholly plant nor wholly animal, but having mere plant nature where their inner organisation is concerned, and having the power to go around, to move about at will like the animals—now this is what I meant were there beings who on being examined anatomically would not be found to have muscles and blood within them but whose anatomy would resemble that of the plants, with only their cells and tissue, but if these beings were able to move at will like the animals, or were there wandering round our earth animals that on dying left plantlike corpses, then man in his whole attitude of soul would really belong among these beings. Here in his earthly existence man would really be able to comprehend such beings. But again the remarkable thing is that for their part these beings could not exist on earth, these beings are only to be found in other worlds. They could not flourish in earth existence. Thus, we may say that man really lacks the faculty for knowledge—and this particularly apparent today's—which enables him to penetrate directly into the being of minerals and plants. and also of animals and men. And the beings he would directly perceive in their whole constitution are just these which could not live on the earth. This is the remarkable position of man where his relation to nature around him is concerned.

But here on earth man stands also in a strange relation to himself. Man is on the one hand a being who has conceptions. When, however, he puts this faculty for conceiving, for having ideas, into action, in the conception he loses his own identity. And he actually has his identity, that is not able to make an appearance in the conception, only when something—his will—works up out of the unconscious. If the will were not to work up and we were to have no trace of it in us, could we have andy ideas about it. The whole world would seem to us ghostly. We should have a ghostly world before us, which about describes the world of scientific concepts; this would actually constitute our world. Imagine the world looking as it is described by natural scientists or zoologists; just think of it being nothing more than what is found in books on Botany and Mineralogy. Real Botany and Mineralogy contain far more than what we find in books. But imagine you were taken into a world described in books, where there was nothing more than what is described in books; it would indeed be a world of mere apparitions, a proper world of ghosts. The world not being one of ghosts is amply due to the will having something to say. Now look! Were you able to fly—I don't mean with a machine but were you able to fly yourself, if you had no need of earth under your feet and were you able to move freely without the earth—then you would come near to perceiving the world in this ghostly fashion. Even if you could only follow the world with your eyes when awake it would appear very ghostly, not so much so as when described by the natural scientist, but all the same it would appear very ghostly. You have a feeling of the solidity of world existence only because you stand with your feet on the ground. And this pressure of your feet against the ground gives you the feeling, akin to the will, but watered-down will, that you are not in a ghostly world but in one that is solid. Were you not to have this feeling, should you only see, the world would appear to you a very ghostly place. You do not tell yourself what is going on in the subconscious; in the subconscious something is going on that makes man say (in the subconscious he does say it): Yes, the world looks very like a ghost! Were it really what is presented by my eyes I should never be able to stand firm, I should have to sink down; and as I do not sink, the world is not as presented by my eyes. This conclusion is constantly being arrived at in the unconscious. The entirely ordinary, most everyday relation to the world is as complicated as this. It is always an unconscious conclusion that to a certain extent originates with the will. Thus in mere conception we actually lack—to use an erudite expression, a pedantic expression—we lack the subject, it drops out. That we have a subject and feel ourselves bound up with the world comes from the will.

Again, when we will, when we develop the will, the object is actually lacking. The object does not come into our consciousness at all as something properly solid. If I want simply to lift this little book from the left side over to the right, and actually do it—the real object of the will does not enter consciousness at all. You can see the passage of the book, the conception which takes its ghostly way into the will, but the actual object of the will does not enter consciousness. So that man when he makes conceptions and also when he wills (this again sounds grotesque because an Imagination is being clothed in words) man as a conceiver as well as a willer is—if you will forgive me—a cripple. He conceives in a ghostly way and wills incompletely. What man is in reality, is actually neither quite within his conception nor his will; once again it is in the centre between the conception and the will. But all this goes on in ordinary life without being able to enter consciousness. In the same way as the plant-animal is unable to enter external nature, what man actually is cannot enter his consciousness. For this reason I have often spoken to you of the fact from another point of view by saying: man perceives the real ego like a hole in life's events. You see we have to be clear that holes can also be perceived. Man knows nothing of sleep, he wakes, sleeps; wakes, sleeps; wakes, sleeps. But reviewing the course of his life he is faced by empty space in his consciousness, the hole in consciousness, and he sees just as if there were a white surface before him with black holes where really nothing is to be seen. Thus he looks at the holes that, during sleep, are there in consciousness. But it is also the same with our ego in waking life. Our ego is not in reality brought into consciousness: in the consciousness there is only a hole for this ego, and perceiving this hole is the only thing that makes us aware that we really have an ego.

These things, that appear to the insensitive men of today as sophistry, must gradually become an elementary consciousness in man. For in the future man will not be able to found life on dogmatic conceptions, as has been possible for him in the past owing to the still existing remains and after effects of atavistic clairvoyance. In future we shall have to base life on grounds that are easy to detect. It will have to be part of our everyday conceptions that mineral and plant kingdoms are observed after the manner of Goethe. For Goethe only examined the phenomenon, and did not believe that in the phenomenon there was revealed anything but, at best, the basic phenomena, the archetypal phenomena and that phenomena do not reveal in laws of nature which can be put thoughts. Goethe never looked for laws of nature, for this would have seemed to him very fantastic; he wanted to pursue the phenomena because the external world shows us in the mineral and plant kingdoms nothing but perceptions, appearances. Thus man has to look at the external world to become conscious of himself. In the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom I really see only the outer side, and when confronted by the animal and human kingdoms I actually see only something like an embryo of the complete being. That also must be so. For you see, in the mineral and plant kingdoms in reality there exist beings who, when observed by man, reveal only a certain side of themselves because it may be said they cannot reveal themselves in any other way. For in the mineral and plant kingdoms lives something man can only fully recognise if—please understand me, thoroughly he looks back to the world from which he came on entering physical existence through birth. Could you after birth with your thought keep possession of the consciousness that stretches backward before birth, could you, that is, look upon being born as an event in your life like—shall we say—the passing from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year, and were the backward-running thread of consciousness to remain unbroken—the consciousness being quite different before birth, before conception—without more ado you would get a view of mineral and plant kingdoms quite different from the one you get on looking from the standpoint of life between birth and death. For you would then say to yourself the followings I have come from the spiritual world through birth. I have entered this physical realm. Why should I have done this? Why should I not have remained in the spiritual realm? Why have I been enticed down to earth at all? For one may speak here of enticement. Then, if you were able to remember, you might says I have been enticed to earth for the reason that suddenly in the course of my development between death and a new birth, it seemed—I came into a sphere where it seemed—as if certain beings had flown away, as if they really should be there, were missing—and were not there. To put it bluntly, in the time just before birth in the spiritual world one is dogged by the feeling that one misses certain beings which actually belong there and are not there. Everything goes to show that these beings are lacking. And if one comes down through birth, these beings are there in the minerals and in the plants, but as though banished, as if these beings were banished from the world just left, as if they could not really flourish, would half die and thus create the corpse-like smell, would become half dead in the world one has entered. Before birth we long to know certain exiles. We only know there are banished beings, but where are they? Then we go into the physical world and perceive them, but they might be said to be embalmed, mummified. For in the world we have entered it is only possible for them to be embalmed, mummified, dried up. It is perfectly right, on being confronted by the mineral world and the world of the plants, that we should have the feeling we are looking at beings exiled from the spiritual world, from the regions in which we were before having to enter physical life.

And when we look at animals and men end see their childishness, then, if we can develop the power to see more deeply into being, we remember that these animals and men, as they actually are here in the world in which we live between birth and death are never finished, never actually bring to completion the whole of their life which is conditioned by their inner being. Anyone looking at animals in the right way, anyone who can look at them with full inward and living force of knowledge, knows well that animals are not immortal, but knows too that animals experience in their group souls the whole tragedy of this not being immortal. The group souls outlast the individual life of the animal but what there is here on earth of the animals is—as I recently sale—in reality sick (see Lecture 1), and this is so on account of its deterioration through belonging to s world from which it is banished. And in his outer physical form man also is an exile in this world. He therefore remains crippled and a mere child. Man remains a child, the animal in his general being, in his physical form, is dried up. For what belongs to animal and man is found when we go through death and enter directly into the spiritual world, which then after death we observe. For actually a circle is described in the life between death and a new birth. What remains hidden here of animal kingdom and plant kingdom, what causes us to perceive that animals and men—as far as men's physical forms are concerned—are exiles from the spiritual world, banished out of the spiritual world, is first perceived by us when we pass into the spiritual world through the gate of death. There we go through an evolution and as we approach ever nearer the cosmic midnight, described in my mystery play, (see The Soul's Awakening, scene 6) we become clear that something is missing, that what is missing has run away from the spiritual world; we pursue it through birth and find it on the physical earth in the mineral and plant kingdoms. On entering this existence through birth we are never really surprised about the mineral and plant kingdoms because they are what we have been expecting. Finding animals on the physical earth, too, and men with an outer form that recalls that of the animal though it is more perfect, is astonishing to us in some measure after being born with our gift of consciousness. We begin ia understand this, however, when we know that a beginning has been made with this outer form of animal and man, which only develops in the world we enter through the gate of death.

Now it might be said: For the abstract and completely dried up religious conceptions that still persist (these conceptions were once much more full of life and really gave men something) for these abstract, dried up conceptions still remaining in our age of consciousness, all that men perceive here in the physical world, all that they should conceive as underlying the world experienced by man between death and a new birth, comes upon them too abruptly. What man experiences between death and a new birth remains on this account so problematical for men today, and can so easily be denied by the grossly material mind, because men in arriving at the age of the consciousness soul, which means the age of the intellect, lives as I have explained only in what is reflected into his consciousness. Therefore, he is also only able to live in reflected images when he goes out beyond the perceptions to where, if he stands firmly on his feet, the will plays into him in the way I have previously indicated. If no will plays in however—and in the immortal life after death no will does play in—when there is no interplay of the will and man is restricted to placing before his soul, the reflected images of his conceptions of what the world is between death and a new birth, then this world will have no certainty and will be not only ghostly but without certainty. Indeed we can go as far as to say that if men obstinately cling only to science, if they fix, their attention only upon the ghostly world given them by science, then they are quite right in denying any life at all after going through the gate of death. For what is given by science is only pictures, apparitions. And even this comes to an end when we pass the gate of death. Science is unable to contain anything of what we experience in the realm after death and before birth. For, you see, in books on mineralogy, in books on botany, in everything connected with Physiology, Geology end so forth, in any of the conceptions you can absorb about plants and minerals, you can absorb only about beings who are living in banishment here in this physical world. Again, you can also perceive in the bodies of animals and men only what has been banished here—even with all the help of your books on Zoology and Anthropology, and, if you widen the field of your thought you can really put all knowledge in the same category—you are only able to perceive what is living down here in banishment. But when you reflect that before birth you feel the lack because they really are not there of just these beings experienced here after birth, that in animals and men you then experience what does not exist down here, you will understand that into the conceptual life of science nothing at all of immortal life can enter, and that since it lives in images science in its own domain has a perfect right not to trouble itself about immortal life. It in for this reason that, since the fifteenth century, in the epoch when the conceptions of science are dominating the whole of mankind, man has on the one side the robust, crude nature actually representing for him the whole of reality, and on the other side a realm that he wishes to reach with only the weakened mirrored images of the age of the consciousness soul. This comes before him as though he were saying to himself: Now that I come to see (this happens in the subconscious, for it is there he comes to doubt immortality) when I come to see that what I think are only reflected images, then were I to believe these reflected images would still be there after my death, including the images of my self, I should be just as stupid as if I believed that there were coming towards me out of my mirror here on the wall the men who appear to approach me—that they were not simply reflected but were actually coming towards me.

It is simply characteristic of this epoch of the development of the consciousness soul that if man will not advance to a spiritual comprehension of the world, then connection with the world into which he will enter once he has passed through the gate of death will vanish from him more and more. It will also disappear from his thought life, from his conscious life, but he will not cease to long for it. And even the most hardened deniers of immortality have in the depths of their will, where longing is born, the longing to experience something of the world man enters through the gate of death, the world from which he comes on passing through the gate of birth. They have a longing. The present time is sick with this longing. And the many illnesses of the present time are the expression of this longing holding sway in man, and of man's inability to find conscious conceptions for his longing. If anything is living in the sphere of the will which we are unable to master by conception (again one has to develop very fundamental concepts to speaker these things) when man cannot overcome by his conception what is living in the sphere of his will, then he starts to rage. This is the essence of raging, or frenzy, that something is living in the realm of the will that man cannot comprehend with his capacity for conception. And if man refuses to give in and agree to recognise the existence of the spiritual world, so that through the recognition of the spiritual world he comprehends what has already taken shape in the sphere of the will, than this raging will become ever greater and greater in the world; the raging which indeed presents itself today as the next stage for men after the—not forthcoming but always hoped for—conclusion of peace. This is not anything which can be talked about in the way things ere discussed at a bowling club where, according to the usual philistine conceptions, people come to an understanding as to the possibility of getting some kind of relief or redress. No, it is something connected with the deepest reality of human evolution. Man cannot struggle against the development in him of what enters the sphere of his will. He has no power over it. He is able only to make up his mind consciously to penetrate to the sphere of the spirit so that he learns to understand what is permeating the region of his will. By this means an ordered co-operative life for men can be developed in future in place of this raging.

You see, men turning to the spiritual world which will be revealed in our time by a special wave of events, is not an affair only affecting mean subjectively; it is an objective necessity for man to turn to the spiritual world in this age of the consciousness soul. For changes have even now entered human evolution.

Up to the time in the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly life, up to that time, everything man needed for standing here in the world with some measure of security came just through sleep. Before the Mystery of Golgotha man slept in a different way from what he now sleeps, whatever the physiologists may say. Those prophetic natures like the Hebrew prophets to whom such sublime things were revealed in dreams, exist no longer, therefore, in the same form. For today these things are not given to men by God in sleep. This used to happen. This is just the great crossing point in evolution. And pictures of the future were not given only to the prophetic natures but in the time of the Greeks men still had their thoughts given them during sleep. On waking, man brought his thoughts back with him. The structure of the human organism was still such that man could bring back his thoughts. For quite a while this went on working, for the fact is that men actually became headless in the fifteenth century—you will forgive mel To become headless means that the head could no longer he used properly, the head could no longer bring back thoughts out of sleep.

One of the results arrived at through Spiritual Science is that we recognise our head as an instrument to have been really of much less use and much more dried up since the fifteenth century than it was before that time. But it is only now that this has become so noticeable; and it will become ever more noticeable if some means is not found to compensate, s0 that the evaporation of the head is made good again by the spiritual world. For up to the present, up to the nineteenth century, the other nature, man's breast nature has always been accustomed to what the head was still getting from sleep during the Greco-Latin period. The breast nature was inured to this, and in their headless condition men were still receiving impulses as an after effect; they were still in the habit—or I might say men still had the gesture of the thought, the shadow of the thought. But this shadow too will pass away and men will have no thoughts at all if they leave their thinking only to their head. And this is really how the matter stands; it is shown by men's reluctance to think. They have less and less will to think. On the one side they want to have thoughts dictated by nature, for what they like best is merely to make experiments and let the experiments say what they themselves should be thinking. But men prefer not to do the thinking themselves. They even have no proper faith in it, for it is their opinion that what they think out lacks true reality. It is true that there is no reality if you take the mere thoughts. We can come to see, however, that thinking, not the thoughts but the thinking, must become active. And when thinking is made active, this means the spiritual world is coming into play. Today when you really begin to think actively, you can do nothing further than let the spiritual world play a part in you. Otherwise you do not think; you think as little as the scientist thinks today who prefers to let his experiments or his investigations dictate everything to him. Or you think so little as the modern students of sociology who, because they have no will to be active, because they do not come to grips with real social impulses which can be grasped only by being active, actually work with what can be discovered in history, what is inherited from the past. Think for once how men, because they themselves no longer have impulses able to create the social structure, have come down to looking back to the time when thoughts were still formed. The matter is then seen from only a false point of view. It was Rousseau who held up to men the natural state, because he had the feeling that in his day nothing could be gained unless men became active in their pursuit of knowledge of the higher worlds. Well, and even modern socialism likes to indulge in a study of mankind's primitive state; it is something that particularly interests the socialists. They study the original conditions of mankind, their primitive conditions, they study the most savage original peoples, primitive peoples, so as to understand how men are meant to live in social co-operation. This is recognised by all who are familiar with these things. Everywhere there is a certain fear of what is making its presence so inevitably felt as the first dawning of connection with the spiritual world, a certain fear of active thinking. This is why there is difficulty in understanding my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for example, which makes such demands on active thinking. In it the thoughts are different from the usual thoughts of today. And people often stop short when reading this book for the simple reason that they would like to read it as any other book is read. But the other books particularly popular today—well, I think you will agree, they are read in a comfortable easy chair where one can just let thoughts go by with as little trouble as possible. Many people do any reading they go in for just like that. Don't delude yourselves into believing that these men often read newspapers in a different way (present company, of course, always excluded); it is true that emotions are mixed up with this reading, and worries too. But even the newspapers that are devoured so sensationally are also read by letting the pictures slip by. Ah, but all one has tried to put into The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read just like that. There you have continually to give yourself a shake to prevent the thoughts sending you to sleep, my dear friends! For it was not written with the idea that you would simply sit in an easy chair; naturally you can sit, even rest your back, but then, just because you are physically at rest, you have to try with the whole of you to set the inner being of soul and spirit in motion so that the whole thinking begins to move. Otherwise you get nowhere but go to sleep. Many indeed do go to sleep and they are not always the least sincere; the insincere ones are those who read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity just like any other book and then believe they have really followed the thoughts. They have not followed them, they have on the contrary just jumped over them as if they were the husks of words; they go on reading the words without taking in what actually follows from the words as the spark should be produced by flint and steel. But this is something that must be required of what has to take hold of the evolution of mankind in the present and the immediate future, for through it man will gradually raise himself to the spiritual world in the right way. By active thinking man's inner relations to the spiritual world will be kindled and then he will make ever greater progress. Today he can already get very far by carrying out such things as are described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But there too it is sufficiently indicated how pre-eminently necessary it is to develop coherent, connected thinking where there is no broken thread—when the thread of the thought is carefully followed.

In this longing, today more or less lacking in clarity and consciousness, to push oneself upward with unconscious thinking to the sphere of the spirit—and it is possible to do this—there is mingled a desire from the past, a weary desire, to go on thinking incoherently. Just recently I have drawn your attention to how contrary it is to men's sense of comfort to have to progress step by step in conscious thinking. They would much prefer to leave things more to the unconscious, and not in thought go on to the next point and then again to make a further step. Isn't it so? You see, Spiritual Science as we understand it here and as in a sane way it reckons with the unbroken sequence of the thoughts in the way you know—well, it is not that this Spiritual Science cannot be understood if thinking is made active, but men simply want to understand Spiritual Science in a different way from how they must understand it; instead of which they would like the thread to be continually broken. When you go deeply into what Spiritual Science gives you, when you plunge into it with real energy (have patience, in the present epoch only faint indications of this can as yet exist) then, already today, by developing the power of thought, by following in thought Saturn, Sun and Moon, as described in my Occult Science, you can follow this evolution up to where man stands there in the world, and you can press on to your own life, penetrate this life of yours with the thought which is thus made vigorous. Then you come to certain conceptions which, although not as you would like them to appear but entirely in the connection, in the coherence, of the thinking, enlighten you about their being, about their nature, about what they are and their character. By bringing to life what is said about Saturn, Sun, Moon and their corresponding details, and then about the evolution of the earth, applying all this to your individual selves, you would be able to progress to your own being; only you have to go on in your thought to the perception of yourself, not letting the thoughts be broken but keeping them coherent and connected. What in this way man begins rightly today enlightens him up to the stage where he should become clear about his own personal being. In this longing, still present more or less unconsciously in men, however, something else is mingled with the broken thread of thought, something calculated! Man would like to find out something of the kind about his being; what does he do? He takes old antiquated knowledge of which, it goes without saying, the venerable nature is certainly not to be disparaged, which, however, has need of explanation when applied in a new epoch—he calculates, reckons, breaks the thread of thought at any point, calculates constellation of the stars, and after that the thread of thought can break, and quite externally without any sequence in the thought this being of man as he appears on earth is supposed to develop without any thinking.

You see, even if the Church, the Roman Catholic Church as I described it to you yesterday, denies what today is most necessary of all, this can be made good just by taking anything like the description of the inner vision of John of the Cross and living today in the sense of the evolution that conforms with Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. What is contained in this book follows on today precisely from what a man such as St. John of the Cross wills; whereas the Catholic Church denies it and wishes even today to see the old way of John of the Cross applied to modern man, as indeed it is to so many people. Because they are too comfort-loving they do not want a life that is active in spirit, a life that has already reached a stage of energetic activity when conceptions are accepted such as those given by Spiritual Science. They would like these to be brought up to date in a more usual form of thought, preferring to remain with what is old and hoping that out of this lack of thought there might spring what should explain present-day mankind. Naturally this is no adverse judgment about what is venerable, but from every point of view it must be indicated that one should not venture to deny what is placed as spiritual necessity into the present evolution of mankind, the evolution beginning with the age of the consciousness soul. The important thing is for man really to understand what today is required of mankind in world-evolution. I believe that out of right feeling for the very things which men find irksome, and do not want, a better attitude towards Spiritual Science will be adopted more and more, and only when this better attitude to Spiritual Science has come about will the social life also be enriched. At this point man will be able to become clear about the life of mankind because he will then have the necessary strength of thought to enlighten himself concerning man's life. For where this enlightenment about man's life is concerned man of today suffers from a very precarious state of affairs. Whether you are a follower of Lenin or Trotsky, whether you are a Marxist or any other kind of thinker about the right form for the social structure of men, in each of these views there lives a state of affairs that is precarious and cannot be understood without the fruitful intervention of Spiritual Science. Doubtless you will admit that man has now entered the epoch of the consciousness soul. He has to develop consciously what arises as social structure. Otherwise nothing will go right. He has to take his place consciously in the world; it is really necessary that man should be conscious. But he should also consciously grasp the relation between men, life in society, the social life. An uncertain state of affairs hinders him in this. The fatal thing is that man can never have a conception of more than one man. And as neither two men (I mean physical men) nor two things (physical things) can be in the same place at the same time—which decides the law of impermeability—two men cannot be in human consciousness at the same time, the actual conception cannot be made of two men! simultaneously. It is very important to take note of this. We cannot live with another man without making a conception of him, neither can we develop any knowledge about the social life in common unless we make conceptions about other men. But today man, because he is able to conceive only of one man, generally prefers to conceive only of himself, to make a conception of himself as man. And social thinking is content to demand a co-operative life in which man's conception is always merely of himself. Man does not get away from the conception of his own self; he often talks of doing so, but in reality today he does not easily get rid of himself. It is only when he makes every effort to fulfil the requirements of Spiritual Science that he gradually finds it possible in some measure to get free of himself. For Spiritual Science sows in the world the seeds of thoughts having a very wide perspective, and this is how man grows into the habit of getting free from himself. As today, if he becomes a spiritualist, man grows more egoistic than he was before, if he would penetrate into the spiritual world on that other path, the path of Spiritual Science, he becomes more selfless. Spiritual Science, therefore, is not simply the handing over of knowledge, but spirit-knowledge is actually something unconditionally necessary for educating modern man in social life. It is for this reason that no cure will be forthcoming if a start is not made in this matter, it men do not really give heed to the necessity for first making a conception. There can be no social reform without schooling to begin with, without men first being instructed. And when this is neglected men miss the possibility of receiving concepts that embrace their longing. And, if I am to get at the root of the matter, men will became more frenzied than ever.

This is the inner connection, my dear friends. But it is desirable that this same inner connection should be perceived. One would wish above all things that this inner connection should be felt by everyone entering upon Spiritual Science and wishing to live in it up to some point or other. This is something that everyone will want to ponder who has the wish to take Spiritual Science and the Movement of Spiritual Science in earnest. It cannot well be overlooked, it cannot well remain unnoticed, that when we enter into relation with Spiritual Science this Spiritual Science makes certain demands on the human heart and mind to widen the interests beyond narrow, personal interests. It is really true that in talking of Spiritual Science one simply speaks of things which, if a right relation is to be established with them, makes it necessary for man to free himself from his most narrow interests! He need have no fear of becoming unpractical on that account: he becomes much more practical. It is just this belief that he is practical which has gradually been arrived at through being unspiritual. In reality the practical man of today is terribly unpractical. And these 'practical' men have actually landed us in the present catastrophe. Herein lies something of tremendous importance which man really must always take for granted if he wishes rightly to understand what has to do with Spiritual Science, namely that he must get free from his narrowest interests. He must rid himself of the immediately personal; for it does not help matters when people carry their narrow personal interests into the Anthroposophical Movement. That is always just the cause of any kind of mischief in the relation taken up towards Spiritual Science. It is also naturally the reason for what is still such a difficulty in our Movement, that people although often abstractly in theory, having the good will to come to Spiritual Science with their own thinking, feeling and willing, nevertheless do not bring all the necessary strength really to enter upon selflessness, which indeed must be called upon for understanding rightly what is said from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. Thus a kind of spirit-condition not easily found today in the world, but the opposite of which is prevalent in the modern world, must be demanded for the health of the Anthroposophical Movement, my dear friends! For the difference between the sincere presentation of the knowledge of Spiritual Science and all other knowledge arising at present, lies in this presentation of Spiritual Science being no personal affair, no personal opinion. Were I obliged to hold the view that I should lecture only about merely personal opinions and not concerning what is revealed today and just what is necessary for mankind, I should prefer to remain silent. For to uphold personal opinions and personal aspirations in a Movement that is anthroposophical is something impermissible. That should not be. A Movement such as is striven for here is justified only when there is the will to present merely what one is allowed to observe out of the spiritual world.

When you describe the appearance of any town you may, according to circumstance, make the description either interesting or tedious, but what the town looks like does not depend upon you. You describe something objective. What you yourself want, what is your own opinion, should come just as little to expression in Spiritual Science. What must take effect in Spiritual Science according to modern demands is all that is spiritually observed. Those who are able actually to will merely what is personal can for that reason only imperfectly understand what should hold good in a movement for Spiritual Science. They continually confuse what should hold good in a Movement such as is meant here with something else drawn, more than ever from the personal. How many there are who coming to Anthroposophy would like their own opinion to be justified by Spiritual Science. They are not always equipped with the open mind necessary for the acceptance of Spiritual Science. Very often they come to it with something quite different to this open mind. They would like this or that to be true, then in some way, while admitting that the investigator of Spiritual science may know something about the truth, persuade themselves that what one thinks oneself one says. Then they would be happy. But this fine distinction must be noticed; it is a fine distinction although a tremendously far-reaching one; there is a far reaching and important distinction between the one who wants to accept what is imparted by the spiritual world and the one who actually wishes only to have confirmation of what it pleases him to think. Only by the most punctilious self-examination, by conscientious self-examination, will the distinction be discovered. The distinction is often unnoticed by those who come to Spiritual Science; it must, however, be noticed. If it is noticed it will become apparent that through a Movement for Spiritual Science something of a new stream of life must flow which was not there before. It is really not possible for an Anthroposophical Movement to be like a mere soft current of air blowing towards anyone who brings to Spiritual Science the Philistine tendencies of his earlier life and then believes he will find what he is only too willing to acknowledge in Philistinism corroborated by Spiritual Science.

When we proceed in this matter earnestly, conscientiously, we shall not want merely to find corroboration of our actual individual opinion; and we shall also come to understand many things which might be said to be obliged to arise as new things in a Movement for Spiritual Science of this kind, things that must do harm if left unnoticed. In a movement in the act of arising like this Movement for Spiritual Science much can work harmfully that cannot cause so much harm in old, dried up Movements, no longer of use or of very little use. We have really to go into these fins points, my dear friends! You see, connected with the endeavour merely to see our own opinions, our own aspirations, justified by what is revealed through Spiritual Science, a remarkable technique of 'touching-up' is developed concerning what comes forth and comes forth perfectly naturally, within a movement such as ours. In this movement for Spiritual Science we must be alive to the fact that phenomena with men cannot be taken as if in a bowling club or something of the kind where men can reveal how verbose they have become in the ordinary world where nothing new is required of them. We must recognise in all earnestness that the aims of investigation into what is spiritual cannot find expression through our own conceptions; we must really prepare ourselves to receive the things. We should picture that something is wishing to flow into the world, something that should more and more widen itself out, so that everything should really be received in full consciousness. Many connections not yet perceived will be perceived later. This willingness to receive everything as in some sense a preparation, will certainly not be present in those who carry their personal aspirations into the impulse of Spiritual Science, for at the first possible moment they will get done with things, giving them the bent of their ordinary opinions. They do not mould their opinions in accordance with Spiritual Science, they mould the knowledge gained through Spiritual Science in accordance with their opinions. And so we often have given out the kind of thing I would like to describe in the following way.

Now you know that the Anthroposophist has to judge the world in a certain way, the world of nature as well as the world of human beings. Education in Spiritual Science consists indeed in our learning to judge afresh the surrounding world and our relation to it and in our learning to look more deeply, into the world. People very often remark when, let us say, the relation of three men is in question: The Anthroposophist B. has been criticizing the man A. And, my dear friends, as soon as we overstep the usual Philistine sphere, so largely around us today, two standpoints can be put forward where the formation of judgment between man and man is concerned: one of these standpoints is that of reason, the second being the standpoint of sympathy. Thus B's judgment of A may be in accordance with what arises from an inner necessity at same time to do something or other purely out of his—B's—sympathy for A. Should it now suit C to be antipathetic because he does not reflect sufficiently and does not assume that it may be possible for pure sympathy to come into the matter here, out of necessity, then, basing his judgment simply on reason he will say: whatever can he be doing that for? Or this inner necessity may speak in such a way that it is not sympathy that becomes dominant but, because of certain factors, reason. Yes, and when it suits the other better he lets sympathy have its say and gives as his verdict: what an unsympathetic person! How utterly without feeling the man is and what a prosy rationalist! He judges purely from the standpoint of reason. In this way the crudest misunderstandings arise in the case of just those who bestir themselves to grasp the inner nerve of existence, where they have at one time to do something based on reason, another time something just out of sympathy. And when it suits this other man (C) in accordance with the sympathetic view he condemns what is done from reason, and what is done out of sympathy he condemns from the point of view of reason, and he can always condemn or praise as he likes. By this path we never arrive at what is right, we only arrive at what is right if we begin by saying: I must consider the case, I must look into the causes why sympathy or reason have held sway here. It is things like this out of which the little misunderstandings in life arise which often grow to very destructive proportions in men's life in common. It is just this that our education in Spiritual Science should help us to overcome. For life is such that it expresses itself in a twofold way. And because it expresses itself in a twofold way one can always condemn at pleasure one of the two cases. This is very little taken into account, however, above all not taken into account where the teachings of Spiritual Science itself is concerned. This, too, must be placed in the world with definite intention. In an individual case either one or other of the two standpoints can be chosen according to convenience, if greater attention is not paid to the deeper grounds out of which the spiritual seeker is obliged to act. He may often be misunderstood. And if there is no agreement in what must be done out of inner duty in accordance with the facts, then it is possible to misunderstand everything, since the world has this dual form of expression.

You see we can fall into the following error for example. When anyone is eager to have what suits him substantiated, he may just fall into the worst form of belief in authority. Belief in authority can naturally make its influence felt, and this influence is actually frequent and of wide range in the very sphere where Spiritual Science also would be active, which wishes to make man into a perfectly free, self-reliant being. The other pole of the belief in authority, however, is hatred of authority. And fundamentally the man who does not feel himself drawn to Spiritual Science through entering into the facts revealed from the spiritual world, but wishes to have these truths conveyed to him by authority, wanting to believe in authority because it is easier than going into things—this man is terribly apt to spring over from his belief in authority, that always has in it a certain kind of love of authority, to hatred of authority. And all manifestations that have arisen in our particular movement of this leap from blind worship of authority, which sometimes has even appeared with a certain shamelessness in the moment of passing over to hatred, this passing from blind worship of authority to hate—all this is something inwardly present as a danger. It is very important to keep these connections in mind, for these connections make it terribly difficult today to create an Anthroposophical Movement so that it will prosper. It must be created in a successful way for the sake of mankind's welfare.

Now, my dear friends, in my life I have found quite a number of people who were spiritual people and were seeking in all sincerity away into Spiritual Science, into some kind of Spiritual Science, who were also in a way advanced in their development. A certain type among them was disillusioned, people who had been disillusioned by one or other of the modern spiritual movements and who then in some place or another came across us—how many are disillusioned today by the Blavatsky Movement, the Besant Movement or some other Movement. There we do not see the characteristic phenomenon that takes such curious forms in the Anthroposophical Movement; but there we have people, for example, who are to a certain extent spiritually advanced; then after some time one again comes across them but now they say: You are completely wrong! And these meetings are not infrequent. Spirituality today is not at all common but there are men indeed who say to one after a time: You are actually wrong, for, you see, the things you give out in Spiritual Science—there's no possible sense in publishing them! But men are not in inclined to accept them; they are certainly not sufficiently mature. All this can only serve one purpose to be developed in oneself and then kept to oneself. I have found many such people who say: It is a definite characteristic of the man who is really advanced spiritually that it no longer enters his head to speak about it to his fellowmen; he keeps the matter to himself. There is indeed no lack of such people in the world. I have never been able to come to an understanding with these people about what out of a certain inner ground I learn from the spiritual world. These men do quite useful work in a spiritual community but they have a hermit tendency, even when at the same time they remain in association with others. For it is possible to become a hermit in spite of wearing elegant shoes and leading an Hotel life. This one sees this double life being led by a number of people; they are indeed the modern Hotel dwellers; for all I care they may be well dressed but they lead this life as an outward mask to hide what is within them; they have their inner life of the spirit with no wish to share it with their fellow men. This seems to one to be doing what is not right, to be sinning against mankind. For one is right in saying that such men have en effect on the spiritual life, what they experience goes into the spiritual stream. Man is not a self-contained being, therefore what he experiences has value and its own significance in the spiritual world, but the question of time always plays its part there. Men like this who live in such a way nowadays, as many do whom I have known, bring about something indeed in the spiritual world which however only comes to maturity after a long time, in the later epochs of mankind. Then, however, can, and quite certainly would, were there always only those who as hermits develop their spiritual being, having no wish to teach what knowledge they have gained from the spiritual world, what they have developed in themselves—then by the time the fruits of these men are ripe, people outside would have so deteriorated that they would no longer be able to receive the knowledge! Earth evolution would be endangered: connection would be missed. We live indeed today at a time when certain spiritual truths such as those of which we have been speaking must unconditionally be imparted to mankind. Things will not be helped by the attitude expressed, for example, by one of my acquaintances who in a certain sense was spiritually advanced. He came to Berlin and I asked him whether he would come to hear a lecture of mine, just to see how the Movement was run (this is some time ago). He answered: No, holding lectures and talking to people serves no possible purpose! To sit together for half-an-hour and have a little talk I find very pleasant—but let us leave spiritual things alone when we can; everyone must settle those for himself! To pay a civil visit and pass the time of day is best for just those people who are seeking the spiritual. And this attitude is a prevalent one. It would be more comfortable, my dear friends, to live in accordance with such an attitude. And the word comfortable certainly does not describe what it is nowadays days to get up in front of people to impart what one feels impelled to impart as a duty. In an Anthroposophical Movement it should be borne in mind that work is done out of inner necessity, and what happens is not a matter of choice but the punctual observance of a duty.

I have used these words at the end of our studies today because I have wanted once again to take the opportunity of calling attention to what is necessary if a movement for Spiritual Science is to be taken nowadays as earnestly as it should be taken. For what can be made of an Anthroposophical Movement, if personal aspirations, personal ambition, is brought in, can cause much injury must cause much injury. Besides there is still the shadow side, namely, that whoever thinks to find only what is just personal corroborated through Spiritual Science cannot discern whether the other may not be acting also merely from personal ambition. And a terrible doom is then forthcoming. I wanted to give an indication of these things, my dear friends. We shall be speaking further next Friday.

As you may have seen in the last few days, and as can also be gathered from the public lectures, it must be clear from my current thinking that important necessities must be pointed out with regard to the transformation of certain perceptions, concepts and ideas. We are still living through a catastrophic time, a time that has been so often and repeatedly pointed out as being incomparable to anything that has happened in the past, usually in the conventional, world-historical version.

It is true that even when the significance and uniqueness of this time is discussed, unfortunately the phrase has become quite prevalent, and that what is said does not always come from the depth of the heart, but rather from the depth of understanding; but much of what comes from this direction is true. But not much is said about another thing. About how much this time should urge us to change our perceptions and concepts, our ideas and feelings.

For those of us who have been involved in this movement for years, this necessity will not be completely foreign, because I would like to remind you, my dear friends in Vienna, that I pointed out in a lecture cycle held here before the war that a kind of carcinoma – a cancerous disease – is spreading in social life and weaving across the earth. That was in view of the serious events that were imminent. One could not point out what was coming with cudgels, and when considering the times, it depends not on being a true prophet, but rather on bringing forth those things that can be used to impel the will and intentions of people. When we look back today on some of the things we have experienced in recent years, the most important impression in a certain direction is probably that we have to say to ourselves that some of the things that were very close to our souls before 1914 have become so far from our souls in many respects, like circumstances that may have occurred centuries ago. I keep thinking of one thing in this regard. In my lectures, I have often referred to a spirit with a very significant world view, Herman Grimm. When I referred to him in the years preceding 1914, it was as if he were standing beside me. At that time, his views were something present, something that could be treated as present; yes, my dear friends, that is no longer the case. Now, what seemed quite modern to us back then seems so, not if it were separated from us by decades, but by centuries. One would like to understand it as history. I don't think that anyone can say that, who has felt with all their intensity what has emerged over the years for the development of humanity. Not everything that has happened is there yet; /gap in transcription] This is a general sign that seems so sad to us, especially in these years, that the materialistic age has so dulled people's minds that even the most insistent speakers of world-historical development are asleep. By sleeping I do not just mean a dull existence, which is also the case with many people in the present, who let everything that happens come close to them – by sleeping I also mean the lack of incentive to evaluate the events of the present, to properly consider these events of the present. I could give many, many examples of this kind of sleeping. I will content myself with one, because you will see from the one what I actually want to illustrate.

You see, last fall, strange news was reported in the newspapers of all the neutral countries vis-à-vis the Central Powers, including a very strange interview that someone had - and that actually spread all over the world - that someone had in St. Petersburg with Rasputin. In this interview, not only was everything described that shed a clear light on the entire position that Rasputin had taken in the current events of the present, I would not even consider that to be the most important thing, but in this interview it was clearly predicted that it would not last long last long – of course, in the way one predicts something in an interview – it was clearly predicted that it would not last long, that Rasputin would no longer be around, and the assassination of Rasputin would be followed by events concerning much higher-ranking personalities. This news spread throughout the world, that is, from the fall onwards, a fairly large number of people throughout the world were actually quite well informed about what happened the following spring. Later on, I had the opportunity to talk to a person who, well, let's just say, is considered an authority on Russian affairs; people listen to him when it comes to finding out about Russian affairs. I tried in every possible way to tie in with this interview. The person in question didn't understand anything, didn't see through anything that was actually important.

Of course, something like this is only a symptom, but you will recognize from the lecture given yesterday that our view of history needs to adopt a symptomatic way of thinking in general. We cannot arrive at a healing development if we do not learn to consider this or that event as more or less important, in order to view the individual event in such a way that we see important developmental impulses. Symptomatology will essentially have to become a consideration of history. But to practise symptomatology, a person must have sharpened their inner soul powers, their power of knowledge, through what spiritual science can give them, because this spiritual science does not want to be taken only for what it is in terms of content, for then it would again be mere theory. It should not be that way under any circumstances. What is communicated from spiritual science in terms of content, of wording, what is written in the books, may be verified - much of it may have to be said in a completely different way. Although we already have a certain basic foundation for truth that will remain for a long time, I do believe that the examination will reveal that some things will have to be different in wording than how they are said today. But the content, the theoretical outlook, is not what matters. Man must acquire a certain way of thinking, he must free his thinking from all narrow-mindedness, limited to the immediate interests, so that he is compelled to broaden his horizons, to orient himself within a broad perspective, that he must immerse himself in reality. Today, not wanting to immerse oneself in reality has become a truly world-historical phenomenon. Today, people talk about all kinds of things that they present as ideals. Of course, one can understand that people feel a certain intellectual pleasure when they can talk about this or that ideal. But when it comes to ideals, it depends on whether one is in the real truth with the formation of these ideals. For example, someone who thinks realistically reads a message from Wilson and says to himself: What is in there and so many people admire is, after all, ancient, it can almost be called historical. These are things that go through all centuries as a phrase, that can be said and applied everywhere. What is important is not introducing such things into people's minds, but striking the right note in terms of ideas that are realistic in a particular age.

Indeed, in order to live realistically in the highest life - in this life that follows the present one - people will have to acquire many things of which they have not yet acquired much today.

Last Sunday we spoke about the fact that a world view must come to establish spiritual science, which, so to speak, enables people to grow old, to lead an expectant life. We should not take such a matter lightly; because precisely such a matter is extraordinarily important. We have — as we saw last Sunday — today really only the gift to believe in the growing, sprouting life into our twenties, then we want to be ready to continue living life in the same breath, as it were; then we have — one has gone through university, the other has learned a trade, the third has not learned anything either, but all consider themselves to be finished with everything that they have incorporated into themselves up to their twenties. We must relearn to wait for what is to come throughout our lives, we must learn to say: When I am 25 years old, then simply by the fact that I am 25 years old, I say: The 35th [year of life] will be able to reveal new secrets to me, the 45th again new ones. We must learn to live in expectation. This is not only important for the individual, it also has a social significance. These things, the establishment, the regulation of the mutual relationship of people can be turned, socialism does it and other associations – for what do you not found all kinds of associations – have done it, but my dear friends, we have to keep reminding ourselves that talking about certain things is one thing, which, as I said, can give an intellectual, voluptuous pleasure that can be proven as something necessary, but it leads to nothing. No matter how many ethical and social demands arise, that the relationship between people - whether for ethical or economic reasons - should be arranged in such or such a way, that this or that position is ideal, no matter how much is preached, it is of no more use than telling the stove: You are a stove, and as a stove you have the duty to warm the room, so warm the room! But it does not warm the room; only if they put wood in and light a fire, then it warms the room. It is often the greatest pulpit orators who are motivated by such an attitude. What matters is that we draw real strength from our world view, which gives life to our soul, emotional life, will life.

Among the many aspects of creative, real power is the fact that we learn to believe in the whole of human life through it, and learn to live in expectation. But if that is not a theory, not a teaching, if that is an inner life force, if that lives in the soul, then it is quite natural that it also means that people do not enter into an abstract relationship with one another, but see that it also plays a role here, that a variety of concrete circumstances play a role when it is important, that they play a role. What social culture is cannot be regulated; it can only be established by giving in the establishment that which gives strength and life to our soul. And take some of what I said last Sunday: We can directly follow up on an idea from last Sunday that related to the coexistence of people here in physical life with the souls of those who have passed through the gateway of death. What the idea of immortality is, has also, over time, taken on a rather selfish character to a greater or lesser extent. Actually, people are hardly more interested in immortality than in what will become of their own soul when they have passed through the gate of death. Yes, that is certainly an important and essential thing, which continues to have an effect if we see it correctly; but something else comes when we really grasp the idea that we have to recognize the meaning of this life throughout our entire life, that our development is not complete at the age of twenty, but that every year of life can reveal something new to us and that it becomes real experience for us, which it can become; then the other thought will not be far from us either, truly not far from us, that life, the event of life, which outwardly presents itself as an event of death, basically does not stop the development of our earth either. For] those who can do spiritual research, this is particularly clear for the present development cycle of humanity. When people will understand that actually spiritual is revealed through all decades, when they do not believe that life has lost its meaning when a person has passed through the gate of death. Not only that a person carries a certain content, a certain essence into the other world, but in a way he is endowed with the richest life experience when he closes his life here. Even if you are no longer able to live life to the full as you age due to memory loss, the wisdom you have gained is still there in your soul, and this is not only important for the people who have passed through the gateway of death in themselves, but also for their future lives on Earth. A person who passes through the gate of death in this present cycle of humanity has not yet lived out everything that is in him. His worldly wisdom can still come in handy, if only people look for such a way of life.

I don't like to do it, but I always like to cite a personal experience when it comes to this matter. Those who have known me longer know that in my first decades as a writer, I spent a lot of time trying to make Goethe's ideas fruitful for our age. I didn't do this in the same way as Goethe researchers; I tried to develop them further. What I have done in my field in this direction has emerged only from the impulse to confront not the dead Goethe but what Goethe had acquired in worldly wisdom in 1832 and what could continue to develop, what could become fruitful for the earth. In this real sense, I tried to write about one thing or another that Goethe would speak about in a later period. One can only take such a stand on such a matter if one is clear about the fact that what a person has worked for until his death continues to be important for the earth. In saying this, I am expressing a thought that still seems quite paradoxical to people today, but which is becoming more and more important; and I am convinced that the time must come when, for example, the following will be done, when people will say to themselves: In our time, this or that question has become important for social coexistence or something else. Let us not only ask our contemporaries about such a question, let us also ask the spirits of the past, but let us ask them in such a way that they would speak to us today, when the wisdom they have gained has been expanded.

I know that many people would not consider this a truly useful thought for humanity. If not only Mr. So-and-so were heard in the parliament of the present, but if Goethe or Schiller were also heard in the parliament, but really heard. In short, I believe that the idea of immortality can be grasped in a completely different way than in the selfish sense. It can be grasped in such a way that we not only believe in the existence of what a person has processed in his soul after death, but also in the fertility, in the effective influx of what has now been processed by him into life. Sometimes it is difficult to express such a thing in general terms, because among the thoughts that I mentioned last Sunday as emerging from the depths of the soul like our ideas, some are the thoughts of the dead. We have to realize that while we think we are having an idea, a dead person is speaking to us. Those who familiarize themselves with this idea know very well that many a dead person speaks through the heart of a living person after his death, saying things that he can only express after his “death. Until his physical death, a person may have had an obstacle in his physical organization that prevented him from seeing clearly. When his life organism has fallen away, he expresses himself about this matter in a way that corresponds to his life experience. Then one must only meet him halfway, then one must be able to free oneself from vanity, not to take some things as one's own idea, but as the saying of a dead person, which he may say after three to four years.

Believing in the effectiveness of those who have passed through the gate of death must become part of the future idea of immortality. My dear friends, it will be of no use to future humanity if it is merely convinced that there is a spiritual life. It will be of use to future humanity, of course not in a trivial sense, it will be of use to humanity only if it knows how to make fruitful for the living what the dead still achieve after their death, if it can be established that the living and the dead can live together. This will be possible if spiritual science is not treated as a theory, but is accepted as something that fertilizes our feelings and permeates our entire soul life. We will certainly have to get used to communicating with the dead!

We have already mentioned a number of things in our reflections on the relationship between the living and the dead, but I must always point out one thing. We must hold on to the fact that we remain connected to those who leave the earth and with whom we have somehow been karmically connected. The connection must not be an abstract one. The connection should become a concrete one, because the most striking thing in the life of the soul after death is that the life of the soul after death is pictorial, that what is to be established as a community between the soul of a living person here and the soul of a dead person must be clothed in imagery. Remembering does not build a bridge. Only when we remember in a concrete way, remembering life situations in which we were with the dead person, remembering them so clearly as if we had them in front of us, seeing each other, hearing the sound of his words, but the words he really spoke – what we have shaped from him in this way is an image that once existed, that once really lived on earth. We then proceed to behave within this image as we would have behaved if the “dead man were still alive; we ask him a question, we tell him this or that; he will not answer us at first, but in the way we indicated on Sunday, we may receive an answer under certain circumstances. It all depends on the image and on the fact that you really develop the images, complete them in your mind and present them to your soul. You cannot remain cold in the process; our whole soul is involved. Those who develop an image in this way will live out exactly the same love that they lived out here when the dead person was still around. If this love is not lived out, it is only because we do not make the effort to bring the image to life. If we stimulate our minds in this way to turn to the dead in a concrete way, in a pictorial way, in a way that is imbued with the soul, we gain the opportunity to build a bridge from us to that realm where the dead live and weave, then we gradually gain the opportunity to be able to bring in a living way the impulses that emanate from the dead. Our social and ethical life must become such that the dead live among us as souls, that they continue to work, but they cannot work in a ghostly way. Only by opening our souls to them can they enter into a real exchange. It is of infinite importance to acquire a sound judgment in this area, because it is precisely in this area that what I have said in general must be observed in each individual case.

People today already have the longing, the instinctive need, to come into contact with the spiritual world, they just reject the only possible ways of doing so at present. In this respect, even the most enlightened people prove to be very stubborn. I will give you an example that you may already know, but which I still want to present.

You see, a very important English naturalist is Sir Oliver Lodge. He has devoted much thought to the connection between man and the spiritual world, especially to the part where the so-called dead are. Now the war in particular led him to devote a great deal of attention to this matter. Mr. Lodge's son was called up to serve at the Franco-German front. And while Mr. Lodge's son was serving there, the father received a letter from America informing him that his son would be in a difficult situation in the near future, that is, in the west in the fall of 1915, but that after the disaster had occurred, old friend Myers, who had long since died, would protect his son.

Those who are familiar with the machinations in this area will not be surprised. This letter could be correct in two cases, among others. One could be: Mr. Lodge's son was almost killed at the front, but escaped with his life. In America, whoever made this announcement would have said that Myers had held his protective hand from beyond the grave to keep him from being shot. But if he had been shot, which is what happened, people believed that Mr. Myers would have held his hand protectively over it. But most people are very satisfied with such general things. Well. Mr. Lodge's son fell, and the waves from America followed up the matter. He received more letters that Myers held his hand over the soul and that the son's soul longed to connect with Lodge and his family. As is done in such a case, it all happens by itself, but the strings are pulled behind the scenes. Several mediums came to the Lodge home and behaved as mediums. All kinds of things were communicated that the soul of Mr. Lodge's son wanted to share with the family. Lodge wrote a thick book about it. It is exemplary in a sense because Lodge is a skilled naturalist and has mastered the scientific method. So everything is conscientiously carried out that you really have the opportunity everywhere in this book to see what was available. The book caused a tremendous stir. It was like a testimony to the existence of a world that connects to ours, in which the dead live, and that people long to know something about. But for those who read the book with the appropriate critical spirit, these things are not convincing.

The following passage caused the most sensation. The one medium reported from the son of Mr. Lodge that he had himself photographed with a group of comrades 14 days before he was killed at the front, and the medium described exactly: He sat with his comrades, the photographer took two pictures, and [in the first] picture, the son of the gentleman was holding his neighbor's hand like this, then the change that was made with the hand, with the whole gesture of the son of the gentleman Lodge - [all of that] was indicated exactly. [It] briefly [said] described the photograph in its various shots. The strange thing was that this photograph had not yet arrived in England, no one in the family could know anything about the photograph, so there could be no question of thought transfer. It was striking. It was, so to speak, an experimentum crucis. Because the photographs only arrived 14 to three weeks later, exactly as the medium had described them. This is, so to speak, the crowning glory of this thick book, which caused a tremendous stir in England and America. A conscientious naturalist, my dear friends, all kinds of things are presented to us, and one can understand that laypeople really have a hard time when a conscientious naturalist describes how to get out of the web that is spun there. However, I was a little surprised that Lodge did not know anything specific. For what was actually going on here? It was a very characteristic, beautiful school case of remote viewing. Everyone who is familiar with the spiritual scientific literature knows the cases where not only [spatial] but also [temporal] remote viewing occurs, where someone sees something today that will happen in a fortnight. The medium has done nothing more than describe the photographs that will be in front of the people 14 days or three weeks later. The whole manifestation is not the slightest proof that the soul of the son of Lord Lodge has manifested itself. A remote vision that was seen in Lodge's house in London three weeks ago, which was to happen. The vision did not go beyond the physical plane. It was a vision, but it did not go beyond the physical plane. Just such a distinction must be learned if one is to be truly spiritual. External events can deceive even those who are great practitioners in the mediumistic field.

Knowledge of nature must be experienced in such a way that one can say of these experiences: they cannot lead one into the spiritual world, even if they bring to light such facts that require forces other than those usually possessed by man. Only then will spiritual science be imbued with the right meaning it is intended to have. It must not be less critical and less exact than science. One must beware of what even a learned naturalist experiences through deception; but one will gradually become knowledgeable in such things. This will lead to the fact that spiritual-scientific methods, which are meant here, really lead to making the ideas of immortality fruitful. We must familiarize ourselves with the thought that the dead walk among us, that human social and ethical structures are pieced together with us.

Yesterday, because such thoughts must be said at most to those who are open to suggestions, I pointed to a certain basic law. While we must strive to seek the impulses in the soul itself that allow us to lead an awakening life even after the twenties, in the older times of human development after the Atlantic catastrophe, this was a natural, elementary fact of life in the older times of human development after the Atlantic catastrophe, that man lives to be old. In the first post-Atlantean period, it was really the case that he experienced his second dentition, his sexual maturity, in such a way that his spiritual life was dependent on the physical until the fifties, in the Persian period until the forties years, in the Egyptian-Chaldean time until the 25th to 32nd year; in a sense, humanity is getting younger and younger; it must be able to make itself older through inner spiritual schooling. We also spoke about this here on Sunday, insofar as [...] can be spoken in a public lecture. If you do not rely on the external historical documents, which are by no means correct, you will find in the seventh to eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha that before the period, due to the special state of mind of the soul that was present, people actually knew about repeated earthly lives because living with the physical body beyond the age of 35 gave them that knowledge naturally. In ancient times, it was a matter of course for those who were not asleep to speak of repeated lives on earth. It was only after the seventh or eighth century BC that humanity lost the ability to speak of repeated lives on earth through atavistic contemplation.

What is this based on? You see, this human life, even as we find it here on earth between birth and death, is actually a very complicated thing. We are a microcosm and the macrocosm plays into this microcosm. Anyone who believes that human life is something simple only wants to follow his or her own convenience. When we have passed the age of 35, our physical organism enters into a certain organic stage, which can be described as such. Before that, however, only in the fine structures, which anatomists do not come across, life really goes downhill, and there were previously sprouting, sprouting forces. We no longer experience this today, because we only experience up to the 27th year. But because we do not experience this, we do not actually experience in a conscious sense today what can give us certainty of repeated earthly lives. Until the seventh or eighth century, all people had this certainty beyond the age of 35. From this 35th year onwards, the forces of Ahriman begin to play a strong role in our physical life. These Ahrimanic forces have the task of bringing about the other phenomenon of decline. If we live with them and transform them into knowledge, we have pointed Ahriman in the right direction. The Egyptians experienced the phenomenon of decline, experienced Ahriman. They experienced the knowledge of repeated earthly lives through what Ahriman causes in the phenomenon of decline of life. Then Ahriman became, so to speak, untraceable, insensible; one could no longer know through inner experience the repeated lives on earth. But another time will come, approximately in the year 4000 of the Christian era, so still a fairly long span of time from now on. Around 3500, as humanity continues to move downwards – today to 27 /gap in transcription] to 15. [gap in transcription] 28. [gap in transcription] 29. [gap in transcription] 30. [gap in transcription] 31. [gap in transcription] 32. [gap in transcription] 33. [gap in transcription] 34. [gap in transcription] 35. [gap in transcription] 36. [gap in transcription] 37. [gap in transcription] 38. [gap in transcription] 39. [gap in transcription] 40. [gap in transcription] 41. [gap in transcription] 42. [gap in transcription] 43. [gap in transcription] 44. [gap in transcription] 45. [gap in transcription] 46. [gap in transcription] 47. [gap in transcription]

In the year 4000, there will be a different influence. Then people will become aware of what is strongest in this respect at the beginning of their lives, because the ability to develop will end so early.

Another real result, which, you may find [gap in the transcript], although it is an enormous and disturbing event for the spiritual researcher to learn about, when it goes further down into the seven thousandth year, where the physical body will give even less. Women will be infertile in the seven thousandth year. The kind of human reproduction that is now, will no longer be possible. Another kind of reproduction will occur. The transformations that will occur to the earth will be great. These things sound crazy to today's people who have today's ways of thinking.

A professor in London gave a very witty lecture. Dewar described the final state of the earth, which will occur after millions of years. He used completely correct physical methods, of course, from the point of view of a physicist – absolutely nothing – to show that because the earth will cool down so much, the air we breathe today will be liquefied. What is now sea will be liquid air, and it will cover the earth as a liquid. Other gases will have become denser. And now he describes very ingeniously how the other substances will have changed. Certain wires, because they are thin, can only withstand a few kilograms today, but will then support tons because of the different state of the gases. All materials will have different properties. Other materials will become luminescent, the protein, it will be able to glow at night. And now, as he says very ingeniously, one will be able to read newspapers by the light that is then created by the walls coated with protein.

Anyone who is capable of thinking will wonder how it will happen that the milk that has been solidified will be milked by the newspapers, how the newspapers will be printed – in short, you can't get to the end of it. But the calculation is correct, the method is scientific. There is nothing to be said against the physical. But how is it done? You can follow the finer anatomical and physiological structure of the stomach or another human organ as it is in its 21st, 22nd year and so on. You can calculate further and work out what the organ will be like in 300 years. You can say: After 300 years the stomach will have this structure – only after 300 years the person will no longer have the stomach. So it is with calculations based on science; they are scientific, but not realistic. It will be possible to coat the walls, it will be possible to read newspapers with luminescent protein, it will be possible for milk to solidify - but the earth will have perished.

People will have to learn to think not only scientifically but also realistically. Because only in direct spiritual vision can one grasp what is happening. But there are such laws as I have described to you now. Humanity must learn not to shrink from what seems paradoxical to it today. Even the way of thinking. The healthy-sensing human being has always revolted against something like Laplace's theory. Grimm says: Long before Goethe's youth, it was known what was later called Laplace's theory; the sun is said to have formed with the planets in a certain time, then man, the animals; nothing else has to happen but that the sun is maintained at the appropriate temperature. Grimm adds: A piece of carrion circled by a hungry dog is a more appetizing piece than this theory of Laplace.

Just the most fundamental things of the present, that in the place of the today safely believed, but just fanatical /gap in the transcript] truth. But there people will often have to learn to stick to the truth, to really take in the truth in their soul, so that it becomes the basic character of the being, no longer to stick to the excuse: I heard it this way, I couldn't have known it any other way. The obligation to tell the truth.

Perhaps one would believe that in no other field is the obligation to tell the truth more far-fetched than in the field of present-day science. There one experiences quite distressing things. I will not speak of such things, which, as it were, are close to us personally. You will find a nice example in the second chapter of “Seelenrätsel,” where I showed how a contemporary researcher reads; another example of the same kind in the second edition of the same writing by the writer in question. There the person in question says that my “Philosophy of Freedom” is my first work. No one can take it any other way than as my first work. He looked it up and tried to talk his way out of it. He did not mean that it could be easily seen that this was my first book, but that it was my first theosophical book. Those who know the facts can only laugh at that.

Perhaps I can illustrate this point with another example. I gave a public lecture in which I was obliged to illustrate something that I drew, how the human physical organism is nothing short of a miracle. How it works in such a way that you can really see: what happens inside a person, even in just one part of the organism, is infinitely more wonderful than what happens externally on a musical instrument when the most wonderful piece is played. If you observe how the cerebrospinal fluid, in which the brain is embedded, is driven up and down through the spinal canal with each breath, through places that can more or less narrow or widen, will experience something like an interaction with the meninges of the spinal canal – sometimes one meninx widens more, sometimes less – and will really come to understand [that the human organism can be seen as an image of the macrocosm]. I was obliged to speak of cerebral fluid, and in the same lecture I was obliged to refute the merely symbolic view. The reporter wrote, among other things, the following: I had indeed rejected the symbolic, but I would use the most impossible terms in the most impossible places, for example, “cerebral fluid”.

My dear friends! Brain water is something very real, otherwise the brain would crush the blood vessels that lie beneath it. Brain water makes it possible for the brain to lose so much of its weight that it does not crush the veins. But the man who writes this has no idea that brain water is something real and not something symbolic to describe something that is not true.

There are thousands, millions of examples like this. I just want to point out that it is so necessary, that we feel obliged to say what we say, to give the prerequisite [gap in the transcript]

We will truly have to become clearer about some things than we are inclined to be today. We all know, of course, the development of Christianity, but you see, my dear friends, this is also necessarily connected with the fact that we are now also pursuing the outer side of the church in its truth, that we are looking into everything that must change if it is not to turn out even more disastrously. But the connection that exists is not known to some people at all. It lives between the lines of popular literature and creeps into the human soul. Not only do people who live on the outside not know, but neither do those whose profession it is. Very strange things are happening, and we must consider it our task in the present to look into such things. You know that you will get nowhere if you divide people into body and soul. Philosophy claims that it is an unconditional science. If you examine the individual links, you come to strange things. Wundt: “Body and soul” - he has no idea how little prejudice this division is. Where does it come from? It was elevated to a dogma after the Council of Constantinople in 869: “Man consists not of three, but of two members.” From this it became the case that in the Middle Ages the Trinity was frowned upon, was hereticized, and the philosophers live off that.

Recently, a wonderful piece occurred. A professor who is actually quite average and does nothing writes a little book in the collection of “nature and the spiritual world”, in which he speaks as befits a doctor [of classical philology, astrology and astronomy]. In the final chapter, he commented on Goethe's horoscope. He talked about what it is as a whole, he just wants to show that in the course of Goethe's life these things have turned out in such a way that the matter corresponds to the horoscope. He does not say: anyone who believes in a [gap in the transcript] is a rhinoceros; but he does say quite clearly that this is his opinion. Mauthner was furious that the professor was writing about a horoscope at all, and because he was angry, he didn't notice that the professor was writing from the same point of view, and wrote an angry feature article against this book. Those who know this book and the feature article couldn't imagine why Mauthner was so terribly angry. He means exactly the same thing.

Then the professor sent in his justification, explaining that he fully agreed with Mauthner, that it was based on a misunderstanding. The relevant journal wrote: They had nothing to add; they had not been able to convince themselves that a misunderstanding had occurred. They had sent the essay to Mauthner and he had not found that he had anything to say about it either. The people agree, but then they jump each other.

But that is significant of what is happening today in all possible fields. People wage war against each other, people feud with each other, and sometimes things are like between this gentleman and Mauthner. In their hearts of hearts they don't know why, because one is far removed from having such ideas, such conceptions, that are immersed in life, that are realistic. A thing can be very logical, but not realistic.

[This includes, my dear friends, a certain inner courage that must glow in the soul, a courage that people today know nothing about. When we point out in the present how spiritual science, in contrast to a world view that believes it offers reality but is far from it, how spiritual science has to bring the soul to immerse itself in reality, to live with the real. If we teach [gap in transcript] to live with the [gap in transcript], to grasp it, then some of what humanity needs so much to get out of the [gap in transcript] can be achieved, and the sense of unreality, the unreal thinking, is not to blame for the least part. If we try to make our relationship to time our guiding principle in this way, then we will understand spiritual science not only in theory, but [...] Again, it is particularly important here that not only what is among you lives, but that the intention lives on and is realized. The most important thing about spiritual science is that it works in our souls as a living impulse, in our soul continues [...]

Jakob Hugentobler: Dear Sirs and Madams! I warmly welcome you to our lecture event. The intention of this lecture is to present you with something positive from anthroposophical spiritual science in contrast to the mostly negative criticism that is so widespread today.

Anyone who keeps their eyes open today, who opens themselves to a deeper understanding of their environment, sees newer phenomena emerging in all cultural fields - in the fields of science, religion and art. They see beginnings that look like something that wants to break through, that has not yet found the actual path for this breakthrough. In anthroposophical spiritual science, an attempt is now being made to show the roots for everything that shows itself as a healthy new thing here in its beginnings - to show how one can penetrate to a deeper spiritual realm and how something can grow out of this spiritual realm, which must again become a union of all that is making itself felt today in so many separate movements. It is because of this possibility of a deeper knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science claims to extend to all areas of life, to penetrate all areas of life with its new knowledge. This spirit, which wants and must be active as a fertilization of today's entire cultural life, is to be spoken of here. Therefore, we must no longer speak with indignation, amazement, and astonishment about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science is spreading to all areas of life, as was so often the case in the past. The fact is that it wants to claim to be a truly comprehensive world view. This lecture will be based on such a real world view.

You will have the opportunity to take part in specialist eurythmy courses here – eurythmy, this new art of movement that was inaugurated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is based on anthroposophical spiritual science, and so this new art of eurythmy will be taught in individual courses. Likewise, there will be opportunities to delve more deeply into anthroposophical spiritual science by attending introductory courses, which will also be held here in Zurich. If you are interested, you can write down your name and address. You can see the rest from the programs that have been distributed.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! When a distorted image of anthroposophy is so often created and this distortion is then fought, so that in this fight little of what anthroposophy really represents is actually encountered, it is probably because that today many people still understand anthroposophy as something that stands, as it were, in the middle between science in the strict sense of the word on the one hand and the various religious views on the other.

In order to draw attention to the fact that the judgments that assign such a fluctuating position to anthroposophy, as it is meant here, are inaccurate, I would like to discuss the sources, the actual origins of anthroposophical research, in this introductory lecture today. And here I must first draw attention to the following. However much it is the case that what comes to light through anthroposophy touches people's religious feelings and religious sentiments, anthroposophy itself did not arise from any religious impulse, but rather it emerged from the natural science of our time, from a natural scientific world view. This may at first seem paradoxical from some points of view, but in order to characterize the scientific spirit of anthroposophy in the right way, this origin from a scientific basis must be emphasized particularly strongly.

In turning to anthroposophy, one is thoroughly imbued with the idea that the more recent development of humanity owes its greatest achievements and strongest forces to what are today called scientific insights. And I myself would like to admit that, in my opinion, no other spirit should prevail in anthroposophy than that which has been trained through the scientific research of modern times, which, above all, has come to know the conscientious, exact methods of observation, experimentation and scientific thinking of the present day. However, when we speak of a kind of scientific preparation for anthroposophy, we are less concerned with the results - I would even say triumphant results - of modern science than with the spirit of training that which a person acquires when he learns to work scientifically, that is, experimentally and observantly, to gain a scientific view of the entities and facts of the world in a serious way.

Now it has come about that in the course of the development of natural science in recent times, so to speak, more and more has been drawn into this research the sense of the exclusive significance of the world of sensual facts – of that which is based on certain facts that can be observed through the senses and whose observation can be intensified by instruments. Only what can be based on this is considered a true foundation of modern scientific research. And the more progress was made, the more this was abandoned, in thinking, in methodical reflection, to rise above this world of facts. One has more and more proceeded to regard the facts, so to speak experimentally, in such a way that they express themselves through their own mutual relations, and in this way one arrives at the laws of nature, as they are called.

Of course, not so long ago, when dealing with facts, one did not shy away from going from these facts to more or less bold hypotheses. In more recent times, these have developed into systems of concepts. And so insights have been gained, for example about the universe. We are now living in a time, however, in which some doubt has been cast on hypotheses that appear so plausible in their own way, for example, on the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the origin of the world. It is certainly regarded as somewhat uncertain, although on the other hand it is admitted that if one wants to arrive at a satisfactory overview of the world of phenomena, such hypotheses cannot be entirely dispensed with. This characterizes one aspect of it. Well, I could only hint at what confronts someone who really goes into the field of natural science today with a sense of inquiry.

But perhaps the second aspect is even more important today. This is that today, in view of the exactitude that has been assumed in natural science, one will no longer be able to get by - not even in the descriptive natural sciences - without a certain basic mathematical education. Indeed, in the natural science of the most recent times a definition has emerged that may seem somewhat paradoxical, somewhat extreme, but which shows the spirit that actually inspires this natural science thinking. The definition has emerged: Being is that which can be measured. Such a definition indicates how much the natural scientist today feels in his element when he has mastered the art that lies in geometry and in the exact measurement that geometry produces, in arithmetic and in the other branches of mathematics. This mathematical training is, so to speak, something that must be brought along today as a basic condition for beneficial scientific research.

What I want to say about anthroposophy today is less about what can be achieved as individual results of scientific research through measurement, counting and so on, but rather about the peculiar state of mind in which the researcher finds himself when he — equipped with the transparent weave of arithmetic, geometric or algebraic concepts, concepts from the world of differential or integral calculus or even synthetic geometry and so on, when he, equipped with the whole weave of these concepts, which are, after all, concepts generated entirely in the human personality itself, approaches the external world of phenomena and then finds: With what you have gained from your own inner being, with what you have formed into formulas and images from your inner being, you can delve into what the senses present to you. And he feels: with what you have, so to speak, spun out of yourself, you can embrace and interweave all that appears to you as completely alien from the external world of facts. This confluence of the mathematical, which is obtained in full clarity, with free, all-encompassing inner volition as a structure, as formulas, this confluence of the mathematical with what confronts us externally, so to speak, from the outside, that is what constitutes the special state of mind of someone who approaches nature in the sense of today's exact natural science.

Now, I would like to draw the attention of those present to what one learns in this way when mathematizing, that is, when forming algebraic or other formulas or geometric structures. I would like to point out that it is indeed possible for a person to observe themselves, as it were, by looking backwards, to see how they behave in this mathematization, how they come to an initially formal certainty in this mathematization, an certainty of the inner truth of these formulas and structures. He can do this on the one hand, and in doing so he gains a kind of insight into the psychological process that takes place when he mathematizes. Certainly, in the emergence of natural science, one has, I would say, been satisfied with the application of the mathematical. One has paid little attention to this psychological process. But if we want to get to nature, if we want to progress from mere scientific research, then it will be necessary to take a really close look at the processes that actually take place in the soul, at what takes place when we develop the mathematical. Because why? When we consider the process that takes place in observation or in controlled experimental observation, when we penetrate the external world with mathematics by observing this process of scientific research, so to speak, observing this scientific research process in one's own personality, one comes to not only conduct scientific research, but also to be able to educate oneself in a conscious way to that kind of grasping of truth that can be grasped through such research. Now, my dear audience, you see, what can truly be called Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, has its origin in such studies - first of all in such a scientific method of research and in such a view of the researcher's activity, the inner researcher's activity. And all that presents itself as Anthroposophy should be measured against this view, this inner view. I freely admit, ladies and gentlemen, that there is an original sense of truth in man, so that numerous personalities, when they hear about the results that appear in the field of Anthroposophy, are inwardly convinced to a certain extent. But, however true it may be that this feeling of truth is based on a certain elementary sense of truth, it is equally true that only those who have undergone the training and self-observation that I have just mentioned, based on natural scientific research, are capable of forming a judgment and, if I may use the term, of “research” in the field of anthroposophy. It is so easy, because of the attractiveness of the anthroposophical results, to lapse into a kind of amateurism that in turn attracts amateurs. But this dilettantism is not at all to be found at the origin of that which, as Anthroposophy, is to present itself to the world today. On the contrary, Anthroposophy seeks to keep every trace of dilettantism out of it, and to be able to give account, so to speak, to the strictest scientific mind of the present time, of its results, and especially of the way in which it has arrived at them. That is why I do not call what occurs in anthroposophy just any kind of religious belief, but something that can stand alongside contemporary science and permeate it. The spirit that has been trained in what is demanded by science today, which underlies today's recognized science, is the same scientific spirit that underlies anthroposophy.

But precisely when one is imbued with this scientific spirit, when one looks back from the mere mathematizing indulgence in external facts to the living research, to what is becoming, when one carries this science in one's soul - leaving the outer facts - then, when one looks back, especially when one looks back on what remains for one as a human being from this science, then one is immediately confronted with a problem that stands out as a major central problem. Only someone who has been educated in the scientific way of thinking can truly grasp the full magnitude of this: this is the problem of human freedom.

Natural science and the philosophy dependent on it – today's dependent philosophy – cannot but start from what is so interwoven in things that we have to speak of necessity. It is impossible for us to start from anything other than necessity with the spirit that prevails in natural science today. And it is virtually the ideal of science to see through what confronts us in the external world as a system of internally necessary, interrelated entities and facts. When you engage in scientific research in this way, you do not come close to what confronts you in the inner fact of human freedom as an immediate experience. You do not come close to it. And so we are confronted with the significant question that leads us to a cognitive abyss: freedom as an immediate experience is given to you! Why then, by stretching out your mathematical web of knowledge over scientific facts and in this way creating a world view, cannot you approach what cannot be denied as an immediate experience: freedom!

If I may interject something personal here, I would like to point out that, as early as the 1880s, my spiritual scientific research confronted me with the scientific necessity, on the one hand, the significance of which for objective research should not be denied in the least at first, but fully recognized, and on the other hand, the problem of freedom. And in my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1893, I tried to deal with philosophy in the way that a scientifically minded person in the present day had to do.

Now, if we already had a psychology or theory of the soul that was developed and suited to our scientific needs – we don't have it, of course – it would be easier to talk about what I have to talk about at this moment. In recent times, the doctrine of the soul has undergone a peculiar development. Whenever I want to characterize the fate of psychology, of the doctrine of the soul, I always have to refer to an outstanding thinker of recent times, who died here a year ago on the Zürichberg, Franz Brentano.

At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, Franz Brentano was completely immersed in natural science thinking, and when he first formulated his theses for his professorship in Würzburg, he included among them the main thesis that in the science of the soul no other method may be applied than that which is applied in the external sciences. In 1874, Franz Brentano published the first volume of his “Psychology on an Empirical Basis,” and he promised that when this volume of “Psychology” appeared in the spring of that year, he would deliver the second volume in the fall and, in rapid succession, the next four volumes in the following years. Franz Brentano has since died – no continuation of the first volume has appeared!

Anyone who reads this first volume of Brentano's psychology without prejudice will understand, I would say from the way in which this psychology is presented, why such a continuation has not been published. In this first volume, Franz Brentano frankly and freely states that if one were to stop at where he stopped, one would first have to admit to oneself that one actually knows nothing. If you look at the connection of ideas and their relationship to memory, the socialization of ideas, as it is usually called, and so on, if you apply the purely scientific method to that, then that is no substitute for the kind of psychology that Plato and Aristotle had hoped for. It would not be a substitute for a psychology that can also deal with what can be described as the eternal in man, or – as Franz Brentano puts it – that can deal with the part of man that remains when the temporal life falls away from him as a body. Franz Brentano wanted to solve this problem, which in the popular sense could be called the problem of immortality, in a scientific-psychological sense. He wrestled with it. I would like to make it clear that he did not want to enter the field that I have to refer to here as anthroposophy; it did not seem scientific enough to him. But because he was an honest researcher, he simply could not continue writing. Combining honesty in the field of the doctrine of the soul with a scientific spirit of research is only possible if one is able to develop that continuation of scientific thinking along the way, which is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science demands.

I would like to say that Franz Brentano's unfinished business with psychology is living proof that we do not have a proper psychology today. If we had a psychology, a proper psychology, then we would be able to look at certain things differently than we usually do today. And here I would like to point out one thing in particular. When we indulge in natural science, when we express natural scientific facts in laws and then incorporate these laws into our intellect, so that we carry within ourselves what has been revealed to us through external observation and experimentation, we notice that the The more we distance ourselves from external facts, the more we work inwardly with the intellect, which proves itself so excellently when guided by experiment and observation, the more we continue to work with this intellect, the more we - in other words - enter the realm of hypothesis, the realm in which we seek to formulate, with the aid of the intellect, the principles underlying these phenomena, we feel more and more distinctly that we are entering a realm in which we cannot, in the long run, satisfy ourselves. The more one, I might say, freely indulges at first in the kind of thinking that can be quite well applied in scientific research, the more one indulges in this thinking, in this forming of thought hypotheses, the more one comes to something unsatisfactory. And this unsatisfactory state is basically evident in the whole course of scientific development.

It is evident from the fact that we see how the most diverse hypotheses have been put forward - hypotheses about light, about the phenomena of electricity, about gravity, and so on. We see how these hypotheses are always replaced by others. And anyone who does not want to completely accept the point of view that we have “come so gloriously far” today must, from these feelings that he may have about this building of hypotheses, say: the hypotheses that have been developed recently will in turn be replaced by others. We are, so to speak, in the middle of replacing the old light hypothesis with another, taken from electrical phenomena. And we have to say to ourselves: we are entering an area where we form hypotheses based on the laws of nature that the mind can gain from external observation and through external experimentation in relation to the sensory world. We come into a region where this mind, so to speak, encounters a fluid, a something that cannot evoke in us the feeling that we can actually approach a being with these mental constructs that we hypothetically form and that, if they are to have a value, can only have this value if they point to something real, to something that exists.

And anyone who, in genuine inner empiricism, that is, equipped with unprejudiced observation of the inner facts of the soul, especially of the will, now considers the element in the soul that includes the fact of freedom, finds this in wonderful harmony with the impossibility of arriving at hypotheses in which there is still the same necessity that we have when we classify and systematize natural phenomena with our thinking. One then feels: if one approaches the soul life with this thinking and only wants to develop hypotheses in the soul life, one swims, as it were, in a liquid. One encounters nothing solid in the soul life. And this harmonizes wonderfully with the fact that the impulse is rooted in the soul life, which can be active without necessity prevailing in it, which can therefore move freely.

I would like to say that through external scientific research we come to a region of our soul life that shows us: if we want to extend the area of necessity into it, it also fails theoretically; it does not satisfy us theoretically either. We come across something in our soul life where freedom is rooted, where freedom can be fully experienced. And we will only be able to properly distinguish this area of freedom from the rest of the world that we can see, when we realize that, as long as we are in the necessity of the world that we can see, we cannot use this necessity to approach what is experienced inwardly when we are in the realm of freedom. I believe that a psychology that is equal to today's scientific exactitude would point to the special kind of inner satisfaction that one has in the game of hypotheses and in the harmony with what one now experiences inwardly, in one's soul, by experiencing the fact of inner freedom.

I would like to make it very clear that I am not talking here about some method or other or some theory or other about freedom, but about the fact of freedom, which we simply discover by deepening unselfconsciously into our own soul life. And then, when we are in a position to do so, when we, equipped with a genuine scientific spirit, so to speak, go against ourselves — not going outwards, but against ourselves — to the limit where we can still reach with scientific thinking and where we can move on to what can be experienced in us as freedom, then we come close to sensing the possibility, the justification of anthroposophy. For, in setting forth its scientific character, Anthroposophy must first start from this experience of the impossibility of approaching freedom through the medium of that which has led outwardly to such great theoretical and practical triumphs – namely, natural science.

Now we stand in this experience of freedom. But if we do not stand in it with abstract concepts, but rather stand inwardly before it, as before an intimately experienced inner fact, then we also know, in a sense, by inwardly experiencing the soul, by being permeated and pulsating with what is experienced as freedom: We cannot enter it with the thoughts that the external laws of nature give us, but if we as human beings really want to engage with life, if, for example, we have ideals, if we are familiar with the true demands of life, in order to take hold of it here or there - we do not enter this sphere of freedom thoughtlessly. We stand in the sphere of freedom by developing free thinking, and we can get to know thinking that moves in the element of freedom, free thinking, which is initially only an inner soul activity, which does not have external observation as a guide, does not have external experiment as a guide. As a progressive inner impulse, it is, so to speak, self-created and rooted in the soul. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I call this thinking pure thinking.

This thinking forms, as it were, the content of consciousness when we have trained this consciousness as I have just indicated. But then, when we move in this thinking, we can remember the concept of being, the concept of reality that we have appropriated from the outer world, especially from the scientifically researched outer world as presented to us by natural science. On the one hand, we take this concept of reality. It need not be particularly clear at first; it can simply be the idea that takes root in us through our direct and scientific contact with the external world. We take this concept, this idea of reality on the one hand, and on the other hand we take what we consciously experience when we engage in free thinking, then something occurs in our soul – yes, I could call it a basic law, I could call it an experience – something occurs to which one must inwardly confess to oneself by saying: I think, but I am not in thinking, that is, I am not as I have come to know existence in the outer world. And the momentous sentence appears before us: I think, therefore I am not.

That is the first thing one has to grasp for one's consciousness, my dear audience. And that is why it is so difficult to deal with the present, which is actually the starting point for the scientific nature of anthroposophy, because, as perhaps most of you know, more recent philosophy still more or less consciously or unconsciously starts from Descartes' sentence: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. So one starts from the great error that in thinking one grasps something of a reality, of a reality such as one has initially formed it as a reality in one's mind. We must first admit to ourselves: Whatever arises as I think, I think freely. This is the experience of non-reality, which is an experience that is at the same time a thinking experience and a will experience, a pure will experience, a desire experience.

Dear attendees, this experience is of tremendous importance for the life of the soul. One should actually spend a long time meditating on this experience until we feel, as it were, that we have hollowed out our ego when we admit to ourselves: I think, and in this thinking my ego lives. It is as if I were looking at a colored wall with a black circle in the middle. There is darkness, there is no light. Nevertheless, I see the black circle. I see the black circle within the light. When I become self-conscious in ordinary life and confess to myself: in that I think, I do not look into a reality, I look, if I may express it this way, into the black circle; I look into the non-light, which is darkness. I believe that I actually see myself, because within the content of my consciousness, the ego is left out. It is precisely because there is a nothing within the content of my consciousness and I see this non-being in the being that I initially consider myself to be an ego in ordinary thinking. This is a fundamental fact of psychology and philosophy. However, it may take a while before philosophers are willing to engage with the analysis that is necessary to do this. I can only hint at it here, I can only point to what is there. Much can still be discussed in very long psychological-philosophical expositions before such an analysis is finally done.

You see, my dear audience, once you have realized that when you think you are actually looking into the emptiness of the inner world, once you have realized that something of a volitional nature is at work there, then you are at the right starting point for what can now occur in inner methodological anthroposophical research. And this inner, methodical, anthroposophical research consists of the following: starting from what one has inwardly experienced in the sphere of freedom in the nature of thinking, and what one has then investigated in the 'I think, therefore I am not' in the sense of the being of the beings outside, by letting it take effect on oneself, by, I would like to say, inwardly grasping this atom of will-being, one can then be in the soul mood from which that meditation starts, which one needs to come to a real inner insight.

May people condemn as heresy what appears as an anthroposophical method and thereby distort it in a certain way before humanity, by presenting it as if it were something inferior in a bad sense, as one often calls it so “inferior” in the field of experiments, pragmatism and so on - in all the fields of manifold superstition, people may, may, as I said, distort all that the spiritual researcher develops there, by starting from a fixed philosophical basis. The methods and meditative techniques developed there, ladies and gentlemen, are nothing other than a further development of those inner soul forces that we have when we do mathematics and whose application in external natural science has yielded such great and significant results. Once we have learned what is present in the soul as an activity when we mathematize, once we have familiarized ourselves with this peculiar, scientifically formed form of creation, we can develop it further by, so to speak, recreating what arises in our memory, so that we have a kind of guiding impulse for our lives from this memory. We have these impulses for our lives as guiding impulses because what occurred as external experiences at a certain point in our childhood is transformed into inner experiences. We can, so to speak, always bring up images from the unfathomable depths of the soul of what we have experienced. But we can also distinguish between the living experience of being inside the experience, as we had it ten years ago, and the act of bringing up what was experienced back then. And no matter how vivid the images may be, the essential thing in this memory life is that we make what we are experiencing temporarily into a lasting one in us through imagination, although it is a lasting one that we cannot immediately determine as to what is going on down there in the soul life - or perhaps also in the organic life. But we can determine what we have before us if we bring up from these depths what we have experienced.

If we now immerse ourselves in the way we have a memory picture, how we have a memory picture vividly within us when we remember something we have experienced over a long period of time, we learn from this 'having' of a memory picture what is necessary for meditation, for the fundamental meditation of the anthroposophical research method. It is necessary for us to place a readily comprehensible idea at the center of our consciousness, and it does not matter whether it refers to something external or whether it is formed only internally, even if it comes from the imagination. The truth of the idea is not important at first, but it is important that we can easily grasp it. I have described all this in relation to this anthroposophical research method in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in “Occult Science” and in other books; there I have described the way in which one enters into this form of meditative imagination in the soul in exactly the same way as one does in mathematizing.

You will then find it absurd if someone compares this activity of the soul, which goes beyond mathematization and is thoroughly permeated by the will, with something hallucinatory or with something subconscious. That is precisely why so much is given to a mathematical preparation for anthroposophy, because it teaches one to recognize how one has a free hand in creating and holding on to ideas in consciousness. And anyone who says that the inner will that anthroposophy aims to achieve could be hallucination, either deliberately or because they are unable to do so, does not fully appreciate the way in which this meditative life is actually pursued, how it is maintained by first placing easily comprehensible ideas into one's consciousness so as not to bring up reminiscences from the subconscious. But by doing so, one exercises an activity - through inner strength, with effort of the will - that one otherwise exercises only on the basis of external facts, because otherwise one proceeds on the basis of external facts and experiences and allows the life of ideas to develop on the basis of these external facts and experiences. But now you free yourself from those external facts and experiences - I can only hint at the principle here, you can find more details in the books mentioned - now it is a matter of holding on to the ideas through inner will and thus constantly evoking an activity of the soul, which otherwise only ignites at external facts and runs in the inner being of man, bound to external existence. But by developing such meditation further and further, by practicing for years to make ideas that are easily comprehensible permanent, by learns to know that soul activity which tears thinking, raised above ordinary existence, away from the bodily, one rises to that which I have presented in the books mentioned as imaginative knowing.

Not fanciful images, not fantastic notions! Imaginative cognition is a state of consciousness filled with images that are present in the soul in the same way as mathematical configurations and formulas. And in this free handling of supersensible reality, which one distinguishes from every [physical] reality just as one distinguishes the triangle drawn with chalk on the blackboard as a mere symbol with full inner consciousness [from the purely spiritual concept of the triangle]. By being able to remain in this imaginative life of the soul for a while, one comes to know the life of the soul as something that can be torn away from the body. We are so used to our life being bound to the nervous system and the rest of the organism that we only really recognize this when we do such exercises. We see that, independently of the organism, the soul-spiritual runs in itself, and that the soul-spiritual can be filled with images. Only through this does one get to know the meditative life. These images are quite like the memory images - not like hallucinations. It is not true that one is filled with something like hallucinations or visions when doing anthroposophical research, but one gets to know the novelty, the new kind of content, through the existence of the memory being, in which the images of imaginative cognition or imaginative consciousness appear. But one also knows that one can no longer say when these images occur: I imagine, therefore I am not – as one can say about thinking.

Now, as I ascend to imagination, I encounter in a strange way what I first encountered in the external world – I encounter necessity. I can form my images in imagination, but I cannot throw them back and forth in any old way in relation to a new world that is now emerging. I see myself gradually forced to relate these images that arise in my imaginative life to a new world that I am getting to know, to a spiritual world. I learn to recognize: I must confront this image, which I have prepared, as a question of some fact of the spiritual world, and through this image, which I have built up, I enter into a connection with this world. I gain access to the spiritual world through the consciously created images of the imagination, just as I come into contact with the sensory world through the images created by my eyes or the sound images created by my ears. These latter images, which are created in the eye and ear, are produced without my arbitrariness. What is produced in the imagination as a world of pictures is, however, attained after such thorough schooling as I have just described in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on. But in this way one acquires the possibility of holding out something to the spiritual world in the way of inner activity, just as our senses can hold out something to the outer, natural world in the way of eye activity, ear activity, so that we receive pictures from it. What spiritual knowledge of the world is to open up for us must first be developed in us, it must first be brought up from the depths of the soul. And that happens in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, in imaginative consciousness. But it is significant that we enter into this state as if by necessity. And now we learn all the more to recognize what freedom actually is.

You see, someone who hallucinates or has visions creates images from his body. He is simply following an inner necessity, an inner compulsion. Someone who lives in fantasy creates images from his soul. He is more or less aware of how he creates these images. And if he is a healthy person and not a lunatic, then he knows that he lives in an unreal fantasy world. What one produces in the imaginative consciousness, one knows – because the ordinary, normal consciousness, the consciousness that experiences itself in freedom, remains present – that in the imaginative consciousness one forms the images oneself, just as in mathematics one forms the formula oneself, through which one comprehends reality. But one also knows that when one enters into the spiritual world, one grasps a spiritual world through these images. So one can see that as human beings with ordinary external consciousness, we can grasp this process. In our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, we have the opportunity to gain freedom – and that is because, with mere pictorial imagining, which is not in reality, one must say: I think, therefore I am not – cogito ergo non sum. If one develops one's freedom with this thinking and then looks back into the spiritual world, one looks back into a world in which the same necessity reigns that one first encountered in the external world. In the external world, one starts from the necessity of facts. One advances into a thinking in which, so to speak, freedom repels the certainty of inner thinking.

One proceeds from this free thinking to imagination, which also claims to have an existence, and thus one comes again into a world of necessity. One comes into this necessity again in an inner way. In this way one learns above all to really see through that which is spoken about so often, but which actually always confronts one in a certain nebulous, poorly mystical way. If one learns to recognize the imaginative consciousness of which I have spoken, then self-observation becomes possible for the first time. I would like to say that what used to be the starting point of the I, when one looked at the non-I, begins to brighten up a little. The will penetrates into it and begins to grasp something. And one also feels oneself again in a world of necessity. This is how one arrives at self-awareness.

If you continue your exercises, you will come to an exercise in particular where you can make the images disappear just as you feel them coming up. And this must be done, otherwise one does not remain master of it, but becomes a visionary and not a spiritual researcher. When one is able to erase the images from one's consciousness, one arrives at the complete inner exercise of will in this world of images, so that one can also erase the image whose becoming one has experienced in the soul. What I have called the second stage - the inspired consciousness - occurs. Please do not be put off by the expression. After all, we have to use expressions as technical aids. It was used in an analogous sense, in reference to old expressions, but it is definitely a new fact, a self-explored fact, that is meant by it; the new, the inspired consciousness is meant by it. And with this one now stands in the spiritual reality. And when one is so immersed in spiritual reality that one is surrounded by it, really surrounded by it, by a world of spiritual beings, then one also beholds one's own soul in its true essence. Then what anthroposophy describes as repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate fact. And one sees more and more of the soul as it passes from life to life, with the intervening life between death and a new birth — one sees this journey of the soul. One has, so to speak, expanded one's imagination so that it can, in principle, when directed inward, move in the opposite direction to which the imagination normally moves.

Let us ask ourselves: How does imagined thinking move? As I said, we first have the experience of being connected to the outside world; we live ourselves into some event in the outside world with our whole being. This speaks to our will impulses, or rather, it speaks to our feelings; it also speaks to our thoughts. We live in it with our whole being. We may even make a physical effort in having the experience. In short, we live in it with our whole being. In this way, this soul, in having our ideas, plunges down into the depths, and in the image we can bring it up again. We can say: in ordinary experience, we proceed from the external experience to ordinary memory in that the external images undergo a certain inner metamorphosis. In meditation, which is available in anthroposophical research, we go the other way. We first learn to have an image that is not allowed to link to an external experience, not to subconscious reminiscences, and learn to progress — now not to an external experience, but to a supersensible experience, also to those experiences that lie before our birth or before our conception. In this way we get to know the pre-existence of the soul, the spiritual being of the soul, in a way that we otherwise only get to know what external experiences have brought us up to a certain point in our childhood. It is the reverse experience, but one that leads us to spiritual experience, where we start from the image and ascend to the experience. And if at the same time we practise a certain self-discipline, namely a self-discipline that increasingly leads us to act out of what we know in ordinary life as the feeling of love, then we learn to recognize objectively where we can develop our activity in love from the tasks that the outer world gives us. If we get to know this life in the outer world, then after much practice, the progression from image to reality will gradually be such that we progress from the imaginative consciousness through the inspired to the intuitive consciousness. This means that we learn to stand within the inner objectivity, within the inner necessity of the spiritual world.

You see, dear attendees, in nature research we start from necessity. In a sense, we approach the human being in such a way that we can only contribute something to thinking if we can inwardly preserve and say to ourselves, in order to be a human being in the right sense, you carry within you something that is connected with the nature of the whole world. But by making the attempt to approach man with that thinking, which is extraordinarily well suited for use in the study of nature, in outer life, one comes to a point – I have characterized this, you can read about it in my Philosophy of Freedom – where one can go no further. The hypotheses become uncertain.

But if you develop what can be experienced in the realm of freedom, you will penetrate the objectivity of the mind in a reverse way. And here you can be helped if you use thinking, in the Goethean sense (as explained in his scientific writings), not to spin out hypotheses, but only to put together phenomena.

By assembling phenomena, one learns to recognize how to approach this world. One does not arrive at the realm of atoms - not at atoms, not at electrons and so on, which are justified to a certain extent, as far as external appearance is concerned. One only comes to the outer appearances in this physical-scientific way of looking at and researching. If, on the other hand, one presents these purely as phenomena, then one can penetrate to what lies behind the phenomenon - to which we ourselves belong in our eternal core - by ascending into the imaginative, inspirational, intuitive. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, we also arrive at a certain self-knowledge, at realizing what we demand in self-observation. By developing the imaginative consciousness, we learn to look into ourselves. What is memory based on? It is based, so to speak, on the fact that we absorb what we experience in the outside world in our imagination. Not in the way it is the case, for example, in the first days of our childhood — there it is transferred down into the organization — but in such a way that it is mirrored, that it has, as it were, a mirror wall on our organization and that we absorb it by remembering, in the memory image of the experience. By developing the memory that we need for a healthy social and scientific life in this way, we overcome the bond to the physical organization through anthroposophical research. However, ordinary consciousness must always be present; it must not be as in hallucination. Rather, anyone who ascends to imaginative consciousness is always a rational human being at the same time, always has ordinary consciousness alongside. This is precisely what distinguishes imaginative envisioning, inspired envisioning, from hallucination. Hallucinations and visions live in what the body produces, so that when we develop physical images from the body, we are dealing with visions and hallucinations. When we compose images from the soul, we are dealing with imaginative creations; when we compose images from the spirit, which we grasp by learning to work freely from the body, purely in spirit and soul, we are dealing with spiritual reality. So, it is the body that produces the images by coming to hallucinations and visions. The soul composes images by coming to fantasies, not to visionary images. The spirit within us composes images by approaching spiritual realities.

But when we look back into ourselves, we see, as it were, through the looking-glass, just as we should see through an actual looking-glass if we were to pierce it or take away some of the coating. And there we do not encounter in our inner being what the nebulous mystics talk about; we encounter something quite different, because the soul has experienced many things before it believes it unites with some deity in its inner being. They speak of divine manifestations in the ego. They speak of something they dream up. But anyone who penetrates into their inner being with genuine spiritual science comes to something quite different. He comes to see materially that which is otherwise given to him spiritually. Otherwise, his thinking, feeling, willing, desiring and coveting are given to him spiritually; now, however, he sees through everything that he feels, which is more or less connected with memory, and he sees into the actual inner laws of his organism. He gets to know his organism. He will not prattle and ramble on about nebulous mysticism, but will speak of the actual nature of the liver, lungs and stomach, which he gets to know through inner vision. He can add his inner vision to what conscientious external-physical anatomy provides. There you see the possibility of ascending to a real science of pathology. There you see how spiritual science, which does not turn to nebulous, rambling mysticism but which starts from exact methods, can really enter into the whole field of science. Yes, you get to know much more. Above all, one recognizes that even with the mystics who, of course, sound so magnificent, even with St. Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, that basically physical abnormalities are involved. One learns to recognize how abnormal liver, spleen and so on functions can arise from an imperfect, inharmonious functioning, from which arise the images that we otherwise so admire in mysticism.

Dear attendees! Knowledge is one thing that cannot be grasped by means of life prejudices, no matter how beautiful they may be. I believe that for those who can immerse themselves in knowledge without prejudice, there is a deeper insight into the foundations of existence, because they know how the human organism “boils” such beautiful things as they encounter in the noblest forms, namely in a Saint Therese or even in a Mechthild of Magdeburg, when they mystically indulge in raptures in the mist and dream of all kinds of things that are supposed to arise from the soul and spirit within. That is the remarkable thing: that we are progressing to the materiality of the human organism through self-observation. This will increasingly distinguish exact anthroposophy from all the ramblings and ramblings of inner mysticism, namely that it does not lead into the nebulous, but into realities. It teaches that which cannot be developed through external anatomy, because what can be learned from external physiology and anatomy is only one side; in this way it shows that the soul is pre-existent. She shows how this soul works down from its more comprehensive being to shape what is formed in the mother's womb from the spiritual. Thus, the real arises out of the spiritual world. We delve into the realm of reality by meditatively penetrating forward.

In science, we approach the human being from the outside world, whereas in anthroposophy, the full knowledge of the human being extends to the realm of nature. This is how we arrive at the harmony of spirit and matter that the human being must experience if they are to be fully human in the appropriate sense. He arrives at the point where, out of an inner urge, he passes directly from inner feeling and will to direct knowledge. It follows that without this knowledge we are always compelled to appeal to an atomistic world, and that we do not really get to the heart of the material. When we learn to recognize more and more of the material, then we also learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual outwardly. We really learn to build that bridge that leads us cognitively from spirit to matter, from matter to spirit. We need not believe that it is possible to solve all the riddles of the world at once. Weak-minded natures may perhaps say: The life of today's man must be a tragic one, since he inevitably comes up against the limits of knowledge, which make the riddles of the world appear insoluble to him. But it is not so. When we ascend in this way and get to know the spiritual life as it really is, when it suddenly flashes into us and when, on the other hand, we encounter the material world again when we approach the world with real powers of perception, , we learn, in essence, by ascending to such knowledge, not to experience something that carries us into the slumber from the outset in relation to knowledge, but we learn to recognize the struggle in which we are interwoven as human beings. Man sees how he lives outside in the struggles of spiritual worlds and beings, how he participates in this struggle through the moral world, the religious world, how he brings social life out of this struggle. He gets to know something that does not, so to speak, superficialize the inner soul state in solving the riddles of the world, but on the contrary, deepens it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy basically wants. It is the way to meet natural science. Anyone who wants to fight anthroposophy from a scientific point of view or, following on from science, from a philosophical point of view, is tilting at windmills, because anthroposophy addresses everything that science legitimately brings up; it can only accommodate what can be achieved through such science and philosophy through full knowledge. But this full realization was not wanted. Over a long period of time, the newer spiritual life and the newer life of civilization has brought about what has become known in recent times as agnosticism. Again and again, those thinkers who did not want to come to a further development of thinking, who did not want to enter into the world of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive, spoke of an ignoramus and thus presented something to people - which is significant - that must be considered as something unrecognizable and incomprehensible. But because man always knows that he is spirit, he should actually be able to distinguish the spiritual origin from nebulous mysticism and the like. The cause of all that is literally superstition in the various areas of life does not lie in anthroposophy, which strives for clarity and exact natural science, but the origin of it lies in ignorabimus, in agnosticism. These created the “foggy” mysticism. It is precisely the ignorabimus that leads to agnosticism, because man must continually seek the spirit. All nebulous movements emanate from the ignorabimus and agnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be fog, Anthroposophy wants to be light, Anthroposophy wants to be the continuation of the light that it itself recognizes in modern science as a truly spiritual light that carries humanity forward. This is how it itself sees the relationships between modern science, modern philosophy and itself as Anthroposophy.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which I had the honor of speaking about here in The Hague last Tuesday and yesterday evening, does not just pursue cognitive goals, nor just the goal of deepening our knowledge of the human being in scientific, moral, and religious terms. It also has practical goals. And it was requested that I speak this evening about one of these practical goals, about the goal of education.

Since this spiritual science strives above all to achieve a true knowledge of the whole, the complete human being - the human being in relation to his physical, his soul and his spiritual being - it can also impart knowledge of human nature in practical life, knowledge of human nature in relation to all ages. And for the art of education, knowledge of human nature in relation to the child itself is, of course, essential.

The question of education is essentially a question of the teacher. It is a question of the teacher in so far as it concerns whether the teacher, whether the educator, is able to solve the human riddle in practice with the child. Perhaps it is in this riddle of childhood that we most clearly perceive the meaning of that ancient saying, which is written like a motto over human knowledge: the saying that the solution to the riddle of the world lies within man himself.

Many people are afraid that if a solution to the riddle of the world were pointed out, human knowledge would then have nothing more to do. But if one is of the opinion that man himself is the solution to all the countless secrets that the universe holds, so to speak, as the ultimate goal of this world development, then one knows that one has to seek the solution to the riddles of the world in man, but man himself, if one wants to get to know him, again requires immeasurable effort, immeasurable work, to gain insight into his nature.

If one is so inclined towards the human being in the world that an immortal is hidden in him, then one also comes to have the shy reverence for the child that one must have as a teacher and educator if one wants to approach this child in the right way.

Today, with regard to the knowledge of human nature, I will endeavor to refrain from the arguments that I have been making in recent days about the knowledge of the human spirit and the spirit of the world. I will try to express the spiritual-scientific content in the most popular terms possible, so that those of our honored listeners who were not present in the last few days can also follow the arguments.

The point is this: anyone who deepens their views on life through what can give them a real – not abstract – knowledge of the human soul and spirit sees, above all, major divisions in the life of the human being; they see that they have to structure the entire life of the human being into epochs. These epochs are not always regarded with the proper interest and deep insight that they deserve. But anyone who wants to have a truly human relationship with a child as an educator or teacher must have a thorough knowledge of these epochs.

We see such an epoch in the child's life coming to a close around the age of seven, when the child gets the second teeth. The person who is a judge of character regards these second teeth only as the external symbol of a significant change in the child's physical, mental and spiritual development. And anyone who is able to practise the art of education in a proper and professional manner will also see a change in the child's mental characteristics and spiritual abilities as the teeth change. Let us just consider the fact that a metabolic turnover also takes place in the human organism at a later age, that after eight or nine years we no longer have the same material composition, the same substances within us, that we had before. If we consider this, we must nevertheless say to ourselves: What happens in the seventh year during the change of teeth is a powerful development of strength that the organism does not repeat in later life and that is also not a one-off event or an event that occurs over a short period of time. Anyone who has an insight into the development of the human organism knows how everything is prepared in the most intimate metabolic processes during the first seven years of life, which then, so to speak, finds its conclusion, its end point, in the second teeth.

And with regard to the soul, we see how, for example, memory, but also imagination, works differently with these second teeth – above all in terms of its nature – than it did before. We see how memory previously developed to a high degree unconsciously, as if from the depths of the child's physical being, and how it later becomes more spiritual. These things must be delicately hinted at, for they hardly lend themselves to a rough approach.

But what is especially important for the educator above all is that the child in the first years of life, up to the change of teeth, is completely devoted to the outside world as an imitative being. The child's relationship to the outer world is based on the fact – I do not say this to express a paradox, but to describe something very real – that in the first seven years of life, almost in these seven years, the child is almost entirely a sensory organ, that it perceives the environment not only with its eyes and ears, but that its whole organism is given over to the environment, similar to the sensory organs in later life. And just as the images of external things and processes are prepared in the sense organs, which are then only mentally recreated within, so it is the case with the child's organism that the child, as an imitative being, wants to imitate inwardly everything it sees outside. It wants to give itself completely to the outside world. It wants to imitate within itself everything that presents itself outside. The child is a complete sensory organ. And if one were to look into a child's organism with the clairvoyant sense, with the exact clairvoyance of which I have spoken in recent days, one would perceive, for example, how taste, which for an adult is experienced on the tongue and palate, extends much further into the organism in a child. Thus, one does not err when one says: In the infant, for example, it is the case that he also experiences breast milk with his whole body according to the taste.

We must enter into such intimacies of the human physical life if we really want to gain the delicate knowledge necessary for the art of education.

And when we look at how the child is an imitator through and through, then we understand, I would say in every single aspect, how the child learns to speak. We can literally follow how the child is led to follow, step by step, through imitation, what is struck as a sound, and to make its own inner being similar to what is perceived externally. And we can look into all the details of the child and see everywhere how the child is completely a sensory organ, completely an imitator, completely devoted to the sensory world around it.

In this respect, we can understand the child in relation to certain things that should not be judged in the same way as in the older child or even in the adult. I will illustrate this with an example. A father once asked me - this really happened in real life -: “What should I do with my boy? He stole money from his mother.” I asked the father: How old is the child? The child was not yet six years old. I had to say to the father: He who really understands the child cannot speak of theft here; the child had – as it turned out in the conversation with the father – seen daily how the mother took money out of the drawer. The child is an imitator; it also took money because it saw her do it. The entire action is exhausted in imitation, because the child did not attach any importance to having some of the so-called stolen money himself. He bought sweets with it and even gave them to other children. Hundreds of such examples could be given.

The mental life of the child after the change of teeth presents itself differently. We see how the child begins to give itself not only to sensory impressions, but to live completely within these sensory impressions and to make itself inwardly similar to what it sees around it. The child now begins to listen to what is said to it in words. But what the child encounters in its environment is needed in such a way that it is carried by the human personality. Therefore, we may say: until the second dentition has changed, the child is an imitative being; from the second dentition onwards - and this essentially lasts until sexual maturity - it becomes a being that no longer imitates but follows what comes to it through the imaginations of the personalities around it. And the teacher and educator must above all ensure that what he says to the child actually becomes a norm and guiding principle for the child. With the change of teeth, the imitative life transitions into a life in which the child, through his natural sense of right and wrong, wants to follow self-evident authority.

All teaching and education in this second phase of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, must be geared towards this natural sense of authority. At this age, the child learns to recognize as true that which the beloved, authoritative personality presents as true. What is beautiful, what is good, is felt to be sympathetic by the child or followed in dependence, in authoritative dependence on the beloved educational personality. And if we want to teach a child something between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen that will be fruitful for the child throughout his or her life, then we must be able to clothe everything we teach the child during this time in this authoritative element.

My dear audience, anyone who, like me, was able to refer yesterday to his “Philosophy of Freedom”, written more than thirty years ago, will not assume that he wants to focus too much on the authoritarian principle. But anyone who loves freedom above all else, who sees in freedom the self-evident law of social life, must point out, based on a true understanding of the human being, that the period between the ages of seven and fourteen is the time when a child thrives solely by being able to draw strength and inspiration from a personality that it perceives as a self-evident authority. Thus we would like to say: in the first seven years of life – this is all approximate, more or less – the child is an imitative, intuitive creature; in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, the child is a being that listens to its human environment and naturally wants to be placed under an authority.

Anyone who, like the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, follows the development of the human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, knows what an enormous significance it has for later life, and perhaps even for old age, if the human being was able to reverence, even if only in the form of a special education for a short time. For example, if one was able to hear about a personality highly revered in the family when one was eight or nine years old, and to really absorb some of that reverence through hearing about them. And then the day approaches when one is supposed to see them for the first time. That day when everything is clothed in shyness and reverence and one expectantly gets the door opened to see this personality for the first time. If one knows how such an experience works, when the soul, in relation to authority, is surrendered to the outer world, as in the first years of childhood the whole human being is surrendered as a sense being — then one knows what a benefit one does to the child during the sculptural age when one lets him experience a great deal of this shy reverence for the self-evident authority.

One must observe such things if one wants to become an educator or teacher out of knowledge of human nature. Then one will consider above all that the human being is not only a spatial organism, in which the individual limb of his body stands in spatial interaction with some other distant limb, but that the human being is also a temporal organism. Knowledge of human nature cannot be acquired without being oriented towards the human being as a time organism. If you take any limb of the right hand, it is in interaction with every other limb of this spatial organism in the human being through an inner overall organization. But if you look at what a person is first in childhood, then in later childhood, in the period of youth and maidenhood, in adulthood, in declining age, then in old age - then everything is intimately connected in time. And anyone who, as an educator and teacher, only looks at the child's present life, at the eight- to nine-year-old child, is not fully fulfilling their duty. Only those who know that what they do for the seven- to eight-year-old child continues to have an effect in the temporal organism, which is a unity - from the child, from the middle-aged person, from the elderly person - and that what that which is kindled in the soul during childhood continues to work, but becomes different, metamorphosed: only those who can form an idea of the way in which this changes, transforms, can educate in the true sense of the word.

I would like to give you an example. You see, it is considered so important that a child understand everything that is taught to him with his still-tender mind. This contradicts the principle of self-evident authority. But anyone who only wants to convey to the child what it can immediately grasp with its delicate mind does not consider the following example. It means a great deal if, in one's eighth or ninth year, one has accepted something as a matter of course and authority as true, beautiful, good, that an honored authority describes as beautiful, good, and true, and one has not yet fully understood it. In the thirty-fifth year, or perhaps even later, it comes up from the depths of the soul. One has become more mature in the meantime. Now one understands it, now one brings it up, now one illuminates it with mature life experience.

Something like this – when, at a later age, one understands out of maturity what one had previously accepted only out of love for authority, when one feels such a reminiscence coming up in later life and only now understands it – something like this signifies a flare-up of new life forces, an enormous principle in the soul, of which one is just not always fully aware.

In another way, I can make it even clearer what I actually mean by the principle that one should educate in such a way that what one brings up works for the whole of life. You know that there are people who enter into any environment where other people are and work like a blessing just by their presence. They do not need to exert themselves much in speaking, their words are breathed out, warmed through by something that has a blessing effect on other people. As a rule, these people will be of mature or advanced age, and will be able to exert such a blessing effect through their mere presence in a very special sense.

Those who study the human being not only in the present moment, but really throughout their entire life – which is a difficult study. In physiology, in the ordinary study of man, it is easier to study only the present moments or short periods of time. But those who whole human life, knows how such a blessing effect, which comes from later in life, is usually connected with the fact that the person in question was able to worship, to look, to look devoutly at another person as a child. And I would like to express it paradigmatically by saying that no one who has not learned to fold their hands as a child can effectively use them to bless in old age. Folded hands in children contain the spiritual seeds of hands that bless in old age. The human being is not only a spatial organism, but also a temporal one, and everything is connected in the temporal life, just as the individual limbs are connected in the spatial organism in interaction.

Anyone who fully understands this will also avoid teaching the child such concepts that cannot be changed in later life. It is so easy for the teacher or educator to be tempted to approach the child with the greatest possible certainty, to give him or her concepts and ideas with sharp contours. This would be just like putting the delicate hands of the child, which are still to grow and change, in brackets so that they cannot grow. Just as the child's physical organism must grow, so too must the forces of growth inherent in what the teacher, the educator, has taken into his soul. We can only bring this into the child if we also shape the education and teaching artistically during the compulsory school age.

By way of illustration, I would like to point out how we at the Waldorf School - which was founded a few years ago by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and which I run - incorporate this artistic principle into our teaching. I can only give you a brief sketch of it today.

For example, when teaching reading, we do not assume that we can directly teach the child what letters are. These letters are, after all, something quite alien to human nature. Just think of how, in earlier times, there was a pictographic writing, a pictographic writing that arose primarily from the fact that what had been perceived was imitated in the picture. In this way, writing was very close to what was perceived. Writing had something directly to do with the human being. In the course of the development of civilization, the forms of letters have become detached from the human being. There is no need to study history to such an extent that the old pictographic script is brought to life again in school. But it is good for the teacher to let their artistic imagination run free, to let the children draw and paint forms that reflect what the child feels, in which the child lives.

Thus, at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, we do not start with learning to read or learning to write in the usual way, but rather artistically, with painting and drawing. We develop the forms of the letters out of this drawing, and in fact we always develop out of the artistic realm first. We also let the children work with paints, even though this is more difficult and must be developed out of the dirty. We begin with the artistic realm and develop writing out of it, and only then reading. And in this way an artistic quality should permeate the entire lesson.

This can happen right up to the point when the children learn arithmetic, if the teachers are there for it, those teachers who have become experts through a real deepening of their own soul treasures by absorbing the guiding forces of a real anthroposophical spiritual science into their minds, into their knowledge, into their feelings, into their will. Those who have assimilated spiritual science in this living way can work from the spirit to transform all teaching into an artistic activity. But when the teacher of this childhood stage becomes completely artistic in his dealings with the child, then he works not so much through what he knows, but through the nature of his personality. He works through his individuality. And the child receives through this in his mind something that has the power of growth in it, just as the physical organism has the power of growth in it. Later on, in one's thirties or forties, one is then in a position not only to think back, as if remembering, to the fixed concepts one was taught at school and which one should recall. No, these concepts have grown with one, have changed. This is how we must work as teachers; we must be able to treat the child as an educator.

In this way we exercise authority, but at the same time we work in the truest sense of the word for the freedom of the child; for we must always be clear in our own minds that we are true educators only when we can also guide in the right way those people who will one day be more capable than we are as teachers. It could well be that we find ourselves teaching in a school, let us say in a class with two geniuses. And if we as teachers are not geniuses ourselves, we must educate the children in such a way that we do not hinder the development of their genius. If we educate in the sense and spirit that I have just mentioned, that we artistically bring to the child with our personality what it needs, just as in earlier years it needed to imitate what it perceived through the senses, so now it needs that what we ourselves are as teachers, then we will be no more of an obstacle to the forces that may not even be in us than a mother carrying the germ of a child within her is an obstacle to genius if she is not a genius herself. We become custodians of the child's qualities and will not be tempted to impose on the child what we ourselves are. That is the worst educational principle, to want to make children into an image of ourselves. We will not be tempted to do so if we acquire knowledge of human nature in the sense of spiritual insight, and if the child is a mystery for us to solve at every stage of life.

My only regret is that we cannot yet have a kindergarten so that younger children too can be educated in these principles. We are not yet able to do so for financial reasons. But those who are teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School feel how what is revealed in the human physical organism as soul and spirit through the gaze, through the physiognomy, through the word, through everything possible, makes use of the body — which is by no means neglected in this education — how it has descended from divine spiritual heights and united with what has become of it from the father and mother in the hereditary current through conception or through birth. Anyone who approaches the child with the feeling that this child has descended from the spiritual world to you, and that you are to solve its riddle from day to day, from hour to hour, has in his mind the loving devotion to the child's development that is necessary to guide this child through all possible imponderables on its path through life. And it is such imponderables – that is, those things that cannot be grasped in a rough and ready way – that are often involved in education and teaching. It is truly not only that which a systematizing educational science wants to accept as prevailing between the educator and the child.

I would like to illustrate what I mean with another example. Let us assume that a teacher has the task of teaching a child in a childlike, simple way about the immortality of the human soul. This must be taught to the child, who is between the change of teeth and sexual maturity and is preferably attuned to receiving images – not yet abstract concepts – and who wants to accept everything on the basis of self-evident authority, precisely through an image.

Now this image can be presented to the child in two ways. You can say: I, the teacher, am terribly clever. The child is still terribly foolish. I have to teach it about the immortality of the soul. I will use an image. I will say to the child: look at the butterfly chrysalis, the butterfly will crawl out of it. It will crawl out as a visible being. Just as the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis as a visible being, so your soul will separate from the physical body at death, as from a chrysalis, and fly away into the spiritual world.

Of course I am not saying that this is philosophical proof. It is certainly not that. But a view can be taught to the child in this way. I can do it – as I said – the way I have just described it. I say, I know all this well, because I am clever and the child is stupid. I teach it to the child. It is a foolish comparison, but the child should believe it.

Now, my esteemed audience, you will not achieve anything by approaching the child in this way, because the child may remember it, but what you are supposed to achieve, raising the soul's level, filling the soul with a life-giving content, you cannot do that in this way. But it can be done in another way, if you do not say to yourself: You are clever as a teacher, the child is foolish, but if you say to yourself - forgive me for speaking so paradoxically -: Perhaps the child is even much cleverer than you are in the subconscious depths of his soul. Perhaps you are the foolish one and the child is cleverer. In a sense this is true, because who knows how the still unformed internal organs, namely the brain, are shaped by the still unconscious soul, the dreaming soul of the child, how an immensely significant wisdom is formed in the earliest years of childhood. Anyone who has an appreciation for such things, who is not a crude philistine and cannot appreciate such things, still says to himself: All the wisdom we acquire in life, no matter how beautiful machines it may produce, is not as far advanced as the unconscious wisdom of the child.

Teachers who work in anthroposophical settings believe that the butterfly can emerge from the chrysalis, because they say to themselves: I am not making this comparison, nature itself is making this comparison. What happens at a higher level, the release of the immortal soul from the body, is modeled in nature by the deity itself in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. If I imbue what I hold in front of the child as an image with my own feelings, then I give the child what is right, I give it life force with it. Nothing that I do not myself believe in with all my might can have the right effect on the child. These are the imponderables that should be at work between the teacher and the child, the unspoken, that which lies only in the exchange of feelings, the supersensible in teaching. If that is not there, then, I would say, only the gross, not the imponderable, is at work, and then we do not give the human being what is right for the path of life.

I wanted to use these things to point out, above all, how an artistic element, I would like to say a pious mood towards the human being, belongs in education and teaching. This is particularly evident when we turn our attention to the religious and moral education that we want to give the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the opportunity to speak about here in The Hague during the past few days, shows us how, precisely in relation to the religious and moral element present in the human being, this temporal organism has its great significance for the whole human being and his earthly life. If we can gain insight into the attitude of the very young child, who imitates everything, towards his whole external world, and if we can put ourselves in this child's place, then we cannot characterize it other than by saying that the child is completely given over to the external world; he loses himself to the external world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world of colors and light, so the child loses itself in the outer world. The inner world dawns only very gradually. Out of dreams that are still completely absorbed in the outer world, more definite ideas gradually emerge.

Now, my dear audience, when you have truly appreciated this mood in the child, do you know what it is? It is in truth the pious mood, it is in truth the religious mood, placed in the midst of the sense world. However strong a tomboy the child may be in other respects, in relation to its relationship to the sense world, in relation to its devotion to the sense world, the child is religiously minded. It wants to be itself wholly what it beholds in its surroundings. There is not yet any religion in which the child finds itself. But this mood, which is present in the child especially in the first years and gradually fades away until the change of teeth, this mood, which is no longer present when the self-evident sense of authority sets in with the change of teeth, reappears in a remarkable way later on for the insightful teacher.

When children reach primary school age between the ages of nine and ten, the truly insightful teacher and educator may be faced with their greatest challenge. For it is then that they will notice that most of the children entrusted to them approach them and have a particular need for them, that they do not always have explicit questions but often have unspoken ones, living only in their feelings. These questions can take on hundreds of thousands of forms. It is much less important to give the child a specific answer. Whether one gives one answer or another is not as important as the content of the answer. What is most important, however, is that you instill the right trust in the child with the right feeling, that you approach the child with the right feeling at just the right moment, which for children always occurs between the ages of nine and ten.

I can characterize this moment in the most diverse ways. When we teach the child, we notice that before this moment, which lies between the ages of nine and ten, he does not yet properly distinguish himself from his environment, does not properly experience himself as an ego - even if he has long been saying “I” to himself. In this moment of life, he really learns to distinguish himself from his environment. We can now no longer just influence the child with fairy tales and all kinds of lessons, in which we bring the outside world to life. We can now already draw attention to the fact that the child distinguishes himself from the outside world as “I”.

But something else of fundamental importance occurs, which is deeply connected with the moral development. This occurs: in the early days of that epoch of life in which the child is subject to authority, he takes this authoritative personality as it is. Between the ages of nine and ten – it does not even need to be conscious of this, it can happen deep within the feeling, in the subconscious, as it is called, but there it is – the child sees itself forced, through its development, to look through the authoritative personality at what this authoritative personality itself is based on. This authoritative personality says: This is true, this is good, this is beautiful. Now the child wants to feel and sense where this comes from in the authoritative personality, what the knowledge of the good, true and beautiful is, the will in the true, good and beautiful. This comes from the fact that what I would like to say in the depths of the soul has been retained during the change of teeth and even afterwards, which in early childhood was, if I may use the strange word, a sensual-pious surrender to the outside world, because that has disappeared there in the depths of the soul and now emerges spiritually as if from the depths of the human being. What was sensual in the infant until the change of teeth, what as sensual is the germ of all later religious feeling towards the world, that emerges soulfully between the ages of nine and ten, becomes a soul need.

Knowing this, and reckoning with the fact that, just as one lovingly tends the plant germ so that it becomes a plant, one now has before one, in soul form, that which was once prepared in the child in a sensually germinal way, and has to be cared for in soul form, gives one a special relationship with the child. And in this way one lays the religious germ in the child.

Then the educators will notice that in later life, towards the seventeenth or eighteenth year, what has emerged as a religious feeling in the soul, that then emerges spiritually, that it is absorbed into the will, so that the person builds up their religious ideals during this time.

You see, it is extremely important to understand these things at the fundamental level if we want to educate and teach in a meaningful, truthful and realistic way. After all, nature has taken care of the physical organism of the human being, otherwise we might not be sure whether - especially if the people concerned are modern futuristic painters - people might even think of putting their ear in the wrong place or something similar. Such things could well happen if nature had not provided for the whole corresponding organization of the human being. So we, as teachers and educators, must take care of the time organism. We must not try to cultivate the religious sense of the child's soul in any other way than in preparation for the moment between the ages of nine and ten. We must handle this time body of the child with care. We must say to ourselves: Whatever religious feelings and concepts you teach the child before that remains external to him; he accepts them on authority. But between the ages of nine and ten something awakens in him. If you perceive this and direct the feelings that then arise of their own accord out of the soul in the religious sense, you make the child into a religiously true human being. There is so little real psychology of the age today, otherwise people would know where the false religious feelings and sentiments that are present in social life today come from: because it is believed that anything can be developed in a person at any age, because it is not known what exactly needs to be brought out of the child's soul between the ages of nine and ten.

If we organize the entire curriculum in such a way that by the age of twelve the child has absorbed so much from the natural sciences – entirely in keeping with primary school education and teaching – that he has an overview of some physical and botanical concepts and so on, not in a scientific but in a thoroughly childlike sense, then at this age, around the age of twelve, we can look at the child and the child treated accordingly – that conflict that arises when, on the one hand, we look up to the divine governance of the world, to which the child can be guided between the ages of nine and ten, and that contrast that arises when we only take note of the external – not moral, not divine-spiritual – unfolding of forces in the natural phenomena that manifest themselves before us. These natural phenomena present themselves to us without appearing to be permeated by moral principles, without our directly perceiving the divine in them.

This is what brought modern people into the conflict in the first place, which on the one hand directs the mind to the religious sources of existence, and on the other hand to knowledge of nature. Around the age of twelve, our knowledge of human nature tells us that we can gently address these conflicts in the maturing child, but that we are also in a position - because the soul-religious feelings are still so strong, so fresh, so full of life, so youthful, as they can only be in a twelve-year-old child, then to be able to guide the child in the right way, so that in later life he does not need to see nature itself as divinized, but can find the harmony between nature and the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

It is important that one allows this conflict to arise around the twelfth year, again taking into account the right development of the temporal organism in man, because it can be most effectively bridged by the forces that are present in the human soul at that time.

In turn, for anyone who is able to observe social life today in truth — not lovelessly, but with a genuine psychology — the art of education offers the insight that many people cannot overcome the conflict mentioned because they were not led into this conflict at the right age and helped to overcome it.

The main thing is that the teacher and educator know about the life of the human being in general, so that when they encounter an individual child or young person, they can recognize what is right at the right time and know how to orient themselves at the right time.

Religious experience also lies within the human being itself. We cannot graft it into him; we have to extract it from the soul. But just as we cannot eat with our nose, but have to eat with our mouths, so we have to know that we cannot teach the religious to a person at any age, but only at the appropriate age. This is something we learn primarily through a true knowledge of the spirit: to bring the right thing to the child at the right age. Then the child takes that which is appropriate to his abilities.

And when we look at this child development and know how everything between the change of teeth and sexual maturity is geared to the personal relationship between teacher and child, and how there must be something thoroughly artistic in this personal relationship , then we will also see that for the child it must initially be a kind of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy, which in turn develops out of imponderables in the face of self-evident authority.

The teacher either talks to the child in stories, in parables – there are hundreds of possible ways – about what he finds morally good and what he finds morally evil. If he is really able to develop an artistic education, then the artistic element between the educator and the child works in such a way that the child, precisely through this inclination towards the self-evident authority, learns to look with sympathy to good and antipathy to evil, and that between about seven and fourteen years of age a moral sense develops in the child out of pleasure and displeasure.

It is completely wrong to try to get the child to obey rules during these years. We either enslave the child or make it malicious, stubborn, and rebellious against the rules. It does not understand why it should follow the commandments. But it can like or dislike what the self-evident authority finds right or wrong, good or evil, and it can learn to follow it with sympathy or antipathy. And this sympathy and antipathy becomes the self-evident content of the soul.

What develops in a scholastic way during this period of life, what has been established in the child's moral sense between the ages of seven and fourteen in the manner indicated, only comes to the fore in the seventeenth or eighteenth year as a volitional impulse, provided that the personality is present later on who, through his own enthusiasm for moral ideals, for beautiful human ideals, shines forth for the young person as a later guide in life - as a volitional impulse only appears in the seventeenth or eighteenth year.

Just as the plant germ is not yet the plant, but the plant germ must first come into being for the plant to arise, so too must the moral will in a healthy way be able to become the ripe fruit of the moral person in the sixteenth or seventeenth year, with all its strength, if the moral feeling has developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, in the process of clinging to the self-evident authority.

And what is the safest way for us to develop this moral sense? If we direct all instruction, all education, in such a way that the child learns to develop a feeling above all else. If possible, the education of even the very young child, long before the change of teeth, can take care of this if we direct this child in such a way that it learns to develop feelings of gratitude towards everything it receives in life. The feeling of gratitude is underestimated today. This feeling of gratitude connects people with the world and allows people to recognize themselves as a part of the world. If a child is guided in such a way that it can develop a clear feeling of gratitude for the smallest of things, then the child does not shut itself away in selfishness, but becomes altruistic and connects with its surroundings. Then one arrives at directing the lessons in such a way, even at school age, that the child gradually receives its physical existence, its soul existence, its spiritual existence, so to speak, in gratitude from the powers of the world, from the physical, from the soul and from the spiritual powers of the world, and that this feeling of gratitude spreads into a feeling of gratitude towards the world from whose bosom one has sprung.

Thus can the feeling of gratitude towards parents, educators, towards all the environment, be transferred into the great feeling of gratitude towards the divine rulers of the world.

This feeling of gratitude must be there before any knowledge that a person can ever acquire. Any knowledge, no matter how logically justified, that does not at the same time lead to the feeling of gratitude towards the world, is detrimental to a person's development, and in a sense maims them mentally and spiritually.

This is shown by spiritual science, which I have had the honor of representing here these days: that every, even the highest, even the most exact knowledge, can lead to feelings, but above all to feelings of gratitude. And if you have planted the feeling of gratitude in the child, then you will see that you have planted the soil for moral education. For if one has cultivated this feeling of gratitude and this feeling of gratitude proves to be compatible with all knowledge, then the child's feeling easily becomes one of love, as one must have it for all other people, and ultimately for all creatures in the world. One will be able to develop love most surely out of the feeling of gratitude.

And in particular, one will be able – again from that point in time, which lies between the ninth and tenth year of life – to gradually transform authority into an authority imbued with love. The teacher's whole behavior must be organized in such a way that this authority, which at first, I would say, is neutral in the face of love, becomes a matter of course, a matter of obedience, a free obedience when the child is nine or ten years old, so that the child follows in love the self-evident authority, in a love that it already awakens in itself, in a love that it already understands.

If one has developed feelings of gratitude and love in the right way in one's soul, then later on one is also able to bring the moral sense of the child or young person to the point where the person now life really sees that which is the very basis of his human dignity to the highest degree: he sees that which elevates him above the mere sensual world, above the mere physical world, which lifts him up to a truly spiritual existence.

In these days I have tried to describe the spiritual world from a supersensible knowledge in certain respects. The spiritual researcher can acquire knowledge of this spiritual world. But with our moral inner life, we also stand in a spiritual way in our ordinary life at all times when we feel the moral with the necessary strength and the necessary purity. But we achieve this if we teach the child a very definite knowledge of human nature. And we should not dismiss any child from the school that is the general school of life, the general elementary school, without a certain knowledge of human nature. We should dismiss the child only when we have imbued it to a certain degree – and it is only possible to this degree – with the motto: “Know thyself”.

Of course, this “know thyself” can be brought to an ever higher level through all possible science and wisdom. But to a certain extent, every elementary school should teach the child to fulfill the “know thyself”. To a certain extent, the human being should recognize himself as body, soul and spirit. But this knowledge of the human being, as it follows from real knowledge of the spirit, establishes a true connection between good and between human beings.

Why does today's recognized science not go as far as to recognize this connection? Because it does not fully recognize the human being. But just as one would not be a complete human being if one lacked blood circulation in some organ - the organ would have to atrophy - so one learns, when one really looks at the whole human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, to recognize that good is what makes a human being human in the first place, and that evil is something that comes from the human being remaining incomplete.

A child who has been guided through life with gratitude and love ultimately comes to understand that a person is only complete when they see themselves as the embodiment of the divine order of the world, of good in the world, in their earthly existence. If one has based moral education on gratitude and thus overcome selfishness in a healthy way – not through mystical-moral declamation or sentimentality – if one has transformed gratitude into love in a healthy, non-sentimental way, then in the end one will be able to young person who loves the world to the realization that the person who is not good as a whole person in body, soul and spirit is just as crippled in the spiritual as someone who is crippled in having one leg missing. One learns to recognize the good in the imagination, in the etheric knowledge of the spirit as the complete human being.

And so, just as if you were to find a diagram of the nervous or circulatory system, a fleeting glance at which resembles a shadow of the human being itself, so too, when you form an image of the good through intuitive knowledge, this is the model for the whole human being.

But here moral education unites with religious education. For only now does it make sense that God is the source of good and man is the image, the likeness of God. Here, religious and moral education will lead to man feeling - and incorporating this feeling into his will - that he is only a true man as a moral man, that if he does not want the moral, he is not a real complete man. If you educate a person in such a way that he can honestly feel that he is being robbed of his humanity if he does not become a good, moral person, then you will give him the right religious and moral education.

Do not say that one can easily speak of these things, but that they must remain an ideal because the outside world can never be perfect. Of course the outside world cannot be perfect. He who speaks out of the spirit of spiritual science knows that quite certainly and quite exactly. But what can permeate us as an attitude, in that we teach or educate, what can give us enthusiasm in every moment and with this enthusiasm brings us to be understood by the childlike soul, that we find the way to the childlike will, that lies nevertheless in what I have just hinted at - in a true knowledge of human nature, which culminates in the sentence: The truly complete human being is only the morally good human being, and the religious impulses permeate the morally good human being.

Thus all education can be brought to a climax in moral and religious education. But here too we must realize that the human being carries within him a time organism, and that in order to educate the child we must, in a spirit of spiritual insight, learn to observe this time organism hour by hour, week by week, year by year. We must lovingly enter into the details.

I have thus indicated to you how guidelines can be obtained from a spiritual knowledge for a part of practical life, for education. I am not just describing something that exists in gray theory. I have already indicated to you that those educational principles which I could only sketch out very briefly have been applied for years at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, that from the outset what I have suggested here for religious education permeates the entire curriculum, a curriculum that is based on the pre-service training of the Stuttgart Waldorf School teachers. And I may add that now, looking back over the first years of the school's development, we can say, even if everything remains imperfect in the outer life, that it is possible to make these principles practical principles so that they reveal themselves in the unfolding of the child's life.

And so these impulses of religious and moral education also show themselves, just as the fruitfulness of the impulses of physical education shows itself on the other side, guided from the spiritual and soul side, for example in the application of the art of eurythmy in school. I mention this only because it has been shown how children naturally find their way into this eurythmic art, just as they find their way into speaking the sounds at an earlier age, and to show you that those who want to see religious and moral education practised in such a way, as discussed today, do not want to neglect physical education at all. On the contrary, anyone who looks at the life of the child with such reverence and spiritual activity does not neglect physical education either, because he knows that the spiritual and soul-like is expressed in the body down to the individual blood vessels and that anyone who neglects it is, so to speak, pushing the spirit back from the sensory world into which it wants to manifest itself.

Above all, the child is a unity of body, soul and spirit, and only those who understand how to educate and teach the child in this totality as a unit, based on genuine observation of human beings, are true teachers and educators.

This is what we are striving for at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and what has already been practically proven to a certain extent in relation to what I have tried to show you today as just one side of education. But what must always be said with regard to this area and other areas of life – and it is obvious to turn our gaze to the whole of social life, which is stuck in so many dead ends today, it is obvious from the point of view of education – is this: social conditions today can only experience the desirable improvement if we place people in social life in the right way, not just by improving external institutions. When all this is considered, the importance of a true, realistic art of education becomes clear; and it is this kind of realistic art of education that Waldorf school education, Waldorf school didactics, wants to introduce into the world as a prime example of an art of education.

It has already experienced a great deal of success, and anyone who is enthusiastic about a realistic art of education based on spiritual science naturally wants it to be widely adopted. For it is built, I would say, on an archetypal truth. Education is also something that must be seen as part of the social life of human beings. For this social life is not only the coexistence of people of the same age, it is the coexistence of young and old. And finally, part of social life is the coexistence of the teacher, the educator, with the child. Only when the teacher sees the whole human being in the child and can, in a prophetic, clairvoyant way, see what depends on each individual educational and teaching activity that he undertakes in terms of happiness and destiny for the whole of life, will he educate in the right way. Because all life, and therefore also the life of education and teaching that takes place between people, must be based on the principle that Everything that happens between people only happens right when the whole person can always give themselves to the whole person in right love.

But this must also be true in the whole field of education. Therefore, in the future, the art of teaching will be based on a secure and realistic foundation when the teacher is able to bring his best humanity to the best humanity in the child, when the relationship between teacher and child develops in the most beautiful sense of the free relationship between human beings, but also in the relationship given in the necessity of the world.

Dornach, 29th June, 1924

The day before yesterday I tried to picture for you the cosmic drama, as it were, wherein human beings are shown in their relation to Beings of the spiritual world, so that one can see how there stems from this relationship not only the working out of karma, but also the living out of karma during physical life on earth. To-day I should like to turn to a thought touched upon in that lecture. I said that the present period in human evolution confronts anyone who has the knowledge of Initiation-Science with problems of world-karma in the deepest sense of the words. And before proceeding to consider how knowledge of karma is acquired, we will study its world-historic aspects, which in the nature of things must closely concern the whole of civilised humanity at the present time.

Things are happening in the world to-day which stir even the everyday consciousness of man and the heart that is bound up with this everyday consciousness. A heavy cloud looms over the civilisation of Europe and from one point of view it is amazing to find what little willingness there is on the part of mankind in general to feel and realise what this cloud portends.

Think only of what is emerging as the result of views of life and of the world widely prevalent in humanity to-day. Look at what is being made of Christianity in the East of Europe! Information—not entirely to be discredited—has reached us that the works of Tolstoy are to be banned by the present Government of Soviet Russia with the object of keeping them out of the reach of future generations. Although such things do not always work out exactly as they are announced, we must not blind ourselves to the gravity of the present moment in world-history; we do well to listen to the warning which Initiation-Science would like to repeat day in and day out—that now is the time when the many petty concerns occupying men's minds ought to be silenced and the attention of numbers of souls directed to the great concerns of life. But in point of fact, interest in these great concerns is dwindling rather than increasing.

We see views of life and of the world arising to-day with a certain ‘creative’ force, although this actually takes effect in destruction; these views are the offspring of human passions and emotions, of an element in human nature working entirely in a Luciferic direction. It may truly be said that reality is denied and rejected by a large portion of humanity to-day. The essential nature of matter is not understood by materialistic thinkers. Matter can be understood only when the creative spirit within it is apprehended. Therefore anyone who denies the reality of the creative spirit within matter knows only a false image of matter and the consequent idolatry is a far greater menace than that of the primitive peoples who are said to represent civilisation in the stage of infancy. Fantastic ideas and conceptions of what is, after all, unreality, hold sway in mankind.—This is one side of the picture.

Such things have of course occurred in various forms throughout human history. But spiritual science teaches us to recognise their connections in the whole World-Order, and to realise with what earnestness they must be studied.

And so we must be mindful of what is brought into existence when certain social orders are created under the influence of materialistic, fantastic ideas—ideas which have sprung entirely from human aberrations, have nothing to do with reality and could never have originated elsewhere than in man himself.

Having turned our minds to a phenomenon of history which has, however, immediate bearing upon our present age, let us consider occurrences in elemental nature like those mentioned in the last lecture, when groups of human beings are suddenly snatched away from earthly existence as the result of an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or the like. The news reaches us of a catastrophe of this kind and we hear that a large number of people have met their death or suffered grave disablement.—Again, there are events for which the devices of civilisation are responsible. We hear, for example, of a railway accident, where again the karmic threads of life are abruptly severed, but in this case as the result of man-made institutions.

If we are earnest in our study of karma, we must ask, on the one hand: What form does karma take in the case of adherents of a social order originating from sheer emotionalism, sheer fantasy in man himself and devoid of objective reality? And on the other, we must ask: What form does karma take when the thread of life is suddenly severed by a catastrophe of nature or one that is the outcome of civilisation?

Here is one of the points where Initiation-Science enters deeply into man's life of feeling and perception. Ordinary, everyday consciousness does not ask about the consequences of such happenings in the successive earthly lives of men. In the case of catastrophes of civilisation particularly, the question of human destiny in the wider sense is never asked. The destiny of a man who has been the victim of such a catastrophe is regarded by ordinary consciousness as finished and done with.

Initiation-Science observes on the one side what takes place in the foreground of earth life and, in the background, the deeds of gods in connection with the souls of men. And it is what proceeds in the background that provides Initiation-Science with a criterion for assessing earthly life. For as we shall see in our further studies of karma, a great deal has to be moulded, recast in one way or another in earthly existence in order that the divine things behind it may take effect in the lives of men—in accordance with the will of the gods.

For on looking into the background we perceive the karma that is woven between one human soul and another during the life between death and rebirth; we perceive how human souls work together with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. We see, too, the activities of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. Within the living organism of gods behind the organism of the earth we perceive the justification for this intervention by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; we realise that Lucifer and Ahriman play an essential part in the deeper, spiritual ordering of the world. But although this necessity becomes evident to us, we must nevertheless often stand aghast at the way in which Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences penetrate into the earthly world.

When our vision extends beyond the earthly into the spiritual world, many things must be viewed in the light of their inter-connections, which need not necessarily be the case in ordinary consciousness. If in times when Initiation Science was regarded with the reverence that must prevail once again—if in those ancient times the question arose whether a person was in truth an Initiate, men knew the right attitude with which such a question must be approached. And when a man who took life earnestly met another like him and their opinions differed as to whether a third person was an Initiate, the question was wont to be put to the one who felt uncertain: “Have you looked into his eyes?” For in those olden times, when clairvoyance was a natural gift in civilisation all over the earth, Initiates were recognised by the deep, earnest look in their eyes.—And something similar will come again. Without losing sight of the humour of life, men must again be mindful of its gravity.

Many of these lessons can be learned from what is happening in our present time and has indeed happened in some form through all ages, but they stand before humanity now as a great and mighty riddle ... And now let us think of the facts connected with a certain kind of event.

Numbers of human beings have perished in some region where a terrible earthquake has taken place. Contemplating the event in the light of spiritual science, it cannot be said that the thread of karma belonging to the present earthly lives of these men has in every case come to an end. Think of the thread of karma in those who have met their death: in the case of the aged, whose earthly karma in this incarnation would soon have been completed, the thread of life will be shortened possibly only by months or at most by a few years. Younger people in the prime of life who have thought a great deal about what they wanted to achieve in the time ahead of them for themselves, for their family, or for a wider circle of humanity, are robbed of many years of activity. Children in process of education as a prelude to manhood are torn away from earthly existence together with the elderly and aged. Babies just weaned or still unweaned are snatched away, together with the old and the young.

The great riddle is this: How does karma work in an event of this kind?

And now think of the difference between such an event in elemental nature and an event that is due, fundamentally, to civilisation, for example, a terrible railway accident. There is obviously a difference, a difference that becomes significant and fundamental when studied from the point of view of karma.

As a rule it will be found that when human beings perish together, let us say in an earthquake, there is some kind of karmic connection between them all—just as men who live in a particular district are, broadly speaking, karmically connected or at any rate have some link with one another. These people have a certain common destiny into which they have been impelled through having descended from prenatal existence to a particular locality on the earth, and with this common destiny they are led along their path to the point where the threads of their lives are severed.

On the other hand, in the case of a railway accident it will generally be found that only a few of the victims are karmically connected with one another. What, then, is their situation? As a rule they are human beings between whom there is no definite link, who are brought together without any such connection as invariably exists between victims of a particular earthquake. The victims of a railway accident may be said to have been brought together at a certain spot by destiny. Do we not see karma working quite differently in these two cases?

With the help of Initiation-Science, let us think of a catastrophe like that of a devastating earthquake. We are concerned there with human beings whose karma at birth did not entail the severance of the thread of earthly life by the time the catastrophe occurred. As the result of this event they were torn as it were out of their karma.

How could this be? It is the decree of the gods that karma shall come to fulfilment, shall be lived out to the full. Now upheavals in nature—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, great floods and the like—are not an integral part of the onflowing evolution of the earth; something extraneous—although still under the sway of natural laws—intervenes here in the evolutionary process, something that in times when man was not subject to birth and death as we know them to-day was both necessary and propitious for evolution. To form a clear conception of what this means, we must turn our minds to the epoch of the Old Moon.

In the epoch of the Old Moon which preceded that of the Earth, man was not led into physical existence by a transition as abrupt as birth or conception, nor led out of physical existence by a transition as abrupt as death. The transition in each case was much gentler; it was a transformation, a metamorphosis, rather than a sudden change. The Moon-man was not as densely material as the man of to-day; nor in the spiritual world was he as bereft of spirit as he is to-day.

The beings inhabitating the Old Moon were subject to quite different natural laws, laws under which this Moon-life was involved in constant movement; it was inwardly mobile, in ceaseless, surging flow. This surging, flowing life has become rigid—but only partially so—in the present Moon, our companion in the universe. The rigidification in the Moon—it has really a kind of hornlike quality—points to the past inner mobility of the Moon which takes effect in the earth when elemental catastrophes of nature occur of the kind of which I have been speaking. The ordinary natural laws of the earth are not operating, but the Old Moon is beginning to stir, to rumble in the earth. The Moon revolving out yonder in the universe has the constitution that is proper for it to-day, but after its separation from the earth, forces were left behind; and it is these Moon-forces that rumble and stir in the earth when nature-catastrophes occur.

As you will remember, I told you that the Beings who were once the great primeval Teachers of humanity are connected with man's karma; it was they who brought the ancient wisdom to mankind. They did not live on the earth in physical bodies but in etheric bodies, and at a certain point of time they departed from the earth to establish their abode in the Moon; and there we encounter them during the first phase of our life between death and a new birth. These are the Beings who engrave a record of men's karma into the cosmic ether, in an unerring script of soul-and-spirit.

But in the cosmos a pledge has been taken—if I may put it so—a pledge that use shall be made not only of the relations between the present Moon and the earth but also of the Moon-forces that were left behind and are still astir within the earth. And it is here that the Ahrimanic powers can step in and take hold of the threads of human life. It can actually be seen how from the depths of the earth the Ahrimanic powers present a countenance of gloating satisfaction when such catastrophes of nature befall.

With the help of Initiation-Science we can perceive how up to the moment when the thread of life is abruptly severed, part of the karma of one who perishes in a catastrophe of this kind has been absolved. According to whether death occurred in old age, adult life or babyhood, a longer or shorter portion of life would have remained to him; life might have continued until the completion of its course, but as things are, the events that would otherwise have been spread across this whole span lay their grip in a single, sudden moment upon the physical organisation.

Think of this situation, my dear friends.—Suppose such a catastrophe befalls a man at the age of thirty. If he had not been a victim of the catastrophe he might, in accordance with his karma, have reached the age of sixty-five, living through countless experiences which now are no more than possibilities. But everything is contained in his karma, in the make-up of his etheric and astral bodies and of his ego-organisation. And what would have been happening up to the sixty-fifth year of life? After the culmination of the upbuilding process, the organism would have been involved in a process of slow and steady decline; a subtle, gradual decline would have been taking place until the sixty-fifth year of life. This steady decline which, in the slow tempo corresponding to such a lengthy period, would have lasted for at least thirty-five years, is fulfilled in a single moment, concentrated as it were into a single moment. Such a thing can happen to the physical body but not to the etheric body, the astral body or the ego-organisation.

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When the circumstances are as described here, a man enters the spiritual world in quite another way than would have been the case had his karma been lived out to the full. Something is brought into the spiritual world that would otherwise not have been there: an etheric body, an astral body and an ego-organisation which might still have been living on earth. Instead of remaining in earthly existence they are taken into the spiritual world. What was destined for earthly existence is carried into the spiritual world.

And so we see an earthly element streaming into the spiritual world from all such nature-catastrophes.

Such is the situation of human beings who have been turned aside in this way from the karmic course of their life by the working of the Ahrimanic powers; such is their situation when they arrive in the spiritual world.

And now we must ask ourselves a question—for if we take spiritual science earnestly we must learn to put questions from the standpoint of the spiritual world and of the spiritual Beings in that world, just as with our ordinary consciousness we put questions relating to the physical world and its beings. We must ask the question: How do the Beings of the three Hierarchies respond when human beings ascend to their realm bearing with them an earthly element, bearing this earthly element into the spiritual world?

It then becomes the task of these spiritual Beings to re-integrate into the World-Order what seems to have been turned to evil, to run counter to the World-Order. The gods have now to reckon with what confronts them in these circumstances, in order that they may transmute the Ahrimanic evil into a higher good.

This leads to the question: What is the situation within the World-Order of those human beings who are destined after their death to pass into the spiritual world in this way? The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are confronted with a particular state of affairs and have to say to themselves: In the previous incarnation of this human being and through the whole sequence of preceding lives, a world of facts was prepared, a world of experiences belonging, properly speaking, to the incarnation that has just ended. But only the first part of what was thus prepared has been able to come to expression; the second part has remained without fulfilment. Hence there is part of a life which ought, in reality, to correspond in respect of karma, to all that went before. There ought to be complete correspondence, but there is not ... there is only a part which corresponds to some extent with the previous incarnation, but not with the whole of it.

As they survey this previous earthly life the gods must say: There is something that has not taken effect as it should have done. Causes are there which have not been utilised or turned to account.—And now the gods can take hold of these unutilised causes, guide them to the human being and so strengthen him inwardly for his next earthly life. The power of what existed as a cause in a previous incarnation can manifest all the more forcefully in the incarnation following the present one. If such a catastrophe had not befallen the man in question he might have appeared again in the world in his next incarnation with inferior faculties or very possibly with faculties of quite a different kind. A change has been wrought in him to the end that karma may be adjusted. But he also comes into the world endowed with special qualities; his astral body is reinforced, as it were, because unutilised causative forces are membered into it.

Will you then still be astonished by the legend of a philosopher who threw himself deliberately into the crater of a volcano? What can have been the motive of such a resolve on the part of one who was initiated into the secrets of world-existence? The motive could only have been a conscious intention to achieve through the agency of human will something that could otherwise have been achieved only through the agency of elemental nature: the sudden sweeping away of a process that would otherwise have worked itself to an end by slow degrees.

What is thus told of a philosopher may be due to a resolve to appear in the world in the next incarnation endowed with special powers. The world takes on a very different aspect when we enter into the deep problems of karma!

In principle, therefore, this is how things are in the case of nature-catastrophes. Let us think now of a catastrophe due to the institutions of civilisation, where human beings between whom there are no strong karmic links are as it were massed together by the Ahrimanic powers to suffer common destruction.

The situation here is altogether different. Again the Ahrimanic powers are in action; now, however, the human beings concerned are not, to begin with, grouped together by karmic ties, but for all that are led together. The consequences here are essentially different from those of nature-catastrophes.

A nature-catastrophe evokes in a man whom it befalls a vivid, intensified remembrance of what lies in his karma as causation. For when the human being passes through the gate of death he is made mindful of everything that is contained in his karma. And remembrance of karma is intensified, made more vivid in the soul as the result of a fatal nature-catastrophe.

On the other hand a railway accident, any catastrophe due to the institution of civilisation, brings about oblivion of karma. But because of this oblivion a man becomes highly sensitive to the new impressions coming to him in the spiritual world after death. And the result is that such a man is impelled to ask himself: What is to become of the unexhausted karma I bear within me?

Whereas in the case of a nature-catastrophe the intellectual qualities especially are intensified in the astral body of the victim, a catastrophe of civilisation leads to a strengthening, an enhancement of the will.

But now we will turn from these catastrophes and think of a state of affairs arising from fanatical emotionalism in a group of human beings, where the sole source of the impulses is man himself, where he lives in sheer unreality and works, moreover, as a destructive force. Let us think of a structure of civilisation as fantastically distorted as that presented to us to-day in the East of Europe, and ask ourselves what happens when the men who help to produce such conditions pass through the gate of death.

Here too—as in the case of the other catastrophes something is carried into the spiritual world, namely a Luciferic element which begets darkness and devastation.

From catastrophes of nature and of civilisation it is, in the last resort, light that is carried from the physical into the spiritual world. But from aberrations and misguided impulses in cultural life, darkness is brought into the spiritual world. When men pass into that world through the gate of death they must make their way as it were through a dark, dense cloud. For the light which Lucifer kindled in human emotions on earth becomes dense darkness in the spiritual world when man enters it after death. And in this case, forces and passions engendered entirely by man himself and are concerns of his subjective life, are carried into the spiritual world.

These are forces which through Ahriman's power can be changed in the spiritual world in a way that enables use to be made of the Moon-elements still present in the earth. Lucifer is here stretching out a helping hand to Ahriman.

What is carried up into the spiritual world through impulses in civilisation arising from sheer emotionalism, from blind, misguided earthly consciousness—this, in different guise, is what bursts from the earth's interior in the form of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and the like.

With this knowledge as a background we are led to the question of the karma of the earth and its peoples, the karma of individuals too, inasmuch as the karma of individuals is bound up with that of the peoples and of the earth itself. In putting the question we shall seek for the seeds in Luciferic activities at work in some region where ancient culture is cast on the rubbish-heap by the working of human emotions, where wild, misguided instincts set out to create something new but succeed in spreading only destruction. And we must ask ourselves: Where shall we see the forces seething in the wild passions of men burst forth one day on the earth, in flames or convulsive upheavals of the ground beneath us?

In respect of many an event of elemental nature, Initiation-Science may, nay must, put the question: When and where was this event set in train? And the answer is that it derives from the horrors and atrocities of enmity and warfare through the course of the development of civilisation. There you have the connection.—These happenings lie in the background of existence. In the light of such knowledge, events do not appear in isolation but are seen in their great cosmic setting. How do they find their place in the destinies of men? As I said already, of a truth the gods are there, gods who are linked with the evolution of mankind, and it is their unceasing task to transform these happenings into what is propitious and beneficial for human destiny.

In the interworking between the earthly and spiritual worlds the destinies of men are continually being wrenched from the pinions of Lucifer and the claws of Ahriman, for verily the gods are good! The unrighteousness originating from the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman behind the scenes of existence is led by the good gods into the path of righteousness again and the karmic connection is finally lawful and good.

Our gaze, which must of course be full of understanding for human karma, is now deflected from the destiny of men to the destiny of gods. For when we contemplate the horrors of war, the guilt and ugliness of war in their connection with death-dealing elemental catastrophes, we are watching the battle waged by the good gods against the evil gods—in two directions evil. We gaze beyond the life of men into the life of gods, beholding the life of gods as the background of human life. We watch this life of gods—not with dry, theoretical thoughts, but with our hearts, with deep, inner participation; we watch it in its connection with the individual karma of men on earth because we see human destiny inwoven with the destiny of gods.

When we contemplate these things, the world lying behind human life has for the first time drawn really near to us. For something is then revealed which cannot but stir the very fibres of our hearts. It becomes clear to us that the destiny of men lies embedded in the destiny of the gods, and that in a certain sense the gods yearn for what they have to take in hand for men while their own battle is being waged. And in making such conceptions our own we are led again to what is brought into the world through the Mysteries—as it was brought, too, in the days of the old clairvoyance.

One who had attained Initiation in the ancient Mysteries told how he was led, to begin with, into the world of the Elements; there he beheld his inmost being, with its moral attributes, turn outwards. But then—and he spoke of this experience in words of power and solemnity—he came to know the nether gods and the upper gods, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic gods. The good gods, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic gods. The good gods move in the field of equilibrium. And as the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came to know what must be known again by the pupil in our modern age, he was initiated, stage by stage, into the very depths of existence. When this is understood and its implications realised, the strange, yet all-illuminating conception is reached: To what end does calamity exist in the world? To the end that the gods may transmute it into well-being. Ordinary well-being does not lead into the life of worlds. Well-being that springs from calamities befalling man along his path through the physical world of sense—this alone can lead into the depths of existence.

In the study of karma we must never call theoretical concepts alone to our aid; we must call upon the whole man. For knowledge of karma can be acquired only when the heart, the feelings and the will participate. If, however, knowledge of karma is acquired in this, the right way, human life will be deepened and due importance attached to the relationships and circumstances by which human beings are led together.

There will, of course, be moments when karma weighs heavily upon a man who does not lead a superficial life. But all such moments are balanced out by others when karma lends him wings on which his soul can soar out of the earthly realm into the realm of the gods. In our inmost being we must feel the reality of the connection between the divine world and the human world if we are to speak of karma in the right and true way.

What we are of ourselves, what is in us in a single earthly life passes away along the path from death to a new birth. What remains is that wherein the gods, that is to say the Beings of the Hierarchies, hold us by the hand. And no one will be able to cultivate the right attitude to the knowledge of karma who does not perceive in karma the helping hand of the gods.

Thus you must try, my dear friends, to grasp the knowledge of karma in such a way that it calls up the feeling: If I am to approach the holy ground of the spirit where something concerning karma can reveal itself to me, I must take the hand of the gods.

Thus real, thus immediate our experiences must become, if we are to win our way to true knowledge of the spiritual world—which is at the same time knowledge of karma.

It is an oft-repeated and a justifiable opinion, with regard to all the realms of human spiritual life, that man's greatest riddle here in our physical life is man himself. And we may truly say that a large part of our scientific activity, of our reflection, and of much besides in man's life of thought, is applied to the solving of this human riddle, to discerning a little wherein the essence of human nature consists. Natural science and spiritual science try to solve from different sides this great riddle comprised in the word Man. In the main, all the more profound natural scientific research seeks to attain its final goal by bringing together all the processes of nature, and so forth, in order to comprehend the external laws. And all spiritual science seeks the sources of existence for the sake of comprehending, of fathoming, man's being and destiny. If then, on the one hand, it is unquestioned that in general man's greatest riddle is man himself, we may say that in relation to life this expression may have a still deeper significance, in that it is necessary on the other hand to emphasize what each of us feels upon meeting another person: namely, that fundamentally each single person is in turn an enigma for others and for himself because of his special nature and being. Ordinarily, when we speak of this human enigma, we have in mind man in general, man without distinction regarding this or that individuality; and certainly many problems appear for us when we wish to understand human nature in general. But today we have not to do with the general riddles of existence, but rather with that enigma, not less significant for life, which each person we meet presents to us. For how endlessly varied are human beings in their deepest individual essence!

When we survey human life we shall have to be especially attentive to this riddle which each person presents, for our entire social life, our relation of man to man, must depend more upon how in individual cases we are able to approach with our feeling, with our sensibility, rather than merely with our intelligence, that individual human enigma which stands before us so often each day, with which we have to deal so often. How difficult it is regarding the people we meet to come to a clear knowledge of the various sides of their nature, and how much depends in life upon our coming to such clear knowledge regarding those people with whom we come in touch. We can of course only approach quite gradually the solution of the whole riddle of the human individual, of which each person presents a special phase, for there is a great gap between what is called human nature in general and that which confronts us in each human individual.

Spiritual science, or as we call it more recently, Anthroposophy, will have a special task precisely regarding this individual enigma—man. Not only must it give us information about what man is in general, but it must be, as you know, a knowledge which flows directly into our daily life, into all our sensibilities and feelings. Since our feelings and sensibilities are unfolded in the most beautiful way in our attitude toward our fellow men, the fruit of spiritual science, of spiritual scientific knowledge, will be revealed the most beautifully in the view we take of our fellow men because of this knowledge.

When in life a person stands before us, we must always, in the sense of this spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, take into consideration that what we perceive outwardly of the person is only one part, only one member, of the human being. To be sure, an outer material view of man regards as the whole man what this outer perception and the intellect connected with it are able to give us. Spiritual science shows us, however, that the human being is something very, very complicated. And often, when one goes more deeply into this complexity of human nature, the individual is then also seen in the right light. Spiritual science has the task of showing us what the innermost kernel of the human being is; what we can see with the eyes and grasp with the hands is only the outer expression, the outer shell. And we may hope to come to an understanding of the external also if we are able to penetrate into the spiritual inner part.

In the great gap between what we may call human nature in general and what confronts us in each individual, we see nevertheless many homogeneous characteristics in whole human groups. To these belong those human qualities which today form the subject of our consideration, and which we usually call the temperament. We need only utter the word ‘temperament’ to see that there are as many riddles as men. Within the basic types, the basic colorings, we have such a multiplicity and variety among individuals that we can indeed say that the real enigma, of existence is expressed in the peculiar basic disposition of the human being which we call temperament. And when the riddles intervene directly in practical life, the basic coloring of the human being plays a role. When a person stands before us, we feel that we are confronted by something of this basic disposition. Therefore it is to be hoped that spiritual science is able to give also the necessary information about the nature of the temperaments. For though we must admit that the temperaments spring from within, they nevertheless express themselves in the whole external appearance of the individual. By means of an external observation of nature, however, the riddle of man is not to be solved; we can approach the characteristic coloring of the human being only when we learn what spiritual science has to say about him.

It is of course true that each person confronts us with his own temperament, but we can still distinguish certain groups of temperaments. We speak chiefly of four types, as you know: the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic temperament. And even though this classification is not entirely correct in so far as we apply it to individuals—in individuals the temperaments are mixed in the most diverse way, so we can only say that one temperament or another predominates in certain traits—still we shall in general classify people in four groups according to their temperaments.

The fact that the temperament is revealed on the one side as something which inclines toward the individual, which makes people different, and on the other side joins them again to groups, proves to us that the temperament must on the one side have something to do with the innermost essence of the human being, and on the other must belong to universal human nature. Man's temperament, then, is something which points in two directions; and therefore it will be necessary, if we wish to solve the mystery, to ask on the one hand: In how far does the temperament point to what belongs to universal human nature? and then again on the other: How does it point to the essential kernel, to the actual inner being of the individual?

If we put the question, it is natural that spiritual science seems called upon to give enlightenment, for spiritual science must lead us to the innermost essential kernel of the human being. As he confronts us on earth, he appears to be placed in a universality, and again on the other side he appears as an independent entity. In the light of spiritual science man stands within two life streams which meet when he enters earth existence. And here we are at the focal point of the consideration of human nature according to the methods of spiritual science. We learn that we have in the human being, first of all, that which places him in his line of heredity. The one stream leads us from the individual man back to his parents, grandparents, and further ancestors. He shows the characteristics inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and all preceding ancestors farther and farther back. And these attributes he transmits again to his descendants. That which flows down from ancestors to the individual man we designate in life and in science as inherited attributes and characteristics. A man is placed in this way within what we may call the line of heredity; and it is known that an individual bears within him, even in the very kernel of his being, qualities which we must certainly trace back to heredity. Very much about an individual is explicable if we know his ancestry, so to speak. How deeply true are the words uttered with regard to his own personality by Goethe, who had such a deep knowledge of the soul:

My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my solemn bearing,
From mother comes my gayety
And my delight in yarning.

Here we see how this great knower of human nature has to point even to moral qualities when he wishes to refer to inherited characteristics. Everything we find as transmitted from ancestors to descendants interprets for us the individual person in a certain respect, but only in a certain respect; for what he has inherited from his ancestors gives us only one side of the human being. Of course the present-day materialistic conception would like to seek in the line of ancestry for everything under the sun, would like even to trace back a man's spiritual being (his spiritual qualities) to ancestry; and it never wearies of declaring that even a man's qualities of genius are explicable if we find signs, indications, of such characteristics in this or that ancestor. Those who hold such a view would like to compile the human personality, so to speak, from what is found scattered among the ancestors. Anyone who penetrates more deeply into human nature will of course be struck by the fact that beside these inherited attributes, in each man something confronts us which we cannot characterize otherwise than by saying: That is his very own; we cannot say, as a result of close observation, that it is transmitted from this or that ancestor. Spiritual science comes in here and tells us what it has to say about it. Today we are able to present only sketchily what is involved in these questions, to indicate only sketchily the findings of spiritual science.

Spiritual science tells us: Certainly it is true that the human being is placed in the stream which we may call the stream of heredity, the stream of inherited attributes. Besides that, however, something else appears in an individual, namely, the innermost spiritual kernel of his being. In this are united what the individual brings with him from the spiritual world and what the father and mother, the ancestors, are able to give to him. With that which flows down in the stream of the generations is united something else which has its origin, not in the immediate ancestors, the parents, and not in the grandparents, but which comes from quite other realms, something which passes from one existence to another. On the one side we may say: A man has this or that from his ancestors. But if we watch an individual develop from childhood on, we see how from the center of his nature something evolves which is the fruit of foregoing lives, something he never can have inherited from his ancestors.

What we see in the individual, when we penetrate to the depths of his soul, we can only explain to ourselves when we know a great comprehensive law, which is really only the consequence of many natural laws. It is the law of repeated earth lives, so greatly tabooed at the present time. This law of re-embodiment, the succession of earth lives, is only a specific case of a general cosmic law.

It will not appear so paradoxical to us when we think the matter over. Let us observe a lifeless mineral, a rock crystal. It has a regular form. If it is destroyed, nothing of its form remains which could pass over to other rock crystals. The new rock crystal receives nothing of its form. Now if we rise from the world of minerals to the world of plants, it becomes clear to us that a plant cannot originate according to the same law as a rock crystal. A plant can originate only when it is derived from the parent plant. Here the form is maintained and passes over to the other entity. If we rise to the animal world, we find that a development of species takes place. We see that the 19th century considered this discovery of the development of the species as among its greatest results. Not only does one form proceed from another, but each animal in the body of the mother repeats the earlier forms, the lower evolutionary phases of his ancestors. Among the animals we have a rising gradation of species. Among human beings, however, we have not only a gradation of species, a development of kinds, but we have a development of the individual. What a man acquires in the course of his life through education, through experience, is just as little lost as the animal's succession of ancestors.

A time will come when a man's essential core is traced back to a previous existence. It will be recognized that the human being is a fruit of an earlier existence. This law will have a peculiar destiny in the world, a destiny similar to that of another law. The opposition against which this teaching has to assert itself will be overcome, just as the opinion of the scientists of earlier centuries was overcome: that the living can originate from the lifeless. Even into the 17th century the learned and the unlearned had no doubt whatever that from ordinary lifeless things not only lower animals could be evolved, but that earthworms, even fish, could originate from ordinary river slime. The first who declared energetically that the living can originate only from the living was the great Italian natural scientist, Francesco Redi (1627 to 1697), who showed that the living derives only from the living. That is a law which is only the forerunner of another: namely, that the soul-spiritual derives from the soul-spiritual. On account of this teaching he was attacked, and only with difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today burning is no longer the custom; but anyone who appears with a new truth today, for instance, anyone who wishes to trace back the soul-spiritual element to the soul-spiritual, would not be burned, to be sure, but would be looked upon as a fool. A time will come when it will be considered nonsense to think that a man lives only once, that there is not something permanent which unites itself with his inherited characteristics.

Spiritual science shows how that which is our own nature unites with what is given to us by heredity. That is the other stream into which the individual is placed, the stream with which the present civilization does not wish to have anything to do. Spiritual science leads us to the great facts of so-called re-embodiment, of reincarnation, and of karma. It shows us that we have to take into consideration the innermost essential kernel of man as that which descends from the spiritual world and unites with something which is given by the line of heredity, unites with what it is possible for the father and mother to give to the individual. For the spiritual scientist that which originates from the line of heredity envelops this essential kernel with outer sheaths. And as we must go back to father and mother and other ancestors for what we see in the physical man as form and stature, and so forth, for the characteristics which belong to his outer being, so we must go back to something entirely different, to an earlier life, if we wish to comprehend a man's innermost being; perhaps far, far back, beyond all hereditary transmission, we may have to seek the human being's spiritual kernel which has existed for thousands of years, and which during these thousands of years has entered again and again into existence, again and again has led an earth-life, and now in the present existence has united itself again to what it is possible for father and mother to give. Every single human being, when he enters into physical life, has a succession of lives behind him. And this has nothing to do with what belongs to the line of heredity. We should have to go back more than centuries if we wished to investigate what was his former life when he passed through the gate of death. After he has passed through the gate of death he lives in other forms of existence in the spiritual world. And when again the time comes to experience a life in the physical world, he seeks his parents. Thus we must go back to the spirit of man and his earlier incarnations, if we wish to explain what in him confronts us now as the soul-spiritual part. We must go back to his earlier incarnations, to what he acquired in course of them. We have to consider how he lived at that time, what he brought with him, as the causes of what the individual possesses today in the new life as tendencies, dispositions, abilities for this or that. For each person brings with him from his former life certain qualities of his life. Certain qualities and his destiny he brings with him to a certain degree. According as he has performed this or that deed, he calls forth the reaction, and feels himself thus to be surrounded by the new life. So he brings with him from earlier incarnations the inner kernel of his being and envelops it with what is given him by heredity.

Certainly this one thing should be mentioned, because it is important, since actually our present time has little inclination to recognize this inner kernel of being, or to look upon the idea of reincarnation as anything but a fantastic thought. It is considered today to be poor logic, and we shall hear materialistic thinkers objecting over and over again that what is in man arises entirely through heredity. Just look at the ancestors, he says, and you will discover that this or that trait, this or that peculiarity, existed in some ancestor, that all the individual traits and qualities can be explained by tracing them in the ancestors. The spiritual scientist can also point to that fact, and he has done so. For example, in a musical family musical talent is inherited, etc. That is all supposed to support the theory of heredity. Indeed, the law is expressed point blank, that seldom does genius appear at the beginning of a generation; genius stands at the end of a line of heredity. And that is supposed to be a proof that genius is inherited. Here one proceeds from the standpoint that some person has a definite characteristic—he is a genius. Someone traces back the peculiar abilities of the genius, seeks in the past among his ancestors, finds in some ancestor signs of a similar characteristic, picks out something here and there, finds this quality in one, that in another, and then shows how they finally flowed together in the genius who appeared at the end of the generation; and he infers from it that genius is transmitted. For anyone whose thinking is direct and logical that could at best prove the opposite. If finding qualities of genius among the ancestors proves anything, what does it prove? Surely nothing else than that man's essential being is able to express itself in life according to the instrument of the body. It proves nothing more than that a man comes out wet if he falls into the water. Really it is no more intelligent than if some one wishes to call our special attention to the fact that if a man falls into the water he gets wet. It is only natural that he takes up something of the element into which he is placed. Surely it is quite self-evident that the qualities of the ancestors would be carried by that which has flowed down through the line of heredity, and has finally been given through father and mother to the particular human being who has descended from the spiritual world. The individual clothes himself in the sheaths which are given to him by his ancestors. What is intended to be presented as proof of heredity could much better be looked upon as proof that it is not heredity. For if genius were inherited, it would have to appear at the beginning of the generations and not stand at the end of a line of heredity. If anyone were to show that a genius has sons and grandchildren to whom the qualities of genius are transmitted, then he would be able to prove that genius is inherited; but that is just not the case. It is limping logic which wishes to trace back man's spiritual qualities to the succession of ancestors. We must trace back spiritual qualities to that which a man has brought with him from his earlier incarnations.

If now we consider the one stream, that which lives in the line of heredity, we find that there the individual is drawn into a stream of existence through which he gets certain qualities: We have before us some one possessing the qualities of his family, his people, his race. The various children of the same parents have characteristics conditioned in this way. If we consider the true individual nature of a human being, we must say that the soul-spiritual essential kernel is born into the family, the people, the race; it envelops itself with what is given by the ancestors, but it brings with it purely individual characteristics. So we must ask ourselves: How is harmony established between a human essence which perhaps has acquired centuries earlier this or that quality and the outer covering with which it is now to envelop itself, and which bears the characteristics of family, people, race, and so forth? Is it possible for harmony to exist here? Is it not something in the highest sense individual which is thus brought into earth life, and is not the inherited part at variance with it? Thus the great question arises: How can that which has its origin in quite other worlds, which must seek father and mother for itself, unite with the physical body? How can it clothe itself with the physical attributes through which the human being is placed within the line of heredity?

We see then in a person confronting us the flowing together of two streams; of these two streams each human being is composed. In him we see on the one side what comes to him from his family, and on the other what has developed from the individual's innermost being; namely, a number of predispositions, characteristics, inner capacities and outer destiny. An agreement must be effected. We find that a man must adapt himself to this union, in accordance with his innermost being on the one side, and on the other in accordance with that which is brought to him from the line of heredity. We see how a man bears to a great degree the physiognomy of his ancestors; we could put him together, so to speak, from the sum of his various ancestors. Since at first the inner essential kernel has nothing to do with what is inherited, but must merely adapt itself to what is most suitable to it, we shall see that it is necessary for a certain mediation to exist for that which has lived perhaps for centuries in an entirely different world and is again transplanted into another world; the spirit being of man must have something here below to which it is related; there must be a bond, a connecting link, between the special individual human being and humanity in general, into which he is born through family, people, race.

Between these two, namely what we bring with us from our earlier life and what our family, ancestors and race imprint upon us, there is a mediation, something which bears more general characteristics, but at the same time is capable of being individualized. That which occupies this position between the line of heredity and the line which represents our individuality is expressed by the word TEMPERAMENT. In that which confronts us in the temperament of a person we have something in a certain way like a physiognomy of his innermost individuality. We understand thus how the individuality colors, by means of the qualities of temperament, the attributes inherited in the succession of generations. Temperament stands right in the middle between what we bring with us as individuals and what originates from the line of heredity. When the two streams unite, the one stream colors the other. They color each other reciprocally. Just as blue and yellow, let us say, unite in green, so do the two streams in man unite in what we call temperament. That which mediates between all inner characteristics which he brings with him from his earlier incarnation, on the one side, and on the other what the line of heredity brings to him, comes under the concept temperament. It now takes its place between the inherited characteristics and what he has absorbed into his inner essential being. It is as if upon its descent to earth this kernel of being were to envelop itself with a spiritual nuance of that which awaits it here below, so that in proportion as this kernel of being is able best to adapt itself to this covering for the human being, the kernel of being colors itself according to that into which it is born and to a quality which it brings with it. Here shine forth the soul qualities of man and his natural inherited attributes. Between the two is the temperament—between that by which a man is connected with his ancestors and that which he brings with him from his earlier incarnations. The temperament balances the eternal with the transitory.

This balancing occurs through the fact that what we have learned to call the members of human nature come into relation with one another in a quite definite way. We understand this in detail, however, only when we place before our mind's eye the complete human nature in the sense of spiritual science. Only from spiritual science is the mystery of the human temperament to be discovered.

This human being as he confronts us in life, formed by the flowing together of these two streams, we know as a four-membered being. So we shall be able to say when we consider the entire individual: This complete human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body or body of formative forces, the astral body, and the ego.

In that part of man perceptible to the outer senses, which is all that materialistic thought is willing to recognize, we have first, according to spiritual science, only a single member of the human being, the physical body, which man has in common with the mineral world. That part which is subject to physical laws, which man has in common with all environing outer nature, the sum of chemical and physical laws, we designate in spiritual science as the physical body.

Beyond this, however, we recognize higher super-sensible members of human nature which are as actual and essential as the outer physical body. As first super-sensible member, man has the etheric body, which becomes part of his organism and remains united with the physical body throughout the entire life; only at death does a separation of the two take place. Even this first super-sensible member of human nature—in spiritual science called the etheric or life body; we might also call it the glandular body—is no more visible to our outer eyes than are colors to those born blind. But it exists, actually and perceptibly exists, for that which Goethe calls the eyes of the spirit, and it is even more real than the outer physical body, for it is the builder, the moulder, of the physical body. During the entire time between birth and death this etheric or life body continuously combats the disintegration of the physical body. Any kind of mineral product of nature—a crystal, for example—is so constituted that it is permanently held together by its own forces, by the forces of its own substance. That is not the case with the physical body of a living being; here the physical forces work in such a way that they destroy the form of life, as we are able to observe after death, when the physical forces destroy the life-form. That this destruction does not occur during life, that the physical body does not conform to the physical and chemical forces and laws, is due to the fact that the etheric or life-body is ceaselessly combating these forces.

The third member of the human being we recognize in the bearer of all pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, instincts, impulses, passions, desires, and all that surges to and fro as sensations and ideas, even all concepts of what we designate as moral ideals, and so on. That we call the astral body. Do not take exception to this expression. We could also call it the “nerve-body.” Spiritual science sees in it something real, and knows indeed that this body of impulses and desires is not an effect of the physical body, but the cause of this body. It knows that the soul-spiritual part has built up for itself the physical body.

Thus we already have three members of the human being, and as man's highest member we recognize that by means of which he towers above all other beings, by means of which he is the crown of earth's creation: namely, the bearer of the human ego, which gives him in such a mysterious, but also in such a manifest way, the power of self-consciousness.

Man has the physical body in common with his entire visible environment, the etheric body in common with the plants and animals, the astral body with the animals. The fourth member, however, the ego, he has for himself alone; and by means of it he towers above the other visible creatures. We recognize this fourth member as the ego-bearer, as that in human nature by means of which man is able to say “I” to himself, to come to independence.

Now what we see physically, and what the intellect which is bound to the physical senses can know, is only an expression of these four members of the human being. Thus, the expression of the ego, of the actual ego-bearer, is the blood in its circulation. This “quite special fluid” is the expression of the ego. The physical sense expression of the astral body in man is, for example, among other things, the nervous system. The expression of the etheric body, or a part of this expression, is the glandular system; and the physical body expresses itself in the sense organs.

These four members confront us in the human being. So we shall be able to say, when we observe the complete human being, that he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. That which is primarily physical body, which the human being carries in such a way that it is visible to physical eyes, clearly bears, first of all, when viewed from without, the marks of heredity. Also those characteristics which live in man's etheric body, in that fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, are in the line of heredity. Then we come to his astral body, which in its characteristics is much more closely bound to the essential kernel of the human being. If we turn to this innermost kernel, to the actual ego, we find what passes from incarnation to incarnation, and appears as an inner mediator, which rays forth its essential qualities.

Now in the whole human nature all the separate members work into each other; they act reciprocally. Because two streams flow together in man when he enters the physical world, there arises a varied mixture of man's four members, and one, so to speak, gets the mastery over the others, and impresses its color upon them. Now according as one or another of these members comes especially into prominence, the individual confronts us with this or that temperament. The particular coloring of human nature, what we call the actual shade of the temperament, depends upon whether the forces, the different means of power, of one member or of another predominate, have a preponderance over the others. Man's eternal being, that which goes from incarnation to incarnation, so expresses itself in each new embodiment that it calls forth a certain reciprocal action among the four members of human nature: ego, astral body, etheric body and physical body; and from the interaction of these four members arises the nuance of human nature which we characterize as temperament.

When the essential being has tinged the physical and etheric bodies, that which arises because of the coloring thus given will act upon each of the other members; so that the way an individual appears to us with his characteristics depends upon whether the inner kernel acts more strongly upon the physical body, or whether the physical body acts more strongly upon it. According to his nature the human being is able to influence one of the four members, and through the reaction upon the other members the temperament originates. The human essential kernel, when it comes into re-embodiment, is able through this peculiarity to introduce into one or another of its members a certain surplus of activity. Thus it can give to the ego a certain surplus strength; or again, the individual can influence his other members because of having had certain experiences in his former life.

When the ego of the individual has become so strong through its destiny that its forces are noticeably dominant in the fourfold human nature, and it dominates the other members, then the choleric temperament results. If the person is especially subject to the influence of the forces of the astral body, then we attribute to him a sanguine temperament. If the etheric or life-body acts excessively upon the other members, and especially impresses its nature upon the person, the phlegmatic temperament arises. And when the physical body with its laws is especially predominant in the human nature, so that the spiritual essence of being is not able to overcome a certain hardness in the physical body, then we have to do with a melancholic temperament. Just as the eternal and the transitory intermingle, so does the relation of the members to one another appear.

I have already told you how the four members express themselves outwardly in the physical body. Thus, a large part of the physical body is the direct expression of the physical life principle of man. The physical body as such comes to expression only in the physical body; hence it is the physical body which gives the keynote in a melancholic.

We must regard the glandular system as the physical expression of the etheric body. The etheric body expresses itself physically in the glandular system. Hence in a phlegmatic person the glandular system gives the keynote in the physical body.

The nervous system and, of course, what occurs through it we must regard as the physical expression of the astral body. The astral body finds its physical expression in the nervous system; therefore in a sanguine person the nervous system gives the keynote to the physical body.

The blood in its circulation, the force of the pulsation of the blood, is the expression of the actual ego. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood, in the predominating activity of the blood; it shows itself especially in the fiery vehement blood. One must try to penetrate more subtly into the connection which exists between the ego and the other members of the human being. Suppose, for example, that the ego exerts a peculiar force in the life of sensations, ideas, and the nervous system; suppose that in the case of a certain person everything arises from his ego, everything that he feels he feels strongly, because his ego is strong—we call that the choleric temperament. That which has received its character from the ego will make itself felt as the predominating quality. Hence, in a choleric the blood system is predominant.

The choleric temperament will show itself as active in a strongly pulsating blood; in this the element of force in the individual makes its appearance, in the fact that he has a special influence upon his blood. In such a person, in whom spiritually the ego, physically the blood, is particularly active, we see the innermost force vigorously keeping the organization fit. And as he thus confronts the outer world, the force of his ego will wish to make itself felt. That is the effect of this ego. By reason of this, the choleric appears as one who wishes to assert his ego in all circumstances. All the aggressiveness of the choleric, everything connected with his strong will-nature, may be ascribed to the circulation of the blood.

When the astral body predominates in an individual, the physical expression will lie in the functions of the nervous system, that instrument of the rising and falling waves of sensation; and that which the astral body accomplishes is the life of thoughts, of images, so that the person who is gifted with the sanguine temperament will have the predisposition to live in the surging sensations and feelings and in the images of his life of ideas.

We must understand clearly the relation of the astral body to the ego. The astral body functions between the nervous system and the blood system. So it is perfectly clear what this relation is. If only the sanguine temperament were present, if only the nervous system were active, being quite especially prominent as the expression of the astral body, then the person would have a life of shifting images and ideas; in this way a chaos of images would come and go. He would be given over to all the restless flux from sensation to sensation, from image to image, from idea to idea. Something of that sort appears if the astral body predominates, that is, in a sanguine person, who in a certain sense is given over to the tide of sensations, images, etc., since in him the astral body and the nervous system predominate. It is the forces of the ego which prevent the images from darting about in a fantastic way. Only because these images are controlled by the ego does harmony and order enter in. Were man not to check them with his ego, they would surge up and down without any evidence of control by the individual.

In the physical body it is the blood which principally limits, so to speak, the activity of the nervous system. Man's blood circulation, the blood flowing in man, is that which lays fetters, so to speak, upon what has its expression in the nervous system; it is the restrainer of the surging feelings and sensations; it is the tamer of the nerve-life. It would lead too far if I were to show you in all its details how the nervous system and the blood are related, and how the blood is the restrainer of this life of ideas. What occurs if the tamer is not present, if a man is deficient in red blood, is anemic? Well, even if we do not go into the more minute psychological details, from the simple fact that when a person's blood becomes too thin, that is, has a deficiency of red corpuscles, he is easily given over to the unrestrained surging back and forth of all kinds of fantastic images, even to illusion and hallucination—you can still conclude from this simple fact that the blood is the restrainer of the nerve-system. A balance must exist between the ego and the astral body—or speaking physiologically, between the blood and the nervous system—so that one may not become a slave of his nervous system, that is, to the surging life of sensation and feeling.

If now the astral body has a certain excess of activity, if there is a predominance of the astral body and its expression, the nerve-system, which the blood restrains to be sure, but is not completely able to bring to a condition of absolute balance, then that peculiar condition arises in which human life easily arouses the individual's interest in a subject, but he soon drops it and quickly passes to another one; such a person cannot hold himself to an idea, and in consequence his interest can be immediately kindled in everything which meets him in the outer world, but the restraint is not applied to make it inwardly enduring; the interest which has been kindled quickly evaporates. In this quick kindling of interest and quick passing from one subject to another we see the expression of the predominating astral element, the sanguine temperament. The sanguine person cannot linger with an impression, he cannot hold fast to an image, cannot fix his attention upon one subject. He hurries from one life impression to another, from perception to perception, from idea to idea; he shows a fickle disposition. That can be especially observed with sanguine children, and in this case it may cause one anxiety. Interest is easily aroused, a picture begins easily to have an effect, quickly makes an impression, but the impression soon vanishes again.

When there is a strong predominance in an individual of the etheric or life-body—that which inwardly regulates the processes of man's life and growth—and the expression of this etheric body—that system which brings about the feeling of inner well-being or of discomfort—then such a person will be tempted to wish just to remain in this feeling of inner comfort. The etheric body is a body which leads a sort of inner life, while the astral body expresses itself in outer interests, and the ego is the bearer of our activity and will, directed outward. If then this etheric body, which acts as life-body, and maintains the separate functions in equilibrium, an equilibrium which expresses itself in the feeling of life's general comfort—when this self-sustained inner life, which chiefly causes the sense of inner comfort, predominates, then it may occur that an individual lives chiefly in this feeling of inner comfort, that he has such a feeling of well-being, when everything in his organism is in order, that he feels little urgency to direct his inner being toward the outer world, is little inclined to develop a strong will. The more inwardly comfortable he feels, the more harmony will he create between the inner and outer. When this is the case, when it is even carried to excess, we have to do with a phlegmatic person.

In a melancholic we have seen that the physical body, that is, the densest member of the human being, rules the others. A man must be master of his physical body, as he must be master of a machine if he wishes to use it. But when this densest part rules, the person always feels that he is not master of it, that he cannot manage it. For the physical body is the instrument which he should rule completely through his higher members. But now this physical body has dominion and sets up opposition to the others. In this case the person is not able to use his instrument perfectly, so that the other principles experience repression because of it, and disharmony exists between the physical body and the other members. This is the way the hardened physical system appears when it is in excess. The person is not able to bring about flexibility where it should exist. The inner man has no power over his physical system; he feels inner obstacles. They show themselves through the fact that the person is compelled to direct his strength upon these inner obstacles. What cannot be overcome is what causes sorrow and pain; and these make it impossible for the individual to look out upon his contemporary world in an unprejudiced way. This constraint becomes a source of inner grief, which is felt as pain and listlessness, as a sad mood. It is very easy to feel that life is filled with pain and sorrow. Certain thoughts and ideas begin to be enduring; the person becomes gloomy, melancholic. There is a constant arising of pain. This mood is caused by nothing else than that the physical body sets up opposition to the inner ease of the etheric body, to the mobility of the astral body, and to the ego's certainty of its goal.

And if we thus comprehend the nature of the temperaments through sound knowledge, many a thing in life will become clear to us; but it will also become possible to handle in a practical way what we otherwise could not do. Look at much which directly confronts us in life! What we see there as the mixture of the four members of human nature meets us clearly and significantly in the outer picture. We need only observe how the temperament comes to expression externally.

Let us, for instance, take the choleric person, who has a strong firm center in his inner being. If the ego predominates, the person will assert himself against all outer oppositions; he wants to be in evidence. This ego is the restrainer. Those pictures are consciousness-pictures. The physical body is formed according to its etheric body, the etheric body according to its astral body. This astral body would fashion man, so to speak, in the most varied way. But because growth is opposed by the ego in its blood forces, the balance is maintained between abundance and variety of growth. So when there is a surplus of ego, growth can be retarded. It positively retards the growth of the other members; it does not allow the astral body and the etheric body their full rights. In the choleric temperament you are able to recognize clearly in the outer growth, in all that confronts us outwardly, the expression of what is inwardly active, the actual deep inner force-nature of the man, of the complete ego. Choleric persons appear as a rule as if growth had been retarded. You can find in life example after example; for instance, from spiritual history the philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the German choleric. Even in external appearance he is recognizable as such, since in his outer form he gave the impression of being retarded in growth. Thereby he reveals clearly that the other members of his being have been held back by the excess of ego. Not the astral body with its forming capacity is the predominant member, but the ego rules, the restrainer, the limiter of the formative forces. Hence we see as a rule in those who are preeminently men of strong will, where the ego restrains the free formative force of the astral body, a small compact figure. Take another classical example of the choleric: Napoleon, the “little General,” who remained so small because the ego held back the other members of his being. There you have the type of the retarded growth of the choleric. There you can see how this force of the ego works out of the spirit, so that the innermost being is manifest in the outer form. Observe the physiognomy of the choleric! Take in comparison the phlegmatic person! How indefinite are his features; how little reason you have to say that such a form of forehead is suited to the choleric. In one organ it is shown especially clearly whether the astral body or the ego works formatively, that is in the eye, in the steady, assured aspect of the eye of the choleric. As a rule we see how this strongly-kindled inner light, which turns everything luminously inward, sometimes is expressed in a black, a coal-black eye, because, according to a certain law, the choleric does not permit the astral body to color that very thing which his ego-force draws inward, that which is colored in another person. Observe such an individual in his whole bearing. One who is experienced can almost tell from the rear view whether a certain person is a choleric. The firm walk proclaims the choleric, so to speak. Even in the step we see the expression of strong ego-force. In the choleric child we already notice the firm tread; when he walks on the ground, he not only sets his foot on it, but he treads as if he wanted to go a little bit farther, into the ground.

The complete human individual is a copy of this innermost being, which declares itself to us in such a way. But naturally, it is not a question of my maintaining that the choleric person is short and the sanguine tall. We may compare the form of a person only with his own growth. It depends upon the relation of the growth to the entire form.

Notice the sanguine person! Observe what a strange glance even the sanguine child has; it quickly lights upon something, but just as quickly turns to something else; it is a merry glance; an inner joy and gaiety shine in it; in it is expressed what comes from the depths of the human nature, from the mobile astral body, which predominates in the sanguine person. In its mobile inner life this astral body will work upon the members; and it will also make the person's external appearance as flexible as possible. Indeed, we are able to recognize the entire outer physiognomy, the permanent form and also the gestures, as the expression of the mobile, volatile, fluidic astral body. The astral body has the tendency to fashion, to form. The inner reveals itself outwardly; hence the sanguine person is slender and supple. Even in the slender form, the bony structure; we see the inner mobility of the astral body in the whole person. It comes to expression for example in the slim muscles. It is also to be seen in his external expression. Even one who is not clairvoyant can recognize from the rear whether a person is of sanguine or choleric temperament; and to be able to do this one need not be a spiritual scientist. In a sanguine person we have an elastic and springing walk. In the hopping, dancing walk of the sanguine child we see the expression of the mobile astral body. The sanguine temperament manifests itself especially strongly in childhood. See how the formative tendency is expressed there; and even more delicate attributes are to be found in the outer form. If in the choleric person we have sharply-cut facial features, in the sanguine they are mobile, expressive, changeable. And likewise there appears in the sanguine child a certain inner possibility to alter his countenance. Even to the color of the eyes we could confirm the expression of the sanguine person. The inwardness of the ego-nature, the self-sufficient inwardness of the choleric, meets us in his black eye. Look at the sanguine person in whom the ego-nature is not so deep-rooted, in whom the astral body pours forth all its mobility—there the blue eye is predominant. These blue eyes are closely connected with the individual's invisible inner light, the light of the astral body.

Thus many attributes could be pointed out which reveal the temperament in the external appearance. Through the four-membered human nature we learn to understand clearly this soul riddle of the temperaments. And indeed, a knowledge of the four temperaments, springing from a profound perception of human nature, has been handed down to us from ancient times. If we thus understand human nature, and know that the external is only the expression of the spiritual, then we learn to understand man in his relation even to the externalities, to understand him in his whole process of becoming; and we learn to recognize what we must do concerning ourself and the child with regard to temperament. In education especially notice must be taken of the kind of temperament that tends to develop in the child. For life's wisdom, as for pedagogy, an actual living knowledge of the nature of the temperaments is indispensable, and both would profit infinitely from it.

And now let us go further. Again we see how the phlegmatic temperament also is brought to expression in the outer form. In this temperament there predominates the activity of the etheric body, which has its physical expression in the glandular system and its soul expression in a feeling of ease, in inner balance. If in such a person everything is not only normally in order within, but if, beyond this normality, these inner formative forces of ease are especially active, then their products are added to the human body; it becomes corpulent, it expands. In the largeness of the body, in the development of the fatty parts, we see that which the inner formative forces of the etheric body are especially working on. The inner sense of ease of the phlegmatic person meets us in all that. And who would not recognize in this lack of reciprocal action between the inner and the outer the cause of the ofttimes slovenly, dragging gait of the phlegmatic person, whose step will often not adapt itself to the ground; he does not step properly, so to speak; does not put himself in relation to things. That he has little control over the forms of his inner being you can observe in the whole man. The phlegmatic temperament confronts one in the immobile, indifferent countenance, even in the peculiarly dull, colorless appearance of the eye. While the eye of the choleric is fiery and sparkling, we can recognize in that of the phlegmatic the expression of the etheric body, focused only upon inner ease.

The melancholic is one who cannot completely attain mastery over the physical instrument, one to whom the physical instrument offers resistance, one who cannot cope with the use of this instrument. Look at the melancholic, how he generally has a drooping head, has not the force in himself to stiffen his neck. The bowed head shows that the inner forces which adjust the head perpendicularly are never able to unfold freely. The glance is downward, the eye sad, unlike the black gleam of the choleric eye. We see in the peculiar appearance of the eye that the physical instrument makes difficulties for him. The walk, to be sure, is measured, firm, but not like the walk of the choleric, the firm tread of the choleric; it has a certain kind of dragging firmness.

All this can be only indicated here; but the life of the human being will be much, much more understandable to us if we work in this way, if we see the spirit activating the forms in such a way that the external part of the individual can become an expression of his inner being. So you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle; but only if you face the whole reality, to which the spiritual also belongs, and do not stop merely with the physical reality, can this knowledge be practically applied in life. Therefore only from spiritual science can this knowledge flow in such a way as to benefit the whole of humanity as well as the individual.

Now if we know all that, we can also learn to apply it. Particularly it must be of interest to learn how we can handle the temperaments pedagogically in childhood. For in education the kind of temperament must be very carefully observed; with children it is especially important to be able to guide and direct the developing temperament. But later also it is still important, for anyone in self-education. For the person who wishes to train himself it is invaluable that he observe what is expressed in his temperament.

I have pointed out to you here the fundamental types, but naturally in life they do not often appear thus pure. Each person has only the fundamental tone of a temperament, besides which he has something of the others. Napoleon, for example, had in him much of the phlegmatic temperament, although he was a choleric. If we would govern life practically, it is important to be able to allow that which expresses itself physically to work upon our soul.

How important this is we can see best of all if we consider that the temperaments can degenerate, that what may appear to us as one-sidedness can also degenerate. What would the world be without the temperaments—if people had only one temperament? The most tiresome place you could imagine! The world would be dreary without the temperaments, not only in the physical, but also in the higher sense. All variety, beauty, and all the richness of life are possible only through the temperaments. Do we not see how everything great in life can be brought about just through the one-sidedness of the temperaments, but also how these can degenerate in their one-sidedness? Are we not troubled about the child because we see that the choleric temperament can degenerate to malice, the sanguine to fickleness, the melancholic to gloom, etc.?

In the question of education in particular, and also in self-education, will not the knowledge and estimation of the temperaments be of essential value to the educator? We must not be misled into depreciating the value of the temperament because it is a one-sided characteristic. In education the important thing is not to equalize the temperaments, to level them, but to bring them into the right track. We must clearly understand that the temperament leads to one-sidedness, that the most radical phase of the melancholic temperament is madness; of the phlegmatic, imbecility; of the sanguine, insanity; of the choleric, all those explosions of diseased human nature which result in frenzy, and so forth. Much beautiful variety results from the temperaments, because opposites attract each other; nevertheless, the deification of the one-sidedness of temperament very easily causes harm between birth and death. In each temperament there exists a small and a great danger of degeneracy. With the choleric person there is the danger that in youth his ego will be determined by his irascibility, by his lack of self-control. That is the small danger. The great danger is the folly which wishes to pursue, from the impulse of his ego, some kind of individual goal. In the sanguine temperament the small danger is that the person will lapse into fickleness. The great danger is that the rising and falling tide of sensations may result in insanity. The small danger for the phlegmatic is lack of interest in the outer world; the great danger is stupidity or idiocy. The small danger in the melancholic is gloominess, the possibility that he may not be able to extricate himself from what rises up within him. The great danger is madness.

When we contemplate all that, we shall see that a tremendously significant task in practical life lies in the directing and guiding of the temperaments. It is important for the educator to be able to say to himself: What will you do, for example, in the case of a sanguine child? Here one must try to learn from the knowledge of the entire nature of the sanguine temperament how to proceed. If other points of view must be considered concerning the education of the child, it is also necessary that temperament, as a subject in itself, be taken into account. But in order to guide the temperaments the principle to be observed is that we must always reckon with what is there and not with what is not there.

We have a child of sanguine temperament before us, which could easily degenerate into fickleness, lack of interest in important things, and, instead, become quickly interested in other things. The sanguine child is the quickly comprehending, but also the quickly forgetting child, whose interest it is difficult to hold upon anything whatever, just because interest in one subject is quickly lost and passes over to another. This can grow into the most frightful one-sidedness, and it is possible to notice the danger if we look into the depths of human nature. In the case of such a child a material-minded person will immediately come forward with a prescription and say: If you have a sanguine child to bring up, you must bring it into reciprocal activity with other children. But a person who thinks realistically in the right sense says: If you begin with the sanguine child by working upon forces which it does not at all possess, you will accomplish nothing with it. You could exert your powers ever so seriously to develop the other members of human nature, but these simply do not predominate in this child. If a child has a sanguine temperament, we cannot help him along in development by trying to beat interests into him; we cannot pound in something different from what his sanguine temperament is. We should not ask, What does the child lack? What are we to beat into him? But we should ask, What as a rule does a sanguine child possess? And that is what we must reckon with. Then we shall say to ourselves: We do not alter these characteristics by trying to induce any sort of opposite quality in this child. With regard to these things which are rooted in the innermost nature of man we must take into consideration that we can only bend them. Thus we shall not be building upon what the child does not possess, but upon what he does possess. We shall build exactly upon that sanguine nature, upon that mobility of the astral body, and not try to beat into him what belongs to another member of human nature. With a sanguine child who has become one-sided we must just appeal to his sanguine temperament.

If we wish to have the right relation with this child, we must take special notice of something. For from the first it becomes evident to the expert that if the child is ever so sanguine, there is still something or other in which he is interested, that there is one interest, one genuine interest for each sanguine child. It will generally be easy to arouse interest in this or that subject, but it will quickly be lost again. There is one interest, however, which can be enduring even for the sanguine child. Experience shows this; only it must be discovered. And that which is found to hold a special interest must be kept in mind. And whatever it is that the child does not pass by with fickle interest we must try to bring before him as a special fact, so that his temperament extends to something which is not a matter of indifference to him. Whatever he delights in, we must try to place in a special light; the child must learn to use his sanguineness. We can work in such a way that we begin first of all with the one thing that can always be found, with the forces which the child has. He will not be able to become lastingly interested in anything through punishment and remonstrance. For things, subjects, events, he will not easily show anything but a passing, changeable interest; but for one personality, especially suited to a sanguine child—experience will show this—there will be a permanent, continuous interest, even though the child is ever so fickle. If only we are the right personality, or if we are able to bring him into association with the right personality, the interest will appear. It is only necessary to search in the right way. Only by the indirect way of love for one personality, is it possible for interest to appear in the sanguine child. But if that interest, love for one person, is kindled in him, then through this love straightway a miracle happens. This love can cure a child's one-sided temperament. More than any other temperament, the sanguine child needs love for one personality. Everything must be done to awaken love in such a child. Love is the magic word. All education of the sanguine child must take this indirect path of attachment to a certain personality. Therefore parents and teachers must heed the fact that an enduring interest in things cannot be awakened by drumming it into the sanguine child, but they must see to it that this interest is won by the roundabout way of attachment to a personality. The child must develop this personal attachment; one must make himself lovable to the child; that is one's duty to the sanguine child. It is the responsibility of the teacher that such a child shall learn to love the personality.

We can still further build up the education upon the child's sanguine nature itself. The sanguine nature reveals itself, you know, in the inability to find any interest which is lasting. We must observe what is there. We must see that all kinds of things are brought into the environment of the child in which he has shown more than the ordinary interest. We should keep the sanguine child busy at regular intervals with such subjects as warrant a passing interest, concerning which he is permitted to be sanguine, so to speak, subjects not worthy of sustained interest. These things must be permitted to affect the sanguine nature, permitted to work upon the child; then they must be removed so that he will desire them again, and they may again be given to him. We must cause these things to work upon the child as the objects of the ordinary world work upon the temperament. In other words, it is important to seek out for a sanguine child those objects toward which he is permitted to be sanguine.

If we thus appeal to what exists rather than to something which does not exist, we shall see—and practical experience will prove it—that as matter of fact the sanguine force, if it becomes one-sided, actually permits itself to be captured by serious subjects. That is attained as by an indirect path. It is good if the temperament is developed in the right way during childhood, but often the adult himself has to take his education in hand later in life. As long, indeed, as the temperaments are held in normal bounds, they represent that which makes life beautiful, varied, and great. How dull would life be if all people were alike with regard to temperament. But in order to equalize a one-sidedness of temperament, a man must often take his self-education in hand in later life. Here again one should not insist upon pounding into oneself, as it were, a lasting interest in any sort of thing; but he must say to himself: According to my nature I am sanguine; I will now seek subjects in life which my interest may pass over quickly, in which it is right that the interest should not be lasting, and I will just occupy myself with that in which I may with complete justification lose interest in the very next moment.

Let us suppose that a parent should fear that in his child the choleric temperament would express itself in a one-sided way. The same treatment cannot be prescribed as for the sanguine child; the choleric will not be able easily to acquire love for a personality. He must be reached through something else in the influence of person upon person. But in the case of the choleric child also there is an indirect way by which the development may always be guided. What will guide the education here with certainty is: Respect and esteem for an authority. For the choleric child one must be thoroughly worthy of esteem and respect in the highest sense of the word. Here it is not a question of making oneself loved through the personal qualities, as with the sanguine child, but the important thing is that the choleric child shall always have the belief that the teacher understands the matter in hand. The latter must show that he is well informed about the things that take place in the child's environment; he must not show a weak point. He must endeavor never to let the choleric child notice that he might be unable to give information or advice concerning what is to be done. The teacher must see to it that he holds the firm reins of authority in his hands, and never betray the fact that he is perhaps at his wits' end. The child must always keep the belief that the teacher knows. Otherwise he has lost the game. If love for the personality is the magic word for the sanguine child, then respect and esteem for the worth of a person is the magic word for the choleric.

If we have a choleric child to train we must see to it before everything else that this child shall unfold, bring to development, his strong inner forces. It is necessary to acquaint him with what may present difficulties in the outer life. For the choleric child who threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness, it is especially necessary to introduce into the education that which is difficult to overcome, so as to call attention to the difficulties of life by producing serious obstacles for the child. Especially must such things be put in his way as will present opposition to him. Oppositions, difficulties, must be placed in the path of the choleric child. The effort must be put forth not to make life altogether easy for him. Hindrances must be created so that the choleric temperament is not repressed, but is obliged to come to expression through the very fact that certain difficulties are presented which the child must overcome. The teacher must not beat out, educate out, so to speak, a child's choleric temperament, but he must put before him just those things upon which he must use his strength, things in connection with which the choleric temperament is justified. The choleric child must of inner necessity learn to battle with the objective world. The teacher will therefore seek to arrange the environment in such a way that this choleric temperament can work itself out in overcoming obstacles; and it will be especially good if these obstacles pertain to little things, to trifles; if the child is made to do something on which he must expend tremendous strength, so that the choleric temperament is strongly expressed, but actually the facts are victorious, the strength employed is frittered away. In this way the child gains respect for the power of facts which oppose what is expressed in the choleric temperament.

Here again there is another indirect way in which the choleric temperament can be trained. Here it is necessary first of all to awaken reverence, the feeling of awe, to approach the child in such a way as actually to arouse such respect, by showing him that we can overcome difficulties which he himself cannot yet overcome; reverence, esteem, particularly for what the teacher can accomplish, for his ability to overcome objective difficulties. That is the proper means: Respect for the ability of the teacher is the way by which the choleric child in particular may be reached in education.

It is also very difficult to manage the melancholic child. What must we do if we fear the threatened one-sidedness of the melancholic temperament of the child, since we cannot cram in what he does not possess? We must reckon with the fact that it is just repressions and resistance that he has power within himself to cling to. If we wish to turn this peculiarity of his temperament in the right direction, we must divert this force from subjective to objective activity. Here it is of very special importance that we do not build upon the possibility, let us say, of being able to talk him out of his grief and pain, or otherwise educate them out of him; for the child has the tendency to this excessive reserve because the physical instrument presents hindrances. We must particularly build upon what is there, we must cultivate what exists. With the melancholic child it will be especially necessary for the teacher to attach great importance to showing him that there is suffering in the world. If we wish to approach this child as a teacher, we must find here also the point of contact. The melancholic child is capable of suffering, of moroseness; these qualities exist in him and we cannot flog them out, but we can divert them.

For this temperament too there is one important point: Above all we must show the melancholic child how people can suffer. We must cause him to experience justifiable pain and suffering in external life, in order that he may come to know that there are things concerning which he can experience pain. That is the important thing. If you try to entertain him, you drive him back into his own corner. Whatever you do, you must not think you have to entertain such a child, to try to cheer him up. You should not divert him; in that way you harden the gloominess, the inner pain. If you take him where he can find pleasure, he will only become more and more shut up within himself. It is always good if you try to cure the young melancholic, not by giving him gay companionship, but by causing him to experience justifiable pain. Divert his attention from himself by showing him that sorrow exists. He must see that there are things in life which cause suffering. Although it must not be carried too far, the important point is to arouse pain in connection with external things in order to divert him.

The melancholic child is not easy to guide; but here again there is a magic means. As with the sanguine child the magic word is love for a personality, with the choleric, esteem and respect for the worth of the teacher, so with the melancholic child the important thing is for the teachers to be personalities who in some way have been tried by life, who act and speak from a life of trial. The child must feel that the teacher has really experienced suffering. Bring to his attention in all the manifold occurrences of life the trials of your own destiny. Most fortunate is the melancholic child who can grow up beside a person who has much to give because of his own hard experiences; in such a case soul works upon soul in the most fortunate way. If therefore at the side of the melancholic child there stands a person who, in contrast to the child's merely subjective, sorrowful tendencies, knows how to tell in a legitimate way of pain and suffering that the outer world has brought him, then such a child is aroused by this shared experience, this sympathy with justified pain. A person who can show in the tone and feeling of his narration that he has been tried by destiny, is a blessing to such a melancholic child.

Even in arranging the melancholic child's environment, so to speak, we should not leave his predispositions unconsidered. Hence, it is even advantageous if—strange as it may sound—we build up for the child actual hindrances, obstructions, so that he can experience legitimate suffering and pain with regard to certain things. It is the best education for such a child if the existing tendency to subjective suffering and grief can be diverted by being directed to outer hindrances and obstructions. Then the child, the soul of the child, will gradually take a different direction.

In self-education also we can again use this method: we must always allow the existing tendencies, the forces present in us, to work themselves out, and not artificially repress them. If the choleric temperament, for example, expresses itself so strongly in us that it is a hindrance, we must permit this existing inner force to work itself out by seeking those things upon which we can in a certain sense shatter our force, dissipate our forces, preferably upon insignificant, unimportant things. If on the other hand we are melancholic, we shall do well to seek out justifiable pain and suffering in external life, in order that we may have opportunity to work out our melancholy in the external world; then we shall set ourselves right.

Let us pass on to the phlegmatic temperament. With the phlegmatic child it will be very difficult for us if his education presents us with the task of conducting ourselves in an appropriate way toward him. It is difficult to gain any influence over a phlegmatic person. But there is one way in which an indirect approach may be made. Here again it would be wrong, very wrong indeed, if we insisted upon shaking up a person so inwardly at ease, if we thought we could pound in some kind of interests then and there. Again we must take account of what he has.

There is something in each case which will hold the attention of the phlegmatic person, especially the phlegmatic child. If only through wise education we build up around him what he needs, we shall be able to accomplish much. It is necessary for the phlegmatic child to have much association with other children. If it is good for the others also to have playmates, it is especially so for the phlegmatic. He must have playmates with the most varied interests. There is nothing to appeal to in the phlegmatic child. He will not interest himself easily in objects and events. One must therefore bring this child into association with children of like age. He can be trained through the sharing of the interests—as many as possible—of other personalities. If he is indifferent to his environment, his interest can be kindled by the effect upon him of the interests of his playmates. Only by means of that peculiar suggestive effect, only through the interests of others, is it possible to arouse his interest. An awakening of the interest of the phlegmatic child will result through the incidental experiencing of the interest of others, the sharing of the interests of his playmates, just as sympathy, sharing of the experience of another human destiny, is effective for the melancholic. Once more: To be stimulated by the interest of others is the correct means of education for the phlegmatic. As the sanguine child must have attachment for one personality, so must the phlegmatic child have friendship, association with as many children as possible of his own age. That is the only way the slumbering force in him can be aroused. Things as such do not affect the phlegmatic. With a subject connected with the tasks of school and home you will not be able to interest the little phlegmatic; but indirectly, by way of the interests of other souls of similar age you can bring it about. If things are reflected in this way in others, these interests are reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child.

Then also we should particularly see to it that we surround him with things and cause events to occur near him concerning which apathy is appropriate. One must direct the apathy to the right objects, those toward which one may rightly be phlegmatic. In this way quite wonderful things can sometimes be accomplished in the young child. But also one's self-education may be taken in hand in the same way in later life, if it is noticed that apathy tends to express itself in a one-sided way; that is, by trying to observe people and their interests. One thing more can also be done, so long as we are still in a position to employ intelligence and reason at all: we can seek out the very subjects and events which are of the greatest indifference to us, toward which it is justifiable for us to be phlegmatic.

We have now seen again how, in the methods of education based upon spiritual science, we build upon what one has and not upon what is lacking.

So we may say that it is best for the sanguine child if he may grow up guided by a firm hand, if some one can show him externally aspects of character through which he is able to develop personal love. Love for a personality is the best remedy for the sanguine child. Not merely love, but respect and esteem for what a personality can accomplish is the best for the choleric child. A melancholic child may be considered fortunate if he can grow up beside some one who has a bitter destiny. In the corresponding contrast produced by the new insight, by the sympathy which arises for the person of authority, and in the sharing of the justifiably painful destiny,—in this consists what the melancholic needs. They develop well if they can indulge less in attachment to a personality, less in respect and esteem for the accomplishment of a personality, but can reach out in sympathy with suffering and justifiably painful destinies. The phlegmatic is reached best if we produce in him an inclination towards the interests of other personalities, if he can be stirred by the interests of others.

The sanguine should be able to develop love and attachment for one personality.

The choleric should be able to develop esteem and respect for the accomplishments of the personality.

The melancholic should be able to develop a heartfelt sympathy with another's destiny.

The phlegmatic child should be led to the sharing of the interests of others.

Thus do we see in these principles of education how spiritual science goes right into the practical questions of life; and when we come to speak about the intimate aspects of life, spiritual science shows just in these very things how it works in practice, shows here its eminently practical side. Infinitely much could we possess of the art of living, if we would adopt this realistic knowledge of spiritual science. When it is a case of mastering life, we must listen for life's secrets, and these lie behind the sense perceptible. Only real spiritual science can explain such a thing as the human temperaments, and so thoroughly fathom them that we are able to make this spiritual science serve as a benefit and actual blessing of life, whether in youth or in age.

We can also take self-education in hand here; for when it is a question of self-education, the temperaments can be particularly useful to us. We become aware with our intellect that our sanguineness is playing us all kinds of tricks, and threatens to degenerate to an unstable way of life; we hurry from subject to subject. This condition can be countered if only we go about it in the right way. The sanguine person will not, however, reach his goal by saying to himself: You have a sanguine temperament and you must break yourself of it. The intellect applied directly is often a hindrance in this realm. On the other hand, used indirectly it can accomplish much. Here the intellect is the weakest soul-force of all. In presence of the stronger soul-forces, such as the temperaments, the intellect can do very little; it can work only indirectly. If some one exhorts himself ever so often: “For once now hold fast to one thing”—then the sanguine temperament will again and again play him bad tricks. He can reckon only with a force which he has. Behind the intellect there must be other forces. Can a sanguine person count upon anything at all but his sanguine temperament? And in self-education too it is necessary to try to do also what the intellect can do directly. A man must reckon with his sanguineness; self-exhortations are fruitless. The important thing is to show sanguineness in the right place. One must try to have no interest in certain things in which he is interested. We can with the intellect provide experiences for which the brief interest of the sanguine person is justified. Let him try to place himself artificially in such situations; to put in his way as much as possible what is of no interest to him. If then we bring about such situations in ever such small matters, concerning which a brief interest is warranted, it will call forth what is necessary. Then it will be noticed, if only one works at it long enough, that this temperament develops the force to change itself.

The choleric can likewise cure himself in a particular way, if we consider the matter from the point of view of spiritual science. For the choleric temperament it is good to choose such subjects, to bring about through the intellect such conditions as are not changed if we rage, conditions in which we reduce ourselves ad absurdum by our raging. When the choleric notices that his fuming inner being wishes to express itself, he must try to find as many things as possible which require little force to be overcome; he must try to bring about easily superable outer facts, and must always try to bring his force to expression in the strongest way upon insignificant events and facts. If he thus seeks out insignificant things which offer him no resistance, then he will bring his one-sided choleric temperament again into the right course.

If it is noticed that melancholia is producing one-sidedness, one must try directly to create for himself legitimate outer obstacles, and then will to examine these legitimate outer obstacles in their entire aspect, so that what one possesses of pain and the capacity for suffering is diverted to outer objects. The intellect can accomplish this. Thus the melancholic temperament must not pass by the pain and suffering of life, but must actually seek them, must experience sympathy, in order that his pain may be diverted to the right objects and events.

If we are phlegmatic, have no interests, then it is good for us to occupy ourselves as much as possible with quite uninteresting things, to surround ourselves with many sources of ennui, so that we are thoroughly bored. Then we shall completely cure ourselves of our apathy, completely break ourselves of it. The phlegmatic person therefore does well to decide with his intellect that he must take interest in a certain thing, that he must search for things which are really only worthy to be ignored. He must seek occupations in which apathy is justified, in which he can work out his apathy. In this way he conquers it, even when it threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness.

Thus we reckon with what is there and not with what is lacking. Those however who call themselves realists believe, for example, that the best thing for a melancholic is to produce conditions that are opposed to his temperament. But anyone who actually thinks realistically will appeal to what is already in him.

So you see spiritual science does not divert us from reality and from actual life; but it will illuminate every step of the way to the truth; and it can also guide us everywhere in life to take reality into consideration. For those people are deluded who think they can stick to external sense appearance. We must go deeper if we wish to enter into this reality; and we shall acquire an understanding for the variety of life if we engage in such considerations.

Our sense for the practical will become more and more individual if we are not impelled to apply a general prescription: namely, you must not drive out fickleness with seriousness, but see what kind of characteristics the person has which are to be stimulated. If then man is life's greatest riddle, and if we have hope that this riddle will be solved for us, we must turn to this spiritual science, which alone can solve it for us. Not only is man in general a riddle to us, but each single person who confronts us in life, each new individuality, presents a new riddle, which of course we cannot fathom by considering it with the intellect. We must penetrate to the individuality. And here too we can allow spiritual science to work out of the innermost center of our being; we can make spiritual science the greatest impulse of life. So long as it remains only theory, it is worthless. It must be applied in the life of the human being. The way to this goal is possible, but it is long. It becomes illuminated for us if it leads to reality. Then we become aware that our views are transformed. Knowledge is transformed. It is prejudice to believe that knowledge must remain abstract; on the contrary, when it enters the spiritual realm it permeates our whole life's work; our entire life becomes permeated by it. Then we face life in such a way that we have discernment for the individuality, which enters even into feeling and sensation and expresses itself in these, and which possesses great reverence and esteem. Patterns are easy to recognize; and to wish to govern life according to patterns is easy; but life does not permit itself to be treated as a pattern. Only insight will suffice, insight which is transformed into a feeling one must have toward the individuality of man, toward the individuality in the whole of life. Then will our conscientious spiritual knowledge flow into our feeling, so to speak, in such a way that we shall be able to estimate correctly the riddle which confronts us in each separate human being.

How do we solve the riddle which each individual presents to us? We solve it by approaching each person in such a way that harmony results between him and us. If we thus permeate ourselves with life's wisdom, we shall be able to solve the fundamental riddle of life which is the individual man. It is not solved by setting up abstract ideas and concepts. The general human riddle can be solved in pictures; this individual riddle, however, is not to be solved by this setting up of abstract ideas and concepts; but rather must we approach each individual person in such a way that we bring to him direct understanding.

That is possible, however, only when we know what lies in the depths of the soul. Spiritual science is something which slowly and gradually pours itself into our entire soul so that it renders the soul receptive not only to the large relations but also to the finer details. In spiritual science it is a fact that, when one soul approaches another, and this other requires love, love is given. If it requires something else, that will be given. Thus by means of such true life wisdom we create social foundations, and that means at each moment to solve a riddle. Anthroposophy works not by means of preaching, exhortation, harping on morals, but by creating a social basis on which one man is able to understand another.

Spiritual science is thus the sub-soil of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of such a life, stimulated by spiritual science. Therefore spiritual science may claim that it is establishing something which will provide a base for the most beautiful goal of the mission of man: genuine, true, human love. In our sympathy, in our love, in the manner in which we approach the individual human being, in our conduct, we should learn the art of living through spiritual science. If we would permit life and love to stream into feeling and sensibility, human life would be a beautiful expression of the fruit of this spiritual science.

We learn to know the individual human being in every respect when we perceive him in the light of spiritual science. We learn to perceive even the child in this way; we learn little by little to respect, to value, in the child the peculiarity, the enigmatic quality of the individuality, and we learn also how we must treat this individual in life, because spiritual science gives to us, so to speak, not merely general, theoretical directions, but it guides us in our relation to the individual in the solving of the riddles which are there to be solved: namely, to love him as we must love him if we not merely fathom him with the mind, but let him work upon us completely, let our spiritual scientific insight give wings to our feelings, our love. That is the only proper soil which can yield true, fruitful, genuine human love; and this is the basis from which we discover what we have to seek as the innermost essential kernel in each individual. And if we permeate ourselves thus with spiritual knowledge, our social life will be regulated in such a way that each single person, when he approaches any other in esteem and respect and understanding of the riddle “man,” will learn how to find and to regulate his relation to the individual. Only one who lives in abstractions as a matter of course can speak from prosaic concepts, but he who strives for genuine knowledge will find it, and will find the way to other people; he will find the solution of the riddle of the other person in his own attitude, in his own conduct.

Thus we solve the individual riddle according as we relate ourselves to others. We find the essential being of another only with a view of life which comes from the spirit. Spiritual science must be a life-practice, a spiritual life-factor, entirely practical, entirely living, and not vague theory.

This is knowledge which can work into all the fibers of man's being, which can rule each single act in life. Thus only does spiritual science become the true art of living—and that could be particularly shown in the consideration of those intimate peculiarities of man, the temperaments. Thus the finest relation is engendered between man and man when we look a person in the face and understand not only how to fathom the riddle, but how to love, that is, to let love flow from individuality to individuality. Spiritual science needs no theoretical proofs; life brings the proofs. Spiritual science knows that something can be said “for” and “against” everything, but the true proofs are those which life brings; and only step by step can life show the truth of what we think when we consider the human being in the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge; for this truth exists as a harmonious, life-inspired insight which penetrates into the deepest mysteries of life.

I have already indicated a few of the symptomatic forces that play a part in the development of contemporary history. I have only time to discuss a few of these impulses. To discuss them all—or even the most significant—would take us too far. I have been asked to give special attention to specific impulses of a symptomatic nature. This can be deferred until next week when I will willingly speak of those symptoms which have special reference to Switzerland and at the same time I will attempt to give a sketch of Swiss history.

Today, however, I propose to continue the studies we have already undertaken. I concluded my lecture yesterday with a picture, albeit a very inadequate picture, of the development in recent times of one of the most significant Symptoms of contemporary history—socialism. Now for many who are earnestly seeking to discover the real motive forces of evolution, this social, or rather socialist movement occupies the focus of attention; apart from socialism they have never really considered the Claims of anything else. Consequently people have failed in recent times to give adequate attention to the very important influence of something which tends to escape their notice. Even where they searched for new motives they paid no attention to those of a spiritual nature. If we ask how far people were aware of the impulses characteristic of modern evolution we can virtually discount from the outset those personalities who in the nineteenth century, and more especially in the twentieth century, were largely oblivious of contemporary evolution, who belonged to those circles which were indifferent to contemporary trends. The historians of the old upper classes were content to plough the old furrows, to record the genealogy of dynasties, the history of wars and perhaps other related material. It is true that studies in the history of civilization have been written, but these studies, from Buckle to Ratzel, take little account of the real driving forces of history. At the same time the proletariat was thirsting for knowledge and felt an ever-increasing desire for education. And this raised the three questions I mentioned yesterday. But the proletariat lacked the will to explore the more subtle interrelations of historical development. Consequently, up to the present, a historical symptom that has not been sufficiently emphasized is the historical significance of the natural scientific mode of thinking.

One can of course speak of the scientific mode of thinking in terms of its content or in relation to the transformation of modern thinking. But it is important to consider in what respect this scientific thinking has become a historical symptom like the others I have mentioned—the national impulse, the accumulation of insoluble political problems, etcetera. In fact, since the beginning of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, the scientific mode of thinking has steadily increased amongst wide sections of the population. It is a mistake to imagine that only those think scientifically who have some acquaintance with natural science. That is quite false; in fact the reverse is true. Natural scientists think scientifically because that is the tendency of the vast majority of people today. People think in this way in the affairs of daily life—the peasant in the fields, the factory worker at his bench, the financier when he undertakes financial transactions. Everywhere we meet with scientific thinking and that is why scientists themselves have gradually adopted this mode of thought. It is necessary to rectify a popular misconception on this subject. It is not the mode of thinking of scientists or even of monistic visionaries that must engage our attention, but the mode of thinking of the general public. For natural science cannot provide a sufficiently powerful counterpoise to the universalist impulse of the church of Rome. What provides this counterpoise is a universal thinking that is in conformity with the laws of nature. And we must study this impulse as symptom in relation to the future evolution of modern man.

Text-books of history, rather thoughtlessly, usually date the birth of modern times from the discovery of America and the invention of gunpowder and printing, etcetera. If we take the trouble to study the course of recent history we realize that these symptomatic events—the discovery of America, the invention of gunpowder, and the art of printing, etcetera—did in fact inspire seamen and adventurers to pioneer voyages of exploration, that they popularized and diffused traditional knowledge, but that fundamentally they did not change the substance of European civilization in the ensuing centuries. We realize that the old political impulses which were revived in the different countries nonetheless remained the same as before because they were unable to derive any notable benefit from these voyages of discovery. In the newly discovered countries they simply resorted to conquest as they had formerly done in other territories: they mined and transported gold and so enriched themselves. In the sphere of printing they were able increasingly to control the apparatus of censorship. But the political forces of the past were unable to derive anything in the nature of a decisive impulse from these discoveries which were said to mark the birth of modern times. It was through the fusion of the scientific mode of thinking—after it had achieved certain results—with these earlier inventions and discoveries in which science had played no part that the really significant impulse of modern times arose. The colonizing activities of the various countries in modern times would be unthinkable without the contributions of modern science. The modern urge for colonization was the consequence of the achievements of natural science in the technical field. It was only possible to conquer foreign territories, as colonization was destined to do with the aid of scientific inventions, with the application of scientific techniques. These colonizing activities therefore first arose in the eighteenth century when natural science began to be transformed into technics.

Applied science marks the beginning of the machine age, and with it a new era of colonization which gradually spreads over the whole world. With technics an extremely important impulse of modern evolution is born in the Consciousness Soul. Those who understand the determinative factors here are aware that the impulses behind worldwide colonial expansion, that these colonizing activities and aspirations are directly related to the epoch of the Consciousness Soul. This epoch, as you know, will end in the third millenium, to be followed by the epoch of the Spirit Self, and will as the result of colonization bring about a different configuration of mankind throughout the world. Now the epoch of the Consciousness Soul recognizes that there are so-called civilized and highly civilized men, and others who are extremely primitive—so primitive that Rousseau was captivated by their primitive condition and elaborated his theory of the ‘noble savage.’ In the course of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul this differentiation will cease—how it will cease we cannot now discuss in detail. But it is the function of the Consciousness Soul to end this differentiation which is a heritage from the past.

Armed with this knowledge we see the connection between wars such as the American Civil War and modern colonizing activities in their true light. When we bear in mind the importance of these colonizing activities for the epoch of the Consciousness Soul then we gain insight into the full significance of isolated symptoms in this field. And these colonizing activities are inconceivable without the support of scientific thinking.

We must really give heed to this scientific thinking, if, from the point of view of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, we wish to penetrate to the true reality of human evolution. It is a characteristic of this modern scientific thinking that it can only apprehend the ‘corpse’ of reality, the phantom. We must be quite clear about this, for it is important. The scientific method starts from observation and proceeds to experimentation, and this applies in all spheres. Now there is a vast difference between the observation of nature and the knowledge which is confirmed by experimental proof. Observation of nature—with different nuances—was common to all epochs. But when man observes nature he becomes one with nature and shares in the life of nature. But, strangely enough, this communion with nature blunts the consciousness to some extent. One cannot live the life of nature and at the same time know or cognize in the sense in which the modern Consciousness Soul understands this term. One cannot do both at the same time any more than one can be asleep and awake at the same time. If one wishes to live in communion with nature one must be prepared in a certain sense to surrender one's consciousness to nature. And that is why the observation of nature cannot fathom its secrets, because when man observes nature his consciousness is somewhat dimmed and the secrets of nature escape him. In order to apprehend the secrets of nature he must be alive to the super-sensible.

One cannot develop the Consciousness Soul in a semiconscious state, a state of diminished consciousness, and therefore modern natural science quite instinctively attempts to dispense with observation and to depend upon experimentation for its findings. Experiments have been undertaken even in the fields of biology and anthropology. Now in experimentation the first consideration is to select and assemble the material, to determine the order of procedure. In experimental embryology for example, the order of procedure is determined not by nature but by intellection or human intelligence; it is determined by an intellectual faculty which is detached from nature and is centred in man. ‘We murder to dissect’—our knowledge of nature is derived from experimental investigation. Only what is acquired experimentally can be exploited technically. Knowledge of nature only becomes ripe for technical exploitation when it has passed through the indirect process of experimentation. The knowledge of nature which hitherto had been introduced into social life had not yet reached the stage of technics. It would be monstrous to speak of technics unless it is concerned purely with the application of experimentation to the social order or to what serves the social order.

Thus modern man introduces into the social order the results of experimental knowledge in the form of technics; that is to say, he brings in the forces of death. Let us not forget that we bring forces of death into our colonizing activities; that when we construct machines for industry, or submit the worker to the discipline of the machine we are introducing forces of death. And death permeates our modern historical structure when we extend our monetary economy to larger or smaller territories and when we seek to build a social order on the pattern of modern science as we have instinctively done today. And whenever we introduce natural science into our community life we introduce at all times the forces of death that are self destructive.

This is one of the most important symptoms of our time. We can make honest and sincere pronouncements—I do not mean merely rhetorical pronouncements—about the great scientific achievements of modern times and the benefits they have brought to technics and to our social life. But these are only half truths, for fundamentally all these achievements introduce into contemporary life an unmistakably moribund element which is incapable of developing of itself. The greatest acquisitions of civilization since the fifteenth century are doomed to perish if left to themselves. And this is inescapable. The question then arises: if modern technics is simply a source of death, as it must inevitably be, why did it arise? Certainly not in order to provide mankind with the spectacle of machines and industry, but for a totally different reason. It arose precisely because of the seeds of death it bore within it; for if man is surrounded by a moribund, mechanical civilization it is only by reacting against it that he can develop the Consciousness Soul. So long as man lived in communion with nature, i.e. before the advent of the machine age, he was open to suggestion because he was not fully conscious. He was unable to be fully self-sufficient because he had not yet experienced the forces of death. Ego-consciousness and the forces of death are closely related. I have already tried to show this in a variety of ways: In ideation and cognition, for example, man is no longer in contact with the life-giving, vitalizing forces within him; he is given over to the forces of organic degeneration. I have tried to show that we owe the possibility of conscious thought to the process of organic degeneration, to the processes of destruction and death. If we could not develop in ourselves ‘cerebral hunger’, that is to say, processes of catabolism, of degeneration and disintegration, we could not behave as intelligent beings, we should be vacillating, indecisive creatures living in a semiconscious, dream-like state. We owe our intellection to the degenerative processes of the brain. And the epoch of the Consciousness Soul must provide man with the opportunity to experience disintegration in his environment. We do not owe the development of modern, conscious thinking to a superabundant vitality. This conscious thinking, this very core of man's being grew and developed because it was imbued with the forces of death inherent in modern technology, in modern industry and finance. And that is what the life of the Consciousness Soul demanded.

And this phenomenon is seen in other spheres. Let us recur to the impulses to which I drew attention earlier. Let us consider the case of England where we saw how a specific form of parliamentary government develops as a certain tendency through the centuries, how the self-dependent personality seeks to realize itself. The personality wishes to emancipate itself and to become self-sufficient. It wishes to play a part in the life of the community and at the same time to affirm its independence. The parliamentary system of government is only one means of affirming the personality. But when the individual who participates in parliamentary government asserts himself, the moment he sacrifices his will to the vote he surrenders his personality. And, rightly understood, the rise of parliamentary government in England in the centuries following upon the civil wars of the fifteenth century provides ample evidence of this. In the early years of the democratic system society was based upon a class structure, the various classes or ‘estates’ not only wishing to affirm their class status, but to express their views through the ballot-box. They were free to speak; but people are not satisfied with speeches and mutual agreement, they want to vote. When one votes, when speeches are followed by voting, one kills what lives in the soul even whilst one speaks. Thus every form of parliamentary government ends in levelling down, in egalitarianism. It is born of the affirmation of the personality and ends with the suppression of the personality. This situation is inescapable; affirmation of the personality leads to suppression of the personality. It is a cyclic process like life itself which begins with birth and ends in death. In the life of man birth and death are two distinct moments in time; in the life of history, the one is directly related to the other, birth and death are commixed and commingled. We must never lose sight of this.

I do not wish you to take these remarks as a criticism of parliamentary government. That would be tantamount to insinuating that I said: since man is born only to die he ought never to have been born—which is absurd. One should not impute to the world such foolishness—that it permits man to be born only to die. Please do not accuse me of saying that parliamentary government is absurd because the personality which gives birth to this system proceeds to destroy the system which it has itself created. I simply wish to relate it directly to life, to that which is common to all life—birth and death, thus showing that it is something that is closely associated with reality. At the same time I want to show you the characteristic feature of all external phenomena of a like nature in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, for they are all subject to birth and death.

Now in the inner circles of the occult lodges of the English speaking world it has often been said: let us not reveal to the world the mystery of birth and death, for in so doing we shall betray to the uninitiated the nature of the modern epoch! We shall transmit to them a knowledge that we wish to reserve for ourselves. Therefore it was established as the first rule of the masonic lodges never to speak openly of the mystery of birth and death, to conceal the fact that this mystery is omnipresent, above all in historical phenomena. For to speak of this is to open the eyes of the public to the tragedy of modern life which will gradually be compelled—a compulsion to which it will not easily submit—to divert man's attention from the results of work to the work itself. One must find joy in work, saying to oneself: the external rewards of work in the present epoch serve the purposes of death and not of creative life. If one is unwilling to further the forces of death, one cannot work with modern techniques, for today man is the servant of the machine. He who rejects the machine simply wishes to return to the past.

Study the history of France and the attempts made to thrust inwards the emancipation of the personality, ending in that disastrous suppression of the personality which we observe in the final phase of the French Revolution and in the rise of Napoleonism. Or take the case of Italy. From what hidden springs did modern Italy derive that dynamic energy which inflamed the nationalism to the point of sacro egoismo? One must probe beneath the surface in order to discover the factors underlying world events. Recall for a moment that important moment before the birth of the Consciousness Soul. This dynamic energy peculiar to modern Italy is derived in all its aspects from that which the Papacy had implanted in the Italian soul. The significance of the Papacy for Italy lies in the fact that it has gradually imbued the Italian soul with its own spirit. And, as so often happens to the magician's apprentice, the result was not what was intended—a violent reaction against the Papacy itself in modern Italy. Here we see how that for which one strives provokes its own destruction. Not the thoughts, but the forces of sensibility and enthusiasm, even those which inspired Garibaldi, are relics of the one-time Catholic fervour—but when these forces changed direction they turned against Catholicism.

People will understand the present epoch only if they grasp the right relationship between these things. Europe witnessed those various symptomatic events which I have described to you. And in the East, as if in the Background, we see the configuration of Russia, welded out of the remnants of the Byzantine ecclesiastical framework, out of the Nordic-Slavonic racial impulse and out of Asianism which is diffused in a wide variety of forms over Eastern Europe. But this triad is uncreative; it does not emanate from the Russian soul itself, nor is it characteristic of that which lives in the Russian soul. What is it that offers the greatest imaginable contrast to the emancipation of the personality?—The Byzantine element. A great personality of modern times who is much underrated is Pobjedonoszeff. He was an eminent figure who was steeped in the Byzantine tradition. He could only desire the reverse of what the epoch of the Consciousness Soul seeks to achieve and of what it develops naturally in man. Even if the Byzantine element had made deeper inroads into Russian orthodoxy, even if this element which stifles everything personal and individual had gained an even stronger hold ... the sole consequence nonetheless would have been a powerful age for the emancipation of the personality. If, in the study of modern Russian history, you do not read of those events which it has always been forbidden to record, then you will not have a true picture of Russian history, you will be unaware of the really living element. If however you read the official version, the only version permitted hitherto by the authorities, you will find everything which pervades Russian life as an instrument of death. It appears here in its most characteristic form because Russian life is richest in future promise. And because Russian life bears within it the seeds of the development of the Spirit Self, all the external achievements of the era of the Consciousness Soul hitherto bring only death and destruction. And this had to be, since what seeks to develop as Spirit Self needs the substratum of death.

We must recognize that this is a necessity for the evolution of the Consciousness Soul, otherwise we shall never grasp the real needs of our time. We shall be unable to form a clear picture of the destructive forces which have overtaken mankind if we are unaware that the events of these last four years are simply an epitome of the forces of death that have pervaded the life of mankind since the birth of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul.

Characteristically the dead hand of scientific thinking has exercised a strange influence upon one of the most prophetic personalities of recent time. In contemporary history the following incident is symptomatic and will always remain memorable. In the year 1830 in Weimar, Soret¹ visited Goethe who received him with some excitement—I mean he betrayed excitement in his demeanour—but not with deep emotion. Goethe said to Soret: ‘At last the controversy has come to a head, everything is in flames’. He made a few additional remarks which led Soret to believe that Goethe was referring to the revolution which had broken out in Paris in 1830 and he answered him accordingly. But Goethe replied: ‘I am not referring to the revolution; that is not particularly important. What is important is the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire in the Academy of Sciences of Paris’—Cuvier was a representative of the old school which simply compares and classifies organisms—a way of looking at nature that is concerned above all with technique—whilst Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has a living conception of the whole course of evolution. Goethe saw Saint-Hilaire as the leader of a new school of scientific thinking, different from that of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Cuvier belongs to the old school of thought; Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is the representative of a scientific outlook which sees nature as a living organism. Therefore Goethe saw the dawn of a new epoch when Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire prepared the ground for a new scientific thinking which, when fully developed, must lead to a super-sensible interpretation of nature and ultimately to super-sensible, clairvoyant knowledge. For Goethe this was the revolution of 1830, not the political events in Paris. Thus Goethe showed himself to be one of the most prescient spirits of his time. He showed that he sensed and felt what was the cardinal issue of our time.

Today we must have the courage to look facts squarely in the face, a courage of which earlier epochs had no need. We must have the courage to follow closely the course of events, for it is important that the Consciousness Soul can fulfil its development. In earlier epochs the development of the Consciousness Soul was not important. Because the Consciousness Soul is of paramount importance in the present epoch, everything that man creates in the social sphere must be consciously planned. Consequently his social life can no longer be determined by the old instinctive life; nor can he introduce solely the achievements of natural science into social life for these are forces of death and are unable to quicken life; they are simply dead-sea fruit and sow destruction such as we have seen in the last four years. In the present epoch the following is important.

Sleep, of course, is a necessity for man. In waking life he is in control of his normal free will ... he can make use of this free will for the various things he encounters through Lucifer and Ahriman, in order to develop guide-lines for the future. When he falls asleep this so called free will ceases to function; he continues to think without knowing it, but his thinking is no less efficacious. Thinking does not cease on falling asleep, it continues until the moment of waking. One simply forgets this in the moment of waking up. We are therefore unaware of the power of those thoughts that pour into the human soul from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up. But let us remember that for the epoch of the Consciousness Soul the gods have abandoned the human soul during sleep. In earlier epochs the gods instilled into the human soul between sleeping and waking what they chose to impart. If they had continued to act in this way man would not have become a free being. Consequently he is now open to all kinds of other influences between sleeping and waking. At a pinch we can live our waking life with natural science and its achievements, but they are of no avail in sleep and death. We can only think scientifically during our waking hours. The moment we fall asleep, scientific thinking is meaningless—as meaningless as speaking French in a country where no one understands a word of French. In sleep only that language has significance which one acquires through super-sensible knowledge, the language which has its source in the super-sensible. Supersensible knowledge must take the place of what the gods in former times had implanted in the instinctive life. The purpose of the present epoch of the Consciousness Soul is this: man must open himself to super-sensible impulses and penetrate to a knowledge of reality. To believe that everything that our present age has produced and still produces without the support of super-sensible impulses is something living and creative and not impregnated with the forces of death is to harbour an illusion, just as it is an illusion to believe that a woman can bear a child without fecundation. Without impregnation a woman today remains sterile and dies without issue. Modern civilization in the form it has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century and especially in respect of its outstanding achievements, is destined to remain sterile unless fertilized henceforth by impulses from the super-sensible world. Everything that is not fertilized by spiritual impulses is doomed to perish. In this epoch of the Consciousness Soul, though you may introduce democracy, parliamentary government, modern finance economy, modern industrialism, though you may introduce the principle of nationality the world over, though you may advocate all those principles on which men Base what they call the new order—a subject on which they descant like drunken men who have no idea what they are talking about—all these things will serve only the forces of death unless they are fructified by spiritual impulses. All that we must inevitably create today, forces that bring death in all domains, will only be of value if we learn how to transform these forces by our insights into the super-sensible.

Let us realize the seriousness of this situation and let us remember—as we have learnt from our study of the symptoms of recent history—that what man considers to be his greatest achievements, natural science, sociology, modern industrial techniques and modern finance economy, all date from the fifteenth century. These are destructive agents unless fructified by spiritual impulses. Only then can they advance the evolution of mankind. Then they have positive value; in themselves they are detrimental. Of all that mankind today extols, not without a certain pride and presumption, as his greatest achievements, nothing is good in itself; it is only of value when permeated with spirit.

This is not an arbitrary expression of opinion, but a lesson we learn from a study of the symptoms of modern history. The time has now come when we must develop individual consciousness. And we must also be aware of what we may demand of this consciousness. The moment we begin to dogmatize, even unwittingly, we impede the development of the consciousness. I must therefore remind you once again of the following incident. I happened to be giving a course of lectures in Hamburg on The Bible and Wisdom.^T1 Amongst the audience were two Catholic priests. Since I had said nothing of a polemical nature which could offend a Catholic priest and since they were not the type of Jesuit who is a watchdog of the Church and whose function is to stick his fingers in every pie, but ordinary parish priests, they approached me after the lecture and said: we too preach purgatory; you also speak of a time of expiation after death. We preach paradise; you speak of the conscious experience of the Spirit; fundamentally there are no objections to the content of your teaching. But they would certainly have found ample grounds for objection if they had gone more deeply into the matter—a single lecture of course did not suffice for this. And they continued: You see the difference between us is this: You address yourself to a certain section of the population which is already familiar with the premises of anthroposophy, people who are educated and are conversant with certain concepts and ideas. We, on the other hand speak to all men, we speak a language which everyone can understand. And that is the right approach—to speak for all men. Whereupon I replied: Reverend fathers (I always believe in respecting titles) what you are saying is beside the point. I do not doubt that you believe you speak for all men, that you can choose your words in such a way as to give the impression that you are speaking for all men. But that is a subjective judgement, is it not? that is what one usually says in self-justification. What is important is not whether we believe we speak for all men, but the facts, the objective reality. And now I should like to ask you, in an abstract, theoretical way: what evidence is there that I do not speak for all men? You claim to speak for all men and no doubt there are arguments that would support your claim. But I ask you for the facts. Do all those for whom you think you are able to speak still attend your church today? That is the real question. Of course my two interlocutors could not claim that everyone attended their church regularly. You see, I continued, that I am concerned with the facts. I speak for those who are outside the church, who also have the right to be led to the Christ. I realize that amongst them there are those who want to hear of the Christ impulse one way or another. That is a reality. And what matters is the reality, not personal opinions.

It is most desirable to base one's opinions on facts and not on subjective impressions; for, in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul nothing is more dangerous than to surrender to, or show a predilection for personal opinions or prejudices. In order to develop the Consciousness Soul we must not allow ourselves to become dogmatists unwittingly; the driving forces of our thoughts and actions must be determined by facts. That is important. Beneath the surface of historical evolution there is a fundamental conflict between the acceptance of what we consider to be right and the compulsion of facts. And this is of particular importance when studying history, for we shall never have a true picture of history unless we see history as a truly great teacher. We must not force the facts to fit history, but allow history to speak for itself. In this respect the whole world has forgotten much in the last four years. Facts are scarcely allowed to speak for themselves; we only hear what we deem to be facts. And this situation will persist for a long time. And it will be equally long before we develop the capacity to apprehend reality objectively. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul what matters in all spheres of life is an objective apprehension of reality; we must strive to acquire an impartial attitude to reality.

What our epoch demands—if we wish gradually to look beyond the Symptoms of history (I will speak more of this in my next lectures)—is that we turn our attention to those spiritual forces which can restore man's creativity. For, as we have seen, the most characteristic feature of all phenomena today is a decline in creativity. Man must open himself to the influences of the super-sensible world so that what his Spirit Self prepares may enter into his ego; otherwise the paths to the Spirit Self would be closed to him. Man therefore must familiarize himself with that which is pure spirit, with that which can penetrate to the centre of his psychic life. The moment he is prepared to turn his attention to this centre of his soul life through a sensible study of the symptoms in history, he will also be prepared to examine more objectively the events at the periphery.

In man there exists a polarity—the psychic centre and the periphery. As he penetrates ever more deeply into his psychic and spiritual life he reaches this centre. In this centre he must open himself to those historical impulses which I have already described to you. Here he will feel an ever increasing urge for the spirit if he wishes to become acquainted with historical reality. In return however, he will also feel a desire to strive towards the opposite pole at the periphery. He will develop an understanding for what is pressing towards the periphery—his somatic nature. If in order to understand history we must look inward, as I have indicated, to the underlying symptoms, then in order to understand medicine, for example, hygiene and medical health services we must look outwards, to cosmic rhythms for the source of pathological symptoms.

Just as modern history fails to penetrate to spiritual realities, so modern medicine, modern hygiene and medical health services fail to penetrate to the symptoms which are of cosmic provenance. I have often emphasized the fact that the individual cannot help his neighbour, however deep his insight into current problems, because today they are in the hands of those who are looking for the wrong solution. They must become the responsibility of those who are moving in the right direction. Clearly, just as the external facts are true that the outward aspect of James I was such and such, as I pointed out earlier, so, from the external point of view it is also true that a certain kind of bacillus is connected with the present influenza epidemic. But if it is true, for example, that rats are carriers of the bubonic plague, one cannot say that rats are responsible for the plague. People have always imagined that the bubonic plague was spread by rats. But bacilli, as such, are of course in no way connected with disease. In phenomena of this kind we must realize that just as behind the symptoms of history we are dealing with psychic and spiritual experiences, so too behind somatic symptoms we are dealing with experiences of a cosmological order. In other cases the situation of course will be different! What is especially important here is the rhythmic course of cosmic events, and it is this that we must study. We must ask ourselves: In what constellation were we living when, in the nineties, the present influenza epidemic appeared in its benign form? In what cosmic constellation are we living at the present time? By virtue of what cosmic rhythm does the influenza epidemic of the nineties appear in a more acute form today? Just as we must look for a rhythm behind a series of historical symptoms, so we must look for a rhythm behind the appearance of certain epidemics.

In the solfatara regions of Italy one need only hold a naked flame over the fango hole and immediately gases and steam escape from the dormant volcano. This Shows that if one performs a certain action above the surface of the earth nature reacts by producing these effects. Do you regard it as impossible that something takes place in the sun—since its rays are directed daily towards the earth—which has significance for the earth emanations and is related to the life of man, and that this reaction varies according to the different geographical localities? Do you think that we shall have any understanding of these matters unless we are prepared to accept a true cosmology founded upon a knowledge of the soul and spirit? The statement that man's inclination to resort to war is connected with the periodic appearance of sun spots is, of course, regarded as absurd. But there comes a point when statements of this kind cease to be absurd, when certain pathological manifestations in the emotional life are seen to be connected with cosmological phenomena such as the periodic appearance of sun spots. And when tiny creatures, these petty tyrants—bacilli or rats—really transmit from one human being to another something that is related to the cosmos, then this transmission is only a secondary phenomenon. This can be easily demonstrated and consequently finds wide public support—but it is not the main issue. And we shall not come to terms with the main issue unless we have the will to study the peripheral symptoms as well.

I do not believe that men will acquire a more reasonable and catholic view of history unless they study historical symptomatology in the light of super-sensible knowledge which is so necessary for mankind today. Men will only achieve results in the sphere of health, hygiene and medicine if they study not historical, but cosmological symptoms. For the diseases we suffer on earth are visitations from heaven. In order to understand this we must abandon the preconceived ideas which are prevalent today. We have an easy explanation: a God is omnipresent ... but whilst recognizing the presence of God in history mankind today is unable to explain the manifold retardative or harmful phenomena in history. And when we are faced with a situation like the last four years (1914–1918), then this business of the single God in history becomes extremely dubious, for this God of history has the curious habit of multiplying, and each nation defends its national God and provokes other nations by claiming the superiority of its own God. And when we are expected to look to cosmology and at the same time remain comfortably attached to this single God, then this same God inflicts disease upon us. But when we can rise to the idea of the trinity, God, Lucifer and Ahriman, when we are aware of this trinity in the super-sensible world behind the historical symptoms, when we know that this trinity is present in the cosmic universe, then there is no need to appeal to the ‘good God’. We then know that heaven visits disease upon us by virtue of its association with the earth, just as I can evoke sulphur fumes by holding a naked flame over a solfatara. We can only advance the cause of progress in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, when men recognize the validity of spiritual realities. Therefore everything depends upon this one aim: the search, the quest for truth.

• 1. Frédéric Jean Soret (1795–1865). Scientist and author. A frequent visitor in Goethe's house. Notes from his journal were used by Eckermann for his ‘Conversations with Goethe’.
• T1. 5th December, 1908. See Bibl. Nr. 68.

In the course of the public lectures lately given in Switzerland I have frequently remarked that knowledge, that way of thinking which prevails among the men of our time and has taken root in human souls, is not adapted to grasp the social-moral life. Present conditions can only be brought to a healthy state if men are able to come again to such a thinking, such a grasp of the universe, as will give what lives in the soul a direct link with reality.

I said that what prevails in the historical, the social, the ethical life is more or less dreamt, slept through by mankind, that in any case abstract ideas are not fitted to take hold of the impulses which must be active in the social life. I stated that in earlier times men were aided through older, what we call atavistic, knowledge, through myths. They brought to expression in the form of a myth what they thought concerning the world, what entered their vision of the world secrets. Myths—the contents of mythology—can be viewed in the most manifold ways, and in fact I pointed in these observations to a positively magnificent materialistic explanation of the myth by Dupuis. In other places we have repeatedly for years examined this or the other myth. However, the myth permits of many points of view and when something has been said about it, its content is far from being exhausted. Again and again from different standpoints different things may be asserted in regard to a myth. It would be very useful for the man of today if he made himself acquainted with the nature of that thinking which underlies the mode of thought found in the concepts of mythology. For the ideas which are formed about the origin of myths, the creation of mythology, belong indeed to the realm of the modern superficial judgment which is so widespread.

Deep truths are embedded in the myths, truths more concerned with reality than those which are expressed through modern natural science about this thing or the other. Physiological, biological truths about man are to be found in the myths, and the origin of what they express rests upon the consciousness of the connection of man as microcosm with the macrocosm. Especially can one realize—and this I shall deal with today and tomorrow—when one has in mind the nature of the thinking employed in the myths, how deeply, or actually how little deeply, one is concerned with reality in ordinary modern concepts. It is therefore useful to recollect sometimes how myths have been formed among neighbouring peoples of the pre-Christian ages. Neighbours to one another and much interconnected in their culture are the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Israelites. Moreover, one can say that a great part of the thinking that still rules in the soul today is connected with the knowledge of the Egyptians, Greeks and Israelites as expressed by them in the form of myth.

The myth which I should first like to discuss—but as already said, from a certain standpoint—is the Osiris-Isis-Myth belonging to the Egyptian culture. I have already called your attention to the fact that the Osiris-Isis-Myth is also conceived by Dupuis as a mere priest lie, that the priests as far as they themselves were concerned, had meant nothing but astronomical, astronomical-astrological events, and had fabricated such a myth for the common people.

One can observe in an interesting way how the Greeks not only have a number of Gods connected with their own life, but how they have whole generations of Gods. The oldest God-generation was linked with Gaia and Uranus, the next generation with Chronos and Rhea, the Titans, and all that is related to them, and the third generation of Gods, the successors of the Titans—Zeus and the whole Zeus circle. We shall see how the construction of such God-myths springs from a special type of soul.

The Greeks, Israelites and Egyptians had different conceptions of their connection with the universe. Nevertheless there prevailed in all, as we shall shortly see, a deep relationship as regards other standpoints, as well as in reference to the one I shall take as a basis today. Of the Egyptians one must say that in the age when the Osiris-Isis-Myth arose as the representative for profounder truths, they developed a knowledge which had a longing to know the deeper foundations of the human soul. The Egyptians desired in this way to turn their gaze to that element in the human soul which lives not only between birth and death, but which passes through birth and death and also leads a life between death and a new birth. Even from external perception one can see how the Egyptians—in their preservation of mummies, in their peculiar death-ceremonies—turned the eye of the soul to that element in the soul which passes through the Gate of Death and in new form experiences new destinies when man treads ways that lie on the other side.

What is it in man that passes through the gate of death and that enters through birth into earthly existence? This question, more or less unconscious and unexpressed, underlay the thought and aspirations of the Egyptians. For it is this eternal-imperishable element—I have often already expressed it in another form—that is united in the Egyptian consciousness with the name of Osiris. Now, in order to have a foundation, let us consider the Osiris-Myth in its most important aspects, let us just consider it, as it has been preserved.

It is related of Osiris that at one time he ruled in Egypt. It is related that above all the Egyptians owed to him the suppression of cannibalism, that they owed to him the plough, agriculture, the preparation of food from the plant kingdom, the building of cities, certain legal ideas, astronomy, rhetoric, even a script and so on. It is then related that Osiris inaugurated not only among the Egyptians such beneficent arts and institutions but that he undertook journeys into other lands and there too spread similar useful arts. And in fact it was expressly stated that Osiris did not spread them by the sword but by persuasion.

Then it is further related that Typhon, the brother of Osiris, wanted to institute new things in opposition to what had proved beneficial for the Egyptians throughout centuries through the influence of Osiris. Typhon wanted to inaugurate all sorts of novelties. We should say today: after the institution of Osiris had existed for hundreds of years, Typhon made a revolution while Osiris was absent extending his institutions among other peoples. This differs a little from the latest example of revolution ... there something happened which newcomers brought about, not while the other was extending beneficent institutions among other nations ... But between Osiris and Typhon there took place what has been stated. Then, however, the myth proceeds:

Isis waited at home in Egypt. Isis, the consort of Osiris, did not permit the innovations to be really sweeping. That, however, had the effect of enraging Typhon, and as Osiris came back from his wanderings Typhon slew him and made away with the dead body. Isis had to search a long time for the corpse. She found the body at last in Phoenicia, and brought it back home to Egypt. Typhon now became angrier and tore the corpse in pieces. Isis collected the pieces and out of each piece, by means of spices and all sorts of other arts she made a being again which had the complete form of Osiris. She then gave to the priests of the land a third of the whole territory of Egypt, so that the tomb of Osiris should be kept a secret, but his service and worship all the more fostered.[See Egyptian Myths and Mysteries.]

The remarkable statement was then added to this myth, that Osiris now came up out of the underworld—when his worship had already been inaugurated in Egypt—and that he then occupied himself with the instruction of Horus, the son whom Isis had borne after the death of Osiris. Then it is related that Isis had the imprudence to release Typhon whom she had succeeded in imprisoning. Thereupon Horus, her son, became angry, tore the crown from her head and set cow-horns there instead and Typhon was defeated in two battles with the assistance of Hermes—that is the Roman Mercury, the Greek Hermes. A kind of Horus-cult, the cult of the son of Osiris and Isis was instituted.

The Greeks in some way or other heard of these Egyptian stories of world-mysteries. It is remarkable how in Greece they often spoke of the same being as was spoken of over in Egypt, or over in Phoenicia or Lydia, etc. These God-conceptions flowed into one another, as it were, and this is very characteristic and significant. When a Greek heard the name Osiris, he could picture something from it, he identified what the Egyptian understood under the name Osiris, with something of which he too had certain concepts. Although the name was different, what the Egyptian conceived of as Osiris was no stranger to the Greek. I ask you to take note of this. It is very significant.

We have the whole thing once more. Read the ‘Germania’ of Tacitus; there Tacitus also describes the Gods that he finds in the North a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, and he describes them with Roman names. He thus gives Roman names to the Gods whom he finds there. In spite of the fact that the Gods whom he found there had of course other names yet he recognized their being and could give them the Roman names. We find in the ‘Germania’ that he knew that in the North men had a God, that was the same God as Hercules and so on. That is very significant and it points to something very deep and of great meaning. It shows that in those ancient times there was a certain common consciousness concerning spiritual things. The Greek knew how to picture something of Osiris, independent of the Osiris-name, because he had something similar. What was concealed behind the name Osiris was not unfamiliar to him.

That is something that one must keep well in mind in order to recognize that in spite of the difference of the separate myths, there existed a certain community of soul! One could sometimes wish that there might be as much common understanding among modern men as, let us say, between the Greeks and the Egyptians, so that the Greeks understood what the Egyptians expressed! A Greek would never have uttered so much nonsense about Egyptian conceptions as Woodrow Wilson is able to think in one week about European conceptions—if one can call it thinking! The Greeks related that Chronos had begotten a son by Rhea in an irregular way. Thus the Greeks speak of Chronos and Rhea—we shall see immediately how they fit into the Greek myth—and this irregular son, who was so begotten, was Osiris. So just think: the Greeks hear that the Egyptians have an Osiris, and the Greeks on their part relate of Osiris that he is the son of Chronos and Rhea, but not begotten in the right way, so incorrectly begotten that Helios, the Sun-God became so angry about the matter that he made Rhea barren.

Thus the Greeks find a certain relationship between their own conception of the Gods and the Egyptian conceptions. But again on the other hand, what the Egyptians in a certain sense formed as their highest concept of a God—the Osiris-concept—is connected among the Greeks with an irregular origin—from the Titan race—from Chronos and Rhea.

One grasps this externally in the first place—we shall have to grasp it much more deeply presently—if we are clear that the Egyptians sought to learn of the eternal part of the human soul. They sought to know about that which goes through births and deaths—but in order to know of this eternal part in life the Egyptians expressly turned the soul's gaze beyond death. To the people of Egypt through whom the Greeks learnt of Osiris, he is no longer the God of the living, but the God of the dead, the God who sits on the Throne of the World and passes judgment when man has gone through the gate of death, that is, the God whom man has to meet after death. At the same time, however, the Egyptian knew: the same God who judges men after death, has at one time ruled over the living.

As soon as one takes these ideas together, one is no longer inclined to agree with the Dupuis verdict that it was only a matter of star-events. These Dupuis judgments have much that is captivating, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves as very superficial. I have said that the Egyptians—in the age when the Greeks received from them the Osiris-concept—directed their mind above all to the human soul after death. This lay far from the Greek mind. To be sure, the Greeks spoke too of the human soul after death, but inasmuch as they spoke of their Gods, they did not really speak of the Osiris-nature of such Gods as primarily give judgment after death. The race to which Zeus belongs is a race of Gods for the living. Man preferably looked up to this world when he turned his mind's eye to the world to which man belongs between birth and death—a race of Gods for the living: Zeus, Hera, Pallas-Athene, Mars, Apollo, etc. But these Gods were, so to say, the last God-race for the Greeks. For the Greeks turned their gaze to three successive generations of Gods.

As you know, the oldest generation of Gods was around Uranus and Gaea or better said: Gaea and Uranus. They were the earliest divine pair with all the brothers and sisters and so on who belonged to them. From this divine pair were descended the Titans, to whom also Chronos and Rhea belonged, but above all Oceanus. As you know, through certain cruel regulations—so says the myth—Uranus had evoked the wrath of his spouse Gaea, so that she prevailed upon Chronos their son, to make his father on the world-throne, impotent, and we then have this rulership of the older Gods succeeded by that of the younger, Chronos and Rhea with all that belongs to it. You know too that in the Greek myth, Chronos had the somewhat unsympathetic, in many respects, characteristic of swallowing all his children as soon as they were born, which was not pleasant for the mother, Rhea. (I am calling attention to various features which we shall particularly need.) And you know too that she saved Zeus and brought him up to overthrow Chronos, just as Chronos overthrew Uranus, only in another way, so that then the new race of Gods arrives. And then we have Hera and Zeus with all that belongs to them with all the brothers and sisters, children and so on.

An important feature in the myth, which I must relate since we shall need it if we wish to regard the myth as foundation for all sorts of world-conceptions, is the following. Zeus, before he overcame the Titans and cast them into Tartarus, had prevailed on the Goddess Metis, the Goddess of cunning, to provide him with an emetic, so that all the children swallowed by Chronos could be brought again to the light of day, and be once more in existence. Thus Zeus could have his brothers and sisters again ... for they had been in the body of Chronos. Zeus himself alone had been rescued by his mother Rhea.

And so we have three successive generations of Gods: Gaea-Uranus; Uranus overthrown through Gaea, because he was cruel, supplanted by the children, Chronos and Rhea; then Chronos overthrown again through Zeus, likewise at the instigation of Rhea. In the Zeus-circle we have the Gods who meet us where actual Greek history makes its appearance.

Now I should like to call special attention to a very significant feature of this. Greek mythology. It is not clearly enough stressed, in spite of being one of the most important features. Three successive races of Gods: these are thus the rulers of the macrocosm. But while Gaea and Uranus, Rhea and Chronos, Hera and Zeus are ruling, the human being, according to the Greek conception is already everywhere in existence. Man is already there without question. When therefore Chronos with Rhea had not yet reigned, when the rulers were still Gaea and Uranus, particularly, however, when Chronos reigned with Rhea and Zeus was not yet in possession of his emetic and so on, there were already men upon the earth, according to the view of the Greeks. And, what is more, as the Greeks related, they lived a happier life than in later times. The later human beings are the descendants of these earlier men. We must say then that the Greeks had this consciousness: up above rules Zeus, but we human beings descend from other forefathers who were not yet ruled over by Zeus. That is an important feature of the Grecian teaching of the Gods: that the Greek venerated his Zeus, his Hera, his Pallas-Athene, but was quite clear that they had not created him, what in general one calls ‘created’, but that men were there much earlier than the reign of these Gods. This is important concerning the Greek Gods.

That this is especially important for the Greek Gods can strike you when you compare the question with the Jewish teaching of the Gods. It is, of course, quite unthinkable that one would find the same feature in the Jewish teaching. You could not possibly imagine that according to the Old Testament men were pointed to ancestors who had not yet come under the rulership of Jahve and the Elohim. This therefore is something which differs radically in the Grecian teaching of the Gods. The Greek looks up to his Gods and knows: they indeed are ruling now, but they have nothing to do with what I call ‘creation’ of the human race.

This was absolutely impossible within the Old Testament conception. In the Old Testament those whom men looked upon as Gods were in the main far more concerned with the creation of man. In observing the course of world events it is very necessary to consider such things. The point is not merely to form concepts, the point is that one is able to form concepts that connect one with reality; the especially characteristic, the especially representative concepts, these are what one must have in mind.

And with this, we have considered an important feature of Greek mythology. Let us just examine it. When the Greek looked up to his Gods, they were not those of whom he had the consciousness: they have created me. For human beings were already there, as we have said, before these Gods had assumed their rulership. What these Gods were able to do was, for the Greeks, quite a respectable amount, but they could not produce for him a human race on a planet. That lay in the Greek consciousness: these Gods could not produce a human race.

Now, what actually were the Gods of the Zeus circle, the Olympian Gods, for the Greek consciousness? To form even an historical concept of what these Gods were—I mean now in the Greek consciousness, we have of course said various things about these Gods, but let us place ourselves into the Greek consciousness—what were they? Well, they were not beings which went about among men under ordinary circumstances. They dwelt in fact on Olympus, they dwelt in the clouds and so on. They paid only at times sympathetic or unsympathetic visits; Zeus in particular, as you know, sometimes paid sympathetic or unsympathetic visits into the human world. They were in a certain respect useful; but they also did things about which the modern man, who is somewhat more narrow-minded than the Greeks, would probably take the law into his own hands and involve such a Zeus in a divorce suit and so on. In any case, these Gods had a half-divine, half-human connection with men, and such beings, so it was thought, are not materialized in the flesh ... When Zeus wanted to conduct his affairs he took on all sorts of forms, did he not—a swan, golden rain, and so on; thus in ordinary life these Gods were not incarnated in the flesh. But on the other hand, if one looks deeper, one finds that the Greeks had the consciousness that these Gods were connected with men who lived in primeval times. Far more than looking up to the connection with the stars, as Dupuis supposed, the Greeks looked up to men of primeval times and brought the concept of the being of Zeus—please note exactly how I form the sentence, for that is the point—into connection with some ancient ruler of a long-past age. Please note that I have not said that the Greeks had the idea that what they meant by Zeus had been an ancient ruler; but I said: that which they pictured as Zeus they brought into connection with an ancient ruler who had once lived in long gone-by ages. For the kind of connection for Zeus and also for the other Gods was a somewhat complicated one.

We will examine the words a little, so that we can form an idea of what really underlies them. Let us suppose that at some time a personality had lived in Thrace, a region in Northern Greece, on whom the Zeus-concept was fastened. Now the Greek, even the quite ordinary Greek was quite clear: I do not, as it were, venerate this ancestor, nor do I venerate the single individuality which has lived in this ancestor, nevertheless I venerate something which had some connection with this ancient forefather, this ancient king in Thrace, or in Epirus. The Greek had in fact this idea: There was once such a king in whose whole being not only his own individuality had lived, but the individuality of a super-sensible being; this had expressed itself, had lived upon the earth, by once descending into a human being. The Zeus-concept was not made earthly in this way, it was brought into connection with an ancient ruler, who at one time had furnished the garment—or let us say—the dwelling place for this Zeus-being. Thus the Greek differentiated essentially that which he conceived of as Zeus from the human individuality which had lived in the body to which the Zeus-concept was referred. But the Zeus-rulership, the rule of Zeus and the Gods, took its starting point, as it were, from the fact that Zeus had descended, had lived in a human being, had found his centre there in order to work in the being of man—but who then went on working no longer as an ordinary man but in fact as an ‘Olympian’. And it was the same in the case of the other Greek Gods.

Why did the Greek form this conception—that there was once a ruler who was possessed, so to say, by Zeus, but that now there is no longer a ruler who can be possessed by Zeus, but that Zeus only rules as a super-sensible being—why did the Greek form this concept? Because the Greek knew that human evolution had progressed, that it had changed. In other words, the Greek knew that there were ancient times when human beings could have Imaginations in a particularly outstanding degree. A certain clairvoyance naturally remained for some few, but the authority of the Imaginations, that disappeared: the beings who can still have real Imaginations, these can only hold sway for the life that man knows between birth and death, in super-sensible worlds.

This is the essence of what the Greeks pictured to themselves concerning their Gods: there were Beings who could imagine. But the time is past when such Beings as can ‘imagine’, can enter into human bodies. For human bodies are no longer adapted to Imaginations. So said the Greeks to themselves: we are governed by a race of Beings who can have Imaginations, while we no longer can have them. The Greek had a quite unsentimental concept of his Gods. It would moreover have been rather difficult to be sentimental over Zeus. Yet the Greek said to himself quietly (I shall again elaborate the matter somewhat, one must add detail when one wants to be quite clear), “We men are going through a definite evolution; we have developed from atavistic clairvoyance in Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination; now we must have ordinary objective thinking. But the Gods have not ventured upon it, they have remained in their imaginative consciousness, otherwise they would have to be men and wander about here in the flesh. It did not suit them (so thought the Greeks in their unsentimental way of regarding the Gods) to pass over to objective thinking, so they have not descended to the earth, but kept to their imaginative consciousness. In this way, however, they rule over us, for they have more power, as it were, since the Imaginative concept, when it is utilized fully, is more powerful than the objective concept.”

From this, however, you see that the Greeks looked back to a time when man's forming of concepts, his observation and perception were different, and that this looking back went hand in hand with the ideas they formed of the Gods. Thus they looked back to Zeus, Hera, and said: These are ruling over us now, at one time we were also as they are, but we have developed further and have become weaker. Therefore they can rule over us, they have remained as it was at that time. A certain Luciferic character, as we should say today, was given to their Gods by the Greeks. And those Beings who had remained at the Imagination stage—this developed in the Greek consciousness—these were themselves successors of these Beings who remained at the Inspiration stage. Hera and Zeus remained behind at Imagination, Rhea and Chronos at Inspiration, Gaea and Uranus at Intuition.

You see, the Greek examined his own soul, and he brought his generations of Gods into connection with the evolution of mankind and the different states of consciousness. This he felt, this he perceived. The eldest Gods, Gaea and Uranus, were Beings whose whole inner relation to the world was ordered by the fact that they had an intuitive consciousness. They wanted to remain at the stage of Intuition; and those at the stage of Inspiration set themselves against them. And again the inspiring Beings wished to remain at Inspiration; and those living in the Imaginative consciousness set themselves against them. The Intuitive were thus overthrown through the Inspiring, the Inspiring through the Imagining. We live as human beings and above us the Imaginings. Now you know that in the Prometheus myth, the Greek already desired to find some kind of instrument against the Imagining.

Gaea-Uranus = Intuition

Rhea-Chronos = Inspiration

Hera-Zeus = Imagination

The Greeks graded their Gods in such a way that in this gradation they showed how they looked back to earlier states of consciousness of that being who has at the same time evolved as humanity. The Greeks showed how they connected this with their retrospect of the Gods. Just think how deeply significant this is for the understanding of the Greek consciousness! Thus the Greek in looking back to his generations of the Gods looked back to the past in the mental life. He connected the ancient Intuitional Beings with Gaea, the Earth, and Uranus, the Heavens, and connected the Inspirational Gods with Rhea and Chronos. They still perceived what Gaea and Uranus were. Rhea and Chronos are described as Titans—What are they actually?

Now for some centuries mankind has lost practically all consciousness of what lies at the foundation of all this.

Let me remind you that you know how a few hundred years ago the human being was brought into connection with three fundamental elements. You can still find this knowledge in Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus, even up to the time of Saint Martin. Jacob Boehme still gives: Sal == Salt; Mercur == Quicksilver; Sulphur == Sulphur. In the Middle Ages one said:

Salt
Mercury
Sulphur.

What was understood was not the same but yet had something to do with what the Greek meant when he spoke of Uranus-Gaea, or Gaea-Uranus; Rhea-Chronos; Hera-Zeus. For you see Chronos drove Uranus from World-rulership, Gaea became—shall we say—as good as widow. For what did she become? She became what is ‘Earth’—not the ordinary earth which we find outside, but the earth that man carries in himself, i.e.—Salt. Could man—this was known to the investigator of nature in the Middle Ages—make use consciously of the salt that existed in him, then he would have Intuition. Thus the process which has sunk down deep into the nature of man was a more living one in the old Gaea-Uranus time.

A younger process which has also entered deep down into human nature is that which can be described as the Rhea-Chronos-process. The Greeks said: the power of Rhea was once widespread, and ‘Chronos’ represented the forces that confronted Rhea. Chronos was overthrown. What has been left? Well, just as from Uranus-Gaea the dead salt has been left, so from Chronos-Rhea, the fluid, Mercury, has been left; the fluid in man that can take a drop formation; that has remained behind. But neither can man make conscious use of this; it has sunk into unconscious depths.

Today, of course, that is long past and in the time of the Greeks it was already gone by, for the Greeks said to themselves: the time of Zeus upon earth was in hoary primeval ages, but at that time man could make use of the Sulphur to be found in him. Were man able to make use consciously of his Salt, he would be able to use Intuition in an atavistic way. If he could consciously make use of his Mercury, his fluid element, he would be able to use Inspiration, and Imagination if he could use his Sulphur—not in that transmitted sense, but in the actual sense as the Alchemists of the Middle Ages still understood it, when they spoke of the ‘philosophical sulphur’. Today there is also a philosophical sulphur¹ Professors of philosophy manufacture it in vast quantities, but this is not what the Alchemists understood by it. They understood an imaginative consciousness, an atavistic Imagining, which was connected with the use of this active sulphur in man. Human beings, so said the Greeks, and their priests of the Mysteries also said so, for the mysteries of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur are ancient; human beings, through their evolution have overcome atavism, making use of sulphur atavistically. But Zeus and his circle have withdrawn into the super-sensible and avail themselves of the Sulphur processes: hence Zeus can hurl his lightning. If man, like Zeus, could hurl lightning, that is, if he could transform the sulphur through Imagination into reality, if he could inwardly and consciously hurl lightning, then he would use Imagination atavistically. That is what the Greeks wished to say when they said of Zeus that he could hurl lightning.

It was known, even by Saint Martin, that with the Sulphur of the Alchemists something different is meant from the ordinary earthly sulphur, of which one could at most say—excuse the plain speaking—it is the excrement of that which was understood by Saint Martin and those before him as the real sulphur, which they also called the ‘philosophical sulphur’. And Saint Martin still speaks of how thunder and lightning are really connected with the processes of the macrocosmic, or one could say the cosmic sulphur. Today, indeed, many a physical-natural scientific explanation creeps into science, which is also a sulphur,² but not exactly a ‘philosophical sulphur’. Yet, remember that the really clever people of today are, of course, far beyond talking of sulphur processes in the cosmos when thunder and lightning arise; for lightning and thunder arise, as you can read in elementary books on physics, through some sort of friction processes in the clouds—don't they? Anything really rational one cannot find in what is said about lightning and thunder; for the wet clouds in their mutual action are supposed to create the electricity which comes about through thunder and lightning! But if an electrical experiment is made in the schoolroom each apparatus is most carefully dried, for the least dampness prevents any electricity from arising. The clouds up there, however, are apparently not wet! The teacher can do nothing with an electric machine which is damp, which indeed is not completely dry, but at the same time he explains that the wet clouds are supposed to be connected with the creation of electricity. Yes, indeed such things get thoroughly mixed up, don't they! I wanted, however, only to say that in Saint Martin there was still a consciousness that this element of which the Greeks dreamt when they spoke of Hera and Zeus, had something to do with lightning and thunder.

You see, even superficial ideas can indicate to us that certain nature processes, the Salt, Mercury, Sulphur-processes, but in their older sense—are connected with what the Greeks possessed in their mythology. Let us hold that fact to begin with. We must have such fundamental concepts in order to pass over in the right way to our own time.

Thus the Greeks looked back to generations of Gods, to conditions that had ceased to exist, but that in earlier ages were also perceptible to man. They connected what lived in their Gods with what we call processes of nature. Mythology was therefore at the same time a sort of natural science. And the more one learns to know mythology, the deeper is the natural science one finds in it, only a different one, which is at the same time a science of the Soul. This is how the Greeks thought, and how the Egyptians too conceived of their Osiris, who once had ruled but who was now in the underworld.

Do you notice how different the things are and yet how they are all to be traced back to a common type? If the Greeks refer to earlier ages when such a being as Zeus, who in their own time could live only supersensibly, could even incorporate in a man, so could the Egyptians also point to an older age when Osiris or Osirises—the number is not the point—ruled, when they had descended into human beings, when they were present. But that time has gone by ... now (in the Egyptian Osiris-culture) one can no longer look to a human being on the physical plane if one wants to find Osiris, one must look to the world which man enters when he goes through the portal of death. Osirises are no more in the world where human beings live, but man meets them after death. Thus the Egyptian too looked back to an ancient time in the sense of the change of human consciousness, when he distinguished between the Osiris who could once wander the Earth, and the Osiris who can now no longer wander the Earth, who only belongs to the Kingdom of death.

If we confine ourselves today to the two mythologies and tomorrow touch briefly upon the Old Testament teachings before we draw any conclusions, we can make the following statement: We observe from the whole way in which Greek and Egyptian stood to their Gods, that at the same time there was expressed in this consciousness a remembrance of the ancient times of atavistic clairvoyance. They have vanished, they are no more there. With the destinies which the human being has gone through together with his Gods—whether with Zeus or Chronos in Greece, or with Osiris in Egypt, man was describing to himself at the same time this knowledge: If I look farther back, I was related as a human being to the macrocosm in a different way from how I am now. This relation has altered.

To look back in this way to earlier ages when the Gods walked among men, had a distinct reality for these ancient peoples, since they knew that the human being stood as microcosm to macrocosm in a different way from in their own time. The old atavistic clairvoyance actually faded away in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This was what it was sought to express through the Greek mythology, what it was also sought to express through the Osiris-mythology of the Egyptians.

• 1. Schwefel (Sulphur) has also a slang meaning of ‘hot air’. Trans.
• 2. See former note. Trans.