The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that the topic of this evening's lecture is one that is at the center of intellectual interest in many respects in the present day. It could easily appear as if it was chosen with regard to the various party opinions and intellectual currents that are asserted in relation to this topic today. However, those of the esteemed listeners to whom I have often been privileged to speak about spiritual-scientific matters will have seen from the overall attitude and tenor of these reflections that the world view presented here does not directly interfere with the pros and cons that arise today with regard to such questions. In view of all this, it is certainly not without interest to hear a word on the subject of “Christ in the twentieth century” from the side that has set itself the task of considering the spiritual development of humanity and the whole of cultural life from the point of view of objective spiritual science.

Perhaps one could believe that the very term “Christ in the twentieth century” is open to dispute from the point of view of objective spiritual science, since the human heart and soul already have an image of something that cannot be subject to the changing views of the centuries when it comes to the name “Christ”. But if we turn our gaze to the past of Christianity, we will be able to see for ourselves, when we visualize the various spiritual activities of humanity, how a clear change in the views of Christ has actually taken place over the centuries. And if we can speak in our time, in a certain respect, of a kind of revision of all spiritual questions, then what is connected with the tasks of the present in relation to spiritual matters must also shed light on the Christ problem. And if not elsewhere, then the discussions of the present time, which are quite lively in some cases, show above all how there is a desire in the hearts of today's humanity to come to terms with this problem, which is not only at the center of the spiritual present, but of the history of human development in general.

If we speak of development in all fields of knowledge today, then everything that exists in terms of ideas, perceptions and feelings in connection with the Christ-problem can also be brought into the light of development. Spiritual science aims to explore everything that lies behind the existence of the senses, beyond what the mind, which is bound to the brain, can comprehend. I have often indicated the sources and the nature of the research in this field. One does not research in the same way as in external science, nor does one observe and contemplate the world in the same way as in external life as one does in spiritual science. Tonight, these things can only be hinted at. More details can be found in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Spiritual science assumes that it is possible for a person to awaken certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in his soul. It provides the methods by which these powers can be awakened. The soul that applies these methods to itself does indeed come to engage in an inner life that is independent of the senses and all physical functions, and is also independent of the mind, which is connected to the brain. An inner life is possible through which one can see into a spiritual world and observe what is supersensible and what is behind the events that have taken place in the course of human development. How can one observe without physical organs? That is the methodological question of spiritual science. The results of this method are then what is communicated as spiritual science.

This spiritual science approaches the public in the same way as the other sciences, which [explore the phenomena of the world through experiments and observe them with apparatus in laboratories and observatories, and then contemporaries come and examine the things with common sense]. Spiritual science also makes use of the experiment, the spiritual experiment, and the apparatus, the soul apparatus. What the soul can make of itself when it has broken away from the outer body and leads an inner life within itself, what it can then explore in the spiritual realm, is communicated in the same way as the results of astronomy and biological research are communicated. Common sense can judge this if it is only willing to engage with it, even though in our time it does not yet feel much inclination to do so. It is obvious that in a single lecture not all paths can be shown that lead the soul, thus liberated, to Christ, nor can all the proofs for this path be adduced now. My task this evening is solely to indicate the point of view of spiritual research regarding this Christ-being and to give an idea of how this spiritual-scientific view of the Christ-problem can be integrated into what our other spiritual culture has to say about the Christ.

Before this is possible, we must take a few glances at the development of the Christ question over the centuries since the founding of Christianity. It is not at all intended to develop everything that people have done in terms of theological and other religious squabbling, but rather to point out the main lines and currents.

A very liberal contemporary scholar, William Benjamin Smith, has pointed out a very curious fact that is likely to correct many a modern judgment about the times in which Christianity was founded. The ideas about Christ that gradually spread in the first centuries cannot be understood without taking a look at what in the first centuries was called Gnostic Christianity. Spiritual science is not a warmed-over Gnosticism, but we must concern ourselves with Gnosticism because we want to orient ourselves regarding the ideas that the past has produced about Christ. In particular, the following fact should be noted in Smith. He says: “From about fifty years before the founding of Christianity until one hundred and fifty years after its founding - and this is not said by a spiritual researcher or an orthodox theologian, but by a liberal researcher! - the greatest theosophical geniuses lived, those people who tried hardest to fathom, through their wisdom and science, what Christ actually is in the context of the whole development of mankind.

The present time has little inclination to hear such a word; it only likes to hear the word that the Christ Being is such a Being that even the simplest mind can still approach with full understanding. So why must comprehensive wisdom and knowledge be summoned to approach Christ, who is supposed to be accessible to the simplest mind? It cannot be said that anyone who raises such an objection is necessarily wrong; the tremendous power of the Christ Impulse really does lie in the fact that it is accessible even to the simplest mind. But such an objection must also be considered in another light. It is perfectly possible to say that a child, still completely uncomprehending, may delight in a flower and understand this flower with its mind, but one can also go further and say that the wise man will admit that his highest wisdom is not enough to truly understand this flower. Similarly, the highest wisdom is necessary to truly penetrate to the essence of Christ. The theosophical Gnostics, says Smith, were those geniuses who, at the beginning of Christianity, out of the bold courage of their souls, tried to truly understand the Christ Being. That which is still useful today for the truly unbiased soul from this Gnosticism should, for once, come before our soul.

For Gnosticism, the Christ Impulse was an impulse that is absolutely necessary for the entire development of humanity on earth. Above all, Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus represented this main developmental idea of Gnosticism. Of course, the spiritual doctrine of evolution of Gnosticism will perhaps fiercely reject what is today called the monistic theory of evolution. However, this so-called monistic theory of evolution differs from the Gnostic one in that, when it looks back to earlier states, it only , while the Gnostic doctrine of evolution goes back to the times when only the spiritual existed as the origin of existence, from which then not only the human soul but also the material developed, depending on the spiritual.

I have often pointed out the purely logical contradiction of the materialistic theory of evolution. It says: We go further and further back in time, come to times when primitive human conditions prevailed, then assume that humans developed from animals, and finally come to times when only animality was on earth. And we go back even further than when life was not yet on earth at all. We can say that this materialistic doctrine goes back to such hypothetical conditions when the earth was a part of the cosmic fog within the solar system, from which the sun with its planets would then have developed. The logical error in this whole materialistic doctrine can be seen from a comparison that is often made when this doctrine is to be explained to the student. This is illustrated by taking a drop of oil floating on water. Then you cut a small piece of paper, stick it on a pin, bring it into the drop of oil and then turn it. As smaller droplets then separate out, you can show the student the formation of a miniature planetary system. The same thing, so they say, happened outside with the great nebula. Therein lies the ground plan of the monistic theory of evolution. However, a big mistake is made in the process; the teacher has forgotten something. He has forgotten that the whole thing only turns when he does it himself. Therefore, the comparison only applies if one assumes a great professor in space who turns the whole thing. Of course, one does not need to assume this if one stands on the monistic point of view.

Spiritual science, however, assumes that if we go back in time from epoch to epoch, we do not come across anything material at all, but rather that the origin of the earth and also of a planetary system lies in a sum of spiritual beings. Spirit is the origin of existence; this was also a fundamental Gnostic idea. And this spirit, which is the origin of all existence, can be recognized today when the soul is freed from the body. If one wants to deny the spirit behind all existence, then such a denial can be compared to what someone might say who looks into a container of water in which pieces of ice are floating, and then wants to say: That is only ice. In the same way, someone who has only opened their eyes to material existence can only see matter and not the spirit. But material existence is embedded in the spirit; it has developed out of the spirit in accordance with natural law; it is a condensation of the spiritual, and all material beings have arisen out of the spirit. Those who only want to accept matter overlook the spiritual only because they have not opened their spiritual eyes, as Goethe says. In primeval times, according to the Gnostics, all material things did not yet exist. These developed out of the spiritual through condensation; they are a consequence of the spiritual, a condensation of the spiritual: all material beings from stones to human beings are products of the spiritual.

One can follow how, little by little, the planetary and the natural kingdoms arose out of the spiritual, and how, at a certain point in the development of the earth, man also emerges out of the spirit and enters the earth. This was the idea of the Gnostics, which still seems correct to true spiritual science today - the Gnostics, who, with bold human wisdom, tried to fathom the nature of Christ. They assumed that at a certain point in the development of the earth, man came into being in such a way that a certain amount of what was predetermined in the spiritual world for man – a certain amount of the human soul that was present in the spirit and destined for the physical human being, found its way into the earthly human being, so that from a certain point in the development of the earth, he was endowed with this spiritual-soul, which became human. But they also assumed that something of this spiritual-human aspect had been left behind in the spiritual world when it emerged into human development, so that only part of the whole human aspect survived in the generations on earth. So people developed down on earth, but it was not the full spiritual-human aspect that was in them; rather, a part had remained behind in the spiritual world and continued to develop there, beyond the human level.

If we take the development of the earth in the sense of gnosis, we can say: From the time when man appeared on earth, we have a twofold developmental current. Firstly, the souls in people develop on earth from generation to generation, but the full spiritual, which humanity should have received from the spiritual world, does not develop. And a second developmental trend is about material existence, is about the cosmos, the spiritual realm. Then, according to the Gnostic view, something occurred in the development of humanity that could only occur at a later point in time.

Why did humanity have to develop for a time without its highest spiritual link? This had to happen because people were to complete a kind of descent within the material in their development, were to fully enter into the material; they had to become aware of themselves in the material, so that when this remaining spiritual approaches them at a later point in time, they would be able to feel and receive it all the more freely and independently. Man had to become entangled in the material so that he could then, by distinguishing the spiritual from the material, feel this spiritual in its purest meaning when it descended.

When did the spiritual descend? Gnosis says: The descent of this spiritual, which has developed in the cosmos, is indicated by what is symbolically stated in the Gospels as John's baptism in the Jordan. If we want to understand this, we can say that every person can know that the individual human being not only develops successively, but that there are moments in the existence of many souls when they feel as if something completely new has entered them, as if something has been awakened in them. For the development of Goethe, for example, it is easy to indicate when one has to make a cut in the nineties, when something completely new entered into the soul of Goethe. There are many souls that know that they not only progress little by little, but that the soul has tremendous moments of reversal and development, where they feel as if a world is flowing into them, where they take in something completely new.

This is for individual souls on a small scale what Gnosis saw on a large scale in the appearance of John the Baptist in the Jordan. Then this spiritual approached the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Until then, Jesus' development had progressed in such a way that he was prepared by it to experience the greatest possible change through this John the Baptist. Not only did a great change occur in this soul, but that which had remained behind in the spiritual-cosmic regions at the origin of human development entered into it; that which had developed separately in the regions of the supersensible entered into the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. It took possession of him and remained in his soul for three years, until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who want to apply the usual sequence of cause and effect from history to such things will not be able to understand this, but those who take into account the factors that are given in my book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact' , will find that factors of a supersensible nature play a part in historical development, and that what is assumed by Gnosticism cannot be rejected out of hand as something effusively mystical.

What did Gnosticism say? It assumed that there are two developmental currents that lead people to the point where they are grasped by the first, the material; above this material current is a supersensible-spiritual one. At the time of the baptism in the Jordan, the second current approached the person of Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that through this event humanity was fertilized with that part of the universal cosmic human being that it had not yet been able to absorb at the beginning of the development on earth. We have here a spiritual fertilization – the fertilization of humanity with that impulse that had to remain behind in order to develop further until humanity had matured materially enough to be able to receive it. Just as it is not a contradiction that some germ in nature must first develop and then be fertilized in order to reach full development, so it is not a contradiction that humanity must first develop materially and then be fertilized by the spirit at a certain point in time.

That is one of the ideas, and indeed the main idea, of Gnostic thought. Today, everyone believes that they can move beyond the Gnostics and dismiss them as fantasists and enthusiastic mystics, although theologians – for example, Harnack in his “History of Dogma” – say that we must turn back to them, because in Gnosticism lies the real starting-point for all later religious and theological speculations; and Smith admitted that these Gnostics were the greatest theosophical geniuses! And if we want to characterize the fundamental position of such a Gnostic with regard to the Christ problem, then we find that the Gnostics had the boldness to say: The human soul is capable, through its own efforts, through the development of what lies dormant in it, of really developing such powers of knowledge that it can survey the spiritual developmental impulses of humanity. If we want to speak more trivially, we can say that these Gnostics dared to gain knowledge of the supersensible path of human development from their souls. Such a Christ-idea, as it was held by these Gnostics, thus comes to meet us at the beginning of the Christian era. If we then continue to observe the development of the Christ-question within the evolution of mankind, we comprehend the necessary process that can be recognized in relation to the Christ-problem right up to the twentieth century.

We can make a small leap from the Gnostics into the Middle Ages. Do we find the same fact there? For a few individuals, yes, but not to the extent that there was such bold confidence in the general intellectual life, such trust in the powers of perception for the supersensible. The medieval view says: That which relates to the Christ-being, that which relates to the supersensible at all, has been revealed to man in Scripture. This revelation from Scripture is accepted as it is. The essential point of the medieval view is that it says: Man can only go so far with his own powers of knowledge; but then all human knowledge must stand still and wait for what tradition and revelation give as a supplement to what man can investigate himself. With his powers of knowledge, man can only recognize nature and what appears out of it, but in relation to the depth of the supersensible, man must rely on what Scripture has handed down to him. Man cannot penetrate with his powers of knowledge into that which is revealed to mankind. The boldness and confidence of Gnosticism have vanished. One no longer admits or recognizes that man can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through his spiritual powers. Thus the development went further.

In more recent times, the epoch is now dawning that has brought about what the spiritual researcher will always acknowledge: namely, the great achievements of natural science, the knowledge of material existence and its laws, the great achievements of industrial, commercial and social life. But in relation to the spiritual, a consequence has necessarily arisen from this material progress. This could only be achieved by man's leaning towards the sensual, the material. Something pushed its way into his thinking habits, causing him to lose his inclination towards the supersensible: while in the Middle Ages divine revelation was still accepted, the more recent epoch only agreed that man should not reach into the supersensible. But then this judgment was revised and it was said: So we leave the supersensible entirely and we also only adhere to the external-material. This was the case [from the Middle Ages] until the nineteenth century.

The view of religious matters, especially of the Christ problem, was also [shaped] in this way. What were the consequences of this? The idea of a being that had developed supersensibly and then entered into human existence was something people no longer wanted to know anything about. Christ as a supersensible, cosmic being that took possession of the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the supersensible Christ in the physical, sensual man Jesus – the new age did not want to go as far as this supersensibility. The result was that it lost the Christ and held only to Jesus. And the whole stream of development took shape as we see it now in the closing nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century as the so-called “Jesus conception”.

Truly, this view has produced many beautiful and glorious things. I would like to draw attention to something from the very last days, to the book by the Nuremberg theologian Rittelmeyer; it is called “Jesus”. And when you read this booklet, you get the impression that the author has gained something in his understanding of Jesus that corresponds to an ideal personality, which gives him nourishment for soul and spirit, to which he devotes himself, which gives him the certainty that all great human things, all that is truly meaningful, are real, that all great impulses of humanity are not a dream but reality. Rittelmeyer has in his soul what one would wish for every soul; he has the certainty in view of Jesus that he has a faithful counselor. His description is so vivid as if he could look at the living Jesus as on a brother who is both hope and salvation for him. Such phenomena have produced the Jesus conception, but it has also produced something else, which has led to significant discussions.

Then came the purely materialistic research, and why should it not also approach this problem? What I mean is quickly indicated. The historians have become accustomed to stating only that which can be proven and substantiated from historical sources, for which one can present historical documents. With the culture of the Occident it is very strange in this regard. I would like to show this with an example. The following is said about the great historian von Ranke: When von Ranke was already advanced in years, he said to a friend: One cannot simply leave out the figure of Jesus from history – and yet, if we look at von Ranke's historical view, he leaves the Jesus impulse out of consideration. Then Ranke himself became suspicious and said: “If we examine the historical facts, we find that the impulse of Jesus plays a part in them everywhere.” This did not become clear to him from the historical sources, but from his instinctive consciousness he felt that one could not simply leave Jesus out of history.

But now the question is: Does a Jesus of Nazareth even exist? — This question would have been quite impossible for the Gnostics. They knew that man can develop to the knowledge of the supersensible, and that the Christ then comes to meet him when he considers the supersensible in the course of human development. One could even say that there is an ancestral relationship between Paul and Gnosticism. Paul, although a contemporary of Christ Jesus, could not be convinced by what had happened in Jerusalem. Certainly, everything was accessible to him, but that could not convince him; he remained an unbeliever. How did he not only become a believer, but also the most important representative and founder of Christianity? Through a supersensible experience! Out of the supersensible the truth about Christ appeared to him in the so-called “Event of Damascus”. And as he saw the Christ event out of the supersensible world, he knew that it was not something nebulous. He also knew that what now lives again in the supersensible — the Christ — once lived on earth in a human body. From the supersensible he received the conviction of the historical Jesus. Thus it was also quite natural for the Gnostics that the Christ lived in Jesus. This view continued well into the Middle Ages. Therefore, the question of the historical Jesus was not yet significant at that time.

It only became significant when people had lost the Christ and only clung to the material, to Jesus. Then the historian stepped in and demanded documents, and now historical radical criticism comes along and shows that in the sense in which we today call documents historical, the Gospels are not documents. No other documents are available. You must not misunderstand me. The Gospels are fully recognized by spiritual research, but in a sense other than a purely historical one. Through spiritual research, one relives the experiences of the Gospel writers, not the other way around. The Gospels are not evidence for the historical Jesus. Harnack said: All the historical traditions about Jesus can easily be written on a quart page. Everything is contestable, and when the purely historical method of research approaches the Gospels, then only what has happened could have happened, namely that Drews has shown in a brilliant way that there is no historical proof of Jesus. That is the movement that has emerged recently. Drews is not alone in this view; Smith is on the same ground. All of them have made a discovery that was highly astounding to them. They first realized that the historical Jesus cannot be established. They say: We have no documents, and therefore the Jesus can just as well be denied. But they made a discovery: They came to the conclusion that there is a Christ, that Jesus was a god. Drews, Smith and others admit that Jesus was not just a man but a god in the time in question, that all the accounts in the Gospels are accounts of a superhuman-divine being. So what do they do? They direct the view to the Christ idea; they come back to the Christ. And what results from that, you can find in Drews or in Smith's “Ecce Deus,” published by Diederichs in Jena.

[These people say:] What the Gnostics believed, what was believed in the Middle Ages, what Origen believed, that is not applicable to a human being. And this proves to us that by Christ is meant a superhuman, a divine being. Thus, in the Being at the source of Christianity, we have not a human being but a God — a Being to whom only spiritual and supersensory attributes can be applied, who has a supersensory significance for humanity. But such a Being does not exist, these people say, and therefore one cannot speak of such a Being; it did not exist in Jesus! So this newer spiritual current has discovered the Christ, has recognized that he is a god, and therefore breaks with the Jesus view; because now that he is a god, he certainly could not have existed. Smith says: If Christ is a god, then it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the existence of Jesus at all. This is how Christ was (re)discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but at the same time the whole Christ being was annulled. That is how it is now!

Look, what does Drews, for example, give us as a living Christ, as a living impulse that has intervened in the course of human development, as a spiritual-living being? Drews is not a materialist, is not a monist - he is quite religious -, but he assumes a development of humanity in general; he says: everyone can undergo an inner development, everyone can come to a certain inner elevation and religious experience in their soul, so that everyone then finds something in themselves, something like a higher self, like a higher human being. This higher self suffers in the ordinary human being and wants to be redeemed from it. - And further he says: At the time when Christianity was founded, this need to develop the higher human being was particularly strong, and so the common idea of such a superhuman Christ being was formed in an early Christian community. This idea of man is the actual Christ impulse. Because Christ is a god, he cannot have existed as a human being, but only as an idea. Drews is in a sense a spiritualistic idealist. He does not deny the Christ, but for him he is merely an idea. There was no man Jesus in whom a special cosmic entity had entered, but rather a human community was once seized by the idea that something higher lives in man, a human God, and that this is the suffering God who wants to redeem himself within humanity.

Thus, from all that the development of contemporary spiritual life has been able to achieve so far, we have an idea instead of the living Christ. Just as in recent times, perhaps out of an awareness of the times, people speak of “ideas of history” in such a way that they imply that only natural human beings exist, not spiritual powers that intervene in history, so too is the Christ himself said to be only an idea. This idea of Drews is a profound idea, but if one goes deeper, one can say: one can indeed find an idea as a characteristic law of world development, but an idea creates just as little as a painted painter will create a picture. What the Christ really is is quite different from what has been conceived as a general idea by some community, just as a painted image of a painter is different from a real painter who creates a picture. The mere idea of Christ could never have produced such an impulse as the Christ event has produced in man.

But that real, genuine Being that descended at the moment of John the Baptist's baptism, that Paul experienced at the moment of the Damascus Event – that is precisely what the present needs, since it cannot relate to an abstract idea. And that is what makes the contemplation of Jesus so acceptable to many people; for how can someone who is oppressed in his soul, who is in suffering and misery, ever find great hope, consolation and confidence, and believe in the redemption of mankind by looking at a cold idea? What makes the conception of Jesus so acceptable is that in this view one is dealing with a being just like any other ordinary human being. But one is dealing with a supersensible entity when one regards the Christ as a real, living entity. And this is how spiritual science regards him. It does not want to revive the old Gnostic teaching, but approaches the Christ as it approaches other facts of the material and spiritual world. And when spiritual research approaches the Christ today, it also finds the development of mankind as it can be understood in the sense of the old Gnosis. And it finds that what man can find as the way to the Christ must indeed take its starting point from within the human being. All spiritual research takes the inner man as its starting point; it says: the soul can develop, it can bring dormant powers to revelation within it, so that it looks into the spiritual world.

Now, on the basis of its research, this science adds to today's views something that is only slowly finding its way into our present education, but which used to be fairly widespread. We first find it in Lessing's “Education of the Human Race”; he speaks of the fact of repeated lives on earth. Just as we live now between birth and death, we are not living here for the first time; our soul has often been embodied in physical bodies and will often be again. What is the meaning of all this re-embodiment? The meaning is that our soul, as it passes from life to life, always develops different powers, always different nuances of character, always different qualities. It is not that we always return in the same way. All the souls that are embodied today were embodied in the time of the ancient Persians or the ancient Egyptians for my sake, and a progression of the souls takes place through these repeated lives on earth. When we consider this progression, the Gnostic teachings make sense: our time was preceded by a time in which man first had to mature in order to then be able to receive the Christ impulse. From life to life, every soul was present in the pre-Christian era, and from life to life it found its way more and more into the physical existence so that it became more and more mature in each new existence. Then the Christ impulse came, and the souls developed further.

Today we may say: we can only understand ourselves as human beings if we look back to the distant past. Our present state of consciousness – the way we think and have a world view today – has only developed over time; in earlier periods of the earth's development, consciousness was more dream-like, but in return people were clairvoyant. The myths and legends are the reproduction of what the clairvoyant soul has seen; they are not fictitious. Man at that time had no freedom and clarity of consciousness, but he still had something instinctively divine in him. Man at that time could not have concluded from the functionality of the world that there was a divine reason for it, but the soul was still connected to the divine spirit. In clairvoyance, man was still connected to his God. In certain intermediate states, the soul was, as it were, lifted out of its body, then a divine spiritual aspect was added to it.

But that was the meaning of further development, that man had to live more and more in the material world. In this way he came to know physical nature, but lost his divine inner consciousness. The inner God, which man experienced within himself, faded away; but what could be seen with human eyes and grasped with the human mind became clear to man. Therefore, science did not begin in primeval times, but only when people began to focus on their physical surroundings, while we have myths and legends from ancient times in which man grasped the divine-spiritual in a dream-like clairvoyance. Such was the descent of the human soul. When we consider this, a word of the Baptist appears to us in a very special depth. He focuses on the characteristic of his time. In the past, the soul had a connection with its God, but now this connection no longer exists. The Baptist could say: The meaning of human beings has changed, they have lost their connection with their God. But he could also say: human development is not only a descent, but also an ascent. For this, the Christ impulse was taken up at a certain point in time; what humanity had left behind in the way of spirituality descended upon Jesus as the Christ and through him enriched humanity. Then, Jesus' body had to pass over into death. Whoever wants to understand that death was necessary for the entire Christ impulse, that the sacrificial death is something most real, can reflect on the fact that the seed must also rot before it can bring forth a new plant and bear fruit. The original divine-spiritual, which preceded the two developmental currents [of which Gnosticism tells us – that which remains in the spiritual and that which leads into matter –] descended, passed through death and became the seed on Earth, in order to now fertilize the soul, so that it may ascend again from the material and find the way back into the spiritual.

Anyone who finds this repulsive and mystical may do so, and must also find it mystical that infinite chemical and physical effects are concentrated in the sun and expand throughout the cosmos and our earth. Just as material life is concentrated in the sun, so is the entire spiritual life of our earth concentrated in that entity, which, as the Christ-being, through that which is indicated by the baptism of John, flowed into Jesus, lived in him for lived in him for three years and then had to go to his death, in order to radiate from there and express its effects over the entire development of humanity, so that linked with the Christ Being is the impulse that came into the development of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The earth has become a different place as a result. When we look back today at the embodiments of people before the Mystery of Golgotha, we have to say: people were not in a position to allow what had come into the spiritual development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha to enter into their souls.

Spiritual science points out that behind what a person experiences in their everyday life, in the depths of their soul, lie subconscious depths. In that which a person is aware of, in that which lives in their higher soul, the Christ does not yet live directly for many people. Only in exceptional cases has he opened himself up, as he did to the apostle Paul. He was able to perceive the truth about the Christ through that which lived in the depths of his soul. But just as the soul has descended, so too does it ascend again. And anyone who has an eye and an understanding for this - not only the spiritual researcher who can penetrate to the certainty of these things - may say: We are now at an important starting point of human soul development. All the signs are there, if one can see into the present, that the matter is as follows.

In today's world, where we have come the farthest in the loss of Christ, in the denial of the historical Christ, where we have lost touch with the mystery of Golgotha, where we see how souls are educated by the scientific way of thinking of the new time, we also see how this way of thinking, when applied correctly, matures the souls to a new knowledge of Christ, which is the knowledge of Christ in spiritual science. One must start from the innermost part of one's soul in relation to the path to Christ. When the spiritual researcher does this, he comes to find something real, not in the conscious mind, but in that which lives in the unconscious part of his soul and which he can see as something that was not always on earth, but entered into earthly development at the time of the Mystery at Golgotha. If today the student of the soul is able to look within and draw forth from himself the deeper forces of his knowledge, he beholds something different than in pre-Christian times. He beholds the Christ in the spiritual world; in pre-Christian times he could not behold him. We can find him in ourselves, but the people of pre-Christian times could not find him in themselves. The historic Christ is the cause of the mystical Christ, which we can find in us, as true as the outer physical sun is the cause of our eyes. If the sun had never poured out its light, the eyes could not have developed. It is true that today's human soul, when it applies the methods of spiritual research to itself, finds the Christ within, because the Christ is in the soul's foundations. In the soul's undergrowth, Christ is in it and shows himself to us in such a way that through this inner Christ we realize: He is in us only because he was once there historically and entered into the development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This Christ is not just an idea of the higher self, but he is the higher self; he is the one with whom we are connected in our deepest consciousness. This is the intimate relationship that we can gain with the Being that descended into a human body and suffered all that is human; but because it suffered divinely, it could be a helper for all people, so that at the same time it became the most intimate for the soul. Today man can say: What I find in me, what is most human in me, that lived as Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. He has become my brother, he is closest to my humanity. One understands the intimacy of the Christ of God only when one realizes His activity in the human soul from the following words of Christ: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Man only then has an intimate relationship with Christ when the spiritual essence, which as divine has participated in all that is human, mediates understanding between him and the other person, when the human soul says to itself: the Christ lives in me and also in you; when the Christ-being in one soul can seek the Christ-being in the other soul in love. This is how spiritual science speaks of the Christ. And at the same time, it finds that the human soul does not go from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, without meaning, but that it continues to develop.

If you compare the souls of people today with those in the eighth century, for example, you will find that the human soul powers were quite different from today. If you look at the nature of today's souls compared to the past, you will find that human souls are on the way to searching within themselves; and the more they search, the more they will find the Christ within themselves. Therefore, spiritual science may say: human souls are on the way to Christ. In the time in which Christ has been lost as God, in the time in which the historical Jesus is increasingly being lost through a radical criticism, man - so says spiritual science - is increasingly being driven into his inner being through the development of the human soul. In today's world, this is still masked and concealed, but the further development of the soul happens through one thing turning into its opposite and thereby bringing forth the other.

Materialism, when people take it very seriously, when it has reached its peak, will automatically lead to its opposite. When man is closed off from the supernatural, then the countervailing forces will awaken, and we are in the twentieth century in the time of the awakening of these countervailing forces. But when these deepest human soul powers awaken, then the Christ appears in the souls, and these souls experience the event of Paul of Damascus. Every soul in our time is living towards this, and just as Paul was convinced of the historical Jesus, so this event will increasingly evoke a living conviction in humanity that once upon a time Jesus was the Christ. “This is a bold fantasy,” some may say, ”but I cannot remain silent about it, even if it sounds bold: it is the truth! Such things are not immediately taken up by the time; there will be many obstacles before one comes to such a conviction, but it can still be given as a suggestion. One who has seen through everything is truly convinced. Those who look without prejudice at the souls of our time may speak of them as being on the path to the indicated knowledge of Christ.

The souls will become ever more mature in order to behold Christ in spirit. And this beholding in spirit is the real return of Christ, that is what can be called the “return” of Christ. What has entered the earth as divine-spiritual substance through the Mystery of Golgotha will not be seen in any physical way, but because, as human evolution progresses, souls will become ever more mature and thus [ever more capable of] seeing the supersensible realm as well. Direct participation in the Christ-consciousness, sharing in the Christ-consciousness, intimate communion with Christ Jesus – that is what lies ahead for humanity. By stating this, spiritual science penetrates directly into the heart; it does not bring dull theories, but leads to life in many areas of everyday life, but also to life where it is important for humanity.

If you look at Christ correctly, if you see him as a matter of humanity, not just as a personal matter, then you can also find the way to the historical Jesus through him. But the recognition of repeated earthly lives is a basic condition for truly grasping the Christ principle. If you ask: Was it not unfair for pre-Christian people that they could have no relationship with Christ? Then you do not recognize repeated earthly lives. But we answer: In pre-Christian times, people were not yet ripe for the Christ experience. They died and then came back down to earth and matured to receive the Christ within themselves. — Thus the Christ comes into the whole development of humanity — little by little into every soul — so Christ becomes an important impulse for the development of humanity by becoming an important impulse for each individual human being. But anyone who only allows the soul to be there once can at most rise in the soul to an idea of the Christ. Therefore, it is right that the theoretical philosophy of the present can only come to an idea of the Christ. It is the living human soul that passes from life to life that gains a relationship to the living Christ.

And how this Christ-idea, which will be the experience of the Christ of the twentieth century, expands into something of wonderful beauty, which is still little understood today! When this Christ-idea will be the foreseeable one of the twentieth century, when it will live in the souls, then something else will come. This idea will be as alive as a man of flesh and blood. It bears the stamp that the Christ is truly historical, as Paul recognized at the time. But something else is connected with this Christ-idea.

This Christ-idea cannot be conceived otherwise than that the human being expands his view from the individual human soul to all human souls. In this way, the human being looks, on the one hand, to the Christ, to whom he can turn in the most intimate moments as to the one who is most akin to the human soul; people will experience what is directly within them, but they will also experience that He is the impulse that has poured over the whole earth and all humanity, and this latter will be something very beautiful if it is truly understood by people. However, it will only be understood slowly! But once it is understood, people will say: the Christ is a reality, and inasmuch as he is a reality, he is this not only for those who recognize him, but for all of humanity. - Then we will be able to face every person of a different faith, whether he is a Hindu or a Chinese, whether he has this or that belief, and we will be able to regard him as a Christian because he is a human being. When Christians understand that in reality all people are Christians, when the Christ-problem is truly understood, then one will no longer make it dependent on religious denominations whether or not to call a person a Christian. Regardless of whether people know it or not, the Christ is the all-encompassing, the fulfillment of all humanity! And this correct understanding of Christ will confirm the word spoken by Christ: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Many a saying attributed to Christ can easily be misunderstood, such as: “Whoever does not leave father and mother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” This was not meant to break the old law, to sever the blood ties that were formerly based on love alone, but to add to the intimate human the general human. And to be a disciple of Christ means to find within oneself that which concerns all humanity, that which is comprehensive and intimate in every human soul, in terms of earth and humanity. As simple as this may be expressed, it is still little understood today. But when the Christ-problem is spiritually grasped, then the Christ will shine forth and stream into the souls and hearts of men. Today it lies latent in the development of humanity. There are, for example, some brilliant researchers of the present day who work with the deepest scientific earnest, such as Smith, whom I mention as a typical example. They made the discovery that what is told in the Gospels is not about a human being, but about a God. Now they say – and one cannot reproach them for this – that it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the earthly existence of this God. So the Christ is only a symbolic fiction, and that is how one can prove that the Christ could not have lived in physical embodiment.

Now, however, spiritual science has to put up with childish and simple-minded people, including the most learned scientific minds, because it has made the discovery that Christ was not just a god, a spiritual being, but that he also really entered into a human life. And for this one person, he became what he has always been for countless people and will increasingly become for more and more people. And spiritual science knows very well that what Christ is must be found within the soul, just as the sun can only be found through the eye. With Goethe, spiritual science says:

If the eye were not like the sun,
The sun could never see it;
If God's own power were not within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

But it not only says that we need an eye to see the sun, but also that if we had only lived in darkness, we would have had no eyes at all. From the original state of man, the sun brought forth the eyes; through the sun, through the light, man has received eyes. It is true that man cannot find the Christ unless he finds him within himself. But it is also true that the Christ can only be found in our inner being because he once lived on earth. It is historically true that the Christ is the sun of spiritual development on earth and that rays emanate from him that have sunk into us. By confirming what has been lost, spiritual science returns the Christ to the twentieth century as a living being, by recognizing both the historical Christ and the [living] Christ, who can be found as the spirit-sun when one delves into oneself. If it is true what Goethe said about the connection between the inner and the outer, about the sun and the divine, then something else is also true, to which Goethe would undoubtedly have given his approval. So let us summarize Goethe's saying in the spirit of our present reflection and pour it into the words, which may sound like an extension of Goethe'

saying:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to God's fulfillment?

First of all, I would like to express my warmest greetings to you, who have come here as the teachers from our immediate neighborhood. I am convinced that those who take an active interest in our Goetheanum and everything , will join me in wholeheartedly welcoming you on behalf of this Goetheanum and its workers and in expressing our great joy at having you here as our guests.

It has been suggested that I should discuss a few things that have emerged, and in some cases already been put into practice, in the wake of our spiritual scientific endeavors for the pedagogical arts and for the school system, before our eurythmic performance.

But before that, let me make a more general comment.

You see, what is to emerge from our anthroposophically intended spiritual science in pedagogical and didactic terms still has, in principle, few truly understanding representatives in the world today; it has all the more uncomprehending opponents and just as many people who, due to the general state of mental sleep of humanity today, are indifferent to such endeavors. But just in the very last days, things have happened that may be considered as, I would say, a sign, as on the one hand, so to speak, through lonely personalities from the whole breadth of our civilized life, the outlook is opened up to what is to happen from this Goetheanum building in Dornach. I must describe it as an important fact, even if only as a symptom, that the old professor Spitta in Tübingen, who is so well known to us, and who has concluded his teaching activities in these days, has given his last lecture in such a way that it culminated in a discussion of the most eminent spiritual-scientific truth: the truth of repeated earth lives. But not so much that this university teacher, at the solemn moment of the conclusion of his university career, once again professed what he had actually held all his life – that does not even seem as significant to me as the other thing, that he said at this lecture: Gentlemen, just imagine what it would mean for human knowledge and, above all, for human action in the future if this view were to become more widespread. It is a significant mark of a man who has grown old in science and in the philosophy of the present day when he concludes his teaching career with such a confession! For one can well imagine that the terrible events of the time have made a very deep impression on such a personality and that precisely such a personality, in lonely thought, feels the need to say what could help today's declining humanity from the spirit, from the soul, which in turn could lead to a revival.

You see, that is what I would like to say from one side: wherever there are discerning, feeling souls, the views that are represented here in a scientific context and that are also expected here to flow into all civilizational life of our time, can be seen at least as intuitions, which from here want to be represented in a scientific context and which are also expected here to be able to counteract the decline with a new dawn.

But these are flashes of light that arise in isolated places. Those who observe them will perceive them as rare flashes of light, but they will recognize from them the striving, especially among the best of our time, for a renewal of spiritual life from very, very deep sources of the soul. This is, however, opposed by what arises today out of a certain not only drowsiness, but, to put it mildly, out of an enormous superficiality of our time; which arises out of a superficiality that often leads to frivolity, especially in circles that are publicly active in journalism, with regard to the great questions of existence and human life. And after I have shown you a flash of light, I would also like to show you, so to speak, some of the shadows, which, however, do not occur in isolation, but are widespread. I could cite hundreds of facts in support of the last assertion; but I will now present only one particularly characteristic one.

One of our English friends has endeavored to arouse interest in London for what is to take place here in Dornach. He tried to place a very truthful and objective little article in what appears to be a respected journal – there are many such journals and newspapers at present. The journalist, who listened to the matter, with whom the gentleman in question was, a journalist from London, was very friendly and extremely accommodating. He promised to advocate the matter in such a way that a visit from about as many people as are here today to give us the pleasure of being here should be arranged from London. The journalist in question then said something about how transformative what he had been told was. I would like to read you something about this transformation as a document of the frivolity with which people speak today of that which they do not know — for the journalist naturally had no idea of what is going on here in Dornach. Something like this shows how little people today are inclined to respond at all when something wants to assert itself from a source that honestly believes it can counter decline with an ascent. So the following appears in a London magazine as the result of this interview, which the journalist conducted favorably:

Remarks and comments

A School of Spiritual Science

A School of Spiritual Science has been established at the Goetheanum in Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland. The building itself exemplifies a new concept of art initiated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is planned to organize a trip to Basel to visit it, and Dr. Steiner has promised to personally instruct the participants during the ten-day visit, which is to take place in August. Assuming that the trip takes four days, it will be possible for the participants to recover from the shock of the first sight of Dr. Steiner's creation during the remaining six days. Assuming that no one who can make the journey wants to miss out on what we expect will be an interesting experience, we will provide an illustration of what awaits participants at the end of their pilgrimage, and if any of our readers are going to travel, we hope that they will do us the favor of sharing their impressions with us upon their return.” [«The Architect», No. 34, London July 16, 1920]

So you see, this is how you treat something you don't know. This is the mood of the world today, these are the difficulties we have to fight against.

Now, my dear attendees, spiritual science is there for many and it should – this will be shown above all in our autumn course, which is to open on 26 September – exert a fruitful influence on all possible branches of spiritual life. In spring, a more limited course here already showed how the medical-therapeutic field can be enriched by spiritual science. And it is the same for the most diverse fields. The outer form of the building itself is intended to bear witness to what can be artistically attempted through spiritual science that can be absorbed into our perceptions. But today I want to speak to you about the consequences that spiritual science can have in the field of education and teaching. I am not speaking to you about some kind of program that we would not give a damn about, nor am I speaking to you about some kind of theoretical pedagogical discussion. I am speaking to you about something that has already been put into practice during the school year at our “Freie Waldorfschule” in Stuttgart. This Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded by Emil Molt. Its initial aim was to bring to life in practice what can arise from a development of what can be found in our spiritual science, above all, for a real understanding of man and thus also of the child.

You see, it is particularly important to me that we already have a year of real school practice behind us. I attach particular importance to this because all of this spiritual science, as it is to be brought into the world from the Goetheanum in Dornach, would basically be nothing more than just another sectarian movement or some worldview theory or the like — there are already many such beautiful things in the world — if something else were not there; if this spiritual science, in particular, did not want something completely different from everything that comes into the world in this way. This spiritual science does not want to produce ideas for a new world view; this spiritual science does not want to be some kind of theory or even a new religious confession, as it has been slanderously accused of — the latter least of all. What it wants to be was not originally conceived with reference to any religious confession, but rather it was conceived with the scientific way of thinking and attitude of our time in mind. It was conceived as that which can be brought forth by the human spirit and soul in the form of knowledge, just as natural science, which has been so fruitful for our time, has been brought forth as knowledge for physical life. And this spiritual science is based on the fact that if one applies the right methods, which I have described in my books “The Secret Science in the Outline” and “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”, one is able to gain just as certain knowledge, so enclosed, contoured knowledge about soul and spirit, as one can gain through the scientific methods of the present for the physical world.

However, the work that needs to be done to arrive at spiritual scientific knowledge in a truly methodical way is no more comfortable or easier than the work that needs to be done in a chemistry or physics laboratory, at an observatory, or in a clinic. Just because people imagine that anthroposophical researchers are people who conjure up all kinds of ideas that can be had quickly, that are quickly drawn from the imagination - just because people imagine this, that is why they misunderstand the paths that are to be taken from anthroposophy into the spiritual world. If one familiarizes oneself with the way in which man, in a self-education of his entire being, can alone come to open up within himself views of the spiritual world that are just as exact and certain as the results of natural science; only if one informs oneself about how long it takes to research relatively small, insignificant truths that are added to external-physical knowledge - let us say, for example, for the doctrine of human sense, for human anatomy or the like; only if one realizes how decades of research are often necessary for the most trivial little things in the field of spiritual science: then one will learn to understand that research in this field is by no means more convenient and easier than research in the clinical field, in the observatory, in the physics or chemistry laboratory. But today one does not yet have the will to accept that there can be such research into the mind and soul.

The intentions that have emerged over the last three to four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century, for scientific knowledge have been great and powerful. And I do not need to tell you what this scientific knowledge has brought to the world. But there is one thing I would like to mention: that anyone who stands firmly on the ground of our anthroposophically-based spiritual science will be the very last to disparage anything legitimate in scientific research. Because that is the first thing to be considered: that only those who are not dabbling or even lay in the scientific work of today can stand firm in the field of our spiritual science. Only when one has acquired scientific conscientiousness and scientifically rigorous research methods in the laboratory, in the observatory and so on, when one has educated oneself to the exactitude of research, only then has one awakened in oneself the inner moral world-view that is necessary to become a spiritual researcher. In the outer world, as one says, one always has the rough reality before one, which corrects one. If I am a bad bridge builder in theory and calculate a bridge badly, then the falling train will teach me that I have built my bridge badly. And so the correction is always there if one wants to apply the laws seen by the spirit in the outer physical reality. However, the further we ascend from the lower foundations of physical reality and approach the actual research of mind and soul, the more precarious its exploration of reality becomes. And if you were as strict in judging a doctor who has to rebuild destroyed health as you are in judging nature when it corrects a bad mechanic by means of a crashing train, you would not be able to proceed in the same way according to today's view. Because as a mechanic you can be checked by nature. Whether someone has died despite or even because of medicine - that's where things get a little shakier! And when one reaches the spiritual and psychic spheres, one must bring with one's inner conscientiousness and, above all, the most earnest and strict sense of truth if one wants to conduct supersensible research, for then it is easy to mistake fantasy for reality.

But something very special happens when one acquires the method for spiritual research in this way through inner soul education and soul training. What happens is that one comes closer to the things of the world than one does as an external naturalist. For you see, that is precisely the remarkable thing about the more materialistic natural science of modern times: on the one hand, it places itself before the world of facts of the outer senses, but, by creating ideas for itself in natural laws, this outer sense world, it has increasingly become more and more intellectualized, theoretical, and divorced from reality, so that the newer researchers of worldviews no longer know how to connect the ideas they concoct with reality. They often research whether the ideas that man carries in his soul still have anything to do with external reality. This is the tragedy of the modern, scientifically oriented worldview: people may profess this worldview; they want to deal with reality, with mere external reality, and they come away from this external reality precisely through their ideas. They no longer have the living connection, the connection of the whole human being with living reality. They want to go for reality and grow out of reality. One arrives at abstract intellectualized soul content. And so it happens that the more man grows into materialism, the more he grows out of reality.

If one now sets out on the path of spiritual research, one immediately has the inner experience: you immerse yourself in reality; you do not just stand there looking at your object, but you immerse yourself in this reality with your entire soul life; you become one with reality. That is why spiritual science, as it is meant here, can never exist without one beginning to love and loving more and more the thing one wants to know. Spiritual science is at the same time something that, when it asserts itself in our soul, permeates us with love for the world; which cannot be at all, even though it strives for mathematical clarity in the formulation and shaping of ideas, without seizing the whole human being, the feeling and the will. Therefore, I may say: the practical testing of what follows pedagogically and didactically from spiritual science is actually the only thing that can be valuable to us. Because talking about something, no matter how beautiful the theories are, when you are alienated from what you are talking about: that is basically easy and is the task that numerous world-view people and confession founders set themselves today. What is wanted here has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is precisely this immersion in reality and especially human reality that arises quite naturally in the wake of this spiritual science through nature, through the essence of this spiritual science.

And so it comes about that, above all, what arises through this spiritual science is a more intimate knowledge of the human being itself. Such a recognition of the human being that the one who now stands before the developing human being, the child - before this wonderful world riddle that is born, that in the first days of its external existence shows us the wonderful construction of a physical organism out of the spiritual and soul in every moment , and then, as it grows up, shows us how everything is formed out of the inner being, out of the soul and spirit, that the person who is now confronted with this living mystery of the world, this developing human being, as a teacher or educator, grows together with his task in such a way that one can truly say: Spiritual science is then the fire through which love for education and teaching is directly awakened. That is the goal of all our striving here: to get to know the human being.

But we cannot get to know the human being without getting to know him as he is becoming. And if we really want to get to know the human being as he is becoming, then we even have to enrich our language with a new word. For those who look a little deeper into the reality of life, all the languages of European civilization have only one word for the fundamental fact of life, and there should be two! They have one word. Now, if we go back to primeval times, to those times of human life that only old documents speak of in a mythical way, then we find something similar to what we need again: when we speak of the eternal, of the indestructible in the human being, as opposed to the destructible, perishable body. We need another word to accompany our word 'immortality', which points to the physical end of life; we need the word 'unborn'. For just as we pass through the gate of death with our eternal, spiritual part and live on in the spiritual world – a different life that can be seen through by spiritual research – we also step out of the spiritual world before we are born or conceived here, down to this physical embodiment on earth. We not only pass through the gate of death as immortals, but also come through the gate of birth as the unborn. We need the word 'unborn' in addition to the word 'immortal' if we want to fully grasp the human being in his essence.

What I am hinting at here can be found in my writings, explained from all sides. I can only give you the main features, so to speak, because I want to show you what becomes of human life and human feeling if we want to make such a view fruitful.

Imagine a teacher who, like our Waldorf teachers in Stuttgart, has gone through everything that can be experienced when spiritual science is allowed to take effect on the soul. Imagine him standing before the developing human being, the child. He has not only a gray theory, he has this as a living purpose in life: he says to himself, “The souls have descended from spiritual worlds, these souls on which I now have to work.” And now, from the pedagogy and didactics that follow from spiritual science, knowledge is imparted to him about how these souls can be treated from year to year, from month to month. And I may perhaps give you an idea, since you are all educators of young people, based on a small detail, which in my case is the result of more than three decades of research. This idea, if it does not remain an idea, does not remain a thought, but when it becomes a living activity in the educator and teacher, it evokes a remarkably stimulating relationship between the teacher and the pupil, between the educator and the child to be educated. You see, today in psychology there is much talk about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. And there are theories that say how soul and body are to interact. But these things are not studied. We do not have the method of spiritual science by which one can study these things. Because one has to study them in detail. You cannot talk about the relationship between the human soul and the body by rambling in generalities, but you have to know all the details. Details of the soul affect details of the human body. I will only hint at which of the individual ideas around which the matter revolves I actually mean.

We first observe the child before they start school. We know that they initially have what are known as milk teeth. From the age of six to eight, they then produce their permanent teeth. This is an extraordinarily important period in the life of someone who does not just observe the outer human being, but observes the whole human being through spiritual science. It is no coincidence that this period coincides with the one in which the child is handed over to the primary school. For what finally pushes through as teeth comes from forces that are present in the whole human being and are active in the whole human being; and that is, so to speak, the final point; when these second teeth appear, an end is put to something that has been active in the human organism until then. That which was active there has gone as far as the emergence of the teeth.

Now, anyone who observes human life more deeply will find that, from a certain stage of human life onwards, memory, and in particular the ability to combine and to imagine, takes on a very specific structure. What later becomes intellectual life particularly emerges from this stage of life onwards. And if we now follow what takes place in the soul and spirit of the child up to the point in time when the second teeth mainly shoot out, if we follow this quite appropriately, as one follows a natural object under the microscope, what becomes of the soul when the teeth are out? then you discover that it is the same power that first flooded and permeated the organism and then emancipated itself from the organism and became free in the soul to become the intellectual faculty.

You observe the child from the age of seven or nine, his life of soul and mind, and you say to yourself: What now emerges as mind has previously, when it was still in the subconscious, worked in the organism. That was active as soul in the body.

I will now summarize something for you that, as I said, is the result of more than three decades of research. You have observed in a very concrete way how the soul works in the body, although it does not appear in its original, natural form until the first seven years. This is how it is everywhere with our spiritual science. Based on strict research principles, it talks about the relationship between soul and body, not philosophically and rambling, but according to concrete results, how the individual soul, in this case the mind, first worked on the body. We follow how the mind works inside the body and gradually organizes the body until the teeth have erupted.

And so it can be done over and over again, and one can come to an understanding of the whole human body from the spiritual-soul realm. Here, theories are not constructed about the interaction of soul and body. Here, not only the human being present in a particular period of time is observed, but the whole human being is followed. One cannot ask: How do soul and body interact from birth to the change of teeth? For that which has been working there only appears externally from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. Then a new epoch begins. And so, step by step, spiritual science is used to study what this human being actually is. This does not result in the abstract, grey theory of man that we are accustomed to finding in the usual textbooks and manuals; it gives us something that fills us with the realization of how we are filled with something in an individual, personal relationship with what we encounter in life and what interests us directly from life.

This opens our eyes to the development of the human being, the child: how the soul of the child develops more and more in the outer body. And this ignites the will to approach this developing child in the pedagogically correct way. Then one acquires the ability to say how the developing child actually stands in relation to what is to be offered to him.

You see, we teach our children to read and write. If we disregard certain primeval times of humanity, when reading and writing was still very close to human perception – I am only thinking of the old pictographic scripts – and look at our times, at our times of civilization – and we must, after all, live in them and educate ourselves in them – yes, what are our characters, what are our letters, if not something that is very far removed from the original, elementary, childlike experience! The child is actually introduced to a world that is quite foreign to him if he is to learn to read and write. It is not the same with arithmetic, because that is more human. Counting is much more closely related to the original and elementary human soul than reading and writing. Writing has developed further, and pictures have become signs through which one enters a foreign world.

Now, based on our essential insights into human nature, we have planned for our Waldorf curriculum that the child, by being educated and taught in the primary school in the beginning, learns to write from the artistic comprehension of writing and then learns to read from writing. So we do not introduce the child to foreign characters, but we seek out the way from the child's nature – which gives us spiritual scientific guidance to recognize it more precisely: How does the hand want to move? What does the hand experience when it makes a stroke, an action? We let the child draw. We let the child develop what is connected with its elementary nature; and only from that do we develop the written characters. So we start from life and lead to the abstract. We avoid bringing the intellectual element to the fore in any way. We start from life.

And we also start from life in such a way that, for example, we do not bring into the curriculum the kind of alternation that some people find so beneficial, where something different is done in every lesson. Instead, we work on a particular subject in the main lessons until the child has mastered it, until the child has understood it. Therefore, we do not have a curriculum of lessons, but for the main school subjects we have a curriculum that remains the same for about three months. Of course, this excludes languages and so on.

And then we try to fit everything that needs to be learned into the time when the child can develop the subject of its own accord. For example, we try to study everything that follows from the fact that what has been working in the organism at first, then stops working when the teeth change, coming to fruition from year to year in the eighth, ninth, tenth year. We observe what we can teach the child in a particular year, starting from the very first rudiments of observation of nature and historical life. We try to put into practice what is often said today, but which must remain abstract. The pedagogy that we have today is not to be criticized. I have the highest regard for what is available in the way of theoretical education and pedagogical instructions. I do not believe that we can add anything essential to that. But in what we can add from spiritual science because it is a living thing, that is in awakening the pedagogical approach, the didactic, in the utilization of precise human knowledge in the child. Thus, if guided by the insights of spiritual science, one can carefully study how around the age of nine a very important phase takes place in the child's soul. Until then, the child is actually always in such a state that it does not differ significantly from the environment. Around the age of nine, the child begins to differ from the environment to such an extent that from then on we begin to talk about plants and animals quite differently than before. And history lessons should only be taught in a fairy-tale or legendary way, in a pictorial way. They should only be taught at all – even in the very early stages – after the child has learned to distinguish itself from its environment, so around the age of nine.

Thus, through spiritual science, we strive to understand the human being in principle – not only in general pedagogical and didactic terms – and this shows us what we have to accomplish for the developing human being day after day. But all this still has something of thinking, of the conceptual, about it. Something much more important is the other.

Just think about what it means for education if you take the view that we have before us in man only the highest being in the animal series, and we have to develop in him what he receives through physical birth. Through spiritual science, on the other hand, the teacher starts from the basis that A spiritual being has descended from the spiritual world; it has embodied itself in a physical human being. It has brought spiritual substance from the spiritual world and combined it with what comes from the hereditary stream. We have this whole living human puzzle before us and have to work on its development. — How one is overcome by a tremendous reverence for the developing human being! For awe-inspiring stands before us, what the gods have sent down to us from heaven to earth.

And the second feeling that creeps up on us when we face the child is an enormous sense of responsibility; but a sense of responsibility that carries us, that really gives us strength and will to educate and teach. It is therefore something that can enter a person alive. I do not want to be misunderstood. What I mean is that what enters the human being as life – not as theory, not as theoretical pedagogy, not as doctrinaire pedagogy – that is what comes to us through spiritual science. For spiritual science does not just want to reflect the general life of the world in ideas; it wants to enable human beings to partake in this general life of the world. That is why things that arise from spiritual science play a role in educational activities that are based on it, and that we only really notice when we engage with this spiritual science.

We often find ourselves in a position where we have to say something to children that initially goes beyond their understanding when we teach it to them in concepts. Let us assume that we want to teach a child about the nature of the immortal human soul. Those who have experience know how difficult this is if we want to take the matter responsibly and reverently. Let us assume – I want to start from a comparison – we look at a butterfly pupa. We say to the child: Look, the butterfly will fly out of this chrysalis; you will see the butterfly when it comes out of the chrysalis. It is the same with the human soul; the human soul leaves the chrysalis of the body at the moment of death. You just cannot see this soul. An image presents itself to the children.

People often think that if someone does something in this way, it is the same as if someone else does it. Spiritual science shows us that this is not the case. If I have to think about it first to realize that the butterfly pupa with the butterfly flying out is an image for the immortal human soul, if I, because the child is more stupid than I am, I cobble together the image and bring it to him so that he can understand immortality – if you approach the child with this attitude, you are not teaching the child. Only if you believe in the image yourself, you are teaching the child the right thing. And I will be quite honest with you: for me, based on spiritual science, this is not a pieced-together image, but a fact; the human soul goes through what the butterfly shows in the image. And it is not my intellect that has found in this butterfly the image for immortality, but rather: at a lower level of nature, the same process is present. The image is made by nature, by the spirit of nature itself. I do not create the image, but I believe that in the butterfly emerging, nature's creative powers represent the same as the human soul leaving the body. I do not believe that the child is stupid and I am clever, but I place myself on the same level because I have honestly gained what I say to the child in consciousness. I must believe it to the same extent and in the same way that I want to teach it to the child. Then there is something imponderable, then it is really my soul and the child's soul, which at that moment are still connected by quite different forces than by the words that live in concepts and thoughts and theories. This connection with the developing child's soul through such things is often what matters.

And again we see how, in recent times, many things have been misunderstood in a one-sided way. People have striven more and more to teach children only what they can understand. But in so doing they descend more and more into the most dreadful triviality. Just think how banal and ordinary things would have to be presented in order for a child to understand them! And when you look at the method books that describe how to teach children, you will be horrified at the banalities you are supposed to inflict on children.

There is one thing that is so important and meaningful for human life that we simply do not know. When we get to know human life, it is like this: sometimes, perhaps at the age of thirty-five, we remember something we may have learned in the eighth year. If we have learned it correctly, from the right spirit, we know it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. You also remember: You did not understand that, you accepted that on authority. — You felt that: I am younger, the teacher is older, he understands it, I do not understand it. Now, at thirty-five, the whole thing comes up again. Now you understand it because you have matured. Once people appreciate what it means when, in later life, you feel empowered by your own maturity to understand something that you used to believe only because you respected the person who told you, because he was an authority — if people would only grasp this, then they would also be able to appreciate what it means when spiritual science says: you have to look at the child as it develops up to about the age of seven, and you will find that the child is above all an imitator. It does everything that those around it do. This is a basic law of human nature developing during these years. You cannot educate by admonishment, but only by example, right down to the thoughts. Those who have impure thoughts in their childhood have a bad effect on children. For the souls have a subconscious connection. So, right down to the thoughts, everything is experienced by the child up to the change of teeth in an imitative way and is incorporated into the whole human being by imitation.

But then, with the change of teeth, with the entry of the intellectual part of the soul, begins what the human soul wants until sexual maturity: devotion to an honored authority. This should be said especially to our time, that it corresponds to a human law of development. The child can absorb truths during this time because it sees that the honored authority depends on these truths. Those who have not experienced absorbing truths out of a sense of authority, roughly from the ages of seven to fourteen, can hardly stand on their own two feet in life as independent and free human beings, for they have not developed the right relationship between people in their humanity!

Therefore, our educational philosophy is based on the fundamental principle that up to the age of seven, education and teaching should be based on imitation. The teacher in the primary school up to the age of fourteen then finds himself so isolated that he is the only authority. It has an enormous significance for life if one can later remember: Through your own maturity, you have now achieved something that was instilled during your school days. This gives a special strength. In this way, schooling and education have an effect on later life, when the teacher, through the authority that is taken for granted, teaches the child what he will only understand later. In general, it is easy and plausible for superficial observation: one only wants to teach the child what he understands. But then one makes people old early. One destroys life. One does not give the human being the right earthly substance for later life.

With these truths, I only wanted to make it clear how, not from theoretical pedagogy, but through what a person can become by permeating themselves with spiritual science, in the human relationship, that is achieved for the child, which we would like to add to what the pedagogy of the 19th century has produced in terms of the magnificent, in terms of very magnificent principles. Spiritual science wants to fertilize life out of the need of our time, because it is a recognition that permeates the human being completely in his innermost being. Therefore, this must be carried out in every detail. Our teachers and educationalists should work from the direct knowledge of the human being. Therefore, anyone who says that we want to introduce a new confession, a world view, into the school is judging us badly.

At our Freie Waldorf School in Stuttgart, whose top management I am in charge of and which I have to inspect from time to time, I said from the outset: It is impossible for us to bring the content of a world view into the school. Protestant children are taught their faith by Protestant pastors, Catholic children by Catholic pastors. Dissident children can remain dissident children. When a whole number of these children or their parents came to us and said: Yes, what you teach the children awakens in them the feeling that they should also receive a religious impulse - so the dissident parents came, not just those who belong to any confession; the present confessions do not manage to create such a strong religious need. We were forced to set up general religious education classes because the children educated in the anthroposophical tradition had a religious need arising from the spirit of our teaching and because the children of dissident parents did not want to send their children to religious education classes within a confessional framework. The children who receive these classes would otherwise have received no classes at all. And as I said, Catholic children receive Catholic religious education and Protestant children receive Protestant religious education. We can, because we do not want to bring a particular worldview into the school, be tolerant in the true, genuine sense in this regard. And this tolerance truly bears good fruit in practice. For what we are seeking is not to bring a worldview or confession into the school, but a practical pedagogy and didactics that can come from spiritual science and only from spiritual science. We have a purely objective educational interest in setting up our school and not in promoting any particular worldview. And anyone who claims that we promote a worldview out of our spiritual science, anyone who claims that, is lying. Only someone who knows how we want to serve nothing but practical life through that which, in the face of this life, does not stand in unworldly distances, but precisely through this knowledge, as I have just described to you, is connected with practical life, judges what we want correctly.

That is why we have included eurythmy in the curriculum as a compulsory subject. You will not think me so foolish as to object to the beneficial effects of gymnastics, which were rightly emphasized in the 19th century. But the time will come when people will think more objectively about these things. Then it will be found that gymnastics does correspond to human physiology; it introduces those physical movements into the child, into the human being, that correspond to the study of the human body. But we do not add to this, by contesting gymnastics – our eurythmy.

What is this eurhythmy? It is, first of all, an art, as presented here in public performances. But in addition, it also has a hygienic-therapeutic element and, furthermore, a strong pedagogical-didactic element. It is not based on some invented gestures - through random connections between external gestures or facial expressions and what is going on in the soul - but on what can be gained through careful study by what I would like to call, in the spirit of Goethe, “sensual-supersensory observation”. If we study the human speech organ more from within and see with our senses what takes place, not in movements or modulations, but in the potential for movement, then we can apply this to the whole human being, entirely in keeping with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe sees the whole plant only as a more complicated leaf. What Goethe explained with regard to forms in his morphology and what will only be appreciated later, we try to apply functionally in human activity in an artistic way. We move the whole human organism or groups of people in such a way that it is derived from spoken language. That is, we make hands, legs and heads perform movements that correspond to the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs. We make the whole human being into a larynx, so to speak, and thus create a soundless but visible language – not a sign language that comes from the arbitrariness of the imagination. We create a language that we transfer to the human being and his movements. It is formed just as lawfully – only formed through study – as it is formed by nature, which is carried out by the larynx and neighboring organs.

And when we have a short demonstration by children after a short break, so that the pedagogical-didactic element is also expressed, you will see that this eurythmy is not only an art but also, at the same time, soul-filled movement. Every movement is not performed out of physiological insight, but out of an understanding of the connection between body and soul. Every movement is inspired, as the sound is inspired. The whole human being becomes a speech organ. That is why it also reveals what can be artistically shaped in poetry. Today people have no idea that the content of prose is not the main thing in poetry. Ninety-nine percent of poetry today is superfluous! What poetry is based on either the shaping of language in the Goethean manner or on the rhythm of language – one need only refer to Schiller; many other examples could be cited. Schiller said that poems such as 'The Diver' or 'The Walk', for example, did not first live in his soul in prose, but rather something like music, something like a picture, something visionary lived in him. And it was only from this wordless-melodious, from the wordless-pictorial that Schiller and also Goethe formed the words, added them, as it were, to the wordless or musical or inwardly plastic. And so we are also compelled, when recitation is required, for example, to fall back on the rhythm of ordinary speech. For you will hear that the eurythmic presentation — as I said, the human being as a living larynx on the stage before you, moving — will be accompanied on the one hand by recitation and on the other by music. It can also be accompanied by what is not expressed with the poetry. But then it must not be recited in the way that reciting is done in our unartistic age, when the content of the poetry is simply taken from the depths of the soul. Rather, it is precisely the beat and rhythm and the connections that are formed in rhyme, that is, the actual artistic element, that must be expressed in the recitation. For eurhythmics could not be accompanied by the usual unartistic reciting of today. Therefore, eurhythmics will also have a healing effect on what is declining in our other arts.

Above all, you will be interested to know that eurythmy has an educational and didactic element. Gymnastics are excellent for people, but they only develop the outer, physical organism. As a compulsory subject in schools, eurythmy has an effect above all on what I would call the initiative of the will, the independence of the human soul. And this is what we actually need for the next age of humanity. Anyone who looks into the chaos of our social conditions today knows that, above all, people lack this soul initiative.

I have already said that the teacher and the educator cannot manage without the consciousness that can fill them with reverence, but also with responsibility: that they have to work on the souls that come from the spiritual world, but in such a way that the next generation enters the world in the right way. Anyone who looks at the world today already feels how important it is what we, as the next generation, bring into the world. And that is why one has such inner satisfaction when one can see how, without bringing a worldview into the school, our teachers, for example, treat anthropology in the fifth grade: not in a dry sense, not anthropological-theoretical knowledge, but in such a way that what one brings to the children as a first anthropology is permeated and warmed by the spirit. If you teach the children in this way, they begin to be present in a completely different way during the lessons; they establish something in themselves that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Likewise, I had the deepest satisfaction when our seventh-grade teacher developed history in this spiritual-scientific way in front of the children – but as I said, not spiritual science, but history treated in a spiritual-scientific-methodical way. In this way, what would otherwise remain more or less foreign to the children is transformed into something that the child knows directly related to its own being. And in this way a bridge can be built everywhere between what the child experiences from the developmental process of humanity and what can inspire the child to become a useful member of the future of humanity.

I wanted to begin with these few words before the eurythmy performances. And now, at the end, I would like to say once more: when I look at people like Spitta, at what can flow from a renewal of spiritual life, when I look at this and am moved to express a value judgment about spiritual science, let me express my joy. This joy is certainly shared by those here at the Goetheanum and those working from the Goetheanum who have set themselves spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical tasks. And I do not hope that it could be absolutely the only right thing to wish you, after you have had the kindness to listen to me for five quarters of an hour and after you will still have the kindness to watch the eurythmic performance and listening to what is played and recited — after that you will still need to recover from the “shock” you have suffered, according to the words of the English journalist, in a period of six days!

We have been occupied in showing how those spiritual forces that we call the luciferic and ahrimanic powers play their part in the historical growth of mankind. We have seen how what is to be carried over from one age into another in the course of world evolution is carried over through such powers, and we have been at pains to show how in the desires, instincts and strivings for knowledge, in the impulses, too, of man's social life, something is present that can only be grasped concretely when one recognizes those super-sensible forces that underlie world historical evolution. We have seen how what must come to expression in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch has been in preparation since the fifteenth century. We have seen what new faculties of mankind have evolved in the whole European cultural life since that time.

If we wish to find a spirit who has brought to expression in the most concentrated and clearest manner what the impulses of our time ought to be, then we can look to Goethe. We have already observed that equally in his conception of nature and in his imaginative world, Goethe has expressed something that can form the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I must remind you today how I have often pointed out that Goethe has expressed in intimate fashion in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he regarded as the right impulses of culture, knowledge, feeling and will; that is, what he was obliged to look upon as necessary for the activity of man in the future. He has concealed in his fairy tale what he knew of the spiritually hidden active forces at work in mankind since the fifteenth century, and that will be at work for about two thousand years more. You know, too, how in our Mystery Dramas we have sought to bring to life in all possible detail what Goethe saw when he composed this Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The intention was to bring to expression, in the way in which it can again be brought to expression today, a hundred years later, what inspired Goethe and is to inspire the entire fifth post-Atlantean culture as the highest spiritual treasure. Such depths of soul underlying so great and powerful a work as the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in spite of its being symbolic, and such great impulses underlying Goethe's Faust as a poem of mankind, point again and again to forces lying deep below the surface of consciousness. All this worked in such a soul out of the depths of old cultural impulses. Today I should like to speak a little about such cultural impulses in connection with yesterday's lecture, and of how they went through a kind of spiritualizing process in Goethe.

We must go back to that age in which the impulses for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were first laid down in germ, back before the fifteenth century because things that are to develop spiritually must be prepared long beforehand. One can only recognize how in the European life of soul, as well as in the European social life, in the striving toward the True, the Beautiful and the Good, the normally progressive divine-spiritual forces intermingle in our age with luciferic-ahrimanic powers when one goes back into the time when the earliest impulses were given. We learned about these first impulses of earlier ages yesterday. Today, we will learn about a similar impetus from the middle of medieval times, and come to know how certain spiritual tendencies were born out of human evolution. In doing so, we will no more than indicate the historical background since nowadays one can read about it in any encyclopedia.

In order to describe the configuration of the cultural impulses that underwent a certain spiritualization in Goethe, I must refer to the age in which the impulse of the Crusades arose out of the European will: in fact, out of the Christian impulses of the European will. At the time when the will to visit the Holy Places originated in the civilized inhabitants of Europe there were bitter conflicts in the life there between what are called the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. That is to say, into the progressive, good, truly Christian impulses those other powers worked in, as it were, from the direction that was described yesterday. They worked in the way in which they are permitted by the wise guidance of the world. Thus, what happens in the wise guidance of the world may be duly influenced by other impulses working from the past and interpenetrating the impulses of the present in the way we have described.

When we consider it, among much that brings rejoicing to the soul, among much that originated soon after the Crusaders won their first successes, we see the founding of the Order of the Knights Templar in the year 1119 A.D. Five French knights united under the leadership of Hugo de Payens and, at the holy place where the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, they founded an order dedicated entirely to the Mystery of Golgotha. Its first important home was close to the place where Solomon's Temple once stood, so that the holy wisdom from most ancient times and the wisdom of Solomon could work together for Christianity in this spot with all the feelings and sentiments that have arisen from entire and holy devotion toward the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer. In addition to the religious vows of duty to their spiritual superiors usual at that time, the first Knights Templar pledged themselves to work together in the most intensive manner to bring under European control the place where the events of the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred.

The Written and unwritten rules of the Order were such that the Knights were to think of nothing except how they could completely fill themselves in heart and soul with the sacred Mystery of Golgotha, and how with every drop of their blood they could help bring the holy places within the sphere of influence of European authority. In each moment of their lives they were to think and feel dedicated with all their strength to this task alone, shunning nothing in order to realize it. Their blood was no longer to be their own but was to be devoted solely to the task we have indicated. Were they to meet a power three times as great as themselves, it was commanded that they were not to flee but were to stand firm. In each moment of their lives they were to think that the blood coursing in their veins did not belong to them but to their great spiritual mission. Whatever wealth they might acquire belonged to no one individual but to the Order alone. Should a member of the Order be killed, no booty should be available to the enemy except the hempen cord girding his loins. This cord was the sign of their work, which was freely undertaken for what was then regarded as the healing of the European spirit. A great and mighty task was set, less to thought than to deep feeling, which aimed at strengthening the soul life as individual and personal with the intention that it might be entirely absorbed in the progressive stream of Christian evolution.

This was the star, as it were, that was to shine before the Knights Templar in all that they thought, felt and understood. With this an impulse was given, which in its broader activity—on the wider extension of the Templar Order from Jerusalem over the countries of Europe—should have led to a certain penetration of European life by a Christian spirit. With respect to the immeasurable zeal that existed in the souls of these Knights, the powers who have to hold evolution back, leading the souls to become estranged from the earth and to led away from it to a special planet, leaving the earth uninhabited, those powers who desired this, set to work quite especially on souls who felt and thought as did the Knights Templar. They desired to devote themselves entirely to the spirit and could easily be attacked by those forces that wished to carry away the spiritual from the earth. These forces do not want the spiritual to be spread over the earth to permeate earth existence. Indeed, the danger is always at hand that souls may become estranged from the earth, become earth weary, and that earthly humanity may become mechanized.

There we have a powerfully aspiring spiritual life that we can assume will easily be approached by the luciferic temptation; a foothold is here given it. Then we also have, however, at the same time as the spread of the Templar Order over the various countries of Europe, the possibility of a sharp intrusion of ahrimanic powers in Western Europe. At the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Templar Order—not the individual Knights but the Order—had attained great prestige and wealth through its activity and had spread over Western Europe, we have a human personality ruling the West who can actually be said to have experienced in his soul a kind of inspiration through the moral, or the immoral, power of gold. He was a man who could definitely use for his inspiration the wisdom materialized from gold. Recollect the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in which the Golden King became the representative of wisdom. Since spiritual forces also exist in the various substances, which are always only maya with spiritual forces standing behind that [which] the materialist cannot perceive, it is absolutely possible for gold to become an inspirer.

A highly gifted personality, Philip the Fair, who was equipped with and extraordinary degree of cunning and the most evil ahrimanic wisdom, had access to this inspiration through gold. Philip IV, who reigned in France from 1285 to 1314, can really be said to have had a genius for avarice. He felt the instinctive urge to recognize nothing else in the world but what can be paid for with gold, and he was willing to concede power over gold to none but himself. He wished to bring forcibly under his control all the power that can be exercised through gold. This grew in him to be the immense passion that has become famous in history. When Pope Boniface forbade the French clergy to pay taxes to the State, this fact, in itself not very important, led Philip to make a law forbidding anyone to take gold and silver out of France. All of it was to remain there, such was his will, and only he was to have control of it. One might say that this was his idiosyncrasy. He sought to keep gold and silver for himself and gave a debased currency to his subjects and others. Uproar and resentment among the people could not prevent him from carrying out this policy, so that, when he made a last attempt to mix as little gold and silver as possible in the coinage, he had to flee, on the occasion of a popular riot, to the Temple of the Knights Templar. Driven to do so by his own severe regulations, he had had his treasures deposited for safety with them. He was astounded to see how quickly the Knights calmed the popular uprising. At the same time, he was filled with fear because he had seen how great was the moral power of the knights over the people, and how little he, who was only inspired by gold, availed against them. The Knights, too, had by this time acquired rich treasure and were immensely wealthy, but according to their rules, they were obliged to place all the riches of the Order in the service of spiritual activity and creative work.

When a passion is so strong as avarice was in Philip the Fair, it presses out strong forces from the soul that have a great influence on the unfolding of the will toward other men. To the nation, Philip counted for little, but he meant much to those who were his vassals, and these constituted a great host. He also understood how to use his power. As Pope Boniface had once opposed his will to make the clergy in France pay as much as possible, Philip hatched a plot against him. Boniface was freed by his followers but he died of grief soon after. This was at the time when Philip undertook to bring the entire Church completely under his control, thereby making Church officials mere bondsmen of the kingly power in which gold ruled. He thereupon caused the removal of the Pope to Avignon, which marked the beginning of what is often known in history as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. This lasted from the year 1309 to 1377.

Pope Clement V, former Bishop of Bordeaux, resided in Avignon and was a tool completely in the hands of Philip. Gradually, under the working of Philip's powerful will, he had reached the point of having no longer a will of his own, but used his ecclesiastical power only to serve Philip, carrying out all he desired. Philip was filled with a passionate desire to make himself master of all the then available wealth. After he had seen what a different significance gold could have in other hands, it was no wonder that he wished above all things to exterminate those other hands, the Knights Templar, so that he might confiscate their gold and posses their treasure himself. Now, I said that such a passion, aroused in such a materialistic way and working so intensely, creates powerful forces in the soul. At the same time, it creates knowledge, although of an ahrimanic order. So it was possible for a certain second-hand sort of knowledge to arise in the soul of Philip, of those methods that we have seen flame up in the harshest, most horrible way in the Mexican mysteries. The knowledge arose in Philip of what can be brought about by taking life in the correct way, although in a different, more indirect way from that of the Mexican initiates. As if out of deep subconscious impulses, he found the means of incorporating such impulses into humanity's evolution by putting men to death. For this, he needed victims. In a quite remarkable way this devilish instinct of Philip's harmonized with what developed of necessity in the bosom of the Knights, resulting from the dedication of their lives to the things I have indicated.

Naturally, where something great and noble arises, as it did among the Knights Templar, much that does not belong—perhaps even immorality—becomes attached to that greatness and nobleness. There were, of course, Knights who could be reproached for all sorts of things; that shall not be denied. But there was nothing of this kind in the spirit of the foundation of the Order, for what the knights had accomplished for Jerusalem stood first, and then what could be accomplished for the Christianizing of the whole of European culture. Gradually the Knights spread out in highly influential societies over England, France, Spain, part of Italy and Central Europe. They spread everywhere. In each single Knight was developed to the highest degree this complete penetration of the soul with the feeling and experience of the Mystery of Golgotha and of all that is connected with the Christian impulse. The force of this union with the Christ was strong and intensive. He was a true Knight Templar who no longer knew anything of himself, but when he felt, he let the Christ feel in him; when he thought, he let the Christ think in him; when he was filled with enthusiasm, he let the Christ in him be enthusiastic. They were perhaps few in whom this ideal had worked a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of the soul life, and who had really often brought the soul out of the body and enabled it to live in the spiritual world, but in respect of the entire Order they were, for all that, a considerable number. Something quite remarkable and powerful had thus entered into the circle of the Templar Order without their having known the rules of the Christian initiation other than through sacrificial service. At first in the Crusades, then in the spiritual work in Europe, their souls were so inspired by intense devotion to the Christian impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha that consequently many Knights experienced a Christian initiation. We have before us the following world historical event: on the world historical basis of the experience of a number of men, the Christian initiation, which is to say the perception of those spiritual worlds that are accessible to men through Christian initiation, arises from the fundamental depths of human development.

Such events always call forth opposing forces, which, indeed, in those times were abundantly at hand. What thus enters the world is not only loved; it is also excessively hated. In Philip, however, there was less hatred than the desire to rid the world of such a Society and to filch from it the treasure that had flowed abundantly to it and that was used only in the service of the spirit.

Now in such an initiation as was experienced by a number of the Knights, there is always the possibility of perceiving not only the beneficent, the divine, but also the luciferic and ahrimanic forces. All that draws men down into the ahrimanic world and up into the luciferic, appears, to him who goes through such an initiation, side by side with the insight into the normal worlds. The one thus initiated is confronted with all the sufferings, temptations and trials that come upon man through the powers hostile to good. He has moments in which the good spiritual world disappears before his spiritual gaze, the gaze of his soul, and he sees himself as though imprisoned by what tries to gain power over him. He sees himself in the hands of the ahrimanic-luciferic forces that wish to seize him to gain control of his willing, feeling, thinking and sense perception. These, indeed, are spiritual trials that are well-known from the descriptions of those who have seen into the spiritual world.

There were many in the circle of the Knights Templar who could gain a deep insight into the Mystery of Golgotha and its meaning and into Christian symbolism as it had taken shape through the development of the Last Supper. They beheld as well the deep background of this symbolism. Many a one who in consequence of his Christian initiation could look into the Christian impulses passing through the historical evolution of the European peoples, also saw something else; he experienced it in his own soul, as it were, since it always again came over him as a temptation. Recognizing the unconscious capabilities of the human soul, he repeatedly overcame the temptation that showed itself to him. The initiate thus became conscious of it and sought to overcome what otherwise remained in the subconscious. Many Knights learned to know the devilish urge that takes possession of the will and feeling to debase the Mystery of Golgotha. In the dream pictures by which many such initiates were haunted, appeared in vision the reverse, as it were, of the veneration of the symbol of the crucifix. This was possible owing to the way in which the initiation had come about, and particularly because the luciferic forces had stood close by with their temptation. He saw in vision how the human soul could become capable of dishonoring the symbol of the Cross and the holy ritual of the Consecration of the Host. He saw those human forces that urge men to return to ancient paganism, to worship what the pagans worshipped and to scorn the advance to Christianity. These men knew how the human soul could succumb to such temptation since they had to overcome it consciously.

You are looking here into a life of soul of which outer history relates but little. Philip the Fair, through his ahrimanic gold initiation, had also a correct knowledge of these facts of soul life, even if only instinctively. He knew enough of it, however, to be able to communicate it to his vassals. Now, after a cruel judicial process had been contrived involving all manner of investigation, a course of action, decided upon beforehand, was begun. Plots were made, instigated by Philip together with his vassals who had been summoned to make investigations against the Knights. Although they were innocent, they were accused of every imaginable vice. One day in France they were suddenly attacked and thrown into prison. During their confinement their treasures were seized.

Trials were now arranged in which, entirely under the influence of Philip, torture was extensively employed. Every Knight to be found was subjected to the severest torture. Here, therefore, torture was also used to take life, the significance of which you have already learned to know. The intention of Philip was to put to the rack as many persons as possible, and the torture was applied in the most cruel way so that many of the harassed Knights lost consciousness. Philip knew that the pictures of the temptations emerged when, in terrible agony on the rack, their consciousness became clouded. He knew: the images of temptation come out! Under his instigation a catechism of leading questions was so arranged that the answers were always suggested in the way the questions were put. The Knights' answers were, of course, given out of a consciousness dulled by the torture. They were asked, “Have you denied the Host and refrained from speaking the words of Consecration?” In their clouded consciousness the Knights acknowledged these things. The powers opposing the good spoke out of their vision and, whereas in their conscious life they brought the deepest reverence to the symbol of the Cross and the Crucifix, they now accused themselves of spitting upon it; they accused themselves of the most dreadful crimes, which normally lived in their subconscious as temptations. So from the admissions made by the tortured Knights, the story was fabricated that they had worshipped an idol instead of Christ, an idol of a human head with luminous eyes; that on their admittance to the Order they were subjected to repulsive sexual procedures of the vilest nature; that they did not conduct the Transubstantiation in the right way; that they committed the worst sexual offences; that even on their admittance to the Order they forswore the Mystery of Golgotha. The catechizing had been so well organized that even the Grand Master of the order had been tortured into making these subconscious avowals.

It is one of the saddest chapters of human history, but one that can only be understood if one sees clearly that behind the veil of what is related by history stand active forces, and that human life is truly a battlefield. Because of lack of time, I will omit all that might be said further on this subject, but it would be easy to show how there is every ostensible reason for condemning the Knights Templar. Many stood by their avowals, many fled; the majority were condemned and, as stated, even the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was forced under torture to speak in the way described. Thus it came about that Philip the Fair, Philip IV of France was able to succeed in convincing his vassal, Pope Clement V—it was not difficult—that the Knights had committed the most shameful crimes, that they were the most unchristian heretics. All this the Pope sanctioned with his benediction, and the Order of the Templar was dissolved. Fifty-four Knights, including Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Shortly afterward in other European countries—in England, Spain, then right into Central Europe and Italy—action was also taken against them.

Thus we see how the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha and its influence penetrated into the midst of European evolution through the Order of the Templar. In a deeper sense, however, these things must be looked upon as determined by a certain necessity. Humanity was not yet ripe to receive the impulse of wisdom, beauty and strength in the way the Knights desired. Besides, it was determined on grounds we have yet to learn, grounds that lie in the whole spiritual development of Europe, that the spiritual world was not to be attained in the way in which the Templars entered it. It would have been gained too quickly, which is the luciferic way. We actually behold here a most important twofold attack of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lucifer urging the Knights on, driving them into their misfortune, and Ahriman working actively through the inspiration of Philip the Fair. We see here a significant twofold attack effected in world history.

But what lived and worked in the Knights Templar could not be eradicated. Spiritual life cannot be rooted out; it lives and works on further. With the Knights, notably with the fifty-four who had been burned at the stake through the agency of Philip, many a soul was certainly drawn up into the spiritual world who would still have done much work on the earth in the spirit of the Templar Order, and who would also have attracted pupils to work in the same spirit. But it had to turn out differently. In the spiritual world these souls lived through those experiences they had undergone in the most terrible agonies that were brought about under the influence of the visionary avowals extorted through torture. Their impulses, which now, between their death and their next birth, go out to souls who have since descended, and also to souls who are still above awaiting incarnation, must be metamorphosed from the character of the activity of the physical earthly world into spiritual activity. What now came from the souls of the Knights, who had been murdered in this pitiful way and who before their death by burning had to undergo the most frightful experience a man can suffer, was to become for many others a principle of inspiration. Powerful impulses were to flow down into humanity. We can prove this in the case of many human souls.

Today, however, we will keep more to the sphere of knowledge and intellect as we have done also in the other examples given in recent days. Inspiration from the cosmic knowledge of the Knights Templar—this was always given. The fact that ultimately people came to look on the Templars as heretics after they had been burned to death is not to be wondered at; nor is it to be wondered at that people also believed they had committed all sorts of infamous crimes. Had someone been pleased to condemn as specially heretical the Devil's act, which has just been presented here,¹ in which Mephistopheles, the Lemures and the thick and thin Devils appear, perhaps—I do not know—countless persons in the nation would also look on that as something heretical. The methods of Philip the Fair are, however, no longer employed in the present rather more lamentable times. The cosmic wisdom that these Knights possessed has entered many souls. One could cite many examples of how the inspiration of the Knights Templar had been drawn into souls. I will read you a passage from the poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen, which appeared in 1838. As you can read in the lecture cycles, I have often referred to Julius Mosen, the author of the profound poem “Ritter Wahn” (Knight Chimera). In the very first canto of the third section of “Ahasver”, Mosen leads his hero to those parts of the earth where, in Ceylon and the neighboring islands, the region is to be sought that we describe in the cosmology of our spiritual science as the approximate locale of Lemurian evolution. This region of the earth is distinguished in a special way. You know that the magnetic north pole is located at a different point from that of the geographic north pole. Magnetic needles everywhere point toward the magnetic north pole and one can draw magnetic meridians that meet at this point. Up in North America where the magnetic north pole lies, these magnetic meridians go round the earth in straight lines. Remarkably, however, in the Lemurian region the magnetic meridians become sinuous serpentine lines. The magnetic forces are twisted into a serpentine form in this region. People notice these things far too little today. One who sees the living earth, however, knows that magnetism is like a force vivifying the earth;

in the north it goes straight, and in the region of old Lemuria it goes in a tortuous winding line. Just think how profoundly Julius Mosen speaks as he sends his Ahasver toward this region in the first canto of the third epoch—it is divided in epochs—of the poem:

In line direct and straight from Southern Pole
Takes the Magnetic Line its chosen course,
When suddenly it twines in serpent-curve

There before India and its neighbor isles
Before the dungeon where in deepest woe
Sits the Eternal Mother ever bound.

In circle form the Line drew back its length,
And twining swift and secret on itself
With a single plunge in swirling vortex fell.

There the Great Spirit in a first embrace
Held the poor spouse, and from their ardent fire
Sprang the Earth-demons instantly to life.

When thus the first creation came to naught,
The Great, the Nameless Spirit in his wrath
Stamped down the bridal couch beneath the sea.

So it goes on. We see inspiration emerge with wonderfully intuitive knowledge. The wisdom lives on that could only enter the world amid sufferings, tortures, persecutions and the most frightful offences. Nevertheless, it lives on in spiritualized form.

When we seek the most beautiful spiritualizations of this wisdom that has entered the development of Europe, as we have described, then we find one precisely in all that would work and live in the powerful imaginations of Goethe. Goethe knew the secret of the Templars. Not without purpose has he used gold as he has done in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which he made the snake consume the gold and then sacrifice itself. By this deed the gold is wrested from the powers with which Goethe truly knew it must not be allowed to remain. Gold—naturally everything is also meant here of which gold is a real symbol. Read once more Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and try to feel how Goethe knew the secret of gold, how, through the way in which he lets gold flow through the fairy tale, he is looking back into earlier times. May I perhaps add here the personal confession that when for the first time in the eighties of the last century, I faced the question of the gold in Goethe's fairy tale, the meaning of the story emerged for me through the development of the gold in it.

Through the way in which Goethe lets gold flow through this fairy tale, he shows how he looks back into the time in which wisdom—for which gold also stands, hence, “The Golden King of Wisdom”—was exposed to such persecutions as those described. Now, he sought to show past, present and future. Goethe saw instinctively into the future of eastern European civilization. He could see how unjustifiable is the way in which the problem of sin and death worked there. If we wished to designate, not quite inappropriately perhaps, the nationality of the man who is then led to the Temple and the Beautiful Lily, who appears at first as without vigor as if crippled, then, from what we have had to say recently about the culture of the East and of Russia, you will not consider it unreasonable to deem this man to be a Russian. In so doing, you will almost certainly follow the line of Goethe's instinct. The secret of European evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies concealed within this fairy tale, just as truly as Goethe was able to conceal it in his Faust, especially in the second part, as we know from his own statement. It is clearly to be seen in Goethe—we have already shown it in various respects; later it can be shown in others—that he begins to regard the world and to feel himself in it, in accord with the fundamental demand of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goethe we have a true continuation of the life of the Knights Templar but, as I have said, in a spiritualized way. This Goetheanism, however, will only be able to enter slowly and gradually into human understanding. I have already shown in certain respects how the impulse for everything of a spiritually scientific nature lies in Goetheanism. All of spiritual science can be developed from Goethe. I have shown in a public lecture (Berlin, April 15, 1916) that I gave a short time ago how the first elementary scientific foundation for the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earth lives, lies in Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis. He begins the teaching of metamorphosis by showing how the leaf changes into the blossom, how an organ appears in different forms. When one follows this through with penetration, there lies implicit in it what I have often explained here; that is, the head of man is the transformed body, and the rest of the body is a human head still to be transformed. Here is metamorphosis in the ultimate degree, which for science will develop into a direct knowledge of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. But Goethe is still but little understood; he must first become familiar in the cultural life of humanity. Not only centuries but millenniums will be needed in order to unravel what lies in Goethe. As a matter of fact, even today there is not a foundation for a study of Goethe such as a monograph or biography could provide that would be produced really in his very style.

Let us see what has been done in particular instances in modern culture toward the understanding of Goethe's personality. We can, of course, only cite single examples. Herman Grimm has, however, rightly said, “A certain Mr. Lewes has written a book, which was for some time the most famous book on Goethe; one can even say the best. It is a book treating of a personality who was supposed to have been born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, and to have had a Frankfurt councilor for a father. He then developed and grew up in such a way that Goethe's youth was ascribed to him, along with all sorts of other things taken from Goethe. Goethe's works were attributed to him; he also traveled to Italy in the same year as Goethe, and died the same year Goethe died. This person, however, is not Goethe but a fantasy of Mr. Lewes's”.

Then we also have a relatively good book in which Goethe's life and creative work is described with immense industry and better than many other works on Goethe. It is filled, however, from the first to the last page with hatred and aversion. This book is by the Jesuit, Baumgartner. It is an excellent but, in fact, a Jesuitical, book; but antagonistic to Goethe. At least, it is better written than the countless others on Goethe that have appeared throughout the nineteenth century and now on into the twentieth. A great number of these works are unpalatable. One continually sneezes because the dust of the library and professor gets into one's nose. They have been written by pedants who call it Goethe. Often they have been written with pedantic pride, but they are also fusty with library dust or the air one must breathe when one guesses how often the man who is writing about Faust, for example, has opened Grimm's or some other glossary in order to decipher a word or passage—and so on. One could say: Oh horrible, most horrible, what has been written in this field!

One book, however, stands out in a quite unusual way. These are Herman Grimm's lectures on Goethe given in the seventies at Berlin University. Grimm was, as we can see, a spirit who had the best will and the most wonderful traditions to aid him in familiarizing himself with Goethe. His book is an intelligent and excellent one that has developed right out of the Goethean atmosphere. Grimm grew up in the age when there were still Goethean traditions, but this book shows something quite remarkable. In fact, in a certain respect it is not at all a book that has developed from Goethean traditions; it is both Goethean and un-Goethean. For Herman Grimm does not write in a Goethean style but, strangely enough, in a style that leads one to say that the book was written by an American, a German American! One can call Grimm's lectures a book written by an American but in German. In style it is American—a style in which Grimm has educated himself. As one of the most enthusiastic followers of Emerson, he has studied him, read, digested, translated him, has quite familiarized himself with him. Now, Grimm finds his way into this American-Emerson style so that he is complete master of it; at the same time he grows enthusiastic about it. One can see at once on reading his novel, Invincible Powers, how he is able to let everything American live on in him. Enthusiasm for what is American and at the same time a wonderful feeling of internationalism is poured out in Herman Grimm's Goethe lectures.

In spite of all this, much, very much in the spiritual life of man must come about before Goethe and similar spirits will be understood! If sometimes they are rightly understood, it must be in quite another way from that of Herman Grimm. Once, in a conversation with him, I wished to make just a few references to the path by which one could gradually enter the spiritual world. The movement of his right arm will always remain unforgettable—a gesture of warding off; he wanted to push that aside. He created a Goethe who is simply delightful to see from outside, but one does not see into his heart. This Goethe of Grimm's, as he makes his way through historical development, as he stands there, as he moves about and comes into relation with people, as human relations flow into his works, as the contemporary world conception flows into his works—this Goethe goes past our mind's eye as a ghost who flits through the world unseen by the living. Goethe will only be understood when one has deepened Goetheanism to become spiritual science. Then, much will emerge from Goethe that he could not express himself. Goethe, truly understood, leads, in fact, to spiritual science, which is really developed Goetheanism.

From the beginning Goethe also understood that Christianity is a living thing. How he longed for a possible expression for the Christianizing of the modern world conception. It did not lie in his time to find it, but in the new age spiritual science is already working to attain it. Let us take his poem, “The Mysteries” (Die Geheimnisse), in which Brother Mark is guided to the Temple where the Rose Cross is on the door, and let us look at the whole picture. We shall see that the Christian mood is in this fragment, “The Mysteries,” the mood born of the feeling that the symbol of the Cross becomes a picture of life through the living roses entwining it! Then, too Goethe lets his Faust end with a Christian conception; he spoke of it to Eckermann in his old age. A time will come when in a much more active, intense sense, one will connect with Christianity the thoughts that ring through the conclusion of Faust, although Goethe, who was inwardly modest in such things, was far from doing so himself. He was, in reality, on the way that he made his Brother Mark take—to the Cross encircled with roses. In this lies ultimately all that is to flow from such wisdom as was striven for by the Knights Templar. (Their striving was too rapid and unsuitable to physical evolution.)

A longing for the full Christianizing of the treasures of wisdom concerning the cosmos and earthly evolution gradually broke through—a longing for the full Christianizing of earthly life so that suffering, pain and grief appear as the earth's Cross, which then finds its comfort, its elevation, its salvation in the Rose symbol of the Crucifix. Repeatedly in men thus inspired, in whom lived on what was thought to have been destroyed with the burning of the Templars—in these inspired men lived ever again the ideal that in the place of what brings strife and quarrels something must appear that can bring good to earth, and this good may be pictured in the symbol of the Cross in conjunction with the roses.

The book, Ruins (Shutt), by Anastasius Grün has been given to me today by one of our members. I have here again the same verses that I read to you some time ago to confirm the fact that this mystery, which this poem also expresses, is not merely something put forward by us, but that it comes to life again and again. Anastasius Grün, the Austrian poet, composed these poems; the eighth edition appeared in 1847. In his own manner he wrote of the progress of mankind, and I will read again today the passage I read years ago as proof of the role played by the image of the Rose Cross in evolving humanity; that is, among those who are incarnated in the new age. Anastasius Grün turns his gaze toward Palestine and other regions after having described how much confused fighting and quarreling has been spread over the earth. After he has seen and described much that causes fighting and strife he, who is a great seer in a certain way, turns to a region of the earth that he describes thus. I cannot read all of it as it would take too long, but one's eye is first turned to a part of the earth where the ploughshare is used.

As children once were digging in a meadow
They brought a shapeless thing of iron to light,
It seemed too straight, too heavy for a sickle,
For plough it was too slender and too slight.

With toil they dragged it home as new found treasure;
The elders see it, yet they know it not;
They call the neighbors round within the circle,
The neighbors see it, yet they know it not.

There is an ancient greybeard, wan and sallow,
Whose lifetime lingers on like tale forgot
Into the present world of busy dealing,
They show it to him, but he knows is not.

Well for them all, that they have never known it,
Else must they weep, and still must be deplored
The folly of their fathers, long since buried,
For what was known by no one was a sword!

Henceforth it shall but cleave the earth as ploughshare;
Shall point the seed-corn's path into the ground,
The sword's new hero-deeds are peaned
When sun-filled airs with song of lark resound.

Once more it came to pass, that in his ploughing
The farmer struck what seemed a piece of stone.
And as his spade unloosed the earthy covers,
A structure of a wondrous shape was shown.

He calls the neighbors round within the circle;
They look at it but still they know it not.
Thou wise and aged one, thou'lt surely tell us?
The greybeard looks at it, yet knows it not.

Thus, in ploughing, something was dug up and even the aged man does not recognize it.

Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around in every roadway;
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight!

They saw the fight not, and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not, and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross will always be known, even in a region where it was already buried and drawn out of the earth as a cross of stone, where civilization has so withdrawn that an un-Christian culture has developed. There, Anastasius Grün wishes to say, a cross is found and men know it in their inmost breasts, even though the oldest among them fails to recognize it through tradition.

Though known to one, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around on every roadway,
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight.

They saw the fight not and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross of stone they set up in the garden;
A venerable relic strange and old,
Flowers of all species lift their growth above it,
While roses climbing high the Cross enfold.

So stands the Cross weighty with solemn meaning
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen;
Long since 'tis hidden by its wealth of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen.

But it is there! There is the Cross! There are the roses! One only learns the meaning of history when one turns one's gaze to what lives in the spiritual and pervades human evolution, when, too, one will turn one's attention to what shows us under what auspices, under what insignia things enter world history. I think that one can feel the deeper connection between what we have characterized for later times and what has been characterized in the ideal of the Knights Templar and their fate in the world at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

• 1. A presentation of Faust had presumably just taken place.

We have been trying to come to grips with the following question: Why does man not notice how different—different spiritually and in their culture—are the several periods in which, during our present earth-cycle, he has spent his repeated earth-lives. We need to understand clearly why it is so widely believed that Man has altered very little during thousands of years, since history began, whereas Spiritual Science shows how greatly souls changed in their essential character during the third; fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs—the fifth being our present one. These changes are confirmed by Spiritual-Scientific knowledge, but we find very little trace of them if we scan outer history, as usually presented and written.

I have already tried to show, in approaching this question, that, if one pays a little attention to the soul-element in history the changes spring to lisht. I have endeavoured to make comprehensible the difference between the feelings of the human soul, in, for instance, the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and those of the of the human soul of to-day. As an example I tried to illuminate for you the soul of Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Such examples might be multiplied, but before we go further in this direction, we will revert once more to the kernel of our question: What is it that prevents man from observing rightly how his various earth-lives differ in this respect?

He is chiefly prevented by the circumstance that, as constituted in the present earth-era, he has exceedingly little perception of his real ego, his true human self. But for certain hindrances, he would have quite a different idea of his nature and being, We will deal with these hindrances presently. For the moment I would like to point out,—you can take it, to begin with, simply as an hypothesis—how man would appear to himself if his real being were revealed to him.

If this were possible, he would above all notice a great and constant change in his personal life between birth and death. Looking back from whatever age—20, 30, or 50—towards his birth, he would see himself in perpetual metamorphosis. He would perceive by-gone changes morn clearly and realise hopefully that further changes are in store for him in the future. These I have mentioned in other lectures.

Because present-day man is too little inclined to realise himself as a soul-being, he has not much idea of how he has altered in the course of time. Strangely, but truly, his idea of himself is divided into two parts. He sees his bodily part on the one hand, a more or less constant factor in his life between birth and death. He is conscious, of course, that he “grows”, that he was tiny and became bigger, but that is almost all he knows consciously about his outer physical being. Take a simple example. You cut your nails—why? Because they grow. That shows, if you think about it, that a continual process of shedding takes place in your organism as regards the outer bodily part of it. In fact you drive that part out, so that in a certain time, at most in six or seven years, the material of the body is completely changed. You continually get rid of your material outfit. Man, however, is not conscious of this outer dissolution and continual reconstruction from within. Just fancy, how differently we should know ourselves, if we were conscious of how, as it were, we shed the external part of our physical body, dissolve it, and rebuild ourselves anew from within—we should be observing the metamorphosis of our own being!

Something else would be linked with this. If we really took into our consciousness that the body we bear is our possession for only seven years, that we have thrown off all we possessed of it before that, we should appear to ourselves much more spiritual. We should not have the deceptive notion, “I was a little child to begin with—then I grew bigger and different”—but we should know that though the material of the child-substance is somewhere, what has remained is not material, but absolutely super-substantial. If man could bring this metamorphosis into consciousness, he would be looking back at something retained ever since childhood. He would recollect himself as a spiritual being. If we knew what takes place in us, we should have much more spiritual conceptions of ourselves.

Yet again—suppose we looked at ourselves much less abstractly, we talk about ourselves as though we had a “Spiritual centre.” We speak of our Ego and we have the idea: “Our Ego was there in our childhood, and accompanied us further,” and so on; but we really picture it simply as a kind of spiritual centre. If only we could rise to the other conception—that of outer dissolution and inner reconstruction—we could not help regarding the Ego as the efficacious, active cause of it. We should see ourselves as something very real and inwardly active. In short, we would look upon our Ego not as something abstract, but would survey its inwardly active work on our body, leading this from one metamorphosis to another. We should correct any erroneous conceptions which we cherish on the subject at present. They are even embodied in the expression of speech. We say “we grow,” because we have the notion that we were to begin with, children, and have grown taller; but the matter is not as simple as that. The truth is that in a tiny child the bodily and the soul-spiritual activities are experienced more as a unity wherein the head-organism and the reproduction-organism (sex-organism) are closely associated. The two experiences of head and body separate later, becoming alien to one another. The material organism of childhood does not increase, for it is thrown off, dissolved; but the two poles of our own being grow wider apart. By this means, later on, in a fully formed body, in which the poles have separated from one another, our substance is organised from within. It seems to us as mere growth, but that is not so; we are organised inwardly, therefore we are connected with different outward things in earlier and later periods of life. As time goes on, the head-organism needs to move itself further away from the immediate earth-forces. The head rises; consequently, we “grow.”

All these conceptions would change if we accepted the actual truth—which we do not do. We leave out of account the constantly changing body, the body that is always becoming different we ignore it and imagine that it grows of itself and becomes larger; and so we fail to notice what a rich, mobile, living, inward entity is the ego, which works on us unceasingly between birth and death. Such a conception would give us a really coherent idea of ourselves if we could but grasp it, but modern man is not capable of that. This is to some extent connected with the destiny of the human race, with the whole development of our epoch. Man does not really identify himself with his living, active, ego, which actually builds his organism from year to year, but he divides it; on the one side he looks at his organism, which he imagines to be solid and enduring, and on the other at his ego, which he makes into an abstraction, a figure of straw. Such a man says: We have on the one side a sense-organism, a bodily one, through which we cannot approach things because they can only make “impressions” on us: the essential nature of the thing does not reveal itself to us at all; the “thing-in-itsef!” cannot be apprehended, we have only phenomena. Certainly, to look on the body as enduring substance gives this argument some justification. Then he looks at this insubstantial ego and says: There, within, there is something like a “feeling of duty,” and he sums it up as the “categorical imperative.” The unity is split up. If we thus divide the unity in human nature, criticising it from two sides, we become followers of Kant. What I am now saying goes into the very depths of present-day human thought.

Man of this age is little fitted to comprehend himself as a complete being in the word. He divides himself in the way I have described. The result is that we never contemplate our real soul-being with the eye of the spirit, or we would see that this part of ourselves is what continually works upon and changes the body. We look merely at the abstract body and the abstract ego and do not trouble about what the whole undivided human being may be. To become aware of that would at once lead us to recognise that this undivided being is different from incarnation to incarnation. The true, genuine human ego, concealed as it is, hidden at present from the soul's gaze, differs from life to life. Of course, if we are thinking of the abstraction, “ego,” not of the concrete human ego, we cannot arrive at the idea of the ego being so different from life to life. The result of thinking abstractly in this way is that things which are in any way similar are ultimately reduced to a featureless uniformity. Souls of course are similar in successive earth-lives; but on the other hand, they also differ, because from life to life a man passes through the course of human development. Because man does not in truth behold either the mutability of his body, or the real, whole activity of his ego, he does not see his true being. This is, as it were, a golden rule for gaining real knowledge of man and insight into his nature. And why?

The answer to this question lies in what you know of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements. We divide our being in such a way that on the one side we place our body, which we regard as having been small once and having expanded and grown, whereas it has in reality continually renewed itself. What is it that appears to us if we look at the body in this way? The Ahrimanic element, active within ourselves. But this Ahrimanic element is not our real human being; it belongs to the species and indeed remains the same though all ages. Therefore in looking at the body, we are really looking at our Ahrimanic part, and this is all that modern scientific anthropology describes in man. That is one thing we see—the corporeal part of ourselves, which we hare conceived of as being dense. The other is the abstract ego, which is in reality fluctuating, living strongly within us only; while we form a conception of ourselves, between birth and death. There we have our individual education, our uselessness and also our value,—there we survey our own personal life between birth and death; but we do not see our ego as it is in reality, as it works upon the metamorphoses of our physical body; we see it as Lucifer shows it to as, rarified. We see our physical part materialised, densified by Ahriman; our soul-spiritual part rarified by Lucifer.

If this was not so, if we did not divide ourselves so that one pole of our being is Ahrimanic and the other Luciferic, we should have a much more intimate connection with the dead who are always among us, because we should be more closely related to the spirituel world. We should comprehend the complete reality, to which belongs also the world in which man is after he passes through the gate of death, and before he returns to this world through the gate of conception.

Thus we never have our real being before us, but on the one side the physical-corporeal Ahrimanic phantom, on the other the soul-spiritual Luciferic phantom; two phantoms, two delusive images of ourselves, yet between that, imperceptible to us, lives the real man, that being to which we must refer when we say “man,” because this is the true man, progressing from life to life.

We must in all seriousness consider what this means for human knowledge. In this way we shall come to understand why it could be imagined that throughout the various epochs man remains the same. What we see are the incorrect thoughts about man; on the one side the idea of what does remain true to the species through long ages, and on the other, the real soul-spiritual psychic being, which is supposed not to extend beyond the life between birth and death. An understanding of how the soul-spiritual element alters the body from year to year would lead to a grasp of the mighty transition which occurs when it envelopes itself in the physical-corporeal through conception or leaves it again through death. We pay no heed to the work performed by the soul-Spiritual element on the body.

All this can be expressed in a different way. What we conceive of as our complete organism is but a small part of what we are as human beings. We only “dwell” in this organism. What we are accustomed to look upon as our organism, densified through Ahriman as we see it, has its real origin much more in our last incarnation than in this one. From the various studies of this year and former years you will gather that your physiognomy, in its present form, results from your preceding incarnation, your last earth-life. In a person's physiognomy we can really see a connection with his former life. Everything belonging to the physical corporeal organism is much more deeply connected with the last life than with the present one. Man of to-day is easily beguiled into saying: inasmuch as we have had no previous life, it cannot give us our present form, whether great or small. That is only self-persuasion. If we were to understand ourselves correctly, we should be obliged to look back to a former life. Paying attention to what forms our organism, in the way I have set forth, would bring enlightenment. A sudden light would be thrown on what we ourselves cannot form, and we would see how it has been formed by an earlier life. We can really have insight into someone if we know how his soul-spiritual part has fashioned his organism. This comes forth, as it were, out of his personality, and behind it remains what Ahriman makes visible as the result of th earlier embodiment.

For anyone who is accustomed to look upon man as a real living being, it is, when meeting a fellow-man, as though an entity emerged from him. Ths entity is his present self: only as a rule it is invisible. The other entity remains a little behind the first, and this it is which was formed from the past life. In the emerging entity something soon presents itself. At first, this entity is, I might say, perfectly transparent, but it rapidly becomes opaque, because the soul-spiritual element, appearing as an active power, densifies the entity which has just emerged. And then appears something else, which seems to be a seed for the ensuing earth-life.

For him who can perceive the connections, present-day man is seen as threefold. All sorts of myths convey this in their symbols. Call to mind numerous descriptions in which three consecutive generations are set forth, obviously to illustrate the threefold nature of man. Remember many of the renderings of Isis, also various Christian portrayals in which three figures are described as belonging together. Man's threeford nature is what is really meant. Of course a materialistic interpretation is possible—“Grandmother, Mother and Child,” if you like; but the threefold character is put there because it corresponds to a reality which can be perceived. We can most truly picture earlier times if we divest ourselves of the fantastic ideas of modern learning (which always tries to spin a meaning round pictorial representations), and take notice of what humanity's perceptions were in a past not so very far behind us, and how these were expressed artistically.

This kind of consideraticn is of the utmost importance. if we are to bring home to ourselves that the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, has His relation (of which we speak so often), to the true human ego. If we consider St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” this “in me” refers to the true, hidden ego, invisible to view as yet. Man must in a sense look on it as a Spiritual being if he would find the right connectiona with the Christ. One would like to know how certain passages in the Gospels can possibly be understood, if this is not taken into account. For instance, the passage at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. John, where John speaks as go the Christ came to man as to the abode where He belongs. The (German) translators usually construe it “He came unto His own estate, and his own people received Him not,” yet the Gospel goes on to say: “But to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His Name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John I. 12,13.). And it is made quite clear that He desired to come to all men who had this consciousness; yet those without, indeed all men, are certainly born “of blood” and “of the will of man”. The being I have been describing as the “true man”, not born of blood nor of the will of man, comes indeed from the spiritual world, and clothes himself in physical heredity. The Gospel is speaking of the man of whom I have told you to-day, and that is why it is so difficult to understand and is so erroneously expounded, fettered as it is by the conceptions current, to-day. Without the conceptions conveyed by Spiritual Science, the underlying, aspects of the Gospels cannot be understood; with them, a sudden light breaks in.

In respect of all these relationships, something tremendous happened at the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of humanity. Before then, as you know, the complete human ego lived differently in the body. The Mystery of Golgotha marked a point of time in which the whole consciousness of man was changed, as the result of the Union of the Christ-Being with earthly evolution. Now the time has , for an increasing comprehension of the Mystery of Golotha and its conneetion with mankind.

A knotty point for the many expositors of the Gospels, for instance, is the saying which, however epressed or translated., always has the same ring—the saying that “The Kingdom of Heaven has descended.” Amongst those who have entirely misconceived this expression is H.P. Blavatsky, who seized upon it and asserted that Christians therefore maintained that with the Mystery of Golgotha a sort of heavenly kingdom had come down to earth, and yet nothing different has happened—the ears of corn and the cherries have not become twelve times is large, etc.; intimating that on the physical earth nothing is altered. This “descent of the Kingdom of Heaven,” of the spiritual kingdom, crates great difficulties for many commentators of the Gospels, because they do not clearly understand it. The meaning really is that until the Mystery of Golgotha, men had to experience what they could of the spiritual on the physical plane by means of atavistic clairvoyance. After that, they had to lift themselves up to the spiritual, and discern things in the Spirit, which really has drawn near to them. There is no need for the word-spinning arguments which are brought forward from all quarters; the' truth must be recognised, and this truth is as follows:—

The effect for men of Christ having passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is that they can no longer receive spiritual life mearly through the fact of their physical existence, but only by living in the spiritual world. Anyone who now lives only in the physical world, is no longer living on the earth, but below the earth; because from the Mystery of Golotha onwards, the possibility is given us of living in the spirit. The spiritual kingdom has in truth come among us. Taken in this sense; the expression is at once understood, but only in connection with the Christ. This, however, was to be temporarily hidden. As man made the effort to acquire it, it would be gradually communicated to him; and only by gaining insight into it can the real course of, modern history since the Mystery of Golgotha be understood. Christianity, as it had come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, was in its early centuries implanted in the Gnosis, which was then more or less still in existence. It embodied very spiritual views of the real nature of Christ Jesus. Then the Church took on a defined form. This form can be traced historically, but you must bear in mind what its task was from the third, fourth, fifth century onwards. The explanation now given must not on any account be misunderstood. Spiritual Science, as here advocated, stands on the ground of genuine, active tolerance for all existing religious revelations. Spiritual Science must therefore be able to discover the relative truth of the different religious creeds. It is not that Spiritual Science leans more or less sympathetically towards this or that creed; its aim is to distinguish the truth contained in the different religious denominations; it weighs them all with care, and refuses to be one-sided. Spiritual Science must not be proclaimed as leaning towards this or that Creed: it is the Science of the Spirit. It can for instance, fully appreciate that it is a pity that for many people the inner content of Catholic ritual is lost. It knows how to appreciate the special virtues of Catholic ritual in relation to the course of civilisation, and also that a certain artistic output is closely related to Catholic ritual, which indeed is only a continuation of certain other religious creeds, much more so than is commonly thought. In this ritual there resides a deep element of the Mysteries. However, what I have to say essentially concerns sonething else, at all events not the Catholic ritual, which has its full inner justification as an extraordinary impulse for human creative achievement. What I now have to set forth is this: that ecclesiastical forms were given certain tasks—which are indeed still theirs to a certain extent, but were given for the most part at the time when such ardent souls as Bernard of Clairvaux found their way to their God through the Church. We must always discriminate between the Churches and such personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux and multitudes of others. What then, was the task of the Church? Its task was to keep souls as far away as possible from an understanding of Christ, to bring it about that souls should not approach too near to Him: The history of Church-life in the third or fourth century, and later on, is substantially the story of the estrangement of the human mind from a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha; in the development of the Church there is a certain antagonism towards an understanding of Christ. This negative task of the Church has its justification in the fact that men must always strive anew through the force of their own minds and souls to reach the Christ, and fundamentally through all these centuries man;s approach to the Christ has been a continual struggle of the individual against ecclesiasticism. Even with such men as Bernard of Clairvaux, it was so. Study even Thomas Aquinas. He was reckoned a heretic by the orthodox; he was interdicted, and only later did the Church adopt his teaching. The path to Christ was really always a “defensive action” against the Church, and only slowly and gradually could men win their way to Christ. We have but to think, for instance, of Petrus Waldus, the founder of the so-called sect of the “Waldenses,” and his associates in the twelfth century, none of whom at that time had any knowledge of the Gospel. The spreading of Church-life had come on without the Gospels. Just think of it! From those around Petrus Waldus a few persons were chosen who could translate something of the Gospels; thus they learnt to know the Gospels, and as they learnt, a holy, lofty Christian life flowed to them from the Gospels. The outcome was that Petrus Waldus was declared a heretic by the Pope, against the will of his contemporaries. Up to this time a certain amount of gnostic knowledge had spread even in Europe, as for instance among the “Catharists” translated as “Purified Ones;” it was directed to acquiring concepts, concrete concepts, about the Christ and the Mystery theof Golgotha. From the standpoint of the official Church this was not allowed, therefore the Catharists were heretics: “hetzer” (German for “heretic”) is only an alteration of their neme—it is the same word.

It is very necessary to take that of which I am now speaking in its full strictness, in order to distinguish the path of Christianity from that of the Church, and thus to grasp how, in our age, through the principles of Spiritual Science, a way must be paved tothe true Christ, to the real Christ-concept. Very many features of the present day become clear when we realise that not all that called itself Christian was intended to communicate the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but that much was even intended to hinder that understanding, to raise a barrier against it. Does this barrier exist to this day? Indeed it does! I would like to give you a case in point.

Manifold endeavours, including that of Protestantism, were always in opposition to the Church, because the Church in many ways had the task of erecting a barrier against the understanding of Christ, and men could do no other than strive for that understanding. Petrus Waldus felt that need when he had recourse to the Gospels. Until then, there was only the Church—not the Gospels. Even now, many strange opinions are held about this relation of the Church to the Gospels. I want to read you a passage from a modern writer, very characteristic of this state of things, from which you will recognise that the opinion which condemnned Petrus Waldus to excommunication is deeply rooted even now. Take it as an example of what is being said even to-day:

“The Gospels and Epistles are for us incomparable written records of revelation but they are neither the foundation on which our Faith was built, nor the unique source from which the content of the latter is spontaneously created. In our view the Church is older than the sacred writings; from her hand we receive them, she guarantees their trustworthiness, and as regards the dangers of hand-written transcriptions, and of the changing of the text in translation into all languages of the earth, the Church is the only authoritative interpreter of the sense and import of every particular utterance.” (“The Principles of Catholicism and Science”, by George von Hertling, Freiburg 1899.)

This means that the actual content of the Gospels is irrelevant; all that matters is what the Church declares is to be found in them. I have to say this, for the simple reason that even in our own circles there is much simple mindedness on the subject. Again and again one hears the view that it would be useful if we could approach the Catholic Church, saying that our interpretation is entirely favourable to the Christ. But that would not help us at all, it would only blacken us in the eyes of the Church, because she allows nothing to be upheld about the Christ, or about any conclusions beyond those of Natural Science, unless the Church herself recognises it as in agreement with her doctrine. Whoever among us upholds a conception of Christ, and believes thereby to vindicate himself in the eyes of the Church, really accuses himself—is indeed regarded as having done so, because he has no right to declare anything about the Christ from any other source than the Church's owm doctrine .

The same author from whose work I have just read, speaks very clearly on the subject: “Believers are in just the same position as is the investigator of nature with the facts of exoerience.” He means that the believer must receive what the Church dictates to him about the spiritual world, just as the eyes take in the facts of nature.

“He must neither take anything away nor add anything, he must take it as it stands; above all the very purest reception of the true content of the matter is expected of him. The truths of revelation are something given, for him who grasps them in faith. For him, they are conclusive and complete. No enrichment of them has been possible since Christ: their volume cannot to decreased, and any change in their content is out of the question”.

So speaks one who subscribes fully to the genuine orthodox Catholic view—a view which must dissociate itself, for instance, with a certain aversion from any train of thought such as Lessing's, which leads-towards a renewed search for the Spiritual. Lessing's views went as far as to embrace repeated earth-lives; they are a product of modern spiritual life. The bitterest opposition is bound to exist between the Catholic Church and such Cerman spiritual life as flowed through Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. This same person (von Hertling) writes further:

“The edifice of Church dcctrine, as it appears to the Theologian of to-day and is presented by him, was not complete and ready-made from the beginning. What Christ imparted to the Apostles, what they proclaimed to the world, was not a methodical, fully prepared system, developed at all points: it was a rich store of truths, all united as in a focus in one event of sacred history: the story of the Redemption, of the Incarnation of the Divine Logos; but the instruction of the believers, and the necessary defence against heathen assaults, as well as against the misrepresentations of heretics, made it necessary tc unite these truths in a system, to develop their full content, to determine their purport.—This was done by the unwearying proclamation of the doctrine by those specially chosen as instruments, according to the Catholic interpretation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but at the same time vith the co-operation of the learning of the early Church.

“No new language was creeted by this revelation, but what was already current was used; the sense and meaning of individual words being recoined and heightened. Theology, which undertook to think out the content of Revelation while setting it in order for expository purposes, needed for the task certain tools and resources: sharply circumscribed ideas for organising the subject-matter; special exnression for making comprehensible relationships which far exceeded the experience of everyday life. A new task in the history of the world thereby devolved upon Greek philosophy. It had the vessels ready Prepared, into which an infinitely richer content, springing from a higher source, was to be poured. Platonism was the first source of this creative work. The drift of its speculation on the super-sensible distinctly singled it out for the task. Much later, after the lapse of more than a thousand years, when the most important essentials of revelation had at last been formulated in dogma, the close union of theological science with Aristotelian philosophy was completed and exists to this day”.

(Because, therefore, the philosophy of Aristotle was united with the Church as long ago as the Middle Ages, its value for the Church today is beyond question!)

“With its help, the sainted Thomas Aquinas, the greatest master of system known in history, raised the great edifice of doctrine, which, only modified here and there in detail, has determined Catholic theology as to form, expression and method of teaching ever since.”

The author in question regards what he calls Church doctrine as having come about by means of a certain union between the Christian wisdom-element and Greek Aristotelian Philosophy. He does recognise the possibility that in a very distant future, (he says expressly “in a future by no means near as yet”), Christianity might be approached through quite different ideas He says: Supposing that Christianity had not been spread abroad throurth Greek philosophy, but as it might have been, through the Indian, it would have come forth in an entirely different form. However, it must remain in the form it has received: it must not, be changed by any novel view, arising in modern times. But he in certainly aware that there are points where he is treading on thin ice:—

“I am only against a spiritual disposition which, in realms where full freedom is accorded to Scientific investigation, is deaf to all the fundamental objections, and holds fast to tradition.”

Yet he holds strongly enough to tradition!

And finally, it is then necessary to give way, as was done in the case of the Copernican system."

That waseonly in 1827! He turns away from legitimate endeavours to understand Christianity afresh, with a modern consciousness. That is remarkably little to his taste. He says:

“I could conceive that a far-distant future might loosen the union of Theology and Aristotelian philosophy, replacing it's no longer comprehensible or satisfying concepts with others, which would correspond to a knowledree improved in many ways.” He “could conceive”—that what nobody in any case understands to-day might be replaced by something equally incomprehensible.

“It would not be offending against the warning of the Gospel, because it would not be pouring new wine into old skins, for on the contrary new vessels would be produced, to preserve therein the never-failing wine of the doctrine of salvation, in its essential character, and to purvey it to the faithful.”

But that must not happen. He goes on:

“But the vessels must be chosen ones. The attempts made by Cartesianism in the seventeenth century, and by the philosnphy of Kant and Hegel in the nineteenth, exhort us to prudence. A school of ideas which would replace Aristotelianism would have to arise, just as that did, From fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness.”

Then these same men would oppose it, because they at any rate are not the offspring of “fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness”.

“It would have to acquire equal authority over wide circles of thinking humanity, and even then its transformation into ecclesiastical theology would hardly be attained without errors and perplexities on all hands.”

It would be necessary to “labour” to bring about understanding. “As, for instance, in the thirteenth century, when through the Arabs the complete philosophy of Aristotle was brought to the Christian West. Its reception aroused severe opposition. Even a Thomas Aquinas was not spared hostility. He was held by many to be an innovator, against whom the champions of the well-tried old order had to marshal their forces.”

It is remarkable how it is with this principle of over coming an old way of understanding. “Christianity—men may think it quite a good principle, but they absolutely will not admit its validity in their own epoch. It cannot be said that such a thing is done in simplicty. It is very learned, for the pamphlet concludes with a really significant reference—a reference to an Order which has at all times had reputation for shrewdness—a brotherhood which has a different standing from that of Bernard of Clairvaix or Francis ef Assisi, whose reputation rested or a certain mystical tendency. This other Order reckoned mystical piety aad such-like of less value than a certain shrewdness and understanding of worldly affairs. Hence the pamphlet says in conclusion:

“I end with an utterance of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which has been incorporated into the constitution of the Jesuit Order, and has ben referred to of late in different quarters: “Scientific pursuits, if they are undertaken with pure stiving in the service of God, are on that account, because they comprehend the whole of humanity, not less, but more pleasing to God than pennance.”

The endeavour has been made in our own time to awaken clear understanding on all sides. I will prove this to you by an example. I have been reading to you from this author so that you may see the position taken up by those who hold certain views, as regards a movement I was describing. This attitude of theirs was perceived by a writer who published a short time ago, (it is importent to note that it is of recent date) an article on the author of this pamphlet. I will read an extract from it:

“At the Conference in 1893, on the subjct of Catholic Science and the position of Catholic savants at the present day this declaration was made:

“We Catholic-Scientists of the nineteenth century are convinced that there is no antagonism between Science and Faith, but that they are ordained to combine in inner harmony. We are convinced that no two sides of truth exist, or can exist. God is the source of all truth; He has spoken to us through the Prophets and the incararnated Logos; He speaks to us through the ordained ministry of the Church, and no less in the laws of logic, which we must hold to when we strive for knowledge of the truths of Nature. eBcause God cannot contradict Hinself, therfore no antagonism can exist between supernatural and natural truths; between the teachings of revelation and a science which earnestly, honestly brings to light the laws and the rules of method.”

“This really means, however, that philosophy is reduced to silence. Its freedom is just the same for us as that of a flock of sheep in its enclosure, or the prisoners within walls. Philosophy, as regards its own principles, is just as little free under the determining, limiting rule of faith as they—who are allowed to walk about on their own feet, to use their own-hands and to move as they like, but in a strictly—enclosed space. The phrase “Catholic philosophy” embodies a direct contradiction, for by its own account of itself it is not unconditionally free.”

If our Spiritual Science were not independent, it would not be what it ought to be.

“Catholic philosophy has to follow a prescribed line of march. A philosophy claiming to be based. on scientific method must hold firm, regardless of consequences, to nothing outside the results of its own researches and its own thinking. It is bound by strict rules of investigation and verification, and is forbidden to take its stand within any particular religion or on any point of ecclesiastical dogma. Otherwise it is not science but unscientific dogmatism, governed not by principles of knowledge, but by faith and the power of faith. In that case it does not go its way unhindered and uninfluenced, nor does it follow impartially its own laws, but it acknowledges as a matter of course an ordained truth, and, in relation to that, resigns its independence.” (Dr. Bernhard Münz. “The German Imperial Chancellor as Philosopher” in the “Austrian Review”, 15th April 1918.)

That is precisely the task of the present time, to find the way for every hman being to stand on his own feet. A man who maintains such things as you have just heard quoted stands in sharpest contradiction to this task. There are neople who see that such opinions preclude any possibility of a scientific view of the universe; but it seems very difficult at the present time to prove the impartiality of one's judgment, however necessary it may be. The further progress of civilisation will depend on men comin to learn how in their soul-being they are connected with the Spiritual world; whoever shuts his eyes to this, hinders the most important task of his own day. There is no escape from this conclusion. The remarkable thing to-day is that people can look at the matter, and in a marvellous way draw other conclusions from it. The author of this article writes of the man from whose pamphlet I have read to you, which culminated in the confession of Jesuitism. The “subject” of the article is Georg von Hertling, now “Count” Hertling.—The author of the article, however, in spite of having said that the outlook he is criticising “excludes all science”, adds in conclusion:

“Count Hertling is a decided, strongly-marked individuality. Individuality literally means indivisibility, but in this case it implies divisibility, inner blending, universal organisation. Individual soul, family soul, and nation-soul meet and are accentuated side by side in this man: this trinity-of soul it is that makes him so strong and stamps him as the predestined Chancellor of the German Empire.” A need of our time is to find a way of touching the nerve through which the current of Spiritual Science must flow, and this can be none other than the one which enables the soul to find its onn way to the spiritual world. This must be thoroughly understood, for it is bound un with the deepest needs, the most indispensible impulses, our age. Our time demands of man that he should be able, in noticing a thing, to admit it, and to draw the real conclusions from it. Spiritual Science can be genuine only in those who have the courage to face truth and to maintain it; otherwise such experiences as I have described will become more frequent. I must add this, because more and more simple minds are to be found amongst us who hear with joy any praise of Spiritual Science, or what appears like it. Discrimination precisely in these very points is necessary. “Praise” can be far more hurtful and run far more counter to our efforts, than adverse criticism, when honestly meant.

Hermann Heisler, a protestant theologian, gave seventeen sermons in Constance and published them afterwards under the title of “Vital questions of the Day”. By chance a characteristic review of his book fell into my hands, and our unsophisticated friends would perhaps count it as something to be pleased with, inasmuch as it is unadulterated praise:

“These sermons deserve particular attention, on account of their authorship. Heisler was for ten years an evangelical Pastor in Styria and Bohemia, then, alarmed at the danger of becoming numbed by the routine of his office, resigned it for the time being, in order to devote himself for a year to studying the fundamentals of natural science and philosophy. Finally, urged by an inner call, he returned to his spiritual sphere with new joyfulness and love. As he could not serve his country with the colours, he offered his spiritual services to the Church of his native Baden, and was entrusted with a cure of souls at Constance, where these seventeen addresses were given in 1917. They are remarkable as regards their substance. They are all based on deep spiritual effort, and expect hearers and readers alike to share in it. They are not, designed to arouse beautiful feelings but to lead through earnest thinkins to convinced knowledge. They avoid the sermonising tone, and read almost like scientific treatises developed in a popular way about religious problems. I would instance the sermon on that many-sided conception, freedom. It arrives at the true conclusion: ‘Of course there always remains as absolute necessity which directs us. Even as free human beings, we still follow the aim which most attracts us; but the divine gift of freedom which Christ brings us is that the lower attractions of the sense-world lose their constraining power over our souls, and the majesty of the spiritual world gains inner sovereignty over us.’ ” The peculiar feature of Heisler's preaching, however, does not lie in the powerful grasp of his thinking, but in its special content: Heisler is a convinced, inspired Theosophist. He himself would rather use the term, “follower of Spiritual Science”. That must not be confused with the spiritualistic belief in the materialisation of spirits. It calls for a purely spiritual activity, bound to no material means. Our thoughts are forces, which, invisible yet powerful, stream out from us and impress the seal of our being on the whole of Nature, beneficially or the reverse. This belief in the imperishable power of the spirit is set forth for our comfort in the address, ‘Our Dead are Alive;’ it takes an amazing form in the one on ‘Destiny.’ Based on the account in St. John's Gospel of the man born blind, the old Indian and Orphic doctrines of the soul's pilgrimage, its reincarnation in an earthly body, is taught; the preacher would thereby solve the riddle of how fate so often seems unjust, and, like Lessing in his “Education of the Human Race,” would arouse a belief in a carefully planned divine education of humanity. When I add that Heisler looks upon this teaching, indeed on all his Spiritual Science, as a return to the New Testamet, lecturinrg upon it as science, and consciously overstepping the Kantian boundary between knowledre and faith, I have sketched his schene of thoght it its main features.”

“Well, we might say, what more is wanted! Really nothing better could be written! But the author of the review concludes his considerations thus: “I myself reject this Spiritual Science and abide by Kant; but after all, the sermons contain so much that is good, and Theosophy is for the moment agitating theology in so significant a way, (cf. for example, Rittlemeyer's writings in the Christliche Welt), that I believe I do many theologians and laity a service by drawing attention emphatically to these addresses.” (D. Schuster in “The Hanover Courier”, 18th July, 1913.)

That is often the way of thought in our age: inner force and courage are lacking in it. The man has “nothing but good” to say; one notices that he has insight into the good, because he can define it in charming words; but then—“I personally reject this Spiritual Science”! There you have the fruits of what I began by describing, and much in the present time is connected with these “fruits”. In the next lecture I will deal further with the tendency I have been discussing, and its effpcts in social democacy and Bolshevism.

In the public lecture given yesterday, “The Human Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom,” I alluded among many other things to an idea which one may have concerning the life of the soul and which of course is in no sense hypothetical, but one which directly corresponds to the reality of the soul-life. I call your attention to the fact that what forms the beginning and end of life in the animal world, and in a sense only comprises two moments—the entrance into physical life and the leaving it, conception and death—stands in such a relation to the animal life that one might say: animal life might be represented as a ladder, at the beginning of which there is conception, and at the end, death. I called your attention to the fact that these two experiences really run through the whole soul-life of the human being; at every moment the soul-life of man gathers into a whole that which is experienced in the animal kingdom, whilst the Group-Soul—which really never quite descends onto the physical plane—is establishing a reciprocal relation with the physical being through conception. And something like a touch of Ego-consciousness appears in the animal at the single moment of death. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that one who is able to observe the death of animals can gain an idea of how in reality the Ego-consciousness, which runs through the whole life of man, is only present in the animal at the moment of passing out of life. But the important thing is this: that the two moments, which in animal life are really only “two moments,” are gathered together into one, in a synthesis as it were, and go through human life in such a way that the human head, the peculiar kind of organization which I have described, can develop a continuous becoming-pregnant and dying, gently reminding one of the fact that this human soul-life continuously proceeds from the interweaving of conception and death. Such is the life of the human soul, and this gives rise to the justifiable thought of human immortality.

In addition I said: Every time that we have a thought, the thought is born of the will; and every time we will, the thought fades into the will. I said that Schopenhauer represented this in a very one-sided manner, for he represented the will alone as something real. He did not see that “will” is only one side of the matter, that in a certain sense it is simply dying thought, whereas the thought is the will being brought to birth. To describe as Schopenhauer does is like describing a human life only from the thirthy-fifth year to the end, whereas every man who reaches the age of 35 must have attained some other age before this, for the time from birth up to the 35th year must also be taken into account. Schopenhauer only depicts the will, he considers thought or the idea as an illusion. That however is only the other side of the question: the thought of the will which strives to be born; whereas the thought is the expiring will. And through the fact that in our soul-life we have a continual interweaving of thought and will, we thus have birth, which refers back to conception (for perception is conception)—and death.

This idea is one for which nothing further is necessary—even if we wish to establish it anatomically and physiologically—but present-day science and the will, the good-will, really to observe the phenomenon of the soul. Anyone who does not take the experiences made with the human brain in the manner of official science today, but really tests free from prejudice, what physiology and biology have to say of it will find what I have just said borne out scientifically. If instead of all the hocus-pocus carried on today at the universities for the purpose of investigating all sorts of things in the psychological-physiological laboratories (for anatomists have no thoughts but, instead of thinking, sit down before their instruments in order to maltreat the soul life of the person to be studied and then to “investigate”), if people would not put up with this, a real observation of the soul-life would be possible and it would be possible also to gain an idea of the continuous coming to birth and dying which goes on in the human soul-life itself, that metamorphosis which is only an intensification of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. But the science of today has not yet even come to the point of understanding Goethe's metamorphosis after the lapse of a hundred years, let alone really carrying such a thought, once given to mankind, further.

Such thoughts as I try to sketch for you in the last lecture are nothing more nor less than Goethe's teaching on metamorphosis carried further. These things can all be established without any sort of clairvoyant consciousness. Real science and psycho-observation are alone necessary. If a number of students were brought to understand such things, instead of the many absurdities to which official science leads, the time would not then be far off when Spiritual Science would be impressed on the culture of mankind. For it is just such thoughts, which could be scientifically established today, and which need nothing else to make them fertile for the soul-life but the good-will to observe and to think—such ideas, such concepts might form the bridge from the outer materialistic science to Spiritual Science; which is not kept from spreading lest it would not be understood by those who have no clairvoyance, but because such a thing as this, which comes fresh into existence, cannot spread at all on account of the aggressiveness of the present-day scientific mind. It is my firm conviction that it will do no harm if these things are sometimes really called by their true names and described as they really are. We may say that the effect of a thought on the human soul-life is more important than the spreading of it abroad as a thought. It is much less important what sort of thoughts we have, than which forces we must use in order to grasp this or some other thought. The constitution of the human soul must be quite different, according to whether one grasps some entirely dead thought of the so-called science of to-day, or a living thought of Spiritual Science. In the case of the latter the whole inner nature of man is brought into play; he is inwardly quick and placed in the Cosmos; on the other hand through what present-day science produces, especially when carried beyond its own narrowest limits, he is pushed out spiritually from any connection with the Cosmos.

We must understand that. It is that which must really be introduced to mankind, through Spiritual Science. For just in those things that begin to be important for our immediate life, for example, education, instruction and everything connected with that, it is of immeasurable importance that the living ideas, which really leads straight into life, should penetrate human souls. It will become clear to the soul when it tries to view things in this manner, what are the tasks and what the essential point in the understanding of Spiritual Science for the whole spiritual culture of our time. That ought really to be grasped in its full significance. Then only would people see how unnecessary it is to look with unprejudiced eyes upon the almost entirely disjointed thinking which sometimes lies at the bottom of the present-day practice of life. The symptoms of this disjointed thinking are by no means so easy to grasp.

I drew your attention to one thing yesterday. In our manner of life it is necessary that nothing of what we might call sluggishness or idleness of thought should be developed. For just imagine if an inactivity of thought were to be developed amongst us! I have recently sung the praises everywhere of Oskar Hertwig's book “The Growth of Organisms.” I have called it the “best book of recent times” as regards his scientific achievements. I spoke without restraint, for a man who stands at the height of the scientific methods of his time has undertaken to disentangle the theories of Darwin and relegate them to their own boundaries! One could agree with him from beginning to end. Now comes his latest book, “In Defense of the Technical, Social and Political Darwinism.” As I have already said, one might really speak scathingly against the limitations of this book. For once, the natural-scientific investigator forsakes his narrow sphere—and talks real nonsense! I gave an example and mentioned that the good man says the following about the methods of natural science: “In the last resort all natural science should be constructed on the pattern of astronomy.” Of course this is not even original! Du Bois Reymond already said this in the year 1876, in speaking of the structure of the atomic world. We are to observe the realities round about us; then the astronomical theory, which is as far removed as possible from man, is set up as a pattern! Logically this is of no more value than if one were to explain the inner life to a family living in poverty somewhere in the country, by telling them: You need not consider how your own father and mother, son and daughter behave, but study the family life of a count's household; from that you can deduce how family rules and regulations should be constituted! Today such things are taken very superficially, and not even noticed; with us not only should there be no belief in authority but also no bed of idleness. We must understand that because an opinion is once formed about a person, one cannot thereafter rely on everything which might come from the same person. Herein is the question, and that must really be carried out practically, even down to the details of our conduct. Therefore no one should wonder if the one activity in Oskar Hertwig is praised to the skies and another found fault with; that must happen; we must accustom ourselves to look at life without prejudice. For he who does not practice this does not practice this does not notice on the one hand the direct realities of life, and on the other hand where he may find the entrance to the spiritual world. I should like to give a little example of this. I do not know how many people have noticed this, that is, have noticed it so as to draw forth the practical application of it to life

Some time ago there appeared in the “Berliner Tageblatt” an article by Fritz Mauthner in which he indulged in the most incredibly trivial, really dreadfully trivial strictures on a man who had written a book referring among other things to Goethe's horoscope. The critical language, Fritz Mauthner, wrote long columns in an uncommonly complacent manner, and tried to show what wrong the author is committing against the present age by writing about Goethe's horoscope and things like that, especially in a book which appeared in such a popular collection as “From Nature and the World of Spirit.” As regards this article of Fritz Mauthner's, one felt that really there was a little too much frivolity in it; but apart from that, the compiler of this book in the “From Nature and the World of Spirit” collection, is really a fairly average scholar of the present-day, and it did not seem that there was anything about which one was compelled to feel especially excited. Really one did not see why Fritz Mauthner should excite himself. One could understand it even less, considering that the compiler of this little book laughs at all those taken things treated therein seriously, and Fritz Mauthner only abuses this man because he speaks of the “horoscope.” Now he who compiled this little book justified himself and explained in the “Berliner Tageblatt” that it had not in the least that his intention to speak in favor of astrology. Thus the author really fulfilled all the conditions that even Fritz Mauthner, in his position, could demand. The two are thoroughly at one; but Fritz Mauthner attacked the man because he considered it extremely dangerous socially but a book of this kind should appear in such a collection. And the “Berliner Tageblatt” the remark that he could not but think that Fritz Mauthner had not understood the matter, for it was quite in agreement with what Mauthner himself had written. This is a particularly striking example of that degree of spiritual feeble-mindedness which really lies at the bottom of all these things. If on the other hand we bear in mind how greatly life is stimulated by what is expressed by such inferior mental activity, we are struck by the thoughts characteristic of the present-based spiritual culture. And we must really take note of these thoughts. That is a necessity, if we wish to gain understanding of the tasks which may really fall to Spiritual Science. What we must above all be aware of is that such things as deceit, lies are real powers, and we cannot imagine a worse deceit than when such a thing as this happens: one man writes a book on astrology, and another assails him because he does not wish anyone at all to write about such subjects. The first man then justifies itself by saying: “Come, I was only joking.” If he had said before hand, “I am only joking when I am talking about Goethe's horoscope,” Mauthner would have been satisfied.

These things are absolutely serious and are connected with the most serious tendencies of the present day, above all with that which we must also perceive, that Spiritual Science must of necessity find it difficult in our present time to work its way through and to attain something of what it is really incumbent on it to attain. It really demands strong and courageous thinking. The field for this has been in many ways prepared, and to understand how this has been done leads us to see that not alone were earthly, human beings active in this work, but that for centuries the great Ahrimanic forces of mankind have been at work. Besides all the things undertaken by the Ahrimanic beings in order to bring mankind into such confusion, out of which the way has again to be found, must be added the fact that men have been rendered incapable of perceiving that everything material is rooted in the spiritual and that everything spiritual desires to reveal itself materially. The world has been torn in pieces, its continuity destroyed. Above all, if we look at the outer history of the continuous Christian impulse—not of Christianity—we find Ahrimanic powers working through humanity, and particularly in the Christian development. One thing among others should be specially observed: the tearing asunder of what on the one hand is Sun and Sun-force, from what on the other is Christ and Christ-force. If the connection between these forces is not again recognized, the world will not easily be linked to the spiritual. One of the principal tasks of Spiritual Science is that we must rediscover, in another way—in a way which entails the spiritualization of mankind through the Christ-Mystery—the great Sun-mystery, which throughout the ages before the Mystery of Golgotha was not then the Christ-Mystery but which afterwards became the Christ-Mystery. Julian, the recreant, the apostate, only knew the Sun-Mystery in the old form; he did not yet understand that it was the Christ-Mystery. That was his tragic fate; he was overtaken by the world-historic delusion of seeking to communicate to humanity the secret of the spiritual power of the Sun. This led to his being murdered on his march through Persia.

In the 19th century we have to record another spiritual undertaking which was directed by Ahrimanic powers to prevent mankind from knowing that of which I am now speaking: the Sun-Mystery in its connection with the other Mysteries. We must look at these things thoroughly in the face. What I am about to say would, if I were to mention it in any scientific society or the like, instead of to persons prepared for it, of course be counted as madness. But we need not consider that. The point is that the truth must be spoken; for the decision as to whether we or others are deluded must not come into the question. In the 19th century a concept was first fundamentally established which now dominates the whole of science and which, if it still continues to do so to an increasing extent, will never allow healthy concepts about the spiritual life to find a place. To the ideas disseminated concerning the basic principles of physics and chemistry belongs the fundamental concept of the “conservation of force,” of the “conservation of energy,” as accepted today. Wherever you investigate today you will hear it said that forces are simply converted. (The examples quoted are of course justified in every respect.) When I stretch out my hand over the table I use pressure, but force expended is not consumed thereby; it is transmuted into warmth. Thus are all forces transmuted. A transmutation of force, of energy, takes place. “Conservation of substance and force” is indeed a favorite expression, used more particularly by all scientific thoughts today. It is considered an axiom that nothing originates nor passes away as regards matter, energy, and force. If this is kept within its proper limits nothing can be said against it; but the science does not keep it within its limits but reduced it to a dogma, a scientific dogma.

Just in the 19th century a remarkable Ahrimanic practice of coarsening the concepts has come about. A wonderful and extremely brilliant essay on the “Conservation of energy” has appeared by Julius Robert Mayer. This essay, which appeared in the year 1844, was rejected at that time by most of the cultured thinkers in Germany; it was considered amateurish. Julius Robert Mayer was indeed later confined in an asylum. Today we know that he made a fundamental scientific discovery. But it had no effect, and we can easily prove that those who mention him in connection with this scientific law have not themselves read his work. There is a History of Philosophy by Überweg, in which Mayer is also mentioned; he is spoken of in a few lines only. But he who reads those few lines is at once aware that this classical writer of the History of Philosophy, which all students must plow through, has entirely misunderstood him. The subject has not entered men's souls in the fine intellectual manner in which it was treated by Mayer, but in a much coarser manner. That principally comes about because, not the thoughts of Julius Robert Mayer himself, but those of the English brewer Joule and of the physicist Helmholtz, ignoring completely the thoughts of Julius Robert Mayer, have permeated science. It is not always considered necessary nowadays to look these things in the face. These relationships ought, however, to be pointed out in our higher teaching institutions. People really ought to learn why Darwinism found such quick circulation. For, believe me, if Darwin's book “The Origin of Species and Natural Selection” had simply appeared as a book given to the public, it would not have gained popularity in all circles, and these opinions would have vanished in the clouds. No, the thought which is at the base of Darwinism was already prepared beforehand. In 1844, a long time before Darwin, a book of gleanings was compiled, which mentions in the most trivial manner all the things which Lemarck and others have said. It was a purely book-selling speculative enterprise inaugurated by Robert Chambers in Edinburgh, knowing that the instincts of the 19th century could be relied upon to push such a thing through. Into this pregnant atmosphere, Darwin threw his ideas. All he did was to connect and combine the theory of selection with the ideas of Lamarck, for these things have been known to English practitioners for a long time. A book had previously appeared, “Ship-building and Tree-culture” by Patrick Matthew, in which the theory of selection is openly pronounced. The ways along which these things penetrated the culture of the 19th century had to be disclosed some time. History, as it is presented, is a myth; and in most spheres is a great deception. We must really look at what actually happened. For it makes a difference whether a young man learns that he has to deal with a scientific reality, or merely with the thoughts of an English brewer, Joule; whether something was really established by the scientific observations of the 19th century, or whether he had to deal with an enterprise of the Edinburgh publisher and bookseller, Robert Chambers. The truth is then discovered aright. Mankind must above all take its stand on truth.

This concept of the absolute—not relative—imperishability of matter and force prevents men—and what I am saying might be established physiologically today, it is only the dogma of the “Conservation of Energy” which keeps men back from seeing it—this concept prevents them from recognizing where substance really does disappear into nothingness and new substance begins. And this unique place in the world—there are many such—is the human body. Substance is not merely passed through the human body, but during the process experienced in the soul in the synthesis of conception and dying, it happens physically that a certain substance which is taken by us in fact disappears, that forces pass away and are generated anew. The things which come into consideration in this connection are really older than one thinks; but no value is placed on these observations. If we carefully study the circulation of the blood inside the eye with the instruments which are perfect enough today to enable us to see such things externally, we shall be able to corroborate what I have just said, externally and physically. For it will be proved that the blood goes to the periphery of an organ, disappears into it, and is again generated out of it, in order to flow back again; so that we are not concerned with a “circulation of the blood,” but with an arising and passing away. These things exist, but the dogmatic concepts of present-day science prevents one from recognizing the cause underlying them, and the men of today are thus prevented from observing in their true reality certain processes and happenings which are absolutely real.

What does it mean to present-day science when men die, purely as physical beings? No notice is taken of this by science. On the other hand sciences is constantly studying the dead because it cannot get at the living, but it takes no notice of the fact of dying. An example of this was given to me only yesterday. In the year 1889 Hammerling was temporarily entombed in Graz. Later on he was transferred to another vault. The gentleman who made the discovery told me only yesterday that during the transference of the body from the temporary vault, the skull disappeared. He investigated the matter and found out that in the University-Museum a plaster cast had been taken of the skull. The skull, wrapped in newspaper, had been left somewhere and was only restored to the rest of the body in its grave because the matter was then discovered. Thus we concern ourselves with the death, but not with the fact of death. Yet this fact of death likewise leads to the perception of important things. I have already pointed to the fact, in one of my last lectures that this human dust takes quite a particular course. I pointed out that it really tries to take an upward path. The dust that comes from human beings, unlike other dust, would be disbursed into the whole Cosmos—no matter whether the corpse is cremated or decays—were it not taken possession of by the power of the Sun, by the forces which are the Sun. In fact that force, which shines from the surface of a brilliant stone, or which we see in the colors of the plants, is only one of the Sun forces, it is that force which Julian the Apostate called the ‘visible sun.’ We also have the ‘invisible Sun’ which lies at the back of the visible one, as does the soul behind the outer physical human body. This force, which of course does not come down with streams of physical ether but only lives again in it, animates the human dust in quite a special way; quite distinct from the way it animates anything else, either mineral, vegetable or animal dust. A continuous interaction takes place after death between what remains of the purely external, physical man and the forces which streamed down from the Sun—they encounter each other. The forces which streamed down to act upon the human dust are indeed those forces which the dead man, now become a soul-and-spirit individuality, himself discovers after death. Whereas we, when we are incarnated in the physical body, see the physical Sun, the dead man, when he has passed through the gate of death, discovers the Sun first as the Cosmic Being Who animates human dust on the Earth below. This is one discovery among the many others which the dead man makes after death. He learns of the interweaving of the Sun-force, the spiritual Sun-force, and the human dust. When he learns to know this web composed of human dust and Sun-force, he first really becomes acquainted with the secret of reincarnation; seen from the other side, the next incarnation is being prepared and woven out of the Cosmos. Besides this he learns to know from the other side certain facts upon which the secret of reincarnation depends, and of which we will also speak in the near future.

This enables us to grasp the concept of how very different the ideas of the inner life of the human soul are when the soul has passed through the gate of death, as compared with the experiences which it has here. After death these are quite different in the whole configuration of the soul. Just as here on Earth we alternate between sleeping and waking, so does the dead man alternate between different states of consciousness. I have already called your attention to this in these lectures, but I will once more characterize it briefly from another point of view.

Among other things we live here in the inner thoughts of our soul. The dead man enters a world of reality. This reality consists of what to us are merely thoughts. Whereas in physical life we perceive the external, mineral, vegetable and animal worlds, and have our physical world besides, that of which we only experience the shadowy reflection in our thoughts is immediately present to the dead man when he has passed through the gate of death. The world he then enters really bears the same relation to the physical world as do objects to their shadows here. In our thoughts we have only the shadow of what the dead experience; but they experience it differently from the way we experience our thoughts. They learn something more concerning thoughts from what man on earth does, at least in our present-day epoch. For we usually dream in respects to our thoughts. But the dead man experiences that while he thinks, he lives in his thoughts as in realities; he grows, he expands, he flourishes; but to the extent to which she ceases to think and no longer lives in thought, he declines, becomes thinner and sparer. Even coming into being and passing away are, after death, connected with living in thought and living outside thought. If it were the case here that men who did not wish to thank became thinner, a remarkable world might be seen. But we only experience the ineffectual shadows of thought, which have no real results. The dead man experiences thoughts as realities; which neither nourish nor devour him in his existence as soul and spirit. The time in which the thoughts either nourish or devour him is at the same time that in which he develops his super-sensible life of perception. He sees how thoughts stream into him and pass out again. It is not such a perception as we have in our ordinary consciousness, where we have only finished perceptions; but a passing stream of thought life, which always connects itself with his own being. No matter how many things a human being on earth can see, yet, when he has seen everything, he is still exactly the same as before: except that afterwards he generally knows something of what he was before, but at least his organization has not altered to any considerable extent. With the dead man it is different; he sees himself in continuous interchange with that which he perceives. That is one of his conditions; the perception of the flowing-in and the continuous flowing-out of a living stream of thought. The other is that this ceases, and a quiet recollection of what has flowed through him comes about; an intense and far-reaching memory, not our abstract memory, but one connected with the whole of the Universe. These two conditions alternate. For that reason the dead are really only receptive to thoughts such as those brought to them from Spiritual Science, or from a spiritual point of view. The thought-organization usually possessed by men of today does not really reach the dead; and the kind of thought which does penetrate to the dead is not much appreciated by the men of today. They like thoughts which they can gather in some way from the outer world. But thoughts which we can only have by working upon them inwardly, which inwardly and spiritually have already a trace of that which thoughts have after death—this mobility and life is not liked by men. It is far too difficult for the men of today. Therefore they are nicely seated in their laboratory, and are able to have a microscope and to study the cells under the microscope, they can make the necessary incision with a knife; they can study the incision and are able to work out other observations in some way or other. They can then write remarkable books such as Oskar Hertwig's “Birth of Organisms.” But the moment they begin to think, they can write senseless books such as those of the present Oskar Hertwig. The only difference is that for such a book as his second one, even “thought corpses” would not have been necessary. For natural-scientific books, thought corpses are necessary; but for books like the second one, living thoughts would have been necessary, and these he has not got! It is necessary really to love such thoughts and to be able to live them. The moment a man left behind on Earth wishes to build a bridge to the friend who has passed through the gate of death, with whom he is linked by karma, he needs at least a disposition of mind which inclines towards life of thought. If we have this disposition of mind our thoughts are really quite a considerable addition to the life of our dead friends, and make a great difference to the existence of those stand between death and rebirth. But if a vague feeling lives in men's souls about everything which the dead consider should be different on the Earth from what it is, the living have but little satisfaction in this thought. Such vague feelings exist; men fear that the opinion of the dead might prevail over much that men think, feel and do in physical life. They are not conscious of this fear; but it holds them chained to materialism. For the unconscious, though we may not be aware of it, is still active. With the courage of the thinker we must not only put soul into the conscious life of idea, but also into the profoundest depth of the human being. This must be said again and again, if Spiritual Science is to be taken in full earnest. The question is not that we should accept some sentence or other which someone or other finds interesting or important for himself, but that just as an organism moulds itself together out of many units, so all the units should form together in man a whole attitude of soul, which for our time can only be characterized from the most varied points of view, as I have attempted to do. It is absolutely necessary that there should be some people at the present day who know how to take Spiritual Science seriously from this point of view, realizing that it gives to our time and active, living thought-life; so that one person does not fall out with another when they are both really quite in agreement; that there is therefore no reason for us to adopt the tendency of crying out when someone says something about the horoscope. That is not looking at the matter properly.

An age in which such an attitude of soul prevails brings forth much more besides from its depths. Unfortunately one can only allude to this briefly; but the possibility had to be created of really looking that in the face which arises out of the necessities of our time, and which is expressing itself sufficiently in such a catastrophic manner. Some people are indeed beginning today to have serious thoughts. But one sees how difficult it is for people to free themselves from the unreal situation towards the world and mankind in which the souls of today are enmeshed. How frequent the question arises which I have referred to briefly today and which I will go into further in the near future, the question: What is the position occupied by Christianity during the past centuries and thousands of years, seeing that although it has been working for hundreds of years, yet the present-day conditions are possible? This question has been touched upon at different points. It can be seen that the materials necessary to answer it are not yet to be found among what mankind calls today the scientific or religious or any other kind of studies. Spiritual Science alone will be able to produce these materials. For it is indeed an earnest question: How is the present-day man to regard Christianity?—considering that it has indeed worked for a long time in the past and yet has allowed such conditions to come about today. Those men are certainly peculiar who demand that Christianity should go back again to some of the forms existing before these conditions, who does have no feeling for the fact that if we go back to the same thing, the same must again come out of it. These people will certainly not very easily admit that something new of a penetrating and intense nature must strike into spiritual life. More as to this in our next lecture.

The best way to make ourselves familiar with ideas which can lead us, as men, into the spiritual world,is to try to obtain information through comparison of different facts which face us in the world.

What I would like to speak about today will be best explained if I start with such a comparison, i.e.—if I compare the consciousness which our present humanity should in accordance with the mission of our epoch, attain with earlier stages of consciousness attained by evolving humanity.

Just think yourselves back to the consciousness of the Greeks, to the ordinary consciousness which the Greeks had of Space. (Naturally I mean the consciousness of Space in a wide sense). You will realise without difficulty that in the consciousness of Space which the Greeks possessed only a portion of Europe was comprised—namely his own land and what bordered on it, a part of Asia and a portion of Africa, and that beyond this definitely limited region, the world was a kind of vague, indefinite quantity It might be said that what formed the horizon of the Greek's consciousness was the boundary of a something which was a vague infinity, at least to his consciousness. And this consciousness of the ancient Greek can be called (although the expression is naturally rather rough and ready, as such expressions always are because the consciousness of language is not adapted to express such things)—this consciousness which the Greek possessed may be called a land, or territorial consciousness. Now you know that the essential feature about the consciousness of humanity in the forward evolution of modern times has been that this territorial consciousness as it were, has developed into an Earth consciousness, that the surface of the Earth as it were, has shut itself off within definite boundaries. As a result of the disclosures of modern history man has imagined the surface of the Earth to be of a spherical shape. Speaking for the moment from the point of view of universal history, it may be said that simultaneously with the emergence of this Earth consciousness as a development out of a territorial consciousness, a panorama of what was outside and beyond the Earth came to be built up, a mathematical-geometrical panorama. The Copernican world-conception arose, and men have conceived of that which is outside and beyond the Earth in Space, in terms of mathematics, of geometry and of mechanics. The Copernican-Newtonian world-conception is, in its essential feature is a mathematical-mechanical picture of the world. Now, for every really thinking man, the question must naturally arise as to whether this mathematical-mechanical picture includes all that there is to be said about that which is beyond the Earth and can be perceived b by men in Space? It obviously does not include it all,,any more than the case when the old Greek confined himself as it were within the land or territory bounded by the horizon of his consciousness, and constructed what was beyond this, in phantasies. Of course the modern man does not clothe that which is beyond the Earth in such poetic phantasy as was the case with the ancient Greek with reference to what lay outside the territorial region comprised with in his consciousness, but the modern man encloses it in mathematical phantasy. Phantasy it is, none the leer for being mathematical. The essential feature in the attitude adapted by humanity in general of the present day is this; to conceive of the Earth as s great sphere in universal space, and to embrace what is beyond the Earth by mathematical and mechanical concepts, which for men who think very accurately, are merely mathematical and nothing else. The concepts which have been invented about all kinds of gravitational forces have been to-day abandoned by more thoughtful men and the world picture of what is beyond the Earth, is really only conceived of in terms of mathematics.

If we take all that we have been considering, during the course of many years, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the question must arise as to whether the time is ripe for this super-terrestrial concept of space, this mathematical and mechanical concept of space, to be ensouled by something else, by something empirical, something that can be experienced. For this mathematical-mechanical concept of Space is not empirical in any sense; the space-concept of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, is something that has been invented, devised, built up from a comparatively small number of observations. And you will realise since there is no possibility of investigating what is beyond the Earth with physical means that such an investigation can only come to pass by means of spiritual science And that it can do to-day. The mathematical-mechanical conception yields no really human factor in this picture; it simply says something to us in abstractions, which do not touch the substantial reality which we postulate. Everything that physics an astrophysics have to tell us today about the super-terrestrial universe, is cold, barren and without any real content. As a matter of fact we are just at that point of time when it is impossible for human evolution to advance any further if we do not progress beyond a concept of the world that is merely mathematical and mechanical. Just as the old Greek had a territorial, or a land consciousness, and man since the beginning of what is called the modern historical epoch, has developed an Earth consciousness, so from now onwards, there must be an expansion to a universal or cosmic consciousness. And today I would like to devote the hour during which we can consider these things, to certain brief, aphoristical suggestions, as to the nature of this world or cosmic consciousness, which must take the place of a consciousness which merely embraces the Earth. Of course a very great deal will have to be done in the future if we are to collect in more exact detail proofs and verifications of that which I am going to put before you today in a kind of aphoristical outline.

You know that the investigations of Spiritual Science are based up-an perceptions of the soul,and in my book An Outline of Occult Science a considerable amount of knowledge gained in that way,is given out. In that Look I gave as mush as is necessary for the general consciousness of humanity at the present time, but it must be extended; what is to be found in that book must be deepened and widened.

Now with reference to the coming cosmic or universal consciousness, we are, if I may make a comparison, in the position of someone who is travelling in a railway train. He looks out through the window of the carriage and gets accustomed to the idea that he sitting still an his seat. He forgets that the train is itself moving forward. The forward movement which he himself makes with the train, is something that he forgets. He only takes into consideration the movements which he makes, when he gets up, for instance, and in relation to other men who are likewise sitting in the train, changes his position. Now, what such a traveller experiences is something that is very limited in scope, and restricted, and it can be extended by the fact of a break in the journey at some town or other. What he has experienced in the train is not, of course, changed, but the content of his consciousness is increased every time he gets out of the train at some town and experiences what is possible in just that particular place. This is all summed up, as it were, into the content of his journey, and something concrete emerges out of the abstract idea of the journey. The travellers' inner knowledge of the experiences he has had in the different towns is a guarantee that he has gone some distance and has entered into a different set of circumstances. Through the experiences which he has had, he knows that he was not standing still and that he was only able to maintain the illusion of being at rest so long as he remained in the train itself.

Now this is something entirely different from what is often said in discussions on the Copernican world-conception. Of course on such occasions mention is made of all kinds of illusions under which man labours, for example, the illusion that he believes to be standing still on the earth, whereas as a matter of fact, he moves together with it, since it is itself moving. But what I mean here is not that. I want to point out something else, namely that man can acquire certain inner knowledge in the course of his life, and especially in the course of experiences which follow one upon each other which are comparable to the experiences which a man has in towns when he gets out of a train and into it again, and so in a certain sense pulls himself up in the inner experiences of his soul, and enters the full content of inner experience at that point. Therein can be found a guarantee, a proof, that while a man is in the world, he travels through space and experiences something which says to him; You, as man, are not at rest, you are in process of taking a real world journey! I want you to be clear in your minds that something like that which is suggested by this parallelism, is the case. The proof of it can of course only be found in the actual experience. Make it clear to yourselves that there can be in the life of the soul, different experiences, in consecutive periods of time which are a guarantee of the fact that one passes on to different points in universal, in cosmic space. We shall afterwards see that this is all said by way of comparison. We shall see too that the difference between the consecutive experiences indicate an element of space which is of much more qualitative a nature than the merely quantitative element which is usually in the mind when Space is spoken of. Anyone who has real inner experience, and not merely the abstract experiences which are frequently brought forward in so external a sense when mystical matters are being talked about, knows quite well that there is something in what I have just mentioned. Whoever has inner experiences is able to notice in the course of his earth life, differences in the content of his soul life at the ages of, say, 30, 40, or 50 years. If he thinks about these inner souls experiences, he knows that he has moved on the world, that he has sought out other places and that his inner, mystical (if I like to use that term) experiences have changed their character. I am here speaking of experiences which are only taken into account by those who do not look upon mysticism in an external, abstract way, but who look upon it as something concrete in inner experiences. The abstract mystic may talk from the age of 25 years, right up to the end of his life, of the “God within him”. But a man who knows how to understand inner experiences as a concrete reality, knows that these inner experiences change their nature and content, as if on a world journey, which is not the same as a tour around the earth. If I may again express myself mystically, we traverse universal space consciously through our inner experiences. But we only do it as it ought to be done, when we reflect upon our relation to the surrounding world in a much more definite fashion than is usually the case.

It is quite possible to look upon our relation to the surrounding world in such a way that on the one side we have only our sense perceptions in mind, and on the other our desires, our willing, our deeds, our acts. The fact of holding our sense perceptions in the mind, sets us in definite relationship with the outer world; we perceive through eyes and ears, certain facts of the external world—we are in living intercourse with the outer world. What happens—happens as it were, at the margin of our corporeality. To-day I will not go into certain physiological objections, or those of theories of cognition which could seemingly be brought against what I am saying, because what I want to do is to outline the nature of the consciousness which must be attained in contradistinction to the earth and the territorial consciousness already described.

Our sense perceptions then, place us in a certain relationship to external events. And again, when we act, we stand but from the standpoint of another pole of our being in a certain relationship to external events and occurrences. We are involved in them, involved in a real sense, for we have ourselves partly brought them about. Between these two extremes of our life as human beings, is to be found everything which goes on in the field of our consciousness; on the one side there is the relationship to the outer world given us by the senses, and on the other side, by our desires and acts.

In that we develop feelings and conceptions of what our senses perceive, we live an inner life. And willing is fashioned from feeling and perceptions which have either deepened or condensed, as it were, into faculties. So that between perception and willing lies that which we psychically experience. But now, what is present in sense perception, is only seemingly a unity. In sense perception we look at the world and it appears to us as something uniform, a unity perceived through the senses. But as a matter of fact within this apparent unity, a duality is contained. For anyone who is capable of real perception, a duality is contained within what seemingly is a unity; there is a continual dying and uprising again. The world without us is in a state of perpetual dying and again coming to birth. In every moment in the world, we live in something that faces death, and out of that death, life continually comes forth again. If you look at a cloud, or anything else in the outer world it appears to you as a unity; but that it is not, The fact is that something is dying in the cloud, and out of this death something is again being born. Out of what comes from the past, there develops something which goes forward into the future. In all that we perceive there is ever contained fuel that is burning away and dying out; and fire that is arising, newly created, passing over as living form into the future. Then through such a training as is given in The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Result, we learn how to separate these two poles of sense perception from each other, and to perceive actually the phenomena of death and coming to birth, then for the first time the world takes on a real aspect for us. When a man who is trained in the right way observes another man through the senses, he sees in that other man something that is continually dying and something that is continually arising again. Dying—coming to birth; dying—coming to birth, that is what we see when we have trained our powers of observation to some degree.

When this continual dying and coming to birth becomes objective to us, when we really see it and do not merely imagine it in an abstract way—when we see continually in a man, a corpse and a child coming into being (and it can be actually seen in this picture)—in that moment we have within our range of vision, the three hierarchies of of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. The world is full of real substance. It is no longer a unity such as we used to see when we look at nature. We cannot observe this dying and coming to birth, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding the whole of nature transformed and resolved as it were, into the activities of the spiritual beings of the three Hierarchies immediately above man. And so it is at the other pole of our being. In our deeds and acts there is again a continual dying and arising. But at this pole it is much more difficult to perceive it. A long and arduous training is necessary, but it can be done. And we then are within range of wisdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Through meditation then, we perceive what is between the two poles: we are able to contemplate that Being Whom, as I have told you, is to be found midway between these two poles. Everything becomes more vital, more living in our epoch as we gradually acquire this way of thinking.

But by rising to this height of contemplation, our soul life changes considerably. 'hen we really have got to the point where we see in our surroundings the activities of spiritual beings, then, at the same time we get to a point where we are able concretely to observe the differences in the soul life of the different epochs of which I have already spoken. And then when we have learnt (it is difficult to learn, but it is possible)—to take account of these inner changes in concrete inner experiences—then we see ourselves to be travelling through universal, or cosmic space. And then we know, not by means of external mathematical considerations, not by the sequence of inner experiences, that we together with the earth have changed our position in cosmic space. And then cosmic space becomes a very different thing to the mathematical-mechanical space conceived of by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. It becomes something that is inwardly vital and living, We learn to distinguish movement which we make as men in universal space. We learn too, to distinguish a movement which is made from left to right—that is an actual movement which we make with the Earth from another movement which is an ascending one as it were; we realise that in turning, we also ascend in space. Yet a third movement—a “forward” movement I might call it—an onward movement. This is not the same thing as moving an the Earth but is something which is done together with the Earth which can be proved by inner experience. We can prove to ourselves that when we turn from left to right, we ascend and at the same time go forward. So, by inner experience, we observe a threefold movement made, not in relation to some other heavenly body but a movement in an absolute sense in space.

Now of course you will say that the present consciousness of humanity is very far away from the conception that man in this sense is a world traveller and that he can quite well prove to himself the reality of this world journey. Yet there is a means whereby such consciousness can be acquired, however far away from these things human consciousness nowadays may be. What I have described is a reality, even if men to-day know nothing about it. Their ignorance can be compared to the belief which may be held by a man in a railway train who imagines that he is sitting still, whereas he is moving forward with the whole train. Now why is this belief general? In the first place the purely mathematical and mechanical Copernican world conception has for the last three or four hundred years had a more lulling to sleep than an enlightening influence an men. I have often said that this purely mathematical-mechanical world conception is really based upon a mistake which is quite fairly obvious. It presents a convenient picture of space but really no more that that. In the well known work of Copernicus about the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in space, three tenets are to be found, but modern science bases itself only an the first two, and takes no account of the third. Copernicus knew something more than what is admitted by modern astronomical science. And this “more” he concealed in his third tenet -but no account is ever taken of that third tenet. The observations made do not agree with the Copernican system, but modern science disregards this. Today when under certain conditions a man investigates empirically where some star or other ought, according to the correct reckoning set forth in the Copernican system to be found at a particular point of time it is not there. But then there is the so-called Beseel correction, and it is applied in order to obtain the right result. The application of this “correction” is only necessary because the third tenet of Copernicus has not been taken into account. Because of this, a kind of convenient mathematical-mechanical world conception or world picture has come into existence during the last three to four hundred years. It is not in accord with many things, but of course today anyone who mentions this fact is put down as a fool! It is scientific to believe that the various facts are quite in accord with each other. Humanity has been lulled to sleep by the Copernican conception of the world with reference to certain facts—facts which are nevertheless substantiated by inner experience. Human consciousness is dulled and in the future men will have to see to it that this state of things does not continue.

I have often remarked that men do not wish to understand spiritual science with their own “healthy” sense. This is really only a result of certain educational prejudices which hold sway at the present time. It is very frequently the case nowadays that when the occultist gives out his experiences people say: Oh well, it may be so, but the only people who can know that are those who have gone through a certain “mystical” training as they describe it. Now that is right to a certain degree, but not entirely right. I have repeatedly said that up to a certain point, everyone today can recognise as fact, through his own consciousness what is, for example given in my Outline of Occult Science. There is no need to take it merely an authority. Everyone can understand it by means of an ordinary healthy human intelligence But How? It could be understood by anyone who had been sent to the Waldorf School from his seventh to his fifteenth year. In that school the forces of his soul would have been healthily developed through methods which correspond to reality, and then, if he had gone to a more advanced school, the elasticity of' his soul forces would have enabled him to absorb what people ordinarily begin to learn after the age of fifteen. That would be one way of getting men who would realise that reality is only given by what is substantiated by spiritual science—and that everything else is nonsense. The fact that men will not admit this, does not originate from any impossibility to understand spiritual science without training, but arises because our school education between the seventh and fifteenth years is of such a kind as to kill out and stultify certain forces instead of waking them into activity. It follows that men resist the acceptance of facts given by spiritual science, although they would readily accept many of them if their psychic powers were developed in a healthy way. Powers of the soul which have been developed in a healthy way are not dead and benumbed as appears to be the case in the majority of men of our modern times; they are mobile, fluidic, elastic, and anyone in whom they had been rightly developed between the ages of seven and fifteen would be irritated at the modern way of learning things. Today people are satisfied with many things because certain incorrect theories have made the illusions far greater than they really need be.

I have often quoted a characteristic example. Children in their 12th, 13th, and 14th years are told that lightning comes from friction in the clouds and it is admitted at the same time that the clouds are wet. Of course they are; but then when it is a matter of producing the electric spark which is the earthly replica of the lightning, it is found necessary to keep the electrical apparatus and everything belonging to it perfectly dry in order that no water of any kind is present; so that it comes to this—the only thing that is present when the lightning originates, is removed and yet the lightning is the same phenomena as the electric spark! Children and grown up people are quite satisfied to be lulled to sleep with all kinds of hypotheses of this kind. There are innumerable examples of the same kind where people will accept obvious nonsense simply on authority and yet in our days there is much talk of the laying aside of all authority—people say that they are no longer credulous of' authority. Yet as a matter of fact if they had been so credulous it would have been quite impossible for the Marxian-Socialistic world conception to arise in our epoch, for it is far more credulous of authority even than ancient Catholicism!

It is today one of the most essential cultural tasks,to overcome that which in so retardative a way interferes with men's powers of understanding—and to substitute for the present system a healthy educational organisation. It is one of the most important social talks to work for the removal of impediments to human understanding. And then men will not be so obstinate and perverse about accepting what spiritual science has to say; they will rather be irritated by much that orthodox science has to say today, that is if their development has been a healthy one. They will very soon learn to see through all the contradictions. There is instinctive opposition nowadays to the establishment of healthy educational conditions, for it is felt that if they were to be established the authority of modern science would be undermined in a drastic way. It is essential that fluidic soul forces should again be produced in humanity and they will emerge quite naturally as a result of the knowledge which Spiritual Science is able to impart. As a result of these elastic soul forces humanity would be able to understand what is meant when it is said that man is within a movement which is absolute; men would furthermore understand how a world consciousness can grow out of an earth consciousness.

To speak in pictures for a moment, but the picture is really a good one—it is as if a man learns to feel himself as a traveller through universal space—a traveller whose movement consists of a rotation combined with a forward movement and a movement from below upwards, If we sketch the result of these movements—moving upwards in rotation, moving forward in this upward spiral movement—the curve will represent the path of the earth through cosmic space, not mathematically and dynamically as it is built up through the Copernican- Newtonian world conception—but as a result of inner observation. This is the way in which it ought to be arrived at for then we get something that is not abstract like the Copernican-Newtonian world conception, but very concrete—something that is actually super-sensible experienced empirically, if one may be allowed to use this tautology. The importance of this kind of cosmic consciousness does not lie in the fact that through it a man begins to feel things more in accordance with the truth than is now the case when he believes the Copernican world conception and the path of the earth as conceived of by it, to be correct, but very much else is dependent upon it. I makes on inwardly a different man. A man learns to feel himself not merely a citizen of the Earth but of the Universe, of the Cosmos. The world expands,as it were, for anyone who comes near the forces which are actually operative in these movements. In the rotary movement from left to right are to be perceived the activities of the Angels; in the ascent from below upwards the activities of the Archangels; and by the advance in universal space forward are to be seen to movement of the Archai, the forces of the Time Spirits. By taking up into his consciousness this absolute movement through the cosmos man turns his gaze into a spiritual space and becomes aware of the fact that physical space is only an abstract image of this concrete, spiritual space, in which the activities of the higher Hierarchies are to be found.

It follows from what I have just said that such a consciousness is connected with something else. Anyone who has an idea that there is something of this kind bound up with the real being of man must necessarily realise what terrible harm is performed by modern education in that it allows certain forces to be paralysed in our children up to their fifteenth year and they then as students develop into something that is a natural result of these paralysed forces. It follows that young people between the ages of 15 and 21 absorb things that are not at all what the present time demands. And in their souls there exists things that are very different from what they ought to be. I assure you that by giving unctuous exhortations to children up to fifteen years old and then again later at an age when people used to have ideals as young men and girls of 20 years of age—you will attain absolutely nothing at all; or at least only that the young people at our Universities and High Schools become what they are today—which there is no need for me to describe any further! The only way to obtain real results is by giving free play to forces which should be active during student days, which nowadays are simply paralysed. Education today is a problem touching the whole of humanity. It is a problem not for arbitrary ideals, but for the whole of humanity, a problem which must be understood in the light of the very deepest demands of the present time. At most today men have a presentiment that muck ought to be different—let us say, for example, in medicine, possibly also in the realm of law and judicial matters, but that feeling when it arises is promptly squashed by the lawyers! Men have a kind of feeling that many things are not what they ought to be, but that they cannot be changed. The aim of mankind must be directed at the right period of life to the awakening and not to the paralysing of forces within them. The life period between the seventh and fifteenth years is not there for nothing. During this period, perfectly definite forces out of human nature which must be reckoned with when it is a question of education or giving instruction at this time of life. When anyone has this in view in education it is a very different thing to working arbitrarily: without any such aim. Certain things will be observed which today pass by entirely unnoticed.

I have called attention to these matters in the article which will appear in the next number of the Waldorf magazine treating them from several different points of view. I have intimated that we can no longer today be satisfied with pedagogics modelled as they often are in perfectly good faith and with the best will in the world. Certain methods and principles and standards are drawn up—in good will perhaps, but without any real insight—and it is believed that these standards of pedagogics can be learnt. Herbart and his followers have this belief to-day that just by “learning” pedagogy it is possible to become a good teacher. Now even in the case where a set of standard rules is the most perfect imaginable—the rules are almost as worthless for teaching as a well-written book on aesthetics is worthless to the artist. It is quite certain that well written books on aesthetics do not make a man into an artist—and a science never makes a true teacher. It is not necessary to learn physiology in order to be able to feed oneself; a man can feed himself by a science that is quite different from physiology. Physiology is there for another purpose and if it is brought into the question of correct feeding, it comes in as a makeshift. It was always a horror to me to meet men at table who had scales near them in order to measure out and weigh every morsel that they put into their mouths and eat at a meal. That is am example of where the science of physiology interferes in a most destructive way in the process of feeding. Ah yes, you may well laugh at that; but those who because of their scientific prejudices feel such a thing to be justifiable, would laugh for quite another reason considering what I have said to you today to be the most god-forsaken dilettantism. He may laugh at these things from diametrically opposite points of view.

Well now, a cut and dried system of Pedagogics can never produce real teachers. And why? It is drawn up in such a way that its fundamental rules have to be accepted and then education is of no benefit at all. What is desirable is to forget pedagogics altogether when one goes into a classroom; to forget everything that may be known about academic pedagogics! Every time it should grow naturally out of a wide knowledge of what man and humanity is. Nobody can be trained to be a teacher by the mere fact of learning pedagogy; pedagogy can only be stimulated in men when they have acquired a knowledge of the nature of man. We should disregard pedagogics as a science as it were, and at most regard it as artists regard aesthetics, being quite conscious of the fact that aesthetics and its laws can never teach how to paint. An artist in Munich once said to me when I was speaking to him about aesthetics and Carriere—who was a celebrated authority on the subject: “When we were in the Art School we used to call Carriere ‘an old grunter on aesthetic rhapsodies!’”(Wonnegrunzer). Now it has not occurred to students as yet to give the same kind of appellation to theoretical pedagogics, for the general idea is that in pedagogics it is possible to make use of things which cannot be used in art. But as a matter of fact, the two things are the same. Into pedagogic training there should be brought that element which is to be found in our spiritual teachings—knowledge of Man, insight into the nature of humanity and that is able to stimulate a living relationship with the human being which is developing out of the child. Pedagogy should be born afresh every moment in the teacher; the impulse to teach and instruct in a certain way arises as the immediate result of having any particular child in front of one. This will produce quite a different kind of atmosphere from what prevails in the school room today, just because it is created not by cut and dried rules of education, but because it flows of itself out of life—living life as it were! If education were to arise out of life in this way, then those forces which ought to be present at the age of fifteen will not be paralysed, and a man will enter upon his later life with forces that are fluidic in his soul-forces of a kind which are necessary in order that something similar to what happened at the transition of the Middle Ages to modern times—when territorial consciousness was transformed into an Earth consciousness, may come to pass in our epoch—in order that out of an Earth consciousness there may grow a world consciousness, a cosmic consciousness. Outer experiences will not produce this; it will only come through the development of susceptibility for inner consecutive experiences of the soul. Today man has not the faintest consciousness of the dissimilarity of there souls experiences.

Now what is the position to-day? Men are children; they act like children influenced by their environment. Then the child becomes an adult; the concepts become more abstract, the experiences richer; that is the case with everybody. But with the soul it is not the same as is the case with regard to the external bodily part of us. We get a more sharply defined countenance when we reach a certain age; we have no longer the round curves of childhood; we get white hair and wrinkles, and we very often get bald! In short, the external bodily part changes. We cannot, however, say that the inner soul nature changes in this way—at most it gets more and more crammed full—but it does not grow in such a way that it changes from the point of view of thee external world. Old age and childhood have a wrong relationship to each other. Man today has no consciousness of things of which I have often spoken to you; for instance that an old man can bless and that the blessing of an old man has a special significance—a significance which is not there in the case of a middle aged man. Men of today have no consciousness of such things—simply because it is not known in our days that if one is to be able to bless rightly in old age, one must have learnt in childhood how to fold the hands (in prayer or veneration) For the power to bless in old age arises out of the folding of the hands in prayer in childhood. The soul element has the same relationship to blessing and the folding of the hands in prayer as grey hair has to the the hair of childhood. This inner change enters the sphere of knowledge of modern humanity in a very limited sense; but it must do so again to a greater degree. Men must again come to a point where they can understand life in its different metamorphoses. Otherwise we shall never get out of the terrible state of things which, for instance, makes it possible for anyone who is 18 or 19 years old and has a little talent, to become at that age, a Feuilletonist. [A journalist responsible for the critical and literary articles which sometimes appear in a newspaper below the leading articles. The feuilletons are usually divided from the rest of the newspaper by a line.] People who read the feuilletons produced by these men have no idea that they have been written by someone only 18 years old—and take them quite authoritative utterances. But if a man writes feuilletons at the age of 18 he does not develop any further. It also comes about that men when they are only 20 or 21 years old are considered mature enough to go into Parliament, or to become a town councilor! They are supposed to be capable to do this kind of thing. It is in these cases considered to be unnecessary at the age of 40 years to try to be a more accomplished person than was the case at their age of 20, for everything that the world can offer and what can be offered to the world, has already been attained! At the age of 20 one chooses or is chosen and the thing is finished! But men will first understand the wor1d in a concrete sense when they again realise that life is something which undergoes concrete transformation. Then that abstract socialism of which we hear so much today, will disappear and something concrete will take its place.

So you see that the growth of a cosmic consciousness out of an earth consciousness will be of great significance, especially because of what is produced in men by their feelings; for the important thing in such matters is not what a man knows but how he feels. There are certain things associated with life which can be understood only when this cosmic or universal consciousness is reached.

There is a great deal of abstract talking today about the ages or generations as they follow each other in life. We think something in this way—I mean those of us who have reached a certain age, for I except young people from this; a man has capabilities of a certain kind; he lives in such and such a way; his childhood was spent in such and such a way. People are really very short-lived, for they get angry with children when they do the same things as they did at the same age; they do not understand that children of to-day do the same kind of things as they themselves used to do; they expect those who are now children to be as well behaved as they are as grown up people, and do not realise that good manners and behavious have first to be acquired. But apart from this, there is something else. Men generally imagine that children now must be just the same as they were when they were children—a generation ago; children, who are born now must be just the same as I was in the year 1860! Now that is nonsense. For we are in an absolute sense, further on in cosmic space and those who are babies now are born at a different point of space. Suppose you travel from Stuttgart to another town today—you will have had something to eat in Stuttgart today and tomorrow somewhere else. You cannot have a meal in Stuttgart when you travel. And the children who are born in our time, cannot have the same psychic constitution as those of us who have reached a respectable age had when we were children. We must realise that childhood itself changes. This is connected with our absolute movement in universal space—of which mathematical space is only a schematic image. There is a tendency today to take ever thing in an absolute sense and it is a matter for rejoicing when this is not so. I was recently very pleased in Berlin when a man came to see me who had read—well,what shall I say the “discussions” of the Threefold Commonwealth which appeared under the title of A False Prophet in the paper called Die Hilfe. I do not know whether any of you read that effusion. This man was an American and he said to himself that there was something interesting about it. And he came to see me with Herr Pfarrer Rittlelmayer and explained that in spite of the feeble style, he had realised that it was a matter of interest. Among the questions which he—all of which were quite understandable—was the following, which specially pleased me; “One can see that the Threefold State is necessary for modern times and that it must be put in the place of the old uniform State; is it your opinion that the Threefold Commonwealth is the final and conclusive solution of the social question?” I answered him: “Most assuredly not; but in the course of historical development it has come about that in past centuries the State as a unity has been more in evidence and now the times demand a threefold Commonwealth, a time will come when the Threefold Commonwealth will have to be replaced by something different. That will not however, be for about three or four hundred years and then it will be necessary again to consider what should take place of the Threefold Commonwealth”. Now that is the opposite of chiliastic thought, the opposite to the thought that imagines the kind of empire which has lasted for a thousand years to be right for all time. It is the opposite of thinking which imagines that once a blessed existence is obtained for humanity it must remain for all time. Life in the world is not so easy as that. What is essential is that what is right for a particular epoch should be brought about and then substituted at the right time by what the following epoch demands, That is the essential point, that is organic thinking in contradistinction to mechanical thinking—and mechanical thinking is what holds sway at the present time; men really imagine that there is one absolute right for all time. One thing is right for Stuttgart, another for New York, another for Australia, One thing is right for 1919, another for 2530. I assure you that the evolution of humanity is not so simple as to possess one absolute Right. Things are always right for particular places and for particular times; there must be concrete thinking which arises from the facts and relationships. And that will happed when humanity is conscious of its absolute movement in universal space. a consciousness which, however, can only be induced through inner experiences, through inner life.

I have again to-day called your attention to something which should indicate to you how things must be looked at with reference to the penetration by spiritual science of our modern culture. Anyone who understands such matters,will see that humanity's love of ease resists spiritual science, for everything else is far more convenient, far easier, Spiritual science is terribly inconvenient! Spiritual science does not permit of our thinking out a certain condition of things which can remain for ever; it forces us to think out what is good and right for the centuries immediately following, perhaps even for a still shorter period of time. But this cannot be thought out by abstract concepts of the intellect about humanity, but only when a real effort is made to understand the special characteristics of the particular epoch, and to realise thereby what it demands. That may be inconvenient, but that is the reality. Men today like the settle down comfortably into cultural evolution, especially those men whose aim it is to be leaders in it!

I will give you an example of the understanding which persons of authority at the present time have of' spiritual science. I won't relate the story in detail in case someone might get offended, but in a certain town a man had occasion to lecture about Anthroposophy in a private High School. He was lecturing about modern world conceptions and he wanted to include an address about Anthroposophy because he considered it historically necessary—you see people try nowadays to be really “all round”. Now how did this man set about it? The plan of the lectures, the programme,was drawn up at the beginning of the tem and a certain hour was allotted to “Anthroposophy” just as in certain hours the subject was Darwinism, a particular hour was set aside for “Steiner's Anthroposophy”. This was all drawn up at the beginning of the term. Now this man, when he put Anthroposophy into the programme, had not the very least idea of what was to be found in a book about Anthroposophy. When the evening for this particular lecture came round, this man went to someone who had my books, and in the morning selected the most important of them in order to get information, in order to be in a position to give his lecture an Anthroposophy in the evening. It is very convenient to familiarize oneself in such a way about a world-conception, and then to give it our authoritatively. Such a thing as this is by no means rare in our modern days, and it deserves to be mentioned. For very, very much of what is said and lectured about and written about in the present day has no greater “depth” than this and it is accepted credulously. Then out of this credulous acceptance it built up what people have in their heads and in their souls about the different world conceptions. We must not close our eyes to facts like this which show the most terrible superficiality, we must be quite clear that to-day it is essential first of all to consider who the person is who is speaking “authoritatively” an certain matters.

The stimulation of this consciousness in the present time is more important, my friends, than all the substance of what I am able to tell you; it is a consciousness which makes us realise how terribly necessary it is to consider what degree of depth there is behind that which is given us, and told us. If one speaks of these things of course many people are hurt. And particularly it is said about Anthroposophists and Theosophists that they ought to have more forbearance, to judge with greater kindliness and not to be so critical, because to be so critical hurts people. But one asks oneself whether it is real charity to ignore the fact that such men who acquaint themselves in the morning with what they have to lecture upon in the evening should be let loose in the sphere of education. In questions that arise out of actual life, the important thing is how they are put. It is important to put the questions in the right way, for then only can the right point of view result.

I have tried to bring home to you today that earth consciousness must change into a cosmic or universal consciousness just as a territorial consciousness changed into an earth consciousness; but I did this in order to indicate much that in the realm of feeling is essential for the bringing about of healthy relationships in our civilisation of today.

And Oh! this must come about. If one could only shake sleepy humanity of modern times into a realisation of this! But it isn't by any means easy nowadays. Much may be said in this direction but men avoid making themselves fundamentally familiar with such a point of view. It is not enough merely to bring forward anthroposophical theories. It is absolutely essential to make one's penetration sharp for what is necessary for our time and not shut oneself up in preconceived ideas, We must open ourselves out toward that which has to be wrestled with, in order that from the point of view of a true charity one may be able to strike actively at the present time. If something is done in this direction by stimulating the souls and hearts of men, more is attained than by the most comprehensive theories imaginable.

It makes one's heart bleed to realise the truth of what was said by Herr Molt recently, that there are people today who say: “We would rather be a province of the Allies before we will think of anything like the Threefold Social Organisation”. This attitude is unfortunately widely spread. And a great many other things are connected with this kind of attitude because as a matter of fact another attitude can only arise from a spiritual deepening. Our modern time can only grow to be healthy through such spiritual deepening.

It is strange that history became a science during a time that was really least suitable for this. You can see this if you look more closely. My position will therefore be somewhat different today from the way it was the day before yesterday, when I wanted to establish links between anthroposophy and psychology. With psychology it was a matter of extending the area of natural scientific thinking to the phenomena of the psyche at a time when the more recent way of scientific thinking entered into human evolution. It was a matter of covering a field of phenomena relating to the psyche which had been considered in a different way before. The reason was that many people who were particularly involved in working in the sciences gained the impression, quite rightly so, that the spirit which prevails in modern scientific research was the only truly scientific one.

Now we have to say that when the modern scientific method is applied to psychology it is certainly brought to bear on something which is given. A true psychology may have to find completely different ways of investigation, as we have seen, but the object of research is given directly in the human being even where the modern scientific method is applied to psychology.

This would seem to be very different in the science of history. If attention is drawn to the facts that need to be considered here, facts we might almost call paradoxical, consideration must be given to something that is relatively little known or considered, which is that the science of history, as it is called, is of fairly recent origin. In the 18th century, those who developed and represented the concept of science certainly did not accept history as a science. The science of history is essentially a 19th century creation. It thus arose at a time when scientific methods had come to be acknowledged as having reached a high point in their development. 18th century people did not see history the way we do today. Let me refer to a typical statement that the German philosopher Christian von Wolff made in the 18th century. One could cite many others to show that at the time scientists considered history to be the recording of events but not something that deserved to be called a science. Wolff wrote: ‘As historical works merely narrate what happened, it does not need much intellect and reflection to read them.’²⁷ Methods of explanation, to put historical events in some order that made sense really, only came to be used to any greater extent in the course of the 19th century.

Among those who had come to be more and more immersed in the modern scientific way of thinking, it was Fritz Mauthner who in his big dictionary of philosophy expressed the opinion that the nature of history is such that it cannot be a science in the most radical terms. The article on history in this work is written very much from the point of view that ‘science’ is only possible in the study of the natural world. Reading it you find that the study of what we call ‘history’ is firmly said to be no science, and that it is even considered a paradox that, seeing that the methods developed in natural science were highly specific, history was to be called a science as well.

So far as people who think in the modern scientific way are concerned, one of the main premises on which they base their ideas as to what science is does not apply. What is the natural scientist’s aim in his investigations? He mainly wants to establish such a configuration of the conditions under which a natural phenomenon occurs that the natural event follows from this and he will be able to say: If conditions are similar or identical, the same phenomena must recur.

This focus on the repeatability of phenomena is particularly important to modern scientific thinkers. In their view a proper experiment must be such that one is, in a way, able to predict the results one is going to see under specific natural conditions.

Now we might indeed say that when such demands are made on history as a science, it is bound to fare badly. Let me give just a few examples. A strange view developed recently among people who wanted to think in historical terms, and it was refuted in a strange way, I would say in a highly realistic way. People who thought they had a degree of profound historical insight into social and economic situations developed the view—especially so at the beginning of the present war—that under the present economic and social conditions the war certainly could not last longer than four to six months at the most. The facts have radically disproved their assumption! Many people believed it to be a view with a solid foundation in science. How often do we hear, when people consider present events that are important in the life of humanity and which they therefore want to evaluate: ‘History teaches this, or that, about these events.’ People consider the events, want to form an opinion as to how they should relate to them, how they should think about the possible outcome; and you then hear people who have done some study of history say: ‘History teaches this or that!’ How often do we hear these words today in the face of the profoundly disturbing, tragic events that have come into human evolution. Well, if history teaches what those people think it teaches, namely that it will be impossible for these events to continue for more than four or six months, we can say that this knowledge drawn from history is strangely contradicted by the facts.

Another example, perhaps no less typical, is the following. A person who is certainly not without significance became professor of history in 1789. It was a time which we might call the dawn of historical studies. Schiller started to teach history in Jena in 1789. He gave his famous inaugural address on the philosophical and the external mechanistic approach to historical events.²⁸ In the course of this address he said a strange thing, something he believed he had concluded from a philosophical approach to human history. He believed he had developed a view on what we can ‘learn from history’, saying: ‘The community of European states appear to have become one large family; sharing the same house they may bear malice towards one another, but one hopes they will no longer tear each other limb from limb.’ This was a ‘historical opinion’ given in 1789 by someone who had certainly made a name for himself. There followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars! And if the lessons history had to teach had been learned, we’d also have to consider the present time in wanting to verify the statement that the European states may bear malice towards one another but will no longer tear each other limb from limb! Again a strange refutation of what people meant when they said that we can learn from history in order to form an opinion on present or future events. It is possible to give countless instances of what is suggested here. This is the one thing people say.

The other is that history, the course of events, must be ‘scientifically penetrated’ from all possible points of view. Did the 19th century really fare well with these methods? People who thought of applying strict scientific methods to history would no doubt be least satisfied when they came to ask themselves if proved useful in any way to apply methods that have their full justification in natural science to historical developments, so that they might be considered ‘in the light of a science’.

We merely need to consider a few things. It will not be possible today—for it is certainly not my aim to criticize the science of history as such today—to go into every detail of the attempts that have been made to develop a method for history. There is the view that it is great men who make history; then the view that the great have been given their character and their powers by their environment. Another view is that historical facts can only be understood if we consider the economic and cultural background, thus letting events in human history emerge from that background, and so on.

Some examples of attempts to approach history with the way of thinking that has proved its value in natural science may serve to show how the attempt has really—well, if not failed completely at least given no satisfactory results. To start somewhere, let us take Herbert Spencer’s²⁹ attempt to apply the modern scientific approach to the evolution of human history. Spencer wanted to penetrate the whole of world evolution and the existing world with the thinking developed in natural science. He made a surprising discovery. He knew that the individual organism, a human organism, for instance, but also the organism of higher animals, develops from three elements of a cell—ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm. Three elements or parts of a cell, therefore, from which the organism develops.

Herbert Spencer saw a similar process in the organism of evolving humanity, as it were. He assumed that different organic systems would develop from these elements as the historical organism of humanity evolves, just as the organic systems of the human body develop from the three elements of the cell. Spencer said that in the historical organism, too, you have something like an ectoderm, an endoderm and a mesoderm. This English philosopher developed the unusual view that in the historical evolution of humanity the warrior people, anything warlike in the world, developed from the ‘ectoderm’; peace-loving, working people from the ‘endoderm’ and the traders from the ‘mesoderm’. A ‘historical organism’ thus evolved from the interaction of these three kinds of people. According to Herbert Spencer, the most perfect community organism develops from the ‘ectoderm’ in the course of history; this is because the nervous system develops from the ectoderm in the human organism. This English philosopher thus saw the warrior class, the military element in a state, as developing from the ‘ectoderm’, analogous to the element that holds the potential for developing the nervous system in the individual human organism, and to his mind the most perfect country was the one that had the best developed warrior class. Just as the brain derives from the nervous system which derived from the ectoderm, so Herbert Spencer said that in a community the ruling class should come entirely from among the warriors. I merely want to mention this strange approach, and in view of the current situation make no further critical comments on Herbert Spencer’s militaristic theory concerning the historical evolution of society.

Another attempt at bringing ideas taken from natural science into the study of history was made by Auguste Comte³⁰—I am limiting myself to the leading thinkers. He attempted to apply the laws of mechanics, of statics and dynamics, to developments in human history. Relationships between individual elements in a social system were considered under the heading of ‘historical statics’, whilst changes, movements or progression came under the heading of ‘historical dynamics’.

Many more such examples could be given. Taking a critical look at these and many other attempts it can be shown that it is hardly possible to get satisfactory results by transferring scientific ways of thinking, which are strictly controlled in their own fields, to a study of historical developments.

Individuals who lived in the dawn, we might say, of historical studies tried to bring something like explanatory principles to the subject. We only have to think of one of the most magnificent attempts from that period. It was made by Lessing in his famous small book, written when he was at the height of his mental powers.³¹ His attempt is particularly interesting because he tried to approach historical developments not in a natural scientific way but by using the concept of education, something, therefore, that also has an element of mind and spirit in it. Lessing thought that successive historical events could only be understood if one saw the way humanity lived in the progress of history as an education governed by historical powers that were active behind the developments we are able to perceive.

And it is interesting to see how Lessing established cohesion among successive historical phenomena. It was precisely because of the way he established this that people would say: ‘Ah well, Lessing was a great man, but he was past his best when he wrote his treatise on the education of the human race.’ This was because he tried to make the succession of historical events a kind of inner event, at least in theory to begin with. This led to the idea of repeated lives on earth for the human soul. He looked back into past periods of history and said: ‘The people who are alive today have lived many times before; in their souls they bring into this period the things they have taken up in earlier periods. The impulse which runs through historical evolution is something which lies in human souls.’

Taking this first of all as a hypothesis, we might at any rate say that infinitely many things in human evolution that would otherwise be riddles can be illuminated, even if only hypothetically, if we assume that human souls themselves take historical impulses from one period of history to the next. What has been a tissue of historical developments lacking in cohesion will then suddenly show itself to be a cohesive whole. This is the only way in which we can hope that individual historical data are no longer just there, side by side, but can truly be seen to arise one from the other, for we now have the principle that makes the one arise from the other.

The view Lessing expressed in his small book has not really been taken up, the reason being that the age of modern science was coming to its peak. For reasons which will be shown in the next lecture, people really had to be against the theory of repeated lives on earth in this age of modern science, and in this particular sphere it was quite right to be against it.

And so it happened that all kinds of attempts were made in the course of the 19th century. You need only think of Hegel’s attempt to see the whole of historical evolution as progressive awareness of human freedom, and so on.³² We could refer to hundreds of attempts, showing that people tried over and over again to bring explanatory principles into historical evolution and thus make history into a science. There were, of course, also people like Schopenhauer, for example, who believed that nothing repeated itself in history, so that one could not speak of a science. History, he said, could only refer to successive data but there were no impulses in history that might serve as explanatory principles as is the case with the facts on which the laws of nature are based.³³

The powerful protest Friedrich Nietzsche made against history as such is still fresh in our minds. He spoke of ‘historicism’, meaning the acquisition not of the ideas of history but of a historical way of thinking, acquiring a way of thinking where people insist on ‘what history establishes’, wanting to work with this in their souls. In his view historicism sucks the soul dry, as it were, whilst there is need for the human soul to be productive and active in the present time, dealing with events as they come in a fruitful way. For Nietzsche, therefore, someone who only felt historical impulses was rather like a creature that must always go without sleep, which would mean that it could never bring fruitful vital energies into its development but would always only be consumed and worn down by something as destructive and enervating as living in historicism. Nietzsche’s treatise on history’s benefits and disadvantages in life is one of the most significant works to have arisen from his whole way of thinking.³⁴

These introductory words should merely serve to demonstrate how much the idea of history as a science is in dispute today, from all kinds of directions, and is so to quite a different degree as yet than psychology is, for instance. The question which must arise from all this is: Where do such things come from? On the premises on which the anthroposophically orientated science of the spirit is based we have to say: Because initially attention was not directed to the important fundamental question: What aspect of the human being are we concerned with when we speak of historical developments? Which part of the human being is involved in these historical developments? To answer the question we will need to look at the nature of the human being from the anthroposophical point of view, for this essential nature goes much further than our ordinary conscious mind is able to encompass.

My starting point—you’ll see later why I have chosen it—will be a look at the inner life of the human being and the rhythmical way in which it again and again goes out of our ordinary state of conscious awareness. We must allow that state of conscious awareness to alternate with the sleep state. We’ll be considering the subject in more detail when we come to consider the natural world from the spiritual scientific point of view in the next lecture. Today I merely want to refer to the aspects that can provide a basis for the study of history.

When sleep comes in the inner life, our conscious awareness is reduced to a level where we may almost speak of unconsciousness, though to someone able to observe this exactly, we are certainly not completely unconscious in our sleep. The world of sensory perceptions we have in full daytime conscious awareness and our world of feelings and active will come to a halt, they go down into the darkness of unconscious or subconscious life. Between the two states—waking and sleeping—lies the dream state.

This dream state is something most remarkable. 19th century philosophers tried to apply their minds, more used to natural science, to penetrating the nature of this mysterious dream world, which rises from the unconscious sleep state and is so very different from the experiences we gain in the world in our ordinary state of consciousness. The philosopher Johannes Volkelt, for instance, who wrote a book on dream fantasies³⁵ in the 1870s, left the issue untouched as though it were a hot coal which one may pick up, only to drop it again immediately. Critics writing about his book who decided to take the matter seriously were actually accused of spiritualism.³⁶ It is amazing what things people can be accused of!

What is the nature of this dream world which rises from the depths of our sleep? What are those images that move and flow in our dreams? The question can really only be discussed if one has the level of conscious awareness of which I spoke the day before yesterday. Someone who progresses from ordinary conscious awareness to being able to gain insight in images, through inspiration and intuition, that is, someone who truly is able to let his soul be out of the body and live wholly in the world of the spirit, will be able to have insight into what happens in the human soul when it lives in dream images. I can, of course, only give a general idea today, referring to some of the results obtained in the science of the spirit. To take this further you will need to have recourse to my books.

Studying dream life with the methods we have been considering here you come to realize that the sphere in which the inner life finds itself during sleep—from going to sleep to waking up again—is indeed separate from our life in a physical body. This is something one gets to know with spiritual scientific methods. You come to know the condition of the soul when it is out of the body. We are therefore able to compare life in dream images to this state of being out of the body which can be scientifically investigated. And we then find that a dream is really much more of a composite than we tend to think.

Anything that lives in the soul when it is dreaming has nothing to do with our present time the way our waking daily life has to do with the present time. They are something which is developing in our organism, in the whole of our essential human nature, like a small seed in a growing plant. The seed developing in the plant is the physical cause of the next plant. Wrapped up in our dream images—if I may put it like that—something emerges from the dim depths of sleep in the human soul which is not physical but is the foundation in soul and spirit for the part of us that will go through the gates of death, entering into the spiritual world to live through a life between death and rebirth before it appears again.

This seed is weak, however, so weak that it does not find its inner content out of its own inherent powers. It therefore only contains things that relate to reminiscences, echoes of the world we have lived through in the present or in the past. Spiritual scientific investigation of dream life shows that as with many things, the feeling people have, though it may be superstitious, that the future may often be revealed in dreams, is indeed a truth which they can sense, yet it is also a dangerous superstition. It is dangerous because the soul as it develops for the future, that is, the eternal in our soul, actually lives in our dreams. We may have a feeling that the element in us which is dreaming may not hold the idea of, but certainly the living potential for, the future of the human being. The content of the dream is taken from reminiscences and so on which are interwoven in a chaotic way. It is therefore superstition to want to interpret the contents of a dream in any other way than by the spiritual scientific approach, yet we have to say that the principle in us which is dreaming does indeed have to do with the eternal nature of the human soul. It is therefore only the content of dream life which makes us cherish illusions.

Progressing from ordinary awareness to the awareness I called vision, we come to insights in images, to inspirations. With the contents of a mind that is gaining insight in visions we are in a world of the spirit. This is the world in which the soul lives when it is out of the body and dreaming. But it is there in a childlike way, I’d say, in a way that is not yet perfect. It is present in that world the way the seed is in the plant as the potential for the next plant. Through vision in images and inspiration a world shows itself to us in which the dreaming soul is also at home.

People usually think human beings dream only when they are asleep. This is the kind of error that must inevitably arise when one develops one’s ideas only in relation to the world outside the human being. But it is an error, an illusion. People who think more deeply, Kant among them,³⁷ have had some idea that the principle present in the soul in sleep and in dreams is there not only in sleep and in dreams but is present throughout life. When we wake up, part of our inner life does indeed enter into the realm where the concepts based on observations made by the physical senses are present. We are wholly taken up with these, giving them our attention, for it is like a powerful light that outshines everything else that lives in the soul. We see it as the only content of the mind in daytime waking consciousness, as it were. But that is an error. Whilst these contents fill our minds, other contents that are entirely the same as the dreams that emerge from sleep during the night live on in the subconscious depths of the soul. We dream on whilst awake, but are not aware that we are dreaming. And though it may sound odd, the following is also true: We do not only dream on; we also sleep on. In the waking state, our conscious mind is thus at three levels—up above, at the surface, as it were, waking daytime consciousness, down below, in the subconscious, an undercurrent of continuous dreaming; and still deeper down we go on sleeping.

We can also state with reference to what we dream and with reference to what we sleep! We dream with regard to everything that does not come to mind in ideas or in concepts that can be clearly stated, but is discharged in us as feeling. Feelings or emotions do not arise from a fully conscious, waking conscious state of mind; they rise up in us from a world where all is dream. It is not right to say that emotions arise from the interaction of ideas. Quite the contrary. Our ideas are filled with something that rises up from a deeper inner life where we dream on whilst in the waking state. Our passions and affects also rise from a life of waking dreams, though the fully conscious life of the mind makes this invisible. And our impulses of will continue to be such an enigma in the way they well forth from the inner life because they come from depths of soul where we are asleep even when we are in the waking state.

Our fully conscious ideas thus develop in waking consciousness up above; our feelings are like waves lapping up from a subconscious state, a daytime dream life; and our impulses of will rise up from a sleep life. The significance this has for the development of ideas in the sphere of social life and of rights, of ethical ideas, and the significance it has when it comes to freedom of will is something we will be considering in the last lecture.

Today the emphasis will be on something else, however. Some sharp minds have realized that we will never be able to explain passions, for example, unless we first seek an explanation for the dream world. Passions, even the best and noblest of them, only live in human beings because they dream even when awake, and what people dream does not come to conscious awareness but laps up into it from the region where dreaming takes place.

One feels some hesitation in the present-day climate in speaking about another finding made in the science of the spirit. It does rather go against accepted views, but then it is also a fact that many developments in science were initially controversial. They ultimately won through. Thus the Copernican view of the universe only came to be accepted by a certain element in our culture in 1822.³⁸ Perhaps the science of the spirit, or anthroposophy, may also have to wait a long time to gain recognition, this time not by that particular element but by modern scientists.

What is really going on, if we study the river of human life, cannot be reached with the concepts we go through in the waking mind, for it does not live there. It may sound controversial, but the impulses that billow and move in history are only dreamt by human beings. The principle that drives history is no more lucid than a dream in the human soul, nothing else. It is perfectly scientific to speak of the dream of evolution. We can see this clearly once we come to realize that it needs the capacity for perceptive vision to gain insight into the actual impulses that drive history. We need to penetrate those impulses with living research based on vision in images and on inspiration. The human being is part of history and plays a role in it. We are therefore dealing with something that cannot be observed in a way that allows concepts to be developed which are like the concepts we use in modern science. We are dealing with concepts that really only come to ordinary conscious awareness out of our dreams.

It would be easy to raise the objection that the science of the spirit lives out of fantasies, attributing important impulses to the products of sheer fantasy and indeed dreams. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that may well be so, but if the reality is something that must live as a dream in the human soul, we have to go and find this reality in the actual sphere where it can be perceived.

The objection which people who are dedicated to the thinking used in natural science have raised against considering history a science has in fact been that one is dealing with isolated facts in history but would never be able to understand what a historical fact actually is, and that one could not get the kind of clear picture of it which one does with the facts of nature, facts on which natural science is based.

This is perfectly correct, also from the point of view of spiritual science; but we need to take a much deeper view in spiritual science. We would first of all say: If you consider what historical impulses really are, they are not given if you direct your usual rational mind to them, an mind relating to facts in the physical world. Historical facts are only given if we direct image-based and inspired perception to nonphysical impulses that are not to be found in the facts of the physical world.

The insights brought to human awareness through the science of the spirit did not, however, arise entirely out of nothing in more recent times. People who have been wrestling with problems of gaining insight and have gone through inner dramas in the process, have already had to turn their attention, even if only for brief moments, to the things that are now given system and order in the science of the spirit. Again I could give many examples of how one individual or another has in a sense ‘divined’ one thing or another. One example which I have also given in the book³⁹ due to be published shortly is the following.

In lectures given in 1869 which have since been published,⁴⁰ the psychologist Carl Fortlage made a strange statement concerning the conscious mind and its connection with the phenomenon of death. He said: ‘If we call ourselves living creatures, ascribing a quality to ourselves which we share with animals and plants, we necessarily take the condition of being alive as one that never leaves us, continuing on in us whether we are asleep or awake. This is the vegetative life of nutrition in our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain is an exception in so far as during the intervals when we are awake this life of nutrition and sleep is dominated by the life of consumption. In those intervals the brain is exposed to a powerful process in which it is consumed. It therefore enters into a condition which would mean absolute debilitation or even death if it were to extend to all the other organs in the body.’

This is a magnificent flash of insight. Fortlage is saying no less than that if the processes that influence the human brain were to take hold of the rest of the body in full waking consciousness, they would destroy it. We are thus truly dealing with destructive processes in the human being when it comes to conditions relating to everyday conscious awareness. Fortlage had deep insight. He continued: ‘Conscious awareness is a lesser, partial death; death is a great, total state of conscious awareness, with the whole of our essential nature awakening in its inmost depths.’

Here we see the connection between death and conscious awareness intuited in a truly magnificent way. Fortlage knew that if we divide the event which happens once, when death comes upon us, into ‘atoms’, as it were, ‘atoms of time’ in this case, these ‘atoms’ would be the events that happen continually in our waking consciousness. In developing conscious awareness we develop an ‘atomistic’ dying process; death is the same process as the one which affects the brain at every moment of conscious awareness, only on a larger scale. For Fortlage, too, death thus was nothing but conscious awareness of the spiritual world awakening all at once. Conscious awareness is all the time killing us off in small steps, and this dying process is necessary for our ordinary daytime conscious awareness. So if we have a human being before us we can say—and Fortlage’s feeling is fully confirmed on the basis of spiritual science—that the element of soul and spirit in this person is really something that consumes and destroys him. The vegetative life he has will hold destruction at bay until death comes. Once death comes, we have on the large scale what develops slowly, atom by atom, we might say, in life. Death is always in us, but we also have the vitality that fights death in us, and the soul enters into this vitality.

If we therefore consider the individual, living human being who stands before us in his body, this body is an outcome of the inner life. We are going to consider this in more detail in the third lecture. We have death; but for as long as the vital energies are active, death is continually prevented from coming in. It might be said to be lurking behind the phenomena and is indeed an important element in life, for life would only be at plant level if death did not kill this life off all the time, with conscious awareness arising in the body exactly because of this.

Once we get to know this peculiar relationship which death has to the vital energies in the human body, our perceptive vision grows sufficiently clear to allow us to form an opinion and indeed find meaning in the course of historical events. Normally they are told in history the way they have happened in the world, which is how history is usually presented.

What do events, fact following fact in the world, actually represent? Again I have to say something that may sound highly controversial. The facts of history do not relate to their soul content—which human beings only dream in the process of historical evolution—the way a body does that bears death within it, but rather like a body that is already dead, with the soul outside it. This means that historical facts no longer have soul in them. In human life, death comes when life in the body has run its course. The soul had been present everywhere in bodily life and then the body is alone, without the soul element. When it comes to historical facts the whole organism is mere dead body, a dead outer form compared to the historical impulses that are alive and active from one age to the next. This can only be perceived if we do not focus on the external facts but on the living principle, which is so alive that we cannot derive it from outer facts.

Let me use an analogy to make this still clearer. Let us assume someone believes—many people do believe this—that he only has to understand the facts of history as clearly as possible, the way we understand the facts in natural science, and he will be able to produce a science of history from the succession of such historical insights. Someone who believes this is like one who—however strange this may sound—if he had a dead human body before him would believe he should be able to extract the life of the soul from it in some way. It is not in there! Nor do historical facts hold the soul of history in them. We perceive historical facts with the rational mind which is bound to sensory perception and evolves from it. Yet we only see what is dead in historical developments when we use the rational mind. Human beings can only penetrate into historical evolution with their common awareness when they are dreaming; they can only see through historical evolution, through the actual inner life of history with imaginative and inspired awareness. Because of this, all available historical facts can only be presented in anecdotes and accounts. It is really true what the great Jacob Burckhardt⁴¹ said: Philosophy is non-history, for philosophy sees one fact subordinate to another; and history is non-philosophy—this is the term he used—because it only has to do with coordination, with facts being put side by side.

This gives rise to a particular attitude in historical thinking. To arrive at truly historical thinking we must use the awareness in vision of spiritual science to gain a clear view of something which definitely can not be learned in the ordinary course of history, something which is there in the process but does not reveal itself at all in the external facts, just as the soul does not show itself in a dead body.

The question then is whether it is really possible to see, using imaginative and inspired insight, what truly lives in historical evolution. Well, having referred to so many peculiar things already, I will not hesitate to speak of some of the realities. One of them is the kind of vision which I characterized the day before yesterday and also dealt with in more detail in my books. With this vision, this imaginative, intuitive and inspired conscious awareness, we gain a view of human evolution that is to the external facts as the soul is to the dead human body. I want to speak in the most real terms possible, for I am after all giving an example.

When someone tries to enter into the things which the mind in its ordinary awareness only dreams of, he will above all be able to delimit the historical process by finding important nodal points in historical life, just as one also finds specific sections in the individual human organism. Children get their second teeth in about their seventh year; they reach puberty at about 14. We can record such nodal points in an individual human life if we consider human physiology. These important changes mean a great deal more in the science of the spirit than they do in ordinary physiology, a science that never comes to an end in its studies. Similar insights are gained in history if one considers it from the spiritual scientific point of view. Thus—now quite apart from external facts, but merely by considering what happens in the spirit—we find that there was a period in European history, and human history in general, that started in about the 8th century BC and came to a conclusion in the 15th century AD. Events between these two points in time form a whole, in a certain respect, just as the life of the child does from his seventh year, when he gets his second teeth, to the time when he reaches puberty. One can establish a whole there, until a change occurs that makes a greater difference in the human organism than the events that happened in between. In the same way we can say that such major changes occurred in the 8th century BC and in about the 15th century AD. Seen from the point of view of historical study based on the science of the spirit, the period between them seems to have had a specific nature, special characteristics with regard to the spiritual reality that lay behind historical facts. This made the period a whole if we consider history from the points of view of spiritual science, something that belongs together.

I can, of course, only mention some aspects. Characterizing such things on the basis of spiritual science one can discover all kinds of details, and indeed things as real as the realities you get if you follow the system of plants in botany, and so on. Let me just present some general aspects.

During that period the life of humanity in general—to perceive this we have to consider the inner life of human beings, leaving aside physical facts—was such that the mind was still working much more by instinct than it does today. Anything people did in full awareness was still much more also an action of the body; it was still much more closely bound up with the living body. The mind still worked more by instinct. If you study the different things said in my books⁴² you will find that the inner life is classified, if I may use this rather academic term, into the life of the sentient soul, which is at a very low level of consciousness, still almost unconscious; the rational or mind soul, which nevertheless works in such a way that its life does not develop in full conscious awareness but still has instinctive character; and then the spiritual soul, which has full conscious self-awareness of the I, emancipating the I from the life of the body, the rational mind being no longer instinctive but taking an independent, critical approach to things. The rational soul was especially active in the people of the period we are considering, that is, people living at the time when the Greek and then the Roman civilization was evolving. And the inner life of people at that time, which led to developments in social life, history, the sciences, the arts and religious life—all this took the course it did because the soul life was characteristically such that the rational mind was still acting by instinct.

These are the general principles, but we can see the truth of it in individual details. Inwardly, in the spirit, one can actually describe how the difference had to come. In Greece, the instinctive mental life developed more in the direction of the living body. Ancient Greeks would see the body as ensouled, and also understood the way in which such an ensouled body was part of social life. In Roman times, the impulse for Roman citizenship arose from this specific constitution of the soul, and so on.

Living through this in an inward way one comes to the significant moment of change that can be so clearly seen in the 15th century. Events naturally happen gradually. The impulses only emerge bit by bit. The change that came in the 15‘ century is clearly evident, however. Human nature was truly revolutionalized then. This is something which only someone who looks at things in such a way will discover; others will always think of a succession of events when in reality history moves in leaps and bounds. The mind then came to relate to human nature in a very different way. It became emancipated, gaining greater self-awareness. Thinking only became more materialistic and sensual because the rational mind had lost its connection with the subconscious. Human beings sought relationships at national level, structures of community life and relationships between countries, and developments in the other areas of civilization that would arise from this peculiar separation from the instinctive life, something we are not aware of in our ordinary conscious minds, only dreaming of the rational mind growing independent of the life of instincts.

Let me just mention some more general aspects. With the approach used in spiritual science it is possible to go back to the time before the 8th century BC. This takes us to a different major period which extends back as far as the 3rd millennium BC, a period that also had its special characteristics, details of which can be established.

We thus gradually find something behind the physical facts that can only be observed in form of images, with a mind inspired and able to perceive in visions. If we are able to do this—something which facts can never give us, gaining insight into things that people normally only dream as they observe the facts and use the thinking based on the observation of physical facts—we come to the process aspect of history. This lives in the human dream level of consciousness and can only be seen more clearly if we have imaginative and inspired awareness. It is this alone which can show the facts in their true light.

Looking at a dead body you have to say that it had significance when the soul was still in it. Just as the soul casts its light, as it were, on the dead body, so we live in the light that illumines the facts when we approach things of the spirit with perceptive vision. Individual facts find an explanation if we illuminate them out of what we have gained in this way.

History thus cannot develop as a science unless we develop perceptive vision. If you think it would be possible without it, you are like someone who lets a light fall on an object, then, using some kind of mechanism to rotate the light, lets it fall on a second object, and a third, and then says: The second object is illuminated as a consequence of the first being luminous; the third object is illuminated as a consequence of the second object being luminous. This would not be true. It is the same light which illuminates each object.

That is how it is with historical facts. Someone who tries to explain facts through other facts, coordinating them, putting them side by side is, as Jacob Burckhardt said quite rightly, like someone who deduces that the light which falls on the second object comes from the first. He should see that it is in fact the same light which falls on the first, the second and then the third object. The explanation for the historical fact lies in the world of the spirit, and it is from this world that we must throw light on facts that will otherwise remain dead, just as objects will not be luminous unless we let the light fall on them that shines on all.

This does call for a radical change in our approach to history, but that should not surprise us. History became a subject at a time when natural scientists were, quite rightly, rejecting anything subjective. People did at first apply the methods of natural science in a study of history that may be said to have evolved at the wrong time—which, of course, is not such a good thing to say—but history can only prosper if natural science is complemented with the science of the spirit.

Then, however, we will no longer search through history in an ethical way, nor in the way many others have done, using abstract ideas. Ideas cannot make things happen; ideas are entirely passive. We must look for the truly real spiritual entities and powers that are behind historical developments. These can only be studied if we have awareness in images.

Now it is remarkable—once you have this guideline, light is indeed cast on what people might sense from a sequence of events, whilst someone who merely looks at things side by side will not find an explanation. Historical development becomes a science when the science of the spirit strikes like lightning from above. If it is unable to strike, people will be presenting progressively more anecdotal, which is not scientific.

It is interesting to note that Jacob Burckhardt wrote that it was approximately at the point in time when in the science of the spirit we would put the beginning of the period of which I spoke today—except that these are not exact points in time, just as puberty, for example, continues for some years—in the 6th or 7th century BC that a common element showed itself that extended from China through Asia Minor to Europe, and this was a general religious movement. Outer history has the facts: Because there was such a change, those events happened! Light is thrown on them. And concerning the end of the period, for what happened after the 15th century, Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the religious movement connected with the name of Martin Luther—again very strange. Once again there were major changes, showing themselves in Europe and at the same time also in India. With the science of the spirit we can see how something which is beheld in the spirit creates a mirror image for itself in the facts, for it illuminates the facts. History changes from being an enumeration of facts to being a genuine science.

We have to say that in this respect, too, many people have been longing to find the right way. Herman Grimm⁴³ tried to take a spiritual approach to history but did not reach the point where one sees into the world of the spirit with perception in images. He used all possible means to discover some kind of historical impulses behind the events that had happened. It was as if he was feeling his way and arrived at a classification which he would repeat many times in his lectures at the university. He said that such historical developments as there had been so far should be divided into a first millennium—starting approximately at the time I have given for the period I have been describing—and then a second and third millennium. You see, he was feeling his way. His ‘first two millennia’ covered everything I included in the Graeco-Latin period, which ran from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD. And our present life, which will continue for many centuries and can be seen to be a coherent whole if one uses perception in images, he considered to be the ‘third millennium’. He tried to have at least a surrogate, I would say, for the vision that can be had in the spirit by saying that history is the ‘work of the nations’ creative imagination’.⁴⁴ Unable to find the spiritual reality that is the driving power in historical developments he believed ‘creative imagination’ to lie behind historical events. He thus made it an illusion, but reminded us that the real impulses in history are only dreamt through by human beings in their ordinary state of conscious awareness.

Anything we are able to grasp with the rational mind with regard to history can only be the dead aspect. Again it is interesting to consider historians who may be said to have still been using their rational minds in an instinctive way and who did not seek to bring in all kinds of ideas from natural science in an artificial way, the way Herbert Spencer did, but were like Gibbon,⁴⁵ for instance, who did use the rational thinking which is also used in natural science, and were still doing so in an instinctive way. They were able—and this was something which puzzled Herman Grimm⁴⁶—to observe and describe the periods of decline particularly well; those were periods when little soul quality remained. Gibbon thus wrote of a time which did in fact have much by way of soul quality, inner development and growth to it, which was the period from the beginning of Christianity and throughout Roman history, but described the aspect which he called ‘decline’. Bringing his rational mind to bear, he described this whole evolution in the early Christian centuries as a decline. This is only natural, for when the rational mind is applied in the way in which it has to be applied in the study of nature, we can only see the decline in historical events. Gibbon was unable to see how something else, which had come into history out of the Christian impulses, was showing healthy growth in the midst of that decline. The way this works cannot be seen directly in historical events, however. It needs to be illuminated by the light provided through the science of the spirit.

Something else is also of interest, for example. Of course it is only possible to make history a science through the evolving science of the spirit. But the knowledge gained in the science of the spirit has always also come up in flashes of light in the heads of enlightened people, people of discernment. There is one really interesting phenomenon. In his historical and sociological lectures given at Basel University in the 1860s, Jacob Burckhardt would repeatedly refer to a historian, a historical philosopher from the first half of the 19th century who must have made quite an impression on him, even if he, Jacob Burckhardt, often went against his views. This was the philosopher Ernst von Lasaulx. He has never become widely known. Lasaulx wrote a strange book, and Burckhardt frequently spoke of this in his lectures.⁴⁷ Lasaulx did have some feeling for the historical impulses that human beings normally only dream through, but since it was the age of modern science, he concerned himself with what I might call interpretation of the facts.⁴⁸ Since he used his rational mind which was trained in modern science, he mainly focussed on the element of decline in the 19th century. There were, of course, also new developments in the 19th century. But these can only be seen with inspired and imaginative perception. At the very end of his book Lasaulx showed that he had some inkling of this. The things he said in his book are interesting beyond anything—forgive the words, but it is so. He considered European history from its beginning to the 19th century. And because of his modern scientific approach he was all the time describing decay, decline, the powers that really lead into the dying process. There are chapters in this book—if you read them they are like a description of powers of decline someone made prophetically in the 1850s, speaking of the powers that inevitably had to lead to the present situation, where the European nations of today are tearing each other limb from limb. We can say that no one else foresaw intuitively in such a deeply moving, magnificent way—his mind being focused on the element of decline—what has now proved itself to be such an outcome in the process of decline.

This kind of direct evidence is such that if you leave the sphere where you have direct vision of or dream the true historical impulses and instead consider only the separate external facts, it is as if you abandon waking consciousness and fall asleep, no longer seeing the element of growth and development, the pulse of which beats in history as the element that truly takes humanity forward. Once this principle of growth and development is recognized, history is lifted out of mere natural causality and assumes the rank of a science. We might say, therefore, that what Lessing felt dimly in his work, putting it clumsily, if you will forgive the expression, at the time and indeed incorrectly, is thus given a secure foundation. External facts show no cohesion. The element in which the human soul lives, lives as in a dream, becomes a continuous organic life in the spirit. I mean a life of spirit, however, if it is seen as the substance of history in the light of the science of the spirit.

You will then also discover, however, that the ordinary student is deceived if he considers historical development to be an organism. Doing this, one must often compare it with the development of an individual human life. In my young days I had a teacher who liked to compare the successive historical periods with human life—Persian and Chaldean history with the life of a young man; Greek life with the later part of youth; dawning full maturity with Roman life. The progression of history is often considered in analogy to human life. This is a distinct source of illusion regarding history. For if we come to see the evolution of the human soul in the course of historical development for humanity as a whole, that is, actually enter into the spiritual reality of historical developments, we can never perceive it the way we perceive the development of a human soul from childhood through youth to adult life and finally old age. The spiritual life which lies behind the facts of history does not develop in this way. It develops in another way. Once again we face a paradox. It seems paradoxical if it is put like this, though it is deeply rooted in the genuine spiritual scientific approach to which I am referring in these lectures.

It is possible to compare what shows itself, lives and can be observed as a whole in a given time in history with the periods in human life. Oddly enough, however, one should not compare the historical development with the development that goes from infancy and childhood through youth to adulthood but the reverse. You have to think of historical life going in the opposite direction. If you take the general state of mind for the period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, for instance, this may be compared to the thirties in a human life. We can say that when people are in their thirties, the inner life connects with the body the way it did in the Graeco-Roman age that continued on into the 15th century (the constitution and inner relationship to essential human nature was different, of course). What followed in history cannot be compared to what follows on the thirties but to what went before. Compared to the life of a human individual, historical life thus goes from back to front.

In the course of its emancipation in our time, the rational mind does indeed relate to bodily life in a way that can be compared to the way the rational mind relates to bodily life for someone in his late twenties. A later period in history relates to the one that preceded it in such a way that we might dare to say the following. A young child learns from an older person who may well have worked in a more instinctive way through the things which the child is receiving in a later form. We always learn from people who have themselves been learning in their childhood. It is the same with successive periods of time when mind and spirit move on from one age to another. This progression in history becomes a phenomenon in the mind, though still at a dream level. Using Lessing’s idea of educating the human race, we are dealing not with education from childhood through youth and adulthood to ripe old age, but rather with retrograde education of the human race. And it is because of this that progress, as we may call it, is able to enter into historical development. Human beings are younger, as it were, in their inner approach to such things than they were in earlier times, and this also gives them a greater degree of freedom and of unawareness, a more childlike approach to other people, and this brings everything we normally call progress into world evolution.

In conclusion let me draw your attention to one phenomenon—we have been considering many things today—to demonstrate what I have been discussing—and that is the strange, significantly progressive relationship which came when Christianity spread from the nations of the Roman Empire, who had received it first, to the youthful Germanic nations. A strange phenomenon arose. How can we explain it? It can only be explained as follows. Throughout the historical evolution of Graeco-Roman life, which was the first to be taken hold of by the great impulses of Christianity, experience of life was at a later stage. Christianity therefore took the form we see in Gnosis and the development of other dogmas. When Christianity came to people whose experience of life was at a younger level—entirely in accord with the way the mind evolved in the course of history, as I have shown—it assumed other forms. It became more inward; religious awareness emancipated, as it were, from the instinctive rational mind; religion as Christian religion became more independent; and later on the religious and scientific ways of thinking and awareness separated completely.

The whole process becomes explicable if we take it as a phenomenon relating to conscious awareness, so that the German mind, which has its foundation in a different soul constitution, took over Christianity from the Roman one, we might say as a child does take something from an older person. Roman predecessors, not Roman ancestors, of course.

I have only been able to touch on some points, and I know as well as anyone else how many objections may be raised to these brief indications. To gain insight and understanding of what is meant here, it will be necessary to take up the development of spiritual science in a serious way, and on the other hand give serious consideration to all the mysteries and sphinx riddles that come up in the young science of history. In my fourth lecture, which will be next Wednesday, I will add the things needed for practical life, for social life, intervention in social life, and understanding of the things that touch us so deeply in immediate experience, bringing pleasure and pain, and events that are so much on our minds at the present time with all its tragic events. We will then consider the consequences for these things as they arise from the historical point of view.

I would like to conclude today’s discussion by pointing out how certain people with prophetic gifts instinctively also had this spiritual scientific thinking at an earlier time. They would instinctively come to the right conclusions regarding history. I am thinking of Goethe. He only considered historical problems occasionally, for instance in his history of the theory of colour, but he had a profound comprehension of history. Intuiting things, he formulated his perceptions in a different way from the one we have used here today. He was, however, able to gain the right approach to history because he had a feeling that humanity is really only going through historical developments in a dream, that is, experiencing them in the regions where feelings, affects, passions and emotions also arise. Goethe knew that all the concepts people produce relating to history, concepts similar to those used in natural science, cannot prove fruitful in human life, for they come from the region in our inner life where waking consciousness lives. This waking consciousness exists only for the world of nature, however. People live through historical events in the dream regions where passions, affects and emotions arise.

Before a human being thus comes alive in imaginative and inspired perception, and for as long as he considers historical developments in his ordinary state of mind, his soul and inner feelings can only be taken hold of by experience of history arising from the dream level of awareness. Abstract concepts and ideas coming from the rational approach used in natural science cannot really touch the human being. All this cannot bear fruit. The only fruitful perceptions are those that come from the same regions and are effective in the same regions where they are gained from history. This is the best thing about history. Because we dream it—Goethe did not conclude this but he sensed it—anything coming from history can also only take effect in the dream region of enthusiasm and the life of emotions. Goethe said that the best thing history is able to give us is the enthusiasm it arouses.⁴⁹ This is significant as a way not of formulating the science of history but of real understanding, born from a poet’s mind; this is something the science of the spirit must make its approach. For as long as we live in history with our ordinary way of thinking, we are not really involved in it. But if we meet it with enthusiasm and approach its phenomena in the way one does out of enthusiasm, we become involved in the life of history itself.

We shall only be able to learn from history the way we do from nature once we look at historical development with imaginative and inspired perception. To develop these thoughts further and apply them to nature and to social life will be our task in the lectures that follow.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 7 November 1917

Question. What is the situation as regards the materialistic view of history, with Marx, for example?

Well, with regard to this I have to say that in the science of the spirit, when we base ourselves on this science, the things I said in my previous lecture are and need to be taken very seriously. Speaking about the gradually developing inner approach to concepts as they are understood in relation to reality. I said that in our ordinary way of thinking we are satisfied once we have a concept that may be said to reflect reality. In the approach based on perception in images, we always have to seek to develop a whole number of concepts, which are like photographs taken from various angles. Anything established as a concept can never show the whole of reality, if we take the point of view of the spiritual world. Concepts can always only give one aspect of reality. That is also how it is with the most sublime philosophical ideas. In the ordinary way of thinking one is a pantheist or one is a monadist, to give you just two opposites. You recognize a divine principle that is alive and active in everything; this means you are a pantheist. Or, like the followers of Leibniz, for example, you recognize individual real monads; these interact to give the world as a whole.

A spiritual investigator cannot be a pantheist nor a monadist. Pantheism simply gives him a sum of concepts, and so does monadism. Both illuminate reality from different angles. Perhaps I may risk an analogy: a pantheist only concentrates on breathing out, a monadist on breathing in. Now we can’t keep life going if we only breathe either in or out, but need to have both. In the same way the spiritual reality can only be grasped if we come alive in our ideas and know how to let both pantheism and monadism illuminate reality for us. If someone is just a monadist, like Leibniz, this is to a spiritual investigator like someone who asphyxiates from too much air he has inhaled. You asphyxiate. And if someone is just a pantheist, this is to a spiritual investigator like someone who wanted to breathe in a room that has no air in it. If you take up the science of the spirit, the life of concepts comes alive to you. You have to think of this relationship to the world of concepts as being as alive as possible. For when such a living relationship is established, you are wholly and in a very real way inside the mutual conflict and harmonious reconciliation of concepts, entering into spiritual reality. With our ordinary way of thinking we live in our concepts in an abstract way. Even the simplest of concepts will thus relate to reality in a new way.

Let me give you an example. Today we learn at school that solids are impenetrable. The definition given is that they are impenetrable because a solid body occupies a space which no other body can occupy. A spiritual scientist cannot say this. He can never base himself on definition of concepts but only on characterization. In this case he would say that something which occupies a space in such a way that no other entity can be in that space is a material body. He therefore looks at things the other way round, and because his concept is a living one he only applies it within the limits where it can be applied. He does not state things in absolute terms. This happens with the simplest lines of thought if one really takes the leap which I would like to call the leap across the threshold to the spiritual, non-material world. This must be taken very seriously. People still want to talk in abstract terms today when they speak of the spiritual world. But the whole of our inner life, the way of thinking, changes its constitution when we enter into reality. You enter into the reality of concepts and live it through. You see, for someone who thinks in an abstract way a rose he has put in water in his room is, of course, something real. But it is not real at all. For in real life no rose can exist unless it grows on a rose bush and lives wholly in the context of that rose bush. A spiritual investigator is therefore always aware that things have to be considered in their existing context. He will know that a cut rose is unreal as a concept.

Now consider this extended to the whole shaping, the whole structure of our thinking and you’ll have an idea of the significant change experienced on crossing the threshold to the world of the spirit. There you find reality. There you get an inner idea of the full implications of concepts, an idea that comes alive to you. Messing around in the abstract world, which is what has to be done in natural science, you never realize how unreal the concepts are which you develop there.

On this kind of occasion I like to remember a lecture Professor Dewar gave in London at the beginning of the 20th century.⁵⁰ From the point of view of natural scientific thinking, it was a brilliant lecture. Taking the point of view of natural science, thinking in physical terms, he construed the end state of earth’s existence. This would come when so and so many million years had passed, temperatures had gradually changed, and so on. If you consider certain facts that present themselves today it is fairly easy to paint a picture of such an end state if you just draw the logical conclusions. Professor Dewar was quite ingenious in describing the way in which some substances which are not luminous today would then be luminous. If people applied certain substances to their walls, those walls would be giving off enough light that you could read your paper by them. It will be so cold by then, however, that one cannot imagine anyone printing papers then. Here we immediately come up against reality. But Dewar gave that picture. Things that would tear off today if you attached just a small weight, would have such powerful cohesion then that you could suspend tons of stuff from them, and so on. The whole had been properly thought through and it is certainly possible to construe an end state of the earth, with everything exactly described in physical terms. The lecture did of course make a great impression, for a physicist who was utterly familiar with physical concepts was here giving a descriptive picture of the earth’s end state that seemed very real indeed.

A spiritual scientist’s experience is that on hearing such a description he finds himself immediately guided towards concepts where a different light is thrown. What Professor Dewar was doing when he described this end state of the earth after millions of years, was arrived at in the same way as if you consider the consecutive states of the stomach and heart of a young person of 12, 13, 14 and 15 as it gradually changes, and then come to a logical conclusion as to what it will all be like in 200 or 300 years—the heart, the stomach, and so on. Now this may all be perfectly correct in natural scientific terms, that is, in abstract thinking. Only the individual will long since have been dead by then, and the stomach no longer there!

If we approach reality like this, side by side with the other view, which is truly ingenuous, and if we have living concepts, we can come to see that Professor Dewar’s description of the earth’s end state in some millions of years may be perfectly correct, but the earth will be dead by then and no longer in existence.

And it is the same thing if we go back 13, 12, 11 years and so on, to say how it was 150 years ago. Only the person was not yet alive then! This is the basis of Kant’s and Laplace’s theory,⁵¹ for they construed the beginnings of the earth quite brilliantly from the physical data, saying it was a nebula, and so on, from which everything arose. But the fact is that none of it existed at the time which one would have to assume for this.

This is where we move from abstract thinking to thinking in real terms. Having given a general characterization I may now say that the materialistic view of history with its concepts arose from a degree of necessity, considering that historical events were really only based on class struggles, with material interests brought into play. The concept of materialism does not have the same meaning in the materialistic view of history as it does in natural science. It developed because certain, entirely feasible concepts were created. One would, however, have to maintain a point of view where one asks: How much of historical development is covered by those concepts? They cover one stream only, a stream which in fact only came up in the 16th century.

People do not believe in authority today, of course they don’t! They have done away with that. Yes, but ‘science’ is a powerful authority at the least. And if you swear by a number of dogmas, everything else is folly and miserable nonsense. Years ago I used to lecture to working-class people, giving many lectures over the years, including lectures on history. I tried to characterize history the way it shows itself, using an undogmatic approach.⁵² However, when I had gained a fairly faithful audience, which continued to grow—I can say this without boasting—some leading social democrats realized that I was not teaching orthodox Marxism, the orthodox materialistic view of history, but actually presented the peculiar view that the concepts of the materialistic approach to history only came to be used from the 16th century onwards. They actually could not be used before that. They came to be used out of the undercurrents in history itself, for that was the time when the rational mind emancipated, as I have shown. It was the time when human beings first emancipated from a more instinctive life and so on, with material interests providing the necessary counterthrust. We thus arrive at the materialistic view of history—even if only as one of the historical ingredients—which does allow us to throw a light on some of the phenomena. However, if we make this materialistic view the only one, we’ll not have history as a result, for many other impulses have not been taken into account. The concepts developed in Marxism must therefore be seen as one aspect, providing a snapshot of reality from one angle. This has to be complemented with views taken from other angles. - Those leading social democrats then stopped the lectures.

It is characteristic of the science of the spirit that it can do justice to impulses that have inner validity, impulses arising in one sphere of culture or another, and is able to perceive their relative value. Error will immediately arise if we make a one-sided aspect absolute, basing all our explanations on it. This is indeed the point.

Life is such, of course, that people will stick to a concept. People altogether prefer to live in concepts rather than reality, in abstractions rather than reality. They are much happier if they have some concepts, and all kinds of things can then be pegged into these. But reality is not like this. Just as to have a tree you need to photograph it from one point of view to get one aspect, and another point of view for another aspect—I have to keep coming back to this analogy—so it is with reality as a whole, if we really want to take it the way it really is.

It has to be said that with material interests having entered so powerfully into historical developments in the last three or four centuries it is only natural that a materialistic view of history developed, representing the view that the outer course of history can be studied using the crudest concepts which are only appropriate for the natural world. However, everything you get that way is dead, non-living. I will be speaking of this again in my fourth lecture when I will mainly be considering ethical and social life. The lack of reality would soon be evident if reality were approached solely with such concepts. Then you would see that such concepts, if they were to take root, would kill reality; they can prove fruitful, however, if we consider them to be merely one aspect.

This is what I wanted to say with reference to this question. I could of course go on for hours on the subject.

Rudolf Steiner was asked to speak again on the process on which the recall of memories is based. He had described this in his first lecture.

I’ll be coming to this again in my next lecture and can therefore be fairly brief now. Above all I’d like to say that people are mistaken in thinking that an idea I have gained now from something perceived—let us say I see an object and form an idea of it at the same time—will remain. All I gain, the after effect which remains when I turn my eyes away from the object, is mere mirror image and not something that will come back again. Something is there and it is then truly lost, just as a mirror image of me is lost once I have walked past the mirror. It is wrong, therefore, to imagine a reservoir in the soul into which the ideas might go, to be fetched up again later from this reservoir. Ideas do not remain, they are gone!

Yet when I form an idea, a subconscious process happens at the same time. This is subconscious where our ordinary conscious awareness is concerned but can be observed imaginatively. This process is responsible for what happens in the organism when occasion arises for something to be recalled. If I gain an idea of an object because it influences my senses, the idea arises; if I have an idea that arises from memory, it is exactly the same, except that it is not the material object out there which makes am impression on me, letting me develop the idea on the basis of that object. Instead I am looking inside, as it were, at what has been taken in unconsciously, and develop my idea from this.

Let me present it in a schematic way. I form the idea ‘ten’; after some time the idea ‘ten’ comes up again; but it is not true that it is the same idea, that it has gone away and then come back again. What has remained is an unconscious engram. This unconscious engram, which has developed in parallel to the process of forming an idea, will remain. This is what I perceive when I have the idea again. So if ‘ten’ comes up, it is the result of an outside stimulus; when it comes up again, it is the result of an inner stimulus. Anything I remember I perceive from within. It is a process we can observe very well in the science of the spirit and which is very useful in education. Attentive teachers can observe it; all they need to do is to give their powers of attention the right direction.

Just consider how we learn things by heart. Observe it carefully. And you will simply see all the things people do to make sure the parallel process takes place! The idea is taken in, but they want the parallel process to go in such a way that it is drummed into something that remains subconscious. Observe when things are drummed in: the ideas will not lead to memory in some way, but a process which must arise to support the mere forming of an idea and does indeed lie in the subconscious sphere. And this way of working in the subconscious—just watch someone learning a poem by rote, all the things that are done to help the process—is something which a spiritual scientist observes directly. The light which is thus gained makes us see. Some people do all kinds of things when they learn by rote, striking their foreheads, and so on, and this certainly has nothing to do with their experience of the idea. If you go into the matter you’ll find that this is an important border region between psychology and physiology. The next time we meet we will see how physiology with a spiritual scientific orientation can discover things there.

Just to indicate the direction, therefore I would say that ideas are first of all formed in a primary process under the influence of something perceived outside, stimulated by an object on the outside; or else as a memory, with the stimulus coming from inside. On the one occasion I am reading with my eyes looking outwards, as it were, and the other time I am looking inwards. If I read a book twice in succession, the idea is gained from the same book, but these are successive acquisitions.

Perhaps this will serve to characterize the situation. More will be added when I speak of the human being as part of the natural world in my third lecture.

Question. Surely the higher forms of conscious awareness must differ between individuals?

As I said the last time, it is easy to think this way—that one person develops these states of higher awareness in a different form than someone else does. This should not let us shy away from entering into what I have called the drama of perceptive insight. The individual aspect is only an intermediate state. One does indeed go through a powerfully individualistic period, but one is aware of this and overcomes it. After this one comes to the objective inner aspect. It is only if we do not observe accurately that we may say that one person says one thing, another something else. It is not like that. The differences are no greater than the differences you get, for example, when two travellers describe the same region. One of them concentrates on one thing, the other on something else. The descriptions do not seem similar at all; yet they describe the same region, and it would be nonsense to think that the descriptions are therefore not leading to objectivity, or that the travellers themselves had not considered things objectively. I would therefore say that certainly, one may easily think of an individualized experience in higher states of awareness. But that is only an intermediate state. In reality we come to the objective spirit if we are able to exclude the subjective element in an imagination, just as we overcome subjectivity in the study of nature and come to see it objectively. Read in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science how this subjective element is excluded as one comes to live in higher states of conscious awareness. You will see that this leads to an objective spiritual view in the inner life just as we come to gain an objective view of nature in the outside world. It truly is the case that in natural science, the subjective element is excluded as we consider the outside world, and in the science of the spirit, the subjective element is excluded as we consider the realm of the spirit.

• 27. Wolff, Christian (1679–1754), German philosopher. Rudolf Steiner was quoting from Fritz Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophy, 1. Bd., München & Leipzig 1910, S. 403.
• 28. Schiller, Friedrich von (1759–1805), German poet, historian and dramatist. Inaugural address, Jena 26 & 27 May 1789: What is universal history and what is the purpose of studying it?
• 29. Spencer, Herbert (1820–1923), English philosopher. See among other things his Principles of Biology, London 1864 ch. VI, par. 288f, and Principles of Psychology, London 1870-72, ch. IV, par. 238.
• 30. Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), French philosopher. Cours de Philosophic positive, Paris 1830-42; Système de politique positive, Paris 1851-54. Comte was a mathematician and also relied on mathematics and mechanics in structuring the body social. See above all ch. 16 in the second work.
• 31. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer and dramatist. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780), see paragraphs 94-100 concerning the idea of repeated lives on earth.
• 32. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), German philosopher. See his 'Vorlesungen über die Philosophic der Geschichte’ in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Werke, Berlin 1845, 9. Band, 3. Auflage, S. 24 (Introduction) and S. 546f. (Conclusion).
• 33. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher. See Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, para. 38 ‘Ueber Geschichte’ in Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden. Mit Einleitung von Dr Rudolf Steiner. Stuttgart o.J. (1894), Bd 5, S. 286-295.
• 34. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900), German philosopher and writer. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historic für das Leben. Zweite unzeitgemässe Betrachtung, Leipzig 1874.
• 35. Volkelt, Johannes (1848–1930). Die Traum-Phantasie, Stuttgart 1875.
• 36. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor (see note 4). He was accused of being a spiritualist because he gave consideration to Volkelt’s book. Altes und Neues. ‘Der Traum. Eine Studie zu der Schrift: Die Traumphantasie von Dr. Johann Volkelt’, Stuttgart 1881.
• 37. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher. See Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1789), par. 5 ‘Von den Vorstellungen, die wir haben, ohne uns ihrer bewusst zu sein.’
• 38. The Roman Catholic Church authorities resolved on 11 September 1822 and the Pope confirmed on 25 September 1822 that the printing and publication of works that teach the movement of the earth and non-movement of the sun would no longer be banned. The Index Congregation had resolved as early as 1757 to omit the decree which banned such books, without expressly permitting their printing and publication.
• 39. Von Seelenrätseln (see note 1).
• 40. Fortlage, Carl. Acht psychologische Vorträge, Jena 1869, S. 35 (Erster Vortrag).
• 41. Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher (1818–1879), Swiss historian. See his published lectures Ueber das Studiuni der Geschichte, publ. posthumously by J. Oeri, Berlin and Stuttgart 1905, ch. 1 ‘Einleitung’, 1. ‘Unsere Aufgabe’.
• 42. Steiner R. Theosophy (various translations), chapter on the essential nature of the human being.
• 43. Grimm, Herman (1828–1901), German historian. Goethe, Vorlesungen, Berlin 1876, 8. Auflage Stuttgart und Berlin 1903, 2. Bd, S. 7ff (16. Vorlesung).
• 44. In the story of his life (GA 28, various translations), chapter 14, Rudolf Steiner told of a talk with Herman Grimm: ‘He spoke to me of his idea of a “history of German creative imagination”, something which lived in his soul. I gained the impression at the time that he intended to write this. He did not get round to it. But he told me most beautifully how the continuous stream of historical evolution had its impulses in the creative imagination of the people, which in his view assumed the character of a living, active, supersensible genius.’ See also Steiner’s lecture ‘Die Weltanschauung eines Kulturforschers der Gegenwart, Herman Grimm, und die Geistesforschung’, Berlin, 16 January 1913, in Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, GA Bibl.-Nr. 62, S. 249-285.
• 45. Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794), English historian. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols, 1776-88.
• 46. Grimm Herman (see note 43). Wrote on Gibbon in 15 Essays, 1. Folge, 1. Auflage, Berlin 1874, S. 80.
• 47. Burckhardt (see note 41). Probably referring to his lectures Ueber das Studium der Geschichte.
• 48. Lasaulx, Ernst von (1815–1861). Neuer Versuch einer alien, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegruendeten Philosophic der Geschichte, Muenchen 1856.
• 49. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832). See Sprüche in Prosa (aphorisms in prose) in Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (see note 10), [Tr.: possibly in Goethean Science, Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1988. See also in Maxims and Reflections].
• 50. Dewar, Sir James (1842–1923), Scottish chemist and physicist. Inventor of thermos flask. It has not proved possible to trace the lecture to which Rudolf Steiner was referring.Dewar, Sir James (1842–1923), Scottish chemist and physicist. Inventor of thermos flask. It has not proved possible to trace the lecture to which Rudolf Steiner was referring.
• 51. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) considered the shape of nebulous stars representing other universes to be due to their rotation. Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de (1749–1827) developed the nebular hypothesis of planetary origin.
• 52. See Rudolf Steiner’s story of his life (note 44), ch. 28, and the volume of lectures entitled Über Philosophic, Geschichte and Literatur (GA 51).

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, its Value for the Human Being and its Relationship to Art and Religion

Dear attendees,Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking during the lecture about one of the most recent critics of the anthroposophical world view, about the book by the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who, as I said yesterday, strangely enough, speaks about anthroposophy from beginning to end, but explicitly says that he retains the term “theosophy” in order to accommodate the general consciousness, but that he always means Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical direction.

Now, today, I would like to start with something that, to a certain extent, is one of the results of Kurt Leese's investigations into anthroposophy. After this man, who, as I also remarked yesterday, has read pretty much everything of mine that has been published, after he has illuminated anthroposophy and what belongs to it from his point of view, he comes to record a strange sentence on one of the last pages of his book. I will read this sentence first:

What is all the talk about the worship of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the soaring of knowledge into primeval depths and primeval heights, if the Theosophist...

— that is, the anthroposophist —

... is unable to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, and why, then, seven world ages are so important for the becoming and the perfection of this ego!?

Now one could initially believe that the man means that only the anthroposophist does not know how to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, but actually it is clear from the following that he means something completely different, that he actually believes that no one can somehow figure out why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. Because he goes on to say:

In the face of such mysteries of the world and life, even the theosophist...

- that is, the anthroposophist —

... nothing more than a positivist who no longer explains, fathoms, solves, but who accepts the ethical-individualistic fate of Western-Christian cultural development as a matter of course that can no longer be justified because he simply cannot escape it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, actually means nothing less than the following: No one really knows how to say anything about the great question of life: Why is it not just as good to be a non-I as an I? And since the author of this book obviously concedes that one should simply take it for granted that one is an I, without brooding over it, he thinks that anthroposophy has nothing to say about it either.

Now, let us recall some of what emerged from what was said yesterday, and then allow me to add, in more of a lecture format, some of what you can find in the already extensive literature on anthroposophy.

As a human being grows up, emerging from unconsciousness into ever greater consciousness, awakening, as it were, from childlike slumber and dreams to a more conscious life, he feels confronted by the world. It is fair to say that this confrontation with the world is initially one that presents a truly human mind, a humanly spiritualized mind, with riddles, the solutions to which must be sought from within. As the human being grows up, the riddles of the world itself are revealed to him. At first, he feels, one may say, in a very vague way, as an ego. He feels, so to speak, this I as an inner point of life, to which everything he can experience flows, from which he also knows that everything he can do flows out. But he comes to realize, and he must gradually come to realize, that this is precisely the great question of life: How does this I relate to the whole environment that presents us with such a vast number of life and world riddles? This question, “How does the I relate to the whole human environment?” basically contains everything else that is there in the way of life and world riddles.

Now one can say that in a certain way, something of the relationship between the I and the environment is already evident in ordinary existence, in that this I grows together with the environment in a certain way. We develop from childhood on, which does not just show itself at some later age in the form of us awakening to full self-awareness, but we develop, above all, our inner life through memory, which was characterized in its significance yesterday, that connects our experiences, that allows our life to appear to us as a whole when we look back to the point in time up to which we can remember. We can say that by holding still and looking back on our lives, we feel our selves connected to all our experiences. We have gone through these experiences, we have taken them into our ideas, into our thoughts, we have experienced joy and suffering through them, we have experienced happiness and pain through them, we have been inspired to do this or that in our actions, which then flowed out of our strength into the strength of life. But when we stand still and look back, we also feel connected to what our experiences were in this form, and we cannot say that there is a moment in our lives when we are not fundamentally what we have been left with in our memories of our experiences, of the suffering and joy that we experienced in these experiences, the happiness and pain that we experienced in these experiences, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that came to us from the fact that we were able to accomplish this or that from these experiences. We are what we have experienced. It becomes pathological when this thread of thought of memory breaks somewhere in a person. In medical literature, cases are well described where such pathological conditions occur, where a person's coherent awareness of memory for this or that breaks down and he feels, as it were, hollowed out, no longer able to fully experience his being.

You see, here life presents itself to us first as an expansion of our ego over that which our existence has brought us since our birth; life presents itself as an inward growing together of our ego with that which has come to us. Yesterday I showed how the human being awakens his supersensible nature by unfolding that which can be developed in him beyond the ordinary powers of knowledge and perception into the supersensible worlds, and thereby comes to an even broader overview of the world. And yesterday I was able to hint at some of the results of the anthroposophical world view. I was able to say that by rising to imaginative knowledge, the human being first comes to perceive his life not only towards birth as a sea from which individual memories emerge, but as a life panorama, as a large tableau, so that he can see the lasting in this earthly life. But I was also able to point out how, through a further development of the supersensible faculty of knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which goes beyond birth and death, that which is eternal in him, that which thus connects him with a world that is more comprehensive than that which he can experience between birth and death. And I then showed how this knowledge can continue to ascend to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. There we have already seen how this I now grows beyond the ordinary contemplation of the I, how the I, which otherwise feels connected in ordinary life with the life events flowing to it, how this I expands its consciousness to include a broader world.

If you now add to what I was able to hint at yesterday the anthroposophical literature, you will see that by developing this cognitive faculty it is also possible to grasp the connection of the I with the whole rest of the cosmos. One may scoff at what Anthroposophy has to say about worlds and world transformations, as indicated, for example, in my “Occult Science”, but only someone who cannot put himself in the method by which such things are found can actually scoff. The essential point of today's reflection, however, is that anthroposophy finds nothing in the cosmos but what is connected with the nature of the I. The essential point is that anthroposophy teaches us to look at the whole cosmos, to see the whole cosmos in such a way that the I is connected in some way with everything in this cosmos, with this whole macrocosm as a microcosm, in the same way that in ordinary life the I is connected with its experiences. One is tempted to say that anthroposophy succeeds in expanding what is otherwise only a 'small' memory in our experiences into a world memory, into a world overview. Thus, through anthroposophical knowledge, we feel expanded, standing within the whole universe, the whole cosmos, we feel the I in its consciousness expanded beyond this cosmos, we feel this cosmos itself as spiritual and the I spiritually connected to this spiritual cosmos.

Those who cannot feel how such an expansion of consciousness affects what a person can actually long for in the world cannot judge the value of anthroposophical world knowledge for the human being either. What Anthroposophy can give, and what these ideas can then be for the perception of the world soul, for the longings of the human soul, must be inwardly experienced by each individual. And this can be experienced in such a way that it is felt as the solution to precisely this fundamental riddle: How does the I, which initially exists only vaguely like a point within us, how does this I relate to the world as a whole? How does that which we ourselves are for our consciousness confront us from the entire world?

The fact that, as this line of inquiry shows, no one can really say why it is better to be an I than a not-I, is answered by showing that such a question is not really posed correctly. What we want is not to answer this question from some abstract point of view, but what we really want is something that belongs directly to life, to growth, to the whole development of the human being. One could just as well ask: Why does a child want to become a great person, an adult? It becomes an adult. But it is not self-evident that one becomes an adult; rather, one must develop that which belongs to the adult. The child has consciousness within it, as it were, asleep; the adult expands consciousness over himself. The person who awakens to consciousness expands consciousness, this I, throughout the spiritual cosmos. In this way, the human being grows into the world in a way that is in keeping with nature. For his feeling, this gives rise to the question of the value of the I, because this value of the I is felt in relation to the value of the world. And anyone who does not want to know about what is far removed from the world and about world development will never be able to develop a true feeling for his ego, because this ego is rich within; it emerges from the whole content of the world. And only if one has a feeling for what is far removed from the world and for world development can one also feel from these what the ego has as its deepest longings. But one must have an inwardly fresh and courageous mind in order not to find it too uncomfortable, so to speak, to send one's mind into world distances and into world developments, so that one can have the rich, inward perception of the I and thus also of the value of the I. And it is a remarkable question that Leese asks: Why are seven world ages necessary to develop this I? If you look at the development of these seven world epochs, you will find everywhere how they contain forces that are connected with the development of human egos. You will find that you are grasped by the world, you feel, you grasp, you also find the forces for your actions from what will arise from the consciousness of your connection with the cosmos.

My dear audience, it is very strange when people judge everything that is to be recognized through anthroposophy, as they must judge it according to what they already have, when they do not engage with it, and then, having basically understood nothing of anthroposophy, say: Yes, what is it worth? What does it explain to you? What is not understood does not explain anything, but that is the fault of those who do not want to understand. But those who are open to what the anthroposophical worldview can be, who enter into the far reaches and the vast expanses of the world with their soul and their spirit, will find a complete answer. In the course of these contemplations, he finds a full answer to the riddle of the value of the human ego, for the whole world answers him. But nothing but the whole world is suitable to answer the question about the value of the I, and anyone who does not want this answer from the whole world will always come to a speech like this critic of anthroposophy, who says: What use can all this be to us, since it does not decide the question of why it is better to be an I than a non-I. But what is expressed here with a certain generality is then expressed in detail when such critics as Leese approach the specific tasks of anthroposophical science. For example, within anthroposophical science it must be said that when the human being observes that which, as it were, holds together as a reality, that which appears in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, anthroposophy speaks of the the carrier of thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, regardless of whether or not it calls this carrier of the soul the astral body - as I said, words are not important, no special value need be placed on them. Now the same critic, the licentiate Kurt Leese, comes along and says: Why is it necessary, when one is already observing and describing the soul, the thoughts, the feelings, the impulses of the will, why is it necessary to assume a special vehicle?

Now, at this point, the complete inability of the approach that leads out of ordinary life into the truly supersensible life of the soul to follow what is going on becomes apparent. First of all, taken in the abstract, it can seem rather superfluous whether I stop at describing the life of thoughts, feelings and will, or whether I also speak of a vehicle. But one never comes to a real essential insight into what lives in the soul if one does not pass from what merely appears as thought, feeling, will, to the carrier. For, my dear audience, as I was able to show yesterday, when the soul becomes aware of its supersensible abilities, it becomes aware of what it is in those times when it is otherwise in an unconscious state between falling asleep and waking up. And the one who becomes a spiritual researcher experiences how this soul relates to the bodily life just as it otherwise relates during sleep, except that now it is not unconscious but conscious. Thoughts, feelings and will can only be observed during waking life; from falling asleep to waking up, no one can observe this except as after-images, often distorted images of the imaginative life in dreams; no one can observe what is of the soul without the spiritual-scientific. One comes to the reality of the soul precisely by observing the soul in the states where it stands out from ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. If one remains within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, one does not grasp the essence of the soul. What then is meant when the anthroposophist says that one passes from imagining, feeling and willing to a “medium”? It means that the anthroposophist wants to suggest that we free ourselves from what never sheds light on the nature of the soul, that we should make an effort to grasp what life of the soul is.

And so it shows here what I mentioned yesterday, when such a critic says as a result: Anthroposophy is actually annoying and ill-tempered. He finds it annoying and ill-tempered because it makes a certain demand of him at every moment. He is supposed to go beyond what he has in his thinking and soul habits of ordinary life – he does not like that, he perceives it as an unreasonable demand that should not be made of him. And so he says: Why are you talking to me about a 'vehicle'? If he were to make this effort and speak of this vehicle, then he would find the way into the spiritual world.

You see, what at first appears to be mere mental games — something like the combination of thinking, feeling and willing in the bearer of this thinking, feeling and willing — is something that wants to achieve something real, that wants to provide an impetus for the development of the higher abilities of human nature, through which the essence of the human being is recognized. Thus, even what appears to be a mere intellectual game in the anthroposophical world view is actually meant as something very real for the value of human life. But another passage from this same book shows even more what the value of anthroposophical world view for the present and future life of science is to consist of; I will speak first of the life of world view and science.

In the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), I pointed out that for several years I have been speaking about how the human soul is actually connected to the human body. I have pointed out that it can really be seen that our thinking, our feeling and our willing are connected with three different aspects of the human being: that our thinking is connected with the actual nervous activity, but that what we develop as feeling is not is not directly but only indirectly connected with this nervous activity, what we develop as feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic activity, especially with the rhythmic activity in breathing and blood circulation, but that our will activity is connected with the metabolism. I only mention this here in a reporting way. I stated in my book “Mysteries of the Soul” that I had only been studying this subject for thirty years before I dared to publicly express the results of my research. It is commonly believed that the entire life of the soul is connected with the nervous system. The new aspect of this view is precisely that in reality the three aspects of the life of the soul are connected with three different activities of the human organization. Now, however, I was obliged to set something apart in this presentation that is completely foreign to today's habits of thought. In order for me to make myself understood about what is actually meant here, I would like to preface the following.

You see, today, especially in the field of philosophy, one often has a very negative judgment about what is presented in the development of spiritual life as medieval scholasticism. Despite the fact that anthroposophy and my own personality are attacked in the most nonsensical way by certain church authorities, this cannot prevent me from saying what can be said about a certain field, purely objectively, even if this field is linked, or at least seems to be linked today, to current church life. Those who are able to really delve into the blossoming of medieval scholasticism, namely the heyday of this scholasticism, the time of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, know that this scholasticism - it is so little recognized today - that this scholasticism has one thing that basically made it greater than any period in the development of human thought to date. It developed in those who belonged to it a gift for subtle thought development, for the finest dissection of thought. And this gift, which was developed in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, as an ability for the finest development of thought, would be very useful to us today, especially in the pursuit of science. For if, for example, a philosopher like Wundt had had a real inner understanding of the fine distinctions of scholasticism, his investigations would have produced different results from those which they have produced. For only a thinking that really has the will to enter into the finest distinctions, only such thinking can also delve into the foundations of reality, for this reality is complicated, and with a rough thinking one does not enter into reality. When one has to throw light on one or other of these subjects from the standpoint of spiritual science, one is obliged to arrive at such fine distinctions of thought.

And so I was obliged to say in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries) in order to characterize what underlies the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the human being with the rhythmic organization, the human being with the metabolic organization: One cannot get along with this threefold human being if one imagines, for example, that these three parts are arranged spatially next to each other, the head at the top, the circulation human being in the middle, and then the metabolism human being at the bottom. I have shown how even in the nerve there is rhythm and metabolism, but that in the case of the activity of imagination in the nerve, rhythm and metabolism are not taken into account, but another activity, whereas in the case of the activity of feeling or of the activity of the will, rhythm and metabolism in the nerve are also taken into account. I had to make the subtle distinction that what one has to highlight, so to speak, in order to understand the human being, one sees interwoven in outer reality. A man like Kurt Leese reads through this and finds it to be a tour de force of thinking. And precisely because he finds it to be a tour de force of thinking, he says: It is precisely at such a point that anthroposophy becomes annoying and intolerable.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the value of the anthroposophical world view will consist precisely in the fact that it cultivates not only clear but also highly discriminating thinking, thinking that reaches into the finest structures of reality. People do not want that; they become angry and ill-tempered, and that is why they say: Anthroposophy is annoying and unpleasant. But precisely this training of thinking to follow reality, which carries the finest distinctions and which cannot be followed with such coarse thinking as is so beloved in the present day, will be the value of the anthroposophical worldview for modern science and thus for modern man.

What should be cultivated through the anthroposophical worldview – and with this I will find the transition from what comes from anthroposophy for the value of the human being in an intellectual relationship, in a purely scientific respect — that which should be cultivated through the anthroposophical world view, that which really comes to the soul's eye through this anthroposophical world view: that is the transition to the moral. As the I expands more and more in its awareness of the content of the world, as the I feels itself as a member of the cosmos, having grown out of this cosmos, it feels its great responsibility within its world existence. The self knows that the thoughts and feelings that develop within it are part of the entire, immeasurable cosmos; the self learns to be responsible for what goes on within it by recognizing itself as having been born out of the entire cosmos. When one feels this responsibility towards the whole world, then one stops carelessly speaking over what the world is supposed to explain.

Such careless talk comes to mind when a critic like Kurt Leese, for example, says that anthroposophy tries to understand the world as developing, but that it does not take what he now understands by development - and he understands this to mean only the emergence of the later from the earlier — but that it is said of anthroposophy: in the course of development, in addition to what is the emergence of the later from the earlier, there is an inflow of something that comes from a completely different side. To his horror, says Kurt Leese, I would even talk about entities that develop in certain world ages being inoculated, and he particularly criticizes the fact that I say in The Education of the Child that the etheric body of the human being is born at the age of seven, just as the physical body of the human being is born at the time of physical birth. That is not development, he says, because it does not show that the etheric body develops out of the physical body.

Ladies and gentlemen, consider what is actually at issue here. Someone comes along and makes an abstract concept of development – the following must arise from the earlier -, he criticizes that I would not show how the etheric body arises from the physical body. But the etheric body does not do that, it does not arise from the physical body at all! If the person in question were to understand what is being presented, he would realize that the process is much more complicated in the development at hand. But when I now speak of the moral, I must nevertheless point out that for the real natural scientist of today, the development is by no means as simple as Mr. Leese now imagines.

You only need to read the first pages of Oscar Hertwig's book, which is truly leading in this respect, about a correction of Darwin's theory of descent, and you will see that Oscar Hertwig is obliged to include the concepts of natural science: firstly, evolution, the emergence of the later from the earlier; secondly, panspermia, that is, the coming into effect of that which is in space alongside the organism; and thirdly, epigenesis, that is, the emergence of completely new effects. Thus the concept of development in science today is such that it is constantly developing, that is, it itself is in a living development. What appears in anthroposophy as the idea of development is precisely what most conscientiously takes into account the idea of development in science. And people who come from such a side to criticize have simply not gone along with scientific development, but have only taken a few scraps out of it and criticize from these scraps. And they then call what is working with the full science “unscientific” because it does not agree with their prejudiced assumptions, which, however, do not coincide with the full science. In this respect, anthroposophy will have a great educational effect on a person's inner conscience and lack of prejudice. It will release forces in people that are particularly lacking in people today. Therefore, this spiritual-scientific worldview can find the courage to intervene directly in practical life, because it wants to develop a way of thinking and a whole human behavior that can be immersed in practical life.

We wanted to show this in the most diverse fields, for example in the field of education, in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and established by me. It has existed for more than a year. In this Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is shown how the anthroposophical worldview wants to have a practical effect on pedagogy and didactics. This Waldorf School is truly not about raising children in anthroposophy – the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of a particular worldview – but rather about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science, because it is directly immersed in reality, can be pedagogically skillfully applied so that the pedagogical as such is created by spiritual science in a certain way as a pedagogical-didactic art. And in this respect, without wishing to boast, the first school year at this Waldorf School has already achieved something that can be talked about. Above all, we do not have the usual system of reporting at the Waldorf School. In some classes we had quite a large number of pupils last year, but nevertheless we do not need the strange relationship between teachers and pupils that arises from the fact that the teacher wants to find out, let's say, among twenty, thirty, fifty pupils, whether one or the other deserves an “almost sufficient”, “half almost satisfactory” and the like in this or that subject. We were able to avoid all of this, which was reduced to an abstract scheme. Instead, I would like to emphasize this: at the end of the previous school year, we were able to give each child a report card in which the child found something very remarkable: a life saying that was completely and utterly felt for the child's soul, spirit, and physical organization. Even in classes with fifty or more pupils, teachers were able to find a way of penetrating and immersing themselves in the individuality of the pupils so that they could write a core saying of life in the report that was completely individual and appropriate for the individual child. This report should not be a dead piece of paper on which one assesses this or that individual with “almost satisfactory”, but it should be something that the child remembers with a certain strength because it contains something that, when it works in his soul, can become life in him. I just wanted to emphasize this point. I could also speak of much that has been attempted, especially in practical application of anthroposophical spiritual science in the didactics of this Waldorf school.

Now, I have often mentioned here how anthroposophical spiritual science at a certain point in time found itself compelled to draw the social consequences from what emerges from its practical thinking. These social conclusions were first drawn in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. They are now being drawn for practical institutions. People today complain a lot about these practical institutions because they have no idea how the apparent practice, which lives in a world of illusions, has led precisely into today's crisis, and how a real practice of life must flow out of a renewal of all thinking. It could actually be amusing if it were not distressing on the other hand, when today the schoolmasters of practice come and remind us that you cannot manage with idealism and belief in the future. They do not know that this economic activity is really not about idealism and faith in the future, but about direct practical intervention with a way of thinking that is more practical than that which the last decades have been able to produce. Through that which, in connection with real life, brings about a life-based grasp of this reality, it will be practically confirmed what Anthroposophy is, because reality is spirit through and through. And if we want to master reality in practice, we must connect with the spirit of that reality. We will succumb to illusions if we do not want to immerse ourselves in the spirit of reality. Therefore, anthroposophy will have to reveal itself in its value for people by making the spirit effective in practical life.

But the central question of life – and it is this that makes anthroposophy particularly relevant to human life – is the big question: how are the moral impulses of the human being, how is what the human being builds up inwardly in the moral world connected to the world of external reality? Let us look at what modern world view has produced: a universe conceived in such a way that at the origin there is a planetary nebula from which suns and planets have formed through circular motion. In the course of time, I would say purely mechanical events arose from this, agglomerations, which then developed into the human being, into the impulse of morality in the human being, which is felt by the human soul as the most valuable thing. But then our gaze is directed to the physical end of the world, when, as it were, what has come together sinks back into a frozen state, when a world grave will stand, and what man has developed within himself in his valuable moral ideals will be buried in this world grave.

One need only visualize this image to see how this modern world view has been unable to bring about harmony between what man feels to be most valuable within himself, his morality, and what surrounds him in the external world and what he seeks to understand in a mechanical-materialistic way. We have only to look back at what I was able to say yesterday, even if only in the most general terms, to see how anthroposophy builds a bridge between what is spread out in space and the world of morality within. There we grasp ourselves first on earth, so that we learn to recognize ourselves in the course of our awakening as the physical-sensual human being, born out of the physical-sensual universe; within us we unfold our supersensible will. Yesterday I showed how this supersensible will contains precisely that which is not accessible to ordinary sense perception, which only becomes accessible when the soul frees itself from the body and experiences the will outside the body. In this will we have something that is thoroughly spiritual. But at the same time this will contains as a power that which constitutes our moral will, our moral feeling, our moral ideal and which remains in the future. We know that in this future our own existence develops in such a way that our body falls away from us, that the elements of this physical body initially disperse into the physical world, but that, as I indicated yesterday, what is contained only as spiritual desire in the will passes through the time that lies between death and a new birth; this builds a new physical body in the future. We see into the future and see our physical body arising again, but out of the spiritual.

If you then turn to the rest of the anthroposophical literature, you will find that this also applies to the worlds. We look at the external worlds, we see light and color in them, we hear sounds in the external world, we hear a whole range of sounds in the external world; we see the three realms of nature. We look at the past in spirit, we see spiritual beings in the past in spirit. We know that what is physical here now has been formed out of spirit. But this physical of the present, this present beauty of the earth, carries spiritual in its lap, and when it will once have solidified as physical, then the spiritual will emerge from it. But the spiritual now only exists in that which is volitional. Future worlds will be built from present morality, just as the present physical world is built from the moral forces of past beings. We see that which shines towards us as stars, that which appears to us as the sun, as the results of that which was once moral. We see in what is moral now the germ of what will shine as worlds in the future, what will appear as worlds to the beings that will inhabit these worlds in the future. By looking at the moral with the insights that only arise when one develops the supersensible powers of the soul, a bridge is built between the moral and the physical. This bridge cannot be built if we look at the world only through the lens of today's natural science: in that case, the world falls apart into the world of mechanical-materialistic events and the world of morality, which then dissolves into illusions, whereas in the anthroposophical worldview, the moral contains the germ of the cosmic, and in this way that which we can call responsibility grows. We know that the outcome of our moral deeds and impulses is not due to some arbitrary assessment of guilt, but is rooted in the laws of the world themselves. And if we look at the starry worlds that affect our eyes, we recognize in them the physical consequence of moral impulses from the distant past. We feel that we are not only in a physical world with moral illusions, we feel that we are in a world of physical and moral realities, where the physical is the metamorphosis of the moral, and the moral is the metamorphosis of the physical.

This, esteemed attendees, gives strength to the human being by steeling his sense of responsibility by placing him with his ego in the whole world. Thus, by opening our view into the spiritual and by showing the physical in connection with the moral in relation to the spiritual, this anthroposophical spiritual science can meet the deepest needs of the present day in the field of art. Anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to achieve this in the field of art, as far as possible at the beginning of its existence. In my four mystery plays, entitled 'The Portal of Initiation', 'The Soul's Trial', 'The Guardian of the Threshold' and 'The Awakening of the Soul', I myself have tried to show how one can artistically embody, from a spiritual-scientific world view, what arises from supersensible observation. And in our Goetheanum outside, everything that this Goetheanum presents - in terms of its external architecture, in terms of its sculptural and painterly design - is shaped from this spiritual-scientific perspective.

Do we not see in the artistic development of the last generations how art longs for new impulses? Today, we need only look back to the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Dürer to see how that ancient conception of art, which strove upwards out of the physical-sensual, had indeed developed to the greatest heights, to depict the physical-sensual in such a way that the physical-sensual reveals the spiritual. One need only think of how human figures are first depicted in the Sistine Madonna, surrounded by the natural world, but how the spirit that embodied this image conjures up spiritual secrets from what it could see with its senses, and how it elevates the sensual so that this sensuality can reveal spiritual secrets to man.

In an age of scientific thinking and scientific research, we have ceased to have the intuitive perceptions that a Raphael or a Michelangelo had, in that they conjured up from the sensual-physical reality that which appeared like a reflection of the spiritual from this physical-sensual reality. Thus we see that in the naturalistic age, art also wanted to become naturalistic. But what is naturalistic art supposed to achieve if it does not unconsciously contain some idealistic factor? Do we still need to somehow transfer what nature presents to us outside onto the canvas or otherwise embody it, for example in drama? Can we really depict the secrets that nature holds in a naturalistic way? No, we cannot. Anyone who has traveled throughout Italy and been exposed to even the most beautiful and greatest works of art and then comes from Italy, let's say, to the top of the Rigi and watches a sunrise, knows immediately that what speaks out of nature is greater than what any painter, any sculptor, any artist could gain from nature. Only when artists, like Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, could not stop at nature, but conjure up the spiritual from the physical and sensual, is this artistic endeavor justified. But precisely those artists who are perhaps to be taken most seriously in the present have within them the deepest yearning for a new source of art. They feel that the impulse has been exhausted, which consisted of conjuring up the spiritual out of the physical-sensual. When we look back to ancient times of human cultural development - wherever the human gaze looked, it saw the spiritual in natural things, the nymph of the spring in the spring, the spirits of the air in the air. Thus it is a final, I would say a certain human ascent, when now the artists have conjured up a spiritual out of the physical-sensual existence.

Today we stand at a point in the development of the world where the longings of the most serious artistic natures of the present point to the fact that new sources must be opened for the artistic. And so the opposite must enter into the development of human civilization today. The old artists have demystified the spiritual from the physical-sensuous. The spiritual must be revealed by looking at the spiritual world, as anthroposophical spiritual science intends. But just as the artist, if he has artistic feeling, is compelled to reveal the spiritual in the physical-sensuous, so the man who beholds the spiritual has, if he has artistic feeling, the direct, naive need to shape the spiritual into forms, to translate the spiritual into material. The old school of art idealized the sensual; the new school of art will realize the spiritual. This will not be a creation in symbolism. Those who find only one single symbol in it are slandering the Dornach building. There is no symbol in it, but what is directly contemplated is poured out into forms. Everything should work in artistic forms. Those who speak of the symbolism of the Dornach building only show by doing so that they have not really grasped the characteristic style expressed in the way the whole artistic aspect of this building is managed. They have not seen have seen how the artistic spirit of nature herself was sought to be joined with the creative spirit of nature herself in the artistic work of this Dornach building, and then to express oneself artistically in forms towards which this spirit strives.

What was idealizing in the development of art in ancient times will be realizing when it is based on such a spiritual view as is meant by the anthroposophical world view. And this artistry will be naive in the best Goethean sense. As the spiritual researcher looks into the universe, he senses the secrets of existence, and he deeply feels what Goethe expressed from his artistic vision: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy revelator, art. He to whom the world reveals its secrets in the mind cannot leave these secrets in the mind as they are, just as a child cannot remain at the age of three or five; it must grow older. What is seen in the spirit wants to take shape. What art creates out of spiritual vision is not didactic, it is not symbolic, it is not in straw-like allegories, it is a real standing within life. And this standing within the spirit brings the human ego together with the whole cosmos. Today I have pointed out how those forces in man that lead to his actual human existence are feelings of responsibility towards the world, I could also say feelings of responsibility towards social existence. And I could list many other ways in which these feelings are aroused, by developing those ideas that initially lead the human being into worlds far away and worlds wide, that present him with all the development that the world must undergo in order to reach the summit, the summit of the self. Those who take such ideas into themselves, by incorporating them into their souls, do not merely absorb cold ideas; they take in something that seizes the feeling and the will, something that warms the feeling with that which flows out of the immeasurable greatness of the world. From these ideas, they take what each individual action that they perform places under the responsibility of the world's wisdom-filled guidance. Summarizing all this, one can only say: religious sentiment flows from what is handed down in anthroposophical spiritual science as images, as ideas, from all of this.

From the outset, spiritual science did not want to be something that would stand alongside any religion as a modern religion, especially not alongside Christianity. From the very beginning, it was asserted within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that Christianity is the religion that encompasses all others, and that for anthroposophy it is important to explain the mystery of Golgotha in the sense in which it is necessary for modern humanity. But through Anthroposophy nothing religious should be placed beside it, other than what is the meaning of the earth itself, coming from the Mystery of Golgotha. Only those who, in a spiritually tyrannical way, want the world-wide mystery of Golgotha to be interpreted in only one sense - namely, their own - can defame anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that would be detrimental to Christianity.

But is it not necessary, my dear attendees, that although not in the essence of the mystery of Golgotha, new elements are included in the understanding of Christianity? One looks at the way in which the knowledge and the realization of this Christianity has developed in the course of the 19th century. One need only look back to earlier centuries. Those who can look at history not only in the abstract, but also with feeling, know that Christ Jesus was regarded as something that poured out of higher, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. A connection between the spiritual world and the physical world has been established through the mystery of Golgotha. In older times, this mystery of Golgotha was understood according to the cognitive abilities of those older times. But as the modern age dawned, with its scientific advances, the old understanding gradually became impossible for those who conscientiously want to take the progress of humanity seriously. And so we have witnessed the strange spectacle of precisely the most advanced theologians of the 19th century having lost the Christ as a supersensible being and having arrived at the mere description of the simple man from Nazareth; because of naturalistic thinking, they could not see the Christ in Jesus. For the most modern theology, Jesus became an outstanding human being, perhaps the most outstanding, but that something took place in Jesus through Christ that cannot be grasped merely with the senses has been shown in the entire theological development of the modern age. We need a path back to spiritual science in order to spiritually comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-secret.

What natural science has taken from Christianity for those who conscientiously want to take in this natural science, spiritual science will give back to Christianity for those who need an understanding of this Christianity from the depths of their soul. Just as little as all the progress of natural science could take away from man of the post-Christian era the mystery of Golgotha, just as little will spiritual-scientific progress be able to take away from man that which, out of the religious mood, but illuminated by spiritual-scientific ideas in accordance with the demands of the new time, flows to the divine, to that which is also given through Christ. The modern human being needs a spiritual view as the basis for his art and for his religion. Those who have lost the Christ through modern science have lost him because modern science was not initially a spiritual science. And I would like to remind those who today often slanderously claim that Anthroposophy wants to deliver something detrimental to Christianity: Is it courageous to say, in the face of the greatness of the Mystery of Golgotha, which towers above all other earthly forces and events, that those who seriously endeavor to understand this Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with this or that science, in accordance with the progress of humanity, are anti-Christian? Is it courageous?

No! Again and again, I see before me that Catholic theology professor, who was my friend in the 1880s and 1890s, who, as a professor of Christian philosophy at a theological faculty, gave a speech about Galileo that fully lived up to Galileo by said at the time: No progress in science should be challenged by those who want to be truly Christian, because in truth everything that science can find of worldly secrets only serves to make people more aware of the magnitude of the wonders of divine guidance in the world, not less. Those are fainthearted who believe that Christianity can be shaken by any scientific progress. No, my dear audience, spiritual science knows: Even if millions of insights come in physical or spiritual fields, the event that gives meaning to the earth will stand in ever greater splendor precisely before spiritual-scientific contemplation.

But here it can also be seen how little impartiality there is in the world today. While one should understand - and if one were impartial, would also understand - that the spiritual-scientific world view is what certain people need in order to be led today to the mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, the spiritual-scientific world view, is being slandered. But perhaps this is only because there is too little religion in those who want to take on religion. Should it not be the case that one recognizes in particular the religiousness of the soul mood by the fruits, by the way the people concerned appear in life? Should there not be some phenomena today that show in the most intense way how an elevation, how an internalization of the religious mood is also necessary? Let me give just one small example.

Among the many recent refutations of anthroposophy, there is one in which there is a sentence to which I would like to draw your attention here. I will read it out loud:

Because the consciousness of the mind is lacking, ...

— namely, among anthroposophists, one might think.

... in theosophy there is also no savior of sinners. Despite all the praise and despite the exaltation of Christ to the “Sun-I”, Dr. Steiner's Christ is a completely alien personality to us. Here, too, a certain pantheistic tendency is disconcerting. Anthroposophy starts from the human being, and its goal is the ideal human being.

I have just shown how all of anthroposophy strives for the opposite; but the author of this brochure continues:

This and God apparently coincide. A nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach: with “Luciferian” features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom.

Now, my dear attendees, what is being carved out of wood in Dornach has been seen not by hundreds but by thousands of people. The one who has seen that something is being formed that has 'Luciferic traits above and animal features below' — I cannot do other than recall to the one who has seen this the anecdote that contains an instruction on how someone who comes home in the evening can tell whether he is drunk or sober. The advice was to go to bed and put a hat on the bed. If he sees the hat once, he can consider himself sober; if he sees it twice, he can consider himself drunk. Now, the person who sees the hat twice reminds me of the person who sees that something is being chiseled in Dornach - in reality it is carved out of wood -; the person sees something that is not there at all, because at the top is a completely human face, nothing of Luciferic features, a purely human face, below, there is nothing done at all yet, there is still a block of wood, there will also come human features, but below, there is nothing done at all yet. And then someone comes along who does not say that someone told him this – then one might believe that someone has told a tale – no, someone comes along who claims this as strict truth: a nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach, with Luciferic features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom. Thousands of people have seen that this is an objective untruth, and that it is not even just an objective untruth, but that it is one of the most incredible, idiotic distortions of what is intended. And, my dear attendees, what is more:

“This ideal human being...”, Steiner said to the observers present, “...must necessarily be the true image of Christ.”

Not one of the thousands of onlookers who were there will be able to say that I ever said these words. There are enough witnesses here in this hall who know that I have always said nothing but, carefully weighing my words, that the one I am forming here appears to me, according to spiritual vision, as the one who walked in Palestine. I cannot describe him any differently than he appears to me. I do not force this view on anyone. - Never, ladies and gentlemen, has it been said that what is here in quotation marks: “[...] must necessarily be the true image of Christ”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is how one approaches the truth - that must be said. The name of the author of this brochure is preceded by the ominous “D.”, which stands for Doctor of Theology. So apparently, here too, as everywhere else, something like this arises from religious sentiments of the present time. Is there not a need for a renewal of people's religious sentiment when something like this can arise from religious teaching today? Can anyone seeking a spark of truth in such a work find such an example of objective untruth?

Oh, my dear assembled guests, what is leading to the fight against the anthroposophical worldview must be sought where one perhaps does not want to seek it: in the comfortable habits of thought and feeling of the present. I must say, quite apart from how one feels about the fact that the attack is directed against one's own cause, it can hurt, really hurt, when books are written today that are inspired by such a sense of truth. We need an increase of the sense of truth, of the sense of truth, and with it precisely an increase of the religious sense of people today.

And finally, my dear attendees:

Are people of such a nature allowed to claim that anthroposophists indulge in illusions?

Well, no one will find such an illusion in me. Above, one will find a human head, which has absolutely nothing of Lucifer, which is preserved from everything Luciferian; below, a block of wood that has not yet been worked at all. Anyone who looks at this with such an illusion that they see Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, anyone who can indulge in these illusions, should truly not ascribe to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientists a tendency towards illusions. The illusions may lie precisely with those who, out of these very comfortable illusions, would like to fight anthroposophy today.

Ultimately, everything that arises from such foundations is ultimately connected with what has been drawn upon as the materialistic view of the world. And we must go beyond this materialistic view. No matter how imperfectly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science may be today, it only wants to be a beginning, but a beginning that has within it the germination of vigorous further work in the fields of science, art and religion, a vigorous continuation that will be able to bring to people, precisely in these three fields, that which is demanded from the deepest longings of the human soul in the present, which will be demanded more and more in the future, and which ultimately also underlies the core of the burning social question. We must enter into true reality. The materialistically conceived realities that have formed the content of the world views of the last centuries and especially decades are not the true realities.

The true realities must be sought in ways such as those that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at least attempts; however imperfect it may still be today; for the reality in which man wants to immerse himself when he wants to create something real, he does not find it if he only strives materially, if he does not strive spiritually. But he strives spiritually only when he does not allow a spirit hostile to human knowledge to be placed at the boundaries of so-called knowledge of nature, which says: No entry to the spiritual worlds. No, when he courageously fights his way out of his own strength to see the true inscription at the boundaries of knowledge of nature. This true inscription comes from the spirit to which man actually belongs, and it reads: Welcome the entry into the spiritual world at the boundaries of the knowledge of nature. For it is true, as it sounds from an important work of poetry to him who does not want to see the spiritual depth of the world: Your heart is closed, your mind is dead. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants nothing more than to find those counsels for the human soul and spirit that will lead to the heart being opened and the mind being enlivened, because through the closed heart, through the dead mind, we only enter into the material world. We can only enter into true reality through the spirit, when the mind is illuminated by the light of the spirit, when the heart opens to the true love of the world that comes from spiritual knowledge, and which brings the I into connection with the whole whole universe and thus brings together the human spirit in cognition, feeling and will in right responsibility, in right love for the universe with the whole of being in the universe - in cognition, in the life of the beautiful, in social life.

Once upon a time a Society was founded with a programme announcing as its central aim: “The abolition of egoism”. All its members had to pledge themselves to cultivate selflessness and freedom from egoism in any form. This Society had elected a President, as all societies do, and the thing now, was to gain support for its fundamental principle in the world at large.

It was emphatically laid down over and over again and in the most diverse ways that no member at any time or place (and especially within the Society) should cherish the slightest egoistic wish or give utterance to any kind of selfish desire.

Now this was certainly a Society with an uncommonly praiseworthy programme and an exalted human goal. But one could not immediately say that the members were seeking to exemplify in themselves the primary point in their programme, for they scarcely allowed themselves to become acquainted with unselfish human wishes. The following scene was often enacted within the Society. A member would say: “Yes, I would like this and that. But if I were to put it to the Chairman, I would be advancing an egoistic wish, and that would never do.” Another member would reply: “Quite simple—I'll go on your behalf. I shall be acting as your representative, and in putting forward your wish I shall be doing something entirely selfless. But listen—there is something I would like. Naturally, it is something quite egoistic, so according to our programme I can't propose it.” The first member would then say: “If you are to be so unselfish on my account, I will do something for you. I will go to the Chairman on your behalf and ask him for what you want.” And so it turned out. One of the two went first to the Chairman and then, two hours later, the other member went. Both had put forward quite unselfish wishes.

“Once upon a time”, I said—of course this Society has never existed. But anyone who looks round him in daily life will perhaps agree that a little of this Society is always present everywhere. At all events, my intention was only to indicate how “egoism” is one of those words which most readily become catch-words unless they are used in a direct connection with whatever they designate; otherwise they appear in disguise and deceive us into passing casually over them.

Today we will take this catch-word, egoism, and its opposite, altruism or selflessness. We shall not treat them as catch-words, but will try to penetrate a little way into the nature of egoism. When we examine these things from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we are not so much concerned with whatever sympathy or antipathy may be evoked by this or that human characteristic, or how it may be assessed in accordance with some prevailing judgment—these are not important points. What matters much more, is to show how the relevant characteristic originates in the human soul, and within what limits it is valid; and if it must be fought against, to determine how far it can be combated through human nature or through other existent beings.

In its literal sense, egoism is the characteristic which impels a man to give first place to his own advantage and the enhancement of his own personality, while its opposite, altruism, aims at placing human faculties at the service of others, indeed, of the whole world.

A simple consideration will show us how precarious our position is if we think only of the word egoism, and fail to enter into the thing itself. Suppose that someone proves himself to be a great benefactor in one way or another. It could well be that he is a benefactor only out of egoism, perhaps out of quite petty forms of egoism, perhaps out of vanity and the like. On the other hand, if a man is dubbed an egoist without more ado, this is by no means the last word on his character. For if a man seeks only to satisfy himself but otherwise has noble qualities, so that he sees the service of others as the best way forward for himself, we might perhaps be well pleased with such an “egoist”. This may sound like a mere play on words, but is more than that, for in fact this playing on words permeates our entire life and shows itself in all realms of existence.

For everything we find in man we can find something analogous in the rest of the world. Schiller has a verse which indicates how in the realms of Nature something symbolical of an outstanding human quality can be found:

Seek you the highest, the greatest?
The plant can teach it to you.
What the plant does without willing it,
Go you and do by willing it.⁴²

Schiller here brings before us the being of the plant and urges man to develop in his own character something as noble as the plant is on its own level. And the great German mystic, Angelus Silesius, says much the same:

Not asking why or wherefore blooms the rose
Cares not for herself or whether men behold her.⁴³

Here again we are called to look at the plant world. The plant draws in whatever it needs for growth; it asks no why or wherefore; it flowers because it flowers and cares not whom it may concern. And yet, it is by drawing its life-forces and everything it needs for itself from its environment that the plant acquires whatever worth it can have for its environment and finally for men. Indeed, it attains the highest degree of usefulness that can be imagined for a created being, if it belongs to those realms of the plant world which can be of service to higher beings. And it will now be an idle triviality to repeat here a familiar saying, although it has been quoted so often:

When herself the rose adorns,
She adorns the garden.⁴⁴

When the rose is as beautiful as it can be, the garden is adorned. We can connect this with the word, egoism, and say: When the rose strives quite egoistically to be as beautiful as she can, and to grace herself with the finest possible form, then through her the garden becomes as beautiful as possible. Can we take this result from a lower level of existence and apply it in some way to man? We have no need to do this, for it has been done already by many others, and by Goethe best of all.

When Goethe wishes to express what man is in the most authentic sense, and how he manifests most truly his worth and the entire content of his existence, he says: “When a man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels himself to be living in the world as in a great and beautiful and worthy whole, when this harmony brings him a pure, free joy, then the universe, if it could come to be aware of its own self, would cry out in exultation at having reached its goal and would marvel at the height which its own being and becoming had attained.”

This passage is from Goethe's splendid book on Winckelmann,⁴⁵ and elsewhere in the same book he says: “Placed upon the summit of Nature, man sees himself as another complete nature, with the task of achieving another summit in himself. To this end he heightens his powers, imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the creation of a work of art.”

Goethe's whole mood shows that he is referring here to the artist only as a specialised example and that he really means: Placed upon the summit of Nature, man gathers together everything that the world can express in him and finally displays to the world its own image, mirrored from within himself; and Nature would rejoice if she could perceive in the human soul this reflected image of herself.

What else does this mean than that everything which surrounds us in the world, as Nature and as spirit, concentrates itself in man, rises to a summit, and becomes in individual men, in the individual human Ego, as beautiful, true and perfect as it can? Hence, man will best fulfil his existence if he draws in as much as possible from the outer world and makes his own everything that can blossom and bear fruit in himself.

This view of things implies that man can never do enough to combine in himself whatever the surrounding world offers, in order to manifest through himself a kind of supreme achievement of Nature. Anyone who wishes to call that “egoism” may do so. Then one could say: The human ego is there to be an organ for elements in Nature which would otherwise remain forever hidden and which can come to expression only through being concentrated in the spirit of man. But although it is natural for man to gather these elements from the natural world into himself, it also lies in his nature to bring error and confusion into the general law which leads the lower realms in outer existence towards the highest levels. This is bound up with what we call human freedom. Man could never enjoy a free existence if he were not capable of misusing in a one-sided way certain forces within him—forces which can lead to the heights and can also pervert existence and perhaps even make a caricature of it. A simple comparison will make this clear. Let us go back to the plant.

It does not generally occur to us to speak of egoism in connection with the plant. It was only in order to bring out clearly the law of egoism that we said: What comes to expression in the plants could be called egoism. Normally, we do not speak of egoism in their case. If we consider the plant world in a spiritual and not a materialistic sense, we can see that the plant is in a certain sense proof against egoism. On the one hand, the conditions of its life require it to make itself as beautiful as it can, without asking who will benefit from its beauty.

But when the plant has risen to the highest expression of its individual being, it is on the verge of having to give all this up. The plant world has a peculiar characteristic. Goethe puts this finely in his Prose Sayings: “The law of vegetable growth reaches its highest manifestation in the blossom and of this, in him, the rose is the summit. ... The fruit can never be beautiful, for then the vegetable law retreats and becomes again merely a law.”⁴⁶ Thus it was clear to Goethe that the plant gives expression to its own law most vividly when it flowers. At this moment, however, it must be prepared to yield up its beauty to the process of fructification, for it is now called upon to sacrifice its highest self on behalf of its successor in the form of the seed-bud. There is something great in this act of self-sacrifice by the plant at the moment when it is rising to the point of imprinting its Ego, as it were, on its appearance. So on this lower level, we see how in Nature egoism progresses to a certain stage, and how it then destroys and surrenders itself in order that something new may emerge. The highest manifestation of the plant, its individuality—as we may call it—which achieves its summit of beauty in the flower, begins to fade directly the new plant-seed is produced.

Now let us ask: Does anything similar occur on the human level? Yes, if we consider Nature and spiritual life in terms of the spirit, we find that something quite similar does occur in man. For man is not intended merely to reproduce his kind and to carry on the human species; he is called upon to transcend the species and to exist as an individual. We shall come to know the true form and nature of egoism in man only if we look at his being in the light of previous lectures.

In Spiritual Science, we do not regard man as consisting only of a physical body, which he has in common with the mineral kingdom. We speak of higher members of his being: the etheric body which he has in common with all living things, and the astral body, or consciousness body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, which he has in common with the animal kingdom. And we say, that within these three members lives the true kernel of his being, the Ego. We must regard the Ego as the bearer of egoism both when the latter is justified and when it is unjustified. Man's development depends entirely on the work accomplished by the Ego in transforming the other three members of his being. At first, on a primitive level, his Ego is the slave of these other members; he follows all the urges, desires and passions that come from his astral body. But the further his development goes, the more will he be doing to purify his astral body, so that he transforms it into something which is ruled by his higher nature, by his Ego, and his Ego becomes increasingly the ruler and purifier of the other members of his being.

As you have heard in previous lectures, man is now in the midst of this development. In so far as he transforms his astral body, he creates what we call Spirit-self, or, in the terminology of oriental philosophy, Manas. In the future it will be possible for him to transform by degrees his etheric body, and so to create what we call Life-spirit, or Buddhi. And when finally he masters the processes in his physical body, the transformed part of it will be what we call Atman, or Spirit-man. So we look towards a future condition in which man will rule consciously, from out of his Ego, over all his activities.

These future faculties have been in preparation for a very long time. The Ego has already worked, unconsciously or subconsciously, on the three other members of man's being. In the far distant past the Ego transformed a part of the astral body, also called the sentient body, into the Sentient Soul; a part of the etheric body into the Intellectual Soul, and a part of the physical body into the Consciousness Soul. Today we shall be concerned especially with the relationship of the sentient body to the Sentient Soul.

When we observe a human being from the time of his birth and see how his faculties gradually emerge—as though from the hidden depths of his bodily nature, we can say: Here the Sentient Soul is working its way out into the light of day. The Sentient Soul, as we have seen, is fashioned by the Ego out of the sentient body, and the sentient body is built up from the young child's entire environment. We can understand this if we recall Goethe's saying: “The eye is formed by light for light.”⁴⁷ If we consider any sense-organ whereby man becomes conscious of the external physical world, we must set against Schopenhauer's one-sided statement,⁴⁸ that we could not see the light if we had no eyes, the equally valid statement that if there were no light, there would be no eyes. Through endless ages, as Goethe says, the all-pervading light worked on the human organism so as to fashion the sense-organ which is now able to look on the light. We can discern in the world around us the forces which have produced in man the faculties which enable us to become conscious of it. Thus the entire sentient body, the whole fabric whereby we enter into a relationship with the outer world, has been woven from its living forces. We have no share in this achievement. The astral body is a product, a flowering, of the surrounding world. Within the astral body the Sentient Soul emerges, formed by the work of the Ego from the substance of the sentient body. So the Ego lives in the sentient body and draws from it the substance of the Sentient Soul.

Now the Ego can work in a twofold way. First, it can develop in the Sentient Soul those faculties which are in harmony with the faculties and characteristics of the sentient body. An example from the field of education will make this clear. It is precisely from the field of education that we can draw the most beautiful and practical examples of what Spiritual Science is.

The sentient body is built up from a child's environment. Hence all those concerned with bringing up and educating a child have an influence on the sentient body, from the very beginning of its physical existence. They can help the sentient body to acquire the soul-qualities that are in harmony with its characteristics, as indicated by the Ego; but they can also pass on things which contradict these characteristics. If a child is brought up and educated in such a way that he can feel a living interest in everything that meets his eyes, if he can rightly rejoice in colours and forms, if musical tones give him happiness, if he can gradually bring about harmony between the impressions that come to him from outside and the feelings of joy and pleasure, of sympathetic interest in life, that arise in the Sentient Soul—then the child's inner response will be in consonance with a true picture of existence; then the inner life of his soul will harmonise with outer existence. Then, secondly, we can say that a human being does not live only within himself, capable only of fashioning a Sentient Soul in his sentient body; he can go out beyond himself. Nor is he capable only of seeing and hearing; he can pour himself out into the surrounding world and live in whatever his sentient body transmits to him. Then we have not only harmony between sentient body and Sentient-Soul; we have harmony also between the outer world and the experiences of the Sentient Soul. Then man is truly a kind of mirror of the universe; a kind of microcosm which—as Goethe said—enjoys the feeling of living in the wide expanse of a great and beautiful world.

We can take another example. If a child were to grow up on a desert island, far from any human society, some of its faculties would not develop. It would be deprived of speech, of thinking power, and of all those noble qualities which can light up only through living together with other human beings, for these are qualities which belong to man's inner being, to his soul.

Now man can develop in such a way that he goes out from himself, with his attributes, and creates harmony between himself and the world around him. Or he can let his endowments harden and dry up within himself. This happens if he fails to respond to the colours, tones and so on that he receives from the outer world, and so is unable to give them back enriched with his own interest and pleasure. A man becomes inwardly hardened if he keeps to himself whatever he acquires from associating with other people, instead of making it contribute to human intercourse. If he secludes himself, choosing to live entirely within himself, a disharmony arises between him and his environment. A cleft opens between his Sentient Soul and his sentient body. If, after enjoying the advantages of human progress, he fails to place at the service of mankind the benefits that can flourish only in a social milieu, a gap arises between himself and his surroundings, whether it be the outer world, to which he can no longer respond, or his human environment, to which he owes his finest interests. The result is that he becomes inwardly dried up, for he cannot be advanced or enlivened by anything that comes to him from outside if it is torn from its roots, and this is what happens if he fails to allow his soul-life to flow out into the world around him. And if he continually reinforces his seclusion from the outer world, the effect is that his soul-life tends to wither and die away. This is precisely the bad side of egoism, and we must now characterise it in greater detail.

When egoism takes this form, so that man is not continually nourished and vitalised by the outer world, he is heading for his own extinction. That is the check generally imposed on egoism, and thereby the true nature of egoism is made clear. For whereas man, by absorbing the forces of the surrounding world, enables the world to attain a summit in himself, he then has to do consciously what the plant does unconsciously. At the very moment when the plant is in course of imprinting its inner being on its visible form, the power behind the plant leads its egoistic principle over into a new plant. But man, as a self-conscious being and an Ego-bearer, is required to bring about by his own efforts this development in himself. At a certain stage he must be prepared to surrender whatever he has received from outside and to give birth, within his own Ego, to a higher Ego; and this higher Ego will not become hardened, but will enter into a harmonious relationship with the entire world.

The knowledge that a one-sided egoism destroys itself can be verified by ordinary observation of life. One needs only to look at people who are unable to take any active interest in the great and beautiful ordering of nature from which the human organism draws its form and substance. How painful it is for anyone who understands these things to see how some people pass indifferently by the world to which they owe their eyes and ears; how they cut themselves off from the world in which their existence is rooted and wish only to be left alone with their inward brooding. Then we see how this perverted way of living brings its own penalty. Anyone who follows it goes through life in a state of chronic boredom; he pursues one desire after another, not realising that he is seeking satisfaction in vague phantoms, when he should be giving himself out to the world from which his own existence has come about. Anyone who goes through life saying: People are a burden, I have no use for them, they disturb my life, I am too good for this world—anyone who talks like that should merely reflect that he is repudiating the origin of his existence. If he had grown up on a desert island, far from the human society that he regards as not good enough for him, he would have remained dumb and would never have developed the faculties he now has. All that he finds so great and praiseworthy in himself would be absent, were it not for the people he has no use for. He should realise that he has separated himself from his environment by his own willful choice, and that in fact he owes to his environment the very faculties which now repudiate it.

If a man pursues this course, he not only kills the interest he might have taken in nature and human life, his own life-force declines and he condemns himself to a desolate, dissatisfied existence. All those people who indulge in world-weariness because they find nothing anywhere to interest them, should for once ask themselves: What is my egoism doing to me? Here a cosmic law is indicated. Wherever egoism takes a perverted form, it has a desolating effect on living. That is the good thing about egoism: if it is carried to an extreme, it destroys the egoist.

If now we take the great law that we have gained from studying egoism and apply it to the various faculties of the human soul, we can ask, for example: How does egoism affect the Consciousness Soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the world around him? In other words, when can a piece of knowledge prove fruitful? It will be truly fruitful only if it brings a man into harmony with the rest of the world. This means that the only concepts and ideas that can invigorate the human soul are those drawn from the life of the great outer world, and then only if we are in harmony with the outer world. That is why all ways of knowledge which seek, above all, to reach the great truths of existence, step by step, are so health-giving for the soul, and also, therefore, for the physical body. On the other hand, anything that leads us away from a living connection with the world, as solitary inward brooding does, or anything that brings us into discord with the world, will have a hardening effect.

Here is an appropriate occasion to refer once more to the widely misunderstood saying, “Know thyself!”, which has a meaning valid for all epochs. Only when a man realises that he belongs to the whole world, that his Self is not confined within his skin but is spread out over the whole world, over sun and stars, over all earthly creatures, and that this Self has only created an expression of itself within his skin—only if he recognises that he is interwoven with the entire world—only then can he make proper use of the saying, “Know thyself”. For self knowledge is then world-knowledge. A man who fails to realise this is like a finger which imagined it could achieve an individual existence apart from the rest of the organism. Cut it off, and in three weeks it will quite certainly no longer be a finger. The finger has no illusions about that; only man supposes that he could do without any connections with the world. World-knowledge is self-knowledge and self-knowledge is world-knowledge. Any sort of inward brooding is merely a sign that we cannot get away from ourselves. Very great harm is therefore done when in certain theosophical circles today it is said: A solution of the riddle of existence will not be found in the world outside, or in phenomena permeated by the spirit, but in your own self. “Look for God in your own breast”—that is the injunction often heard. “You need not exert yourself to seek for revelations of the cosmic Spirit out there in the universe. You have only to look within yourself; you will find it all there.” This kind of instruction does the student very bad service. It makes him proud and egoistic with regard to knowledge. The result is that certain theosophical directives, instead of training a person in selflessness, instead of freeing him from himself and bringing him into relation with the great riddles of existence, have a hardening effect on him. One can appeal to man's pride and vanity by telling him: “You need learn nothing from the world; you will find it all in yourself.” We appeal to truth when we show that to be in harmony with the great world can enable a man to become greater in himself and therefore greater in the world.

This applies also to human feeling and to the entire content of the Intellectual Soul, which gains in strength when a man knows how to achieve harmony between himself and the outer world. Strength and power are not acquired by sitting down and brooding all day long over such questions as—“What shall I think now? What shall I do? What's that pain I feel coming on again?”—but by opening the heart to everything great and beautiful in our surroundings, and by showing interest and understanding for everything that warms the hearts of others, as well as for their wants and privations. In this way we strengthen the life-forces in the realm of feeling within us; we overcome narrow minded egoism and we enhance and enrich our Ego by bringing the true form of egoism into harmony with our environment.

This comes out very clearly when we consider the human will and the Consciousness Soul itself. A man who exerts his will only for himself and his own advantage will always feel inwardly dissatisfied. Only when he can see his resolves reflected in the outer world and his will-impulses realised in action—only then can he say that he has brought his willing into harmony with outer events. And here we learn that our inner strength and power are not developed by anything we will for ourselves, but by whatever we will for the outer world and for other people. Our willing becomes reality and its reflection shines back to us. As our eyes are formed by light, so is our strength of soul developed by our actions and activities.

Thus we see how man, as a self-conscious being, is able through a right comprehension of his “I”, his Ego, to arrive at harmony between himself and the world around him, until he grows out of himself and accomplishes the birth of what we may call a higher man. In this way he brings forth something in himself, even as a plant on a lower level brings forth out of itself a new being at the moment when it is in danger of becoming hardened in its own existence. That is how we must understand egoism. The human Ego, having been fructified by the surrounding world, brings forth on the heights of existence a new Ego, and will then be ripe to flow out into actions which would otherwise give expression only to worthless demands and useless moral postulates. For only through world-knowledge can the will be fired to act on the world in return. Whatever points may be set out in the programmes of societies, however many societies may have “universal human love” at the head of their programmes, these moral injunctions will have no practical effect.

All the ordinary preaching of human love is as though a stove were standing in a cold room and someone says to it: “Dear stove, your moral duty as a stove is to warm the room”. You could go on like that for hours or days—the stove would not be moved to make the room warm. Similarly, men will not be moved by sermons to practise human love, even if you were to preach to them for centuries that men ought to love one another. But bring the human Ego into connection with the content of the whole world, let people participate in the radiance of flowers and in all the beauties of Nature, and you will soon see that this participation is a foundation for the higher participation that can arise between human being and human being.

By gaining knowledge of human beings and human nature, man learns to meet the faults and good qualities of others with understanding. Wisdom of this kind, derived from approaching the world with living insight, passes over into the blood, into action and will. And what we call human love is born from it. Just as babbling to the stove is useless, when what we need to do is simply to bring wood and start a fire, so should we bring to human beings the fuel that will kindle, warm and illuminate their souls; and the fuel required is knowledge of the world, so that understanding of human nature and harmonious consonance between the human Ego and the outer world are brought about. Then we shall in fact be kindling human love—a love that can flow from heart to heart and draw human beings together, teaching them that actions performed only for ourselves have a deadly, desolating effect upon us, while actions that have a helpful influence on the lives of others are reflected back to enhance our own strength. Through a right understanding of egoism, accordingly, our Ego is enriched and enabled to develop, if, as far as possible, we realise our own Self in the service of another, and strive to cultivate not only personal feeling, but fellow feeling, as far as we can. That is how the nature of Egoism is seen by Spiritual Science.

The subject we have touched on today has deeply interested all the thinkers who have pondered seriously on human existence. The nature of egoism was bound to concern outstanding men during the 18th century, a time when man as an individual had broken free from certain ties with his social environment. One of these outstanding men was Goethe. And he has given us a work, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship and its sequel Wilhelm Meister's Year's of Travel, which we can take as an example, as if drawn from the world, of his thoughts on the nature of egoism.

Just as Faust occupied Goethe throughout his life, so did Wilhelm Meister. As early as the seventeen-sixties, Goethe felt that he had the task of depicting, in the peculiar life of Wilhelm Meister, a kind of mirror-image of his own life, and it was in his old age, when he was nearing his death, that he completed the Years of Travel. It would take us too far to go into the details of Wilhelm Meister, but perhaps you will allow me to outline the problem of egoism as we meet it here in Goethe.

A thoroughgoing, refined egoist, one might say, is portrayed here. Wilhelm Meister was born into the merchant class, but he is enough of an egoist to abandon this calling, in spite of the claims of duty. What, then, does he really want? We are shown how he wants to develop his own Self to the highest degree and with the utmost freedom. He has a dim presentiment of becoming some kind of perfected man. Thus Goethe leads Wilhelm Meister through the most varied experiences, so as to show how life works upon this individuality in order to raise it to a higher level. Of course, Goethe is well aware that Wilhelm Meister is driven around by all sorts of circumstances and reaches no definite goal. Hence at one point he calls him a “poor wretch”.⁴⁹ But at the same time he knows that although a man may have to work his way through folly and errors, he is led by certain forces to a certain goal, or at least along a certain path. It was Goethe's opinion, which never left him, that human life is never completely at the mercy of chance, but is subject, like all things, to laws—indeed, spiritual laws. Therefore Goethe says that the whole human race can be regarded as a great individual, striving upwards and making itself the master of chance.⁵⁰

Goethe's intention, accordingly, is to show Wilhelm Meister as intent always on heightening, enriching and perfecting his Ego. At the same time, he leads Wilhelm Meister into a way of life which is, strictly speaking, at one remove from actuality. The whole character of the 18th century can help us to understand why Wilhelm Meister is led away from pursuing a career in the world of real events and brought into the theatre, where he mingles with people who present an appearance, a picture, of life. Art itself is, in a certain sense, an image of life. It is not part of immediate reality but raises itself above this reality. Goethe knew very well that the artist, standing alone with his art, is in danger of losing the firm ground of reality from under his feet. It has been well said that the Muse may accompany a man but cannot lead him through life.

To begin with, Wilhelm Meister gives himself over entirely to the forces that belong to art, and especially the art of the theatre, with its beautiful illusions. If we follow the course of his life, we find that he is habitually torn to and fro between dissatisfaction and joy, and these swings of feeling are evident already during his time in the theatre. At last he experiences a kind of model performance of Hamlet, and this gives him a certain satisfaction within the limits of the theatrical world. His Ego is enhanced.

Two episodes are particularly important for understanding this first part of the story, the Years of Apprenticeship, and they show clearly that Goethe had the nature of egoism at the back of his mind. The first episode concerns little Mignon, who is found by Wilhelm Meister in somewhat dubious company and accompanies him as a wonderful attendant for a while.

Some very significant remarks about Mignon were made to Chancellor von Müller⁵¹ by Goethe in his old age. He referred to Madame von Stael's comment that all the part about Mignon was an episode which did not really belong to the story. Goethe agreed that anyone interested only in the external narrative might say that the Mignon episode could be left out. But it would be quite wrong to suppose, Goethe continued, that the part about Mignon was only an episode; in fact, the whole of Wilhelm Meister had been written on account of this remarkable figure.

Goethe was apt to express himself somewhat radically in conversation and to say things that are not to be taken literally. But if we go more deeply into the matter, we can come to see why he spoke in this way to Chancellor von Müller. In the figure of Mignon—this is not a personal name but means simply “the darling”—we are shown a human being who lives just long enough for the germ of anything that can properly be called egoism to develop in her. The whole psychology of Mignon is most remarkable. In her own naive way she expresses everything that could be called participation in the whole world. She never gives any sign of acting from selfish motives. Things that other people do out of self-interest are done by her quite naturally. She is naive in the sense that egoism has not yet awoken in her. Directly Wilhelm Meister embarks on an episode in his life which breaks his bond of union with Mignon, she fades away and dies, just as a plant withers when it has reached a certain stage in its existence. She is not yet a fully human person, not yet an “Ego”; she represents a childlike naiveté in relation to everything in the world around her. She dies as a plant dies, and one could indeed apply to her the lines:

Not asking why or wherefore blooms the rose,
Cares not for herself or whether men behold her.

One might say that two apparently identical actions are different when they are performed by different persons! What other people do out of egoism Mignon does naturally, and directly that there could be a question of an egoistic impulse arising in her soul, she dies. That is the enchantment of her character: we have before us a human being without ego-hood who slips through our fingers at the first stirring of egoism within her. And since Goethe was specially interested in egoism in Wilhelm Meister, it is quite conceivable that he should have said in effect at the time: What you are looking for in Wilhelm Meister, you will find in his counterpart, Mignon. The impulse that shows itself in the little creature, and dies with her at the moment of its appearance, is the same impulse that plagues Wilhelm Meister with so many difficulties when he tries to develop his Ego, and on account of which he has to go through a complete education in the school of life.

We then find woven into the story of Wilhelm Meister the apparently unconnected part called Confessions of a Beautiful Soul. It is known that these confessions are taken almost word for word from a diary kept by Goethe's friend, Susanne von Klettenberg. They show, one might say, the nature of egoism at its highest point. This beautiful soul, Susanne von Klettenberg, rose indeed to high levels, but these confessions bring out the danger of egoism, the reverse side of the enrichment of the Ego, for it is her own development that Susanne von Klettenberg describes.

First, she relates how, like other people, she delighted in the world around her. Then, one day, something awakens in her soul and tells her: “Living within you is something that will bring you nearer to the God within you.” These inward experiences have the effect of estranging her from the outer world; she no longer feels any interest in it. But she finds continual joy and blessedness and inward happiness in her experience of communion with what she inwardly calls her “God”. She withdraws entirely into her inner life. Yet this beautiful soul cannot escape from the feeling that her chosen way of life is nothing else than a refined form of egoism.

The dawning of this type of spiritual element in the soul, where it estranges a person from the outer world, shuts him off from his environment and makes him cold and heartless towards it, may bring him some satisfaction and a certain happiness, but in the long run it does him no good. By alienating him from the world around him it has a desolating effect on his soul. But this beautiful soul is also an energetic, striving soul, and she goes on from stage to stage.

She is not able to sever herself entirely from the impressions that come from the outer world and can lead to harmony with it. So she is forever seeking the mysteries that underlie the symbols of the various religions, hoping to see reflected there the divinity that had arisen in her soul. But whatever she can experience in these outer forms is not enough for her; she is resolved to go further. Finally, she is led to a remarkable stage in her life. One day she says to herself: Everything human on our earth was not too mean for God to descend and incarnate himself in a man. And at that moment she feels that the outer world is not debased by being only an expression of the spiritual rather than the spiritual itself, or because it represents a decadence of the spiritual; for now she feels that the outer world is permeated by the spirit and that man has no right to detach himself from his environment.

Then another experience comes to her and she says to herself: It was a true event that is said to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. She enters into this and experiences in herself the whole life of Christ Jesus up to His crucifixion and death. She experiences the divine in herself in such a way that—as she clearly describes—everything which appears to the physical senses as external image recedes and becomes purely spiritual experience; the invisible becomes visible and the inaudible, audible. Now she feels herself united not with an abstract divinity, but with a divine presence belonging to the earthly world. But she has again withdrawn in a certain sense and cannot find her way back into ordinary life. Then something comes to her which enables her to see in every natural object, in every detail and circumstance of daily life, the imprint of the spiritual; and she regards this as a kind of highest stage. And it is characteristic of Goethe that it was for him a kind of confession to be able to communicate the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul.

What was it that Goethe wished to indicate here as an important point in Wilhelm Meister's education? Wilhelm Meister was to read the manuscript and be led by it to a higher stage. He was to be shown that a man cannot do enough to develop in himself an active life of soul; he cannot go far and high enough in what may be called intercourse with the spiritual world; but also that to shut himself off from the outer world cannot lead to a satisfying existence, and that he can understand the great world around him only when his own enriched inner being flows out to meet it.

Thus Goethe wishes to show that a man can take the surrounding world just as it is; he will then see it as ordinary and trivial and will remain bound to the commonplace. But then he will perhaps say to himself: All that is commonplace: the spiritual can be found only by looking within oneself. And we can indeed find the spiritual there, on a very high level. But we are then all the more in duty bound, for our own sake, to return to the outer world; and now we find that the commonplace has a spiritual dimension. The same world stands before a trivially minded man and a man who has found the spirit within himself. The former accepts the ordinary trivial world of present-day Monism; the latter, having first enriched his spiritual faculties and developed the appropriate organs in himself, is aware of the spiritual behind everything perceived by the senses. Thus, for Goethe, inner development is an indirect way of gaining knowledge of the world. This is evident, above all, in the soul characterised as Wilhelm Meister. He is helped to progress by the influences that work on him from the hidden side of life.

Towards the end of the Years of Apprenticeship we are shown that behind Wilhelm Meister there is something like an occult society, which guides a human being while remaining invisible to him. Some critics have complained that this kind of thing belongs to the 18th century and can have no interest for people today. For Goethe, however, something quite different was involved. He wished to show that Wilhelm Meister's Ego really had to find its way through the various labyrinths of life, and that a certain spiritual guidance of mankind does exist. The “Society of the Tower”, by which Wilhelm Meister is guided, was meant to be only the outer garment of spiritual powers and forces by which a man is led, even though the course of his life may lie through “folly and confusion”; and by these invisible powers Wilhelm Meister was guided.

In our time, such things are dismissed with a condescending smile. But in our time, also, the Philistines have acquired the sole right to pass judgment on personalities such as Goethe. Anyone who knows the world will concede that no-one can find more in a man than he has in himself. And anyone could say it in relation to Goethe. But that is just what the Philistine does not say; he believes he has found in Goethe everything there is to find. For he possesses the entire range of wisdom and can survey it from his vantage-point! Naturally, he makes Goethe into a Philistine, but that is not Goethe's fault.

Wilhelm Meister's life is continued in the Years of Travel. Both Philistines and non-Philistines have been moved to protest at the lack of composition and the inartistic character of this sequel. Yes, indeed, Goethe served up something rather dreadful here. In his prime, out of his life-experience, he had wanted to show a person finding their way through the labyrinths of life, had wanted to present a mirror-image of himself in a certain sense; and he has told us how this was composed. He had taken great pains over the first part of the Years of Travel, but printing began before the later part was finished, and the printer set the type faster than Goethe could write. Goethe then had somehow to sketch out the rest. In earlier years he had written various tales and stories, for example the story of the “Holy Family”, the story of the “Nutbrown Maiden”, the “Tale of the New Melusine”, and others. All these are included in the Years of Travel volume, although never intended for it. Goethe inserted these stories at various points and made quick transitions between them. Obviously, anything like orderly composition was ruled out; but still the work did not go fast enough.

Goethe had various other writings left over from earlier years, and these he now gave to his secretary, Eckermann, saying: “Slip in somewhere whatever can be slipped in!” So Eckermann patched in these remnants, and naturally the separate items are often very loosely connected. Hence it can well be said that this is an entirely formless work, and anyone is at liberty to judge it in this way from an artistic standpoint. But, after all, not a line of it was written by Eckermann. It is all by Goethe, and throughout he was giving expression to experiences of his own, with the figure of Wilhelm Meister constantly before him. Thus he was able to bring in events from his own life which had set their mark on his soul. And since Wilhelm Meister is a reflected image of himself, the various episodes meander through the story even as they had meandered through his own life, and the picture we gain from them is by no means irrelevant.

It has been said that the narrative lacks tension and is repeatedly interrupted by sagely discourses. Some people criticise the book from the ground up without having read it. They are, of course, right from their own point of view, but it is not the only one. We can learn an immense amount from these Years of Travel if we can muster the interest and the goodwill to raise ourselves to the level of the experiences from which Goethe learnt so much. And that is something. Must every piece of writing be skillfully composed if it can be of service to us in some other way? Is a lack of formal design so fatal? Perhaps the wealth of wisdom in Wilhelm Meister is fatal for those who know everything and have nothing more to learn.

It is precisely in this second part of Wilhelm Meister that we find described in a wonderful way how the Ego can rise to ever higher levels and become the peak of existence. We are shown in a particularly beautiful way how Wilhelm Meister takes his son Felix to a remarkable educational establishment. This, too, has been condemned by the Philistines. They have not stopped to think that Goethe had no intention of presenting this establishment as though it existed somewhere or other in the real world. He wished to give a kind of symbolic survey of the nature of education in his “pedagogical province”.

People who visit this establishment are surprised to see how the life of the soul is given expression in certain gestures. In one gesture the hands are folded on the breast and the eyes turned upwards. In another, the hands are clasped behind the back while the pupils stand side by side. Especially significant is the gesture which gives an impression of the soul bowing towards the earth. If questions are asked about the meaning of all this, one is told that the boys are taught to kindle in their souls the “three venerations”, whereby the soul's development can be carried to ever higher levels. The three venerations are presented as the most important of all educational principles. First, a man must learn to look up with veneration to what is above him. Then he must learn to venerate what lies beneath him, so that he may realise how he himself has grown up from it. Then he must learn to venerate what stands beside him as equality between man and man, for only thus can he learn to venerate his own Ego in the right way. By these means he will be brought into harmony with the world around him and egoism cannot go astray.

We are then shown how the most important religions are to carry their influences into the human soul. The folk or ethnic religions should take the form of gods or spirits standing above man. The philosophical religions, as they could be called, are to inculcate veneration for our equals. And the teaching that leads us down into existence and enables us to look with proper veneration on death, sorrow and the hindrances in the world—this teaching, though it can easily be despised, leads to a right understanding of the Christian religion. For it is emphasised that the Christian religion shows how God came down into a physical body, took on himself all the misery of life and went through everything human. Veneration for what is below us should especially promote a right understanding of the Christian religion.

Thus the development of the human being is set before us with precision. Goethe describes how Wilhelm Meister is led to a kind of temple, where deeply significant pictures of the three religions are brought before the souls of the pupils from their earliest youth, and we are shown how everything in this utopian school is intended to produce a harmonious whole. But the school gives expression even more to the wise principle that from his earliest years a human being should grow up in such a way that, on the one hand, he finds harmony with his environment, while, on the other, he finds it possible to lead his Ego to ever-greater heights.

This principle is applied to all details. For example, a boy's age is not indicated by the clothes he wears. He is offered a varied range of garments and has to choose those he prefers. In this way the individual characteristics of the pupils are brought out. Moreover, since a kind of esprit de corps is always apt to develop, with the result that a weaker boy will imitate a stronger by choosing the same outfit, to the detriment of his own individuality, the rule is that garments are exchanged for others at frequent intervals. In brief, Goethe wished to show how the growing boy should be educated, even down to his gestures and clothes, in a way that will lead him to a life in harmony with the world around him, while promoting his inner freedom as an individual.

It has been said that all this is a fantasy and that nothing like it has ever existed. But Goethe meant to imply only that the plan could be realised somewhere at some time; the thoughts in question would flow out into the “all and everywhere” and would find an embodiment when and where they could. Those who think this impossible might be advised to read Fichte;⁵² he set a high ideal before his students, but he knew what he was doing, and to those who called themselves realists while knowing little about reality, he said: We know as well as you do: and perhaps better, that ideals cannot be realised immediately in ordinary life, but ideals must be there, in order to act as regulators in life and to be transmuted into living. That must be emphasised ever and again. And of those who reject all ideals, Fichte said that in the reckoning of Providence they were left out; but may a good God—he added—grant them rain and sunshine at the right times, a good digestion and, where possible, good thoughts! This saying could be turned against those who assert that the educational establishment in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister could never exist in reality. It could exist, both in its principles and in its details, if there were people ready to give effect to such principles in a setting of everyday life.

A second episode in the Years of Travel introduces a remarkable personality, Makarie, who exemplifies in the highest degree a union of the individual Ego with the great Self of the world. Goethe shows us here a personality who is inwardly awakened and has developed the spirit in herself to such an extent that she lives in the spirit that permeates the world. The liberation of her inner powers gives her the knowledge that an expert astronomer acquires from calculating the courses of the stars. The highest spiritual-scientific researches are indicated by Goethe when he describes how through spiritual science the soul can enter into the life of the universe, and how self-knowledge can become world-knowledge and world-knowledge, self-knowledge. Thus in a series of pictures we are shown how the human self must pursue its development. Rightly understood, Wilhelm Meister is from beginning to end an example of how the development of man is related to the nature of egoism.

If we find in a writer an exposition of a problem so important for Spiritual Science, this is for us a further proof—already apparent in our considerations of Faust, the Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and Pandora⁵³—that in Goethe we have a genius who is at one with our Spiritual Science in its true sense. Goethe himself speaks in this sense when he says, in effect: We can grasp the nature of egoism only if we know that the wisdom of the cosmos had to lead man out of spiritual existence to the point where he could fall into the temptations of egoism. If this possibility had not been open to him, he could not have become the flower of all that surrounds him in the outer world. But if he succumbs to the temptations of egoism, he incurs a sentence of death on himself. The wisdom of the cosmos has ensured that everything good in the world can be overturned and appear in man as freedom, but directly he misuses his freedom and overturns himself, a measure of self-correction comes in.

Here again we have a chapter which shows us how everything bad and sinful in human nature, if we consider it from a higher standpoint, can be transmuted into good—into a pledge of man's eternal, ever ascending progress. And so, if we are not afraid to descend into the depths of pain and evil, all the teachings of spiritual science will lead us eventually to the heights, and will confirm the beautiful words which resound to us from the wisdom and poetry of ancient Greece:

Man is the shadow of a dream, but when
The sun-ray, Heaven-sent,
Shines in upon him, then
His day is bright,
And all his life transfused with sheer delight.⁵⁴

• 42. From the poem “Das Höchste”, 1795.
• 43. From the “Cherubinischen Wandersmann” by Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), Book 1, Verse 289.
• 44. End of the poem “Welt und Ich” by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866).
• 45. See note 5.
• 46. “Sprüche in Prosa”, vol. V, p.495 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften
• 47. See “Entwurf einer Farbenlehre”, vol. III, p.88 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften
• 48. Rudolf Steiner is here presumably referring to the sentence from Schopenhauer's introduction to his treatise “On Vision and Colours”: “That the colours which ... appear to clothe the objects are really only in the eye”.
• 49. In the conversation with Chancellor von Müller of 22nd January 1821.
• 50. “Spruche in Prosa”, vol. V, p.482 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften
• 51. In the conversation of 29th May, 1814.
• 52. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814. “Vorbericht” to Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten.
• 53. Rudolf Steiner is here referring to the lectures on 22nd and 24th October 1908: “Goethe's Secret Revelation, Exoteric and Esoteric” and on 11th and 12th March 1909: “The Riddles in Goethe's Faust, Exoteric and Esoteric”.
• 54. Cf. Pindar (522–C.448 B.C.) Pythian Odes, 8th Ode, 5th Epode.

The present lecture is to be a short preparation for the study of the Mystery of Golgotha, which will be more fully explained on the second day of our Easter Festival. As the basis for our study, let us take a text which to many appears incomprehensible, or, at any rate, difficult, and can only be understood when connected with the deepest esoteric meaning. This text will lead us to-day still deeper into the spirit and meaning of Christianity: ‘All sins may be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit.’

These words really contain the purpose and mission of Christianity, and Anthroposophy is the right instrument with which to reveal and express the profound meaning hidden in these words. Anthroposophy does not wish to inaugurate a new faith or found a new sect; the time is past when new faiths or new special religions can be founded. The task of the future is the formation of the already existing religions into one great common religion of humanity. Anthroposophy does not wish to preach a new religion; it is rather the means for teaching the various religions how to comprehend the profound truths contained in them, and which fundamentally are one and only one!

The tendency of the age is to make trivial the religious truths. From the modern standpoint people like to consider Christ Jesus as ‘the simple Man of Nazareth’; they like to look upon Him as a sort of higher ideal man, in somewhat the same manner as Socrates, Plato, Goethe and others are also looked upon as ideals; they do not wish to uplift Him too far above the level of humanity; they are far from recognising that in this Christ Jesus there lived something which towered far above humanity.

But in order to have at least some small perception of the Mystery of Christ Jesus we must throw a strong light upon the old Gnostic questions. We must bring to our help all human wisdom to understand what happened between the first and thirtieth years of our era.

The religious records are certainly not there to be explained by trivialities, and there is no wisdom deep or wise enough to unveil the deep meaning in this Mystery. It is certainly true that the understanding of this Mystery ought also to be brought down to the simple mind, but it is also true that it is so profound and full of wisdom that no wisdom reaches far enough to measure all its depths! From this standpoint and in this frame of mind we may first explain what is understood in Christianity—in true esoteric Christianity—by the Holy Spirit, the Son—also called the Word or Logos—and the Father. We shall not penetrate into the meaning of these conceptions by means of philosophic speculations; we shall not give them an arbitrary meaning. The meaning was attached by the initiates, and we have to keep to what was taught in the schools of the Christian Initiates. It is bad when one probes into the Bible and speculates as to what this or that means. We know that there are schools in which the meaning has been taught from very ancient times and it is always the same meaning, there was never a different knowledge; there were never at any time different standpoints in it.

If we hold to what has come most to the surface of history, we find the esoteric school which St. Paul had at Athens, the school of Dionysius. The learned are accustomed to speak of a pseudo Dionysius, because the existence of these schools is not sufficiently indicated by documentary evidence; only in the sixth century a.d. do we find written traditions of them.

We must clearly understand that as regards writing the custom has radically changed. When at the present day a person has a clever thought he cannot wait, but must have it printed at once and scattered over the world. But the earlier custom was otherwise. The profoundest thoughts were strictly withheld from publicity; they were not thrown at everybody’s head; they were only given to one who was known, only to one who had been found worthy to receive them. Only he who had a sense of truth was allowed to receive the truths. They were only given to one who devotedly and with a true feeling towards the truths, opened his heart to receive them. What the pupil had to acquire was calmness, a deep longing, a feeling of devotion towards the higher truths. This was quite a different view from that of the present day, for now everyone may receive the truths, quite irrespective of the frame of mind in which he approaches them. In those days, however, it was held that one might not receive indifferently a truth, for example, about the starry heavens. It was clearly understood that the frame of mind was important if the truths were really to influence: only in a pure and uplifted frame of mind were even simple truths received, such as the truths of mathematics, and the student’s preparation before he was allowed to receive the truths consisted in the production of the right frame of mind.

This was also the case in the school of St. Paul: the pupils were most strictly prepared before they were allowed to receive the highest truths. This preparation—as well as the subsequent training—was given by word of mouth; the living spirit passed on from teacher to pupil, for a long period of time, and the highest Initiates who were the vehicles of the esoteric truths, always bore the same name. Thus in the sixth century the recorder of the Dionysian training was still known as Dionysius. One has to know this in order to be able to judge correctly when a pseudo Dionysius is spoken of.

Now to-day let us investigate according to esoteric Christianity into the profound meaning of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In our lecture on the Lord’s Prayer we have already discussed this meaning. We have learned how the Godhead is expressed in the three higher principles of man. We have heard that behind the ‘Father’ stands the Divine Will, behind the ‘Kingdom’ there is the Word, the Logos, and behind the ‘Name’ the Holy Spirit.

We shall now consider these three principles from a different point of view, in the manner taught in Christian esoteric training. Let us briefly recall the relations between the higher and lower parts of man. We have always learned that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, and within the astral body dwells the ‘I’; this was once the so-called sacred quaternary. We have also learned how in the course of human evolution the three bodies are transformed. The ‘I’ transforms the astral body, which is the vehicle of passions, impulses and desires; it may also be called the consciousness- body. In esoteric Christianity one is also taught to ennoble, cleanse and purify this body; and as far as this takes place in man it is called the work of the Holy Spirit. One might say that that part of the astral body which is purified by Manas or Spirit-Self, is called in Christianity: ‘To be seized by the Holy Spirit.’

We know that the ‘I’ also works transformingly on the etheric body. Now this is much more difficult. What man receives from art and religion alone works in a transforming, ennobling way upon the etheric body. Art sees and perceives the Eternal; the Eternal shines through it, and the impulses of art act more strongly on the ennobling of mankind than all the laws of ethics. But the religious impulses work the most strongly! One who with deep devotion looks up to the Eternal, who opens himself towards It and allows It to stream in, receives Buddhi or Life-Spirit—in a Christian sense, the Logos, Christ. In esoteric Christianity this is known as ‘taking the Christ into oneself.’ In order to explain to you the third principle, the process of taking in the Father, you must allow me to make a slight digression.

I beg you always to remember that Anthroposophy is absolutely not a colourless theory, for then it would run into the danger of forming a sect; no, it is to act upon the daily life, it is to ennoble and spiritualise it—then it is practical Anthroposophy. It does not wish to weave fancies, to excogitate anything, it intends that the spirit shall flow into the whole of our civilisation, and therefore it also draws attention to the practical side.

When you are in the midst of life, when the multitude of impressions press in upon you from life, then what you experience in this way is but a portion of the sum-total of your experiences. One who does not take this into account cannot unravel the secrets of life! The anthroposophist looks deeper; he knows that the etheric body and the astral body are influenced in various ways by his daily experiences. What you take into yourselves consciously, what attracts your conscious attention, for example, as you go along the street, is expressed in ebullitions and currents in the astral body. The occultist can observe these ebullitions and movements. But there are other impressions which do not usually engage one’s full attention. I will give an example to explain what I mean. We walk along a street and pass numberless things which do not arouse our strict attention; we know that we have passed shop windows left and right, that there were buildings left and right, and that we met human beings and carriages, but our attention was not directed to them, we have not consciously received anything from them. However, it does not on this account pass by us without leaving a trace; it makes a certain impression upon us. When we look at a placard or skim through a comic paper, not only what we follow consciously remains within us, but the things of which we are unconscious also make an impression upon us. One is wont to say that these impressions remain below the threshold of consciousness; but in truth it is different. Many things act upon a human being without coming to his consciousness, and in the meantime they act upon him deeply and produce an important effect. To begin with, they act on the etheric body. This body is continually taking in impressions, and from this we may gather how tremendously important to human development is also that to which a person pays no attention.

Everything that takes place on the surface of civilisation acts upon human beings; all these things call forth pictures in them. But Anthroposophy indicates the undercurrents of our civilisation; again and again it emphasises the need of understanding the spiritual world which lies behind the physical, it draws attention to the deep connection between the external world and spiritual things.

One age thinks differently from another and has different inclinations; in one age the spiritual movements are higher and in another lower, depending more upon sensation. To the occult investigator all this which makes an impression upon the etheric body is reflected as secret influences which act upon human beings. When in an occult manner one investigates the temperament, inclinations and sentiments of the people in central Europe in the eleventh or twelfth century one has to trace back the results to the style of architecture, the art, the means of civilisation which at the time surrounded them. The effect upon a man of that particular age in passing along the street of his town was different from the effect produced upon a man of the present age; other objects surrounded him and other sentiments filled him.

One must not leave out of account the fact that what lies more deeply down than the consciousness, is profoundly influenced by such impulses. And on this account one must not undervalue the seriousness of the statement when I say that just at the present time it is in the underground of our civilisation that the real foundation for materialism is found. I should not on this account be considered as a reactionary. The one who guides his method of observation by spiritual truths knows that the profound and noble things which act upon the etheric body also provide it with constructive forces; and when he extends this method of observation to what is produced by the materialistic way of looking at things it is then clear to him that nothing can be done by theories and teachings if they do not come down to these things. A change for the better cannot be expected until the spiritual truths are reflected in what surrounds man and influences him, even though his attention may not be continually directed towards it. With these remarks as a basis we may now consider the part of the higher man called the Spirit Man, Atma, Father.

We know that, starting from ‘I,’ the physical body also can be transformed. This transformation takes place consciously through what is taught in esoteric training. All that the pupil can learn with the intellect, all that influences his astral body is only the preparation; the training begins when the ‘I’ begins to work upon the etheric body, when he conquers his temperament, his inclinations and habits, when he becomes a different man. Through this he gains insight into the higher worlds. All that he learns, all that gives him a theoretical insight, all sciences, only influence the astral body; but all that works upon his etheric body gives such an impetus to his development that gradually the spiritual organs are formed in him and he begins to see in the higher worlds. Thus we see how the astral body and etheric body are transformed. That which transforms the physical body comes from the breathing process; this purifies and spiritualises the physical body. Christian esotericism calls this the Father. We have to distinguish that as much as a person has within him of what purifies and transforms the astral body, so much has he of the Holy Spirit within him.

As far as a person has within him that which purifies and transforms the etheric body, so far has he the Son, the Logos, within him.

As far as a person has within him (this is only known to an Initiate) that which ennobles and transforms the physical body, so far has he the Father within him.

If we wish to distinguish between the sins or blasphemies against the Holy Spirit, against the Son, and against the Father, we have to remember what the esoteric teachers understood as the mission of Christianity. You will find this mission expressed in the words which Christ Jesus uttered when He was told that His mother and His brethren were outside: ‘He who does not leave father and mother, etc., has no part in Me,’ or ‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (Matt. 10, 37).

In Mark and Luke it is somewhat different. There He says: ‘My mother and My brethren are those who hear God’s word and do it’ (Luke 8, 21; Mark 3, 33; Matt. 12, 46-50).

In all these statements we have the true mission of Christianity; let us now go into this more closely and we shall gain at the same time the best preparation for our Easter Festival—the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we go a long way back along the path of the development of humanity we arrive at the Lemurian epoch. We know that ancient Lemuria lay south of present-day Asia, in the part now occupied by the Indian Ocean. In ancient Lemuria we find the four-membered, half-animal man, who indeed was already gifted with his fourfold nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the germ of the ‘I,’ but he was not yet able to work even to the very tiniest extent, on the three lower coverings, for the forces necessary for the work on these coverings had first to come into the vehicle of these coverings. That which is the content of your soul did not at that time exist in man! The ‘I’ was, as it were, a hollow space into which these forces could come, and this hollow space still exists within man. That which at the present time is called the depth of his inner being was formerly outside him, and at that time it sank into the human shell. Previously it was a part of the Divine Nature, it still rested in the Bosom of the Deity. We have often represented the outpouring of this divine part by saying that it was as if a number of little human sponges had each absorbed a drop, as it were, of this divine spiritual substance, which we pictured as a body of water. What is now within you, which forms your soul and which formerly rested in the Divine Bosom, was divided up among the several human bodies so that each one received a drop of this common divine substance. This common substance thus individualised itself into parts of the Deity. Just as each finger has its own life and still belongs to the whole human organism and from it receives its life, so each drop in each human being received its own life and dwelt in the human bodies which had prepared themselves to receive it and which waited to be ensouled by the Deity.

Now those human beings looked very different from what they do at present. You would be much astonished if I were to describe those grotesque bodies which absorbed the souls! Who worked so that these grotesque bodies developed into our present human bodies? Who did this? It is the work of the soul which is active within I From within, it shapes and forms the human body.

One may gain an idea of this work of the soul-forces by observing the remains of this self-out-shaping of the soul in the body of a human being of the present day; for example, when we consider the feeling of shame. The soul drives the blush of shame to the face; what is in the soul, namely, shame, expresses itself in the body in the blush of shame. Anxiety, fear, terror—these psychic experiences express themselves in the body as pallor. We all know that this is connected with the blood; the blood is the expression of the being that works within. But this only applies to warm blood! Just as it is true that at the present day in the feeling of shame, fear, anxiety and terror the ‘I’ acts on the blood and expresses itself in the body in a very limited way, so it is also true that in the remote past the effect was very great; at that time the blood expressed the inner force very accurately and minutely; it formed and fashioned the human figure through the several races. The inner experiences and feelings fashioned the human body when it was still soft and plastic, and their activity, their constructive forces, worked indirectly through the blood. The creator, the inner being, the power which shaped the body plastically, worked from the ‘I,’ indirectly through the blood, at the construction of the human being. Thus we may recognise that the blood is the vehicle of the ‘I.’

In this thought we have an explanation of the statement in the Bible that Adam was hundreds of years old. This depends upon endogamy or near marriage. In the earlier days of human evolution we find in every race smaller groups who were related to one another by blood, for they married exclusively within their groups and tribes. This had an important result, which is indicated in the following conversation between the authors Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger describes his peasants in a dry matter-of-fact way, but Anzengruber describes them much more vividly, his peasants truly live before us. Once when these two authors were together, Rosegger gave Anzengruber the advice that he ought to go to the country and there live for a time amongst the peasants in order to see them and thus be able to describe them more vividly. But Anzengruber answered: ‘That I would never do, for then I should forget all my art. I have never seen a peasant, but the understanding of them is in my blood; I do not need to have seen them to be able to describe them, for the blood of generations of peasants flows through my veins. The spirit which lives in the peasants Eves in me, it passes through my father, grandfather and great-grandfather to me—for all my ancestors were peasants.’

Thus in Anzengruber there was still a degree of the peasant consciousness. And this was much more the case in ancient times! In those days a son did not merely feel in the same way as his father and grandfather had felt, but in him there was actually a vivid remembrance of the experiences of his ancestors.

There was a time when man had in his memory not only what he himself, but also what his father and grandfather had experienced. And therefore in those ancient, strictly limited communities a son said in regard to what his father had experienced: ‘I have experienced’ it. This was also the case in the generation of Adam, his ‘I’ was preserved for nine hundred years.

The ‘I’ continued through the generations; it was a common ‘I,’ a group ‘I.’ This ‘I’ which passed through several generations was called ‘Adam,’ and for this reason it is said that Adam lived for so long. This fact is hidden behind the statements in the Bible regarding the longevity of the persons mentioned at the beginning of the Bible.

From this we see how the blood, which was common to these narrowly limited groups, comes into consideration as the expression of the inner creative soul of man and how it binds these people to a certain extent into unity.

Now how was this broken through? By what means was the memory of the human being limited to his own life? It was through exogamy! By this means the narrowly limited tribe was loosened and expanded into a nation. Man would have been unable to develop if this strict community had not been broken through. The memory of the members of these blood-related communities extended up through the generations. Now we must remember that the vehicle of the memory is the etheric body. And here we have the intimate connection between the blood and the etheric body. The ‘I’ imprints itself into the etheric body, and is expressed in that which shoots into the blood.

Let us remember what he who is to be initiated has to accomplish in his etheric body and we shall to-day learn what this has to do with his blood. We know whence these schools of initiation originated; they can be traced back to the ancient Turanian Adept-Schools of Atlantis. And let us now call to mind how initiation took place. We know that when the pupil was sufficiently prepared he was put into a sleep by the Initiator for three days, and this made it possible for the Initiator to lift the etheric body of the pupil out of his physical body. The etheric body then lived in the higher worlds; the pupil consciously experienced the higher worlds; he knew their reality from his own experience. Only through his being prepared did he gain this power. When he returned again into his physical body he could bear witness to the reality of the higher worlds in which he had lived.

We see that this initiation depended upon one thing. The pupil had to suppress his consciousness, which was absolutely under the control of the Initiator. The Initiators worked through the Initiates into life, to a certain extent they were at the head of the social structure, they were there like a social pyramid, everyone believed them, everyone looked up to them. Through acting upon the impulses of the Initiates they had everything under their authority. And this authority was founded upon truth and wisdom, for only wise ones might exercise this authority without harm coming to humanity.

In Initiation all depends upon leading out the etheric body in the right way. The Initiator could not do this with everyone. In order to initiate a person in this way long and careful preparations were necessary. It depended upon the blood of the neophyte being of the right composition. This was the reason for the great value attached to the priestly caste or tribe which might not be mixed with other blood. For centuries they were prepared; people were brought together who were necessary for this right mixture of blood, until one was produced who could become an Initiate. This was handling human life in grand style! The greatest Initiates were prepared for centuries with respect to their mixture of blood. This was the method of initiation of pre-Christian times. But this could not remain the same for ever in the course of human development; for with what is it connected? It is connected with the small blood-communities. The further we go back the more do we come to this principle of initiation. Then this blood principle was broken through; the family expanded to the tribe and the tribe to the nation. It was then proclaimed that all such limited blood-ties had to be broken through; for where dwelt the communal principle in man? It came through his blood. When in ancient times it was made possible by means of warm blood for the Divine to be implanted in the developing humanity—how did this implantation take place? It surged through the blood. Where did He work most powerfully Who said: ‘I Am He Who is, Who was and Who will be’? In the blood running through the veins. When one led a human being to the highest, to initiation, one led him by handling his blood!

He who only considers the Mystery of Christianity externally understands it badly! Christianity itself is a mystical fact! We can only understand it as we understand the mystery of blood.

With the advent of Christ Jesus a new configuration of our planet came about! If someone on another planet had been able to observe ours, from a few centuries before Christ, if he had directed his attention to it through the centuries and right into the distant future, if he saw it, not with his physical eyes, but directing his attention to the astral and etheric atmosphere of our planet, he would have seen that from the sixth century before Christ our planet slowly changed. Then it made a sudden leap, it gained a new impulse; something else entered into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Only he who admits that there is something spiritual around the earth, and who considers this as something real and actual, can understand what this means! He who considers it in this way will find the expression for this transformation in the spiritual, and to such an one we say: All that holds people together in small blood communities gradually breaks asunder. There comes the time when a person leaves father, mother, etc. All that which acts upon the blood as a kind of ‘group “ I ”’ has to disappear from the earth! When it is ready to become a new, astral planet all this must have disappeared and in the place of what has disappeared something new will come I A great bond of brotherhood will then bind humanity, and the impulse for this brotherhood is given by Christ Jesus! He is the spiritual fact which effects this transformation. Hence the ideal which He presents when He says, ‘He who does not leave father and mother cannot be My disciple,’ and the indication which He gives: ‘They who believe in the Divine Spirit are My brothers and My sisters !’ Hence the non-recognition of those related to Him, for these ties of blood were something which had been overcome. It is from this standpoint that we have to consider these words of Christ, not as a symbol, not as a comparison, but as reality I For they are a reality!

Now consider the uplifted cross and the blood which flows from the wounds 1 Understand well the profound significance of this in the course of the world’s history I Why does it flow? Why is the blood spoken of? It is that which has to lose its importance in this narrow sense if humanity is to broaden out to the coming ideal, to the common brotherhood! That which is to make all humanity one is no longer to depend upon the blood which pulsates in the ‘I.’ Therefore the superfluous ‘I’-blood flows through the wounds of Christ. All egoistic, self-seeking blood which unites a man with mother, father, brother, sister—all this has to flow! This is the real fact! With the amount of blood which flows there is lost the tendency to form limited communities, and there originates the tendency for the whole of humanity to be united into one great community. No one has come so close to this as Richard Wagner in his ‘Parsifal’ I Never did an exoteric person approach so closely to the deepest truth of the esoteric secrets of Christianity!

When we learn to understand it in this way, we shall see that the deepest purpose of Christianity is to unloose that which binds mankind within narrow egoistic limits. It will split up mankind into individuals who feel themselves to be separate, and who unite again in love of their own free will; who increase in individuality to the same extent that they feel themselves to be part of the whole world. This you see in the Mystery of Golgotha, in this religious impulse. which is of the very greatest importance. Here everything that is to come about in the future is prepared! It begins to work at Whitsuntide when the Holy Spirit is poured forth, that is, when the understanding of this tie of brotherhood begins to stir. This is expressed in a most beautiful symbol when we are told that the Apostles spoke to all nations in every tongue! That which had flowed through the blood of the Logos is there spread abroad by the Holy Spirit!

Let us go back to the ancient principle of initiation. At that time everything depended upon the Initiates. The whole of civilisation received its impulses from them. This now ceased. The splitting up of mankind into individuals had to take place and thereby the impulse towards brotherhood was created at the same time. The ancient principle of initiation exercised by the Initiators of truth and wisdom no longer sufficed if humanity was to mature to this brotherhood. Each human being must himself be in possession of truth and wisdom. We then see the spreading abroad of this wisdom step by step and its co-operation with the individual, in the activity of the Holy Spirit, how it worked from then onwards in humanity. As long as man listened to authority he could live quietly in the narrowest circles, for this authority took care of the whole group; but this now ceases, the limited community is broken through, each one must now take care of himself; each individual has now to receive that which holds good for each human being. What can this be?

The wisdom which was poured into humanity through the Initiates was One; when, however, it was to be given to the individual human being it was specialised. Thus originated the teachings which Buddha, Zoroaster, Hermes and others brought to mankind; the smaller the community the more it was specialised.

When brotherhood was founded there had to flow down into the whole of humanity that of which the Initiates had formerly taken care. In this wisdom we have that which unites, that which will unite the human beings who have left father and mother. But so far removed are people from this universal wisdom that they talk about ‘their own opinions,’ and they say, ‘I find this,’ ‘I believe that.’ They have passed over to egotism; they are in a condition of separation, but they have not yet made their connection with universal wisdom. They are as individual as possible! They must first disaccustom themselves from saying, when they are speaking about the knowledge of wisdom, ‘This is my standpoint.’ That is a childish position! There is no special standpoint in regard to wisdom. He only has comprehended the idea of the Holy Spirit who has comprehended that truth and wisdom are one I He who presses forward along the path knows that there is no such thing as different standpoints in truth; he knows that he is dealing with a fundamental unity. He no longer needs to attach himself to an authority, because the universal common Spirit of Wisdom and Truth joins mankind together into the great brotherhood I That is the experience at Whitsuntide, when the Apostles speak from the hearts of all men to all men. The festival of Whitsuntide is the indication that with the development of the highest authority, the Spirit of Truth unites us all. That which from that time on will live and work is the unifying wisdom which can be revealed to us as soon as we open ourselves to it and wish to receive it!

And he who sins against this wisdom which forms humanity into one brotherhood, he who sins against this universal Spirit of Truth and Wisdom, commits the great sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven him, because he is sinning against the development of the earth, because he is teaching the spirit of division and not the Unifying Spirit who will form the brotherhood of the future.

What teaches us this Unifying Spirit? Anthroposophy! Therefore positive Anthroposophy is also positive wisdom. It does not wish to preach in general ethical terms, for it is unnecessary to preach brotherhood to humanity; it wishes to give humanity wisdom, concrete wisdom which must lead to brotherhood. It gives this wisdom by teaching people to understand their own being, by answering the profound riddles of existence as to the whence and whither of man, by teaching the evolution of the world! He who thus penetrates into the wisdom, he who thus gathers knowledge, he who is prepared in this way by the positive teachings of Anthroposophy, comes entirely of himself to the union with humanity, for people are united into a brotherhood when the Sun of Wisdom unites them in the spirit; it completely ennobles them, completely transfigures them, completely unites them.

That is the mission of Christianity. Christianity is the expression of the connection between human beings who are becoming freer and freer, and it is the union in perfect freedom into a brotherhood in the light of the one truth I This brotherhood develops entirely of itself when you pay heed to those sublime words of Christ: ‘Ye will know truth by means of truth and the truth shall make you free.’

There will not be two thoughts about one and the same thing when humanity has come to this brotherhood in the spiritual; that is the profound meaning of this statement.

When humanity has known the truth, when it has lived the truth, it will have found the truth, through itself; it will then be truly free and will know the depth of the statement: ‘Ye will know the truth by means of truth and will make yourselves free!’