The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is no doubt that the Spiritual Science we have been studying for many years is beginning to make more and more headway in the world and to find increasing understanding in the hearts and minds of our contemporaries. It might be useful occasionally to speak of how the ideas of Spiritual Science are being made known and many of you would be glad to know what effect the spiritual nourishment you have yourselves received has had upon others at the present time. It is only now and then that I can speak of this spread of spiritual-scientific thought in the outer world, but it will be some satisfaction to you to know that we can see how the spirit inspiring us all is finding entry in various countries. I could see, for instance, that our ideas were beginning to find a footing when I was lecturing in the south of Austria, in Trieste, recently. Then, when I gave a course of lectures in Copenhagen¹ only a few days ago, there too it was evident that the spirit we are trying to cultivate under the symbol of the Rose Cross is gaining more and more ground. Signs such as these make it clear that there is a need and also a longing for what we call Spiritual Science.

It is fundamental to the spirit informing our Movement that we should refrain from any agitation or propaganda and far rather pay heed to the great, all-embracing wisdom needed by the hearts and souls of modern men if they are to feel any security in life to-day. It is our duty to make these spiritual thoughts into real nourishment for our souls. You will certainly have understood enough of the great law of Karma to know that it is by no chance or accident that an individual feels urged to come down into the physical world at this particular time. The souls of all of you here have felt the longing to incarnate in a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century because of a desire to experience what can be achieved in the present physical environment.

Let us look at our own epoch and see how its spiritual aspect appears to souls which, like yours, have been born into it. At the turn of the century conditions were very different from what they had been fifty or sixty years earlier. Human beings who—like all of you here—are growing up at the present time, attempt now and then to hear about the spiritual guidance and leadership of the world, about the spiritual forces and influences pervading the external world in the different kingdoms of nature and penetrating into the souls of men. But for the last fifty years a soul longing and searching for spiritual nourishment has found very little. This longing has been present in the depths of men's souls, although it may have been a very faint voice, easily silenced. Nevertheless the longing is there and everyone is seeking for spiritual nourishment, whatever his position in life and whatever use he may make of his faculties. No matter in what department of science you may be working to-day, you learn only external, material facts; they can be utilised very cleverly and ingeniously to advance modern culture but they are no help at all towards understanding what the spirit may reveal. No matter whether you are an artist or are engaged in some practical work, you will find little that can pass into head or hand to give you not only energy and impetus for your work but also security and comfort in life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century people had forebodings that in the near future very little spiritual nourishment would be left. During the first half of the century, when vestiges of an old spiritual life were still present, although in a different form, many people felt that there was something in the air presaging the complete disappearance of the ancient treasures of the spirit handed down by tradition from olden times. Yet it is precisely the legitimate progress of culture during the nineteenth century that will completely wipe out the spiritual traditions handed down from the past.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, many voices are to be heard speaking in this strain and I will quote one example of a man who lived during that period and had a wide knowledge of the old form of theosophy, but who also knew that owing to the course of events in that century it was bound to disappear; at the same time he was convinced that a future must come when there would be a revival of this old theosophy but in a new form. I am going to read you a passage written towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, in 1847. Its author was a thinker of a type no longer in existence to-day—men who were still sensitive to the last echoes of those old traditions which have now been lost for a considerable time.—

‘It is often difficult to learn among the older theosophists what the real purpose of theosophy is ... but it is clear that along the paths it has taken hitherto, theosophy can acquire no real existence as a science nor achieve any result in a wider sphere. Yet it would be very ill-advised to conclude that it is a phenomenon scientifically unjustifiable and also ephemeral. History itself decisively disproves this: it shows how this enigmatic phenomenon could never make itself really effective in the world but for all that was continually breaking through and was held together in its manifold forms by the chain of a never-dying tradition. ... At all times there have been very few in whom this insistent speculative need has been combined with a living religious need. But theosophy is for these few alone. ... The important thing is that if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered.

But all this lies in the womb of the future which we do not wish to anticipate. For the moment let us be thankful for the beautiful presentation given by Oetinger, which will certainly be appreciated in wide circles.’

This shows what a man such as Rothe of Heidelberg felt about the theosophical spirit in 1847. The passage is from his Preface to a treatise on Oetinger, a theosophist living in the second half of the eighteenth century.

What, then, can be said about the spirit of theosophy? It is a spirit without which the genuine cultural achievements of the world would never have been possible. Thinking of its greatest manifestations, we shall say: Without it there would never have been a Homer, a Pindar, a Raphael, a Michelangelo; there would have been no depth of religious feeling in men, no truly spiritual life and no external culture. Everything that man creates he must create from out of the spirit. If he thinks that he can create without it he is ignorant of the fact that although in certain periods spiritual striving falls into decline, the less firmly rooted a thing is in the spirit the more likely it is to die. Whatever has eternal value stems from the spirit and no created thing survives that is not rooted in it. But since everything a man does is under the guidance of the spiritual life, the very smallest creation, even when used for the purposes of everyday life, has an eternal value and connects him with the spirit. We know that our own theosophical life has its source in what we have called the Rosicrucian stream; and it has often been emphasised that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom have been preparing conditions that began at the end of the nineteenth century and will continue in the twentieth. The future longed for and expected by Rothe of Heidelberg is already the present and should be recognised as such. But those who caused this stream to flow into souls, at first in a way imperceptible to men, have been preparing conditions for a long, long time. In a definite sense what we have called the Rosicrucian path since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is present in our Theosophical Movement in a more conscious form; its influence has flowed into the hearts and minds of the peoples of Europe and sets its stamp upon them.

From what has happened in European culture, can we form an idea of how this spirit has actually taken effect? I said just now that it has worked as the true Rosicrucian spirit since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; it was always present although only at that time did it assume Rosicrucian form. This Rosicrucian spirit goes back to a very distant past—it had its Mysteries even in Atlantean times. The influence has been taking effect for long ages, becoming more and more conscious as it streamed into the hearts and souls of men.

Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit made its way into humanity. We meet together here and our studies help us to perceive ways in which the human soul develops and gradually rises to regions where it can understand the spiritual life, and perhaps actually behold it. Many of you have for years been trying to let concepts and ideas which mirror the spiritual life stream into your souls as spiritual nourishment. You know how we have tried to acquire some understanding of the riddles of the world. I have often described the different stages of the soul's development and how it can rise to the higher worlds; how a higher part of the Self must be distinguished from a lower part; how man has come from other planetary conditions, having passed through a Saturn-, a Sun- and a Moon-evolution, during which his physical, etheric and astral bodies were formed; and how finally he entered into the period of Earth-evolution. I have told you that there is something within us that must receive its training here on the Earth in order to rise to a higher stage. We have also said that the development of certain beings—the Luciferic beings—was retarded during the Old Moon-period and they later approached man's astral body as tempters, and also in order to impart to him certain qualities. I have often told you too how man must overcome certain tendencies in his lower self and through this conquest rise into the spheres to which his higher Self belongs, into the higher regions of the spiritual life. Words of Goethe must be remembered:

And as long as thou knowest it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou art but a troubled guest
Upon the dark Earth!

The degree of development that is possible to-day and can give strength, assurance and a genuine content to life is within our reach if we acquire knowledge of the manifold nature of man and realise that his constitution is not a haphazard medley but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. We have formulated definite ideas, for example of the temperaments, by studying the process of education and the development of the physical body up to the seventh year, of the etheric body up to the fourteenth and of the astral body up to the twenty-first year. By studying the mission of Truth, of Prayer, of Anger, our ideas of the three bodies, of the sentient soul, intellectual or mind-soul and consciousness—or spiritual soul, do not remain mere abstractions but impart meaning, clarity and content to our existence.

In this way we have achieved some understanding of the riddles of the world. And although there are large numbers of people outside our circle who still, consciously or unconsciously, persist in materialism, there are nevertheless many souls who feel it necessary to their very existence to listen to expositions of the kind we have been able to give. Many of you would not have been present among us for years, sharing our experiences and activities if it were not a necessity of your very lives. Why are there souls to-day who understand these things and for whom the ideas and concepts developed here become a guide on their life's way? The reason is this.—Just as you have been born into the modern world with these longings, so our forbears in Europe—and this means very many of those present here to-day—were born during past centuries into a world and environment very different from those of the nineteenth century. Let us cast our minds back to the sixth, seventh or even the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era when many of those present here were incarnated, and think of the sort of things that souls then living might have experienced.

In those times there was no Theosophical Society where subjects such as those with which we are concerned were studied; the influence of the environment upon the souls of men took a very different form. People did not travel about giving lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects, but minstrels went from village to village, from city to city, proclaiming the spirit. These minstrels did not speak about theosophy, about the lower and higher Ego, about man's physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on. As they moved around the land their mission was to speak of the spirit in the way it was wont to be proclaimed at that time. The following story was told all over Middle and Eastern Europe.—

Once upon a time there was a King's son. During a ride one day he heard moans coming from a ditch, and following the course of the ditch in order to discover the source of the moans, he found an old woman. He dismounted, climbed down into the ditch and helped the old woman who had fallen into it, to get out. Then he saw that she had injured her leg and could not walk. He asked her how the accident happened and she told him: ‘I am old and I have to get up soon after midnight to go to the city and sell my eggs; on the way I fell into this ditch.’ The King's son said to her: ‘You cannot get home by yourself so I will put you on my horse and take you.’ This he did, and the woman said to him: ‘Although you are of noble birth, you are a kind and good man; and because you have helped me I will give you a reward.’ He guessed now that she was not an ordinary woman, for she said: ‘You shall have the reward which your kind soul has earned. Do you want to marry the Flower-Queen's daughter?’ ‘Yes!’ he replied. She went on: ‘For that you will need something that I can easily give you,’ and she gave him a little bell, saying: ‘If you ring this bell once the Eagle-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; if you ring twice the Fox-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; and if you ring three times the Fish-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself.’—The King's son took the little bell and returned home, announced that he was going to search for the Flower-Queen's daughter, and rode off. He rode a long, long way but nobody could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. By this time his horse was completely exhausted and could carry him no longer so that he was obliged to continue his journey on foot. He came across an aged man and asked him where the Flower-Queen lived. ‘I cannot tell you,’ the aged man replied, ‘but go on and on and you will find my father who may perhaps be able to tell you.’ So the King's son went on, year after year, and then found another, still more aged man. He asked him: ‘Can you tell me where the Flower-Queen lives?’ But the aged man replied: ‘I cannot tell you, but you must go on and on for many more long years and you will find my father who will certainly be able to tell you where the Flower-Queen lives.’—So the King's son went on and at last found an old, old man and asked him if he could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. The old man replied: ‘The Flower-Queen lives far away, in a mountain which you can see from here in the distance. But she is guarded by a fearsome Dragon. You cannot get near at present for this is a time when the Dragon never sleeps; he sleeps at certain times only and this is one of his waking periods. But you must go a little further, to another mountain, and there you will find the Dragon's mother; through her you will attain your goal.’ So he went on and found the Dragon-mother, the very archetype of ugliness. But he knew that whether he could find the Flower-Queen's daughter would depend on her. Then he saw seven other dragons around her, all eager to guard the Flower-Queen and her daughter who had been long imprisoned and were destined to be set free by the King's son. So he said to the Dragon-mother: ‘I know that I must become your servant if I am to find the Flower-Queen.’ ‘Yes’, she said, ‘you must become my servant and perform a task that is not easy. Here is a horse which you must lead to pasture the first day, the second day and the third. If you can bring it home in good condition you may possibly achieve your object after three days. But if you fail, the dragons will devour you—we shall all devour you.’ The King's son agreed to this and the next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to pasture but it soon disappeared. He searched for it in vain and was in despair. Then he remembered the little bell given him by the old woman, took it out and rang it once. A host of eagles gathered, led by the Eagle-King, looked for the horse and found it, so that the King's son was able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She said to him: ‘Because you have brought the horse back I will give you a cloak of copper so that you can attend the Ball tonight at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ Then, on the second day, he was again given the horse to take to pasture, but again it disappeared and he could not find it. So he took out the bell and rang it twice. Immediately the Fox-King appeared with a host of his followers; they looked for and found the horse and the King's son was again able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She then said to him: ‘To-day you shall have a cloak of silver so that you can attend the Ball to-night at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ At the Ball the Flower-Queen said to him: ‘On the third day ask for a foal of that horse and with it you will be able to rescue me and we shall be united.’ Then, on the third day, the horse was again handed to him to lead to pasture, and again it soon disappeared, for it was very wild. So he took out the bell and rang it three times, whereupon the Fish-King appeared with his followers, found the horse, and for the third time the King's son brought it home. He had now successfully performed his task. The Dragon-mother then presented him with a mantle of gold as his third garment in order that on the third day he might attend the Flower-Queen's Ball. He was also given as a fitting reward the foal of the horse he had cared for. With it he was able to lead the Flower-Queen and her daughter to their own castle. And around the castle, since there were others who wanted to steal her daughter, the Flower-Queen caused a thick hedge to grow to prevent the castle from being invaded. Then the Flower-Queen said to the King's son: ‘You have won my daughter and henceforth she shall be yours, but only on one condition. You may keep her for half the year but for the other half she must return beneath the surface of the earth and be restored to me. Only on this condition can you be united with her.’ So the King's son won the Flower-Queen's daughter and lived with her for half the year, while for the other half she was with her mother.—

This story, as well as others like it, was listened to by many people in those days. They listened and drank in what they heard but did not, like many modern theosophists, proceed to invent allegories, for symbolic or allegorical interpretations of such matters are valueless. People listened to the stories because they were a source of delight to them and a warm glow pervaded their souls as they listened. They wanted nothing more than this as they listened to the story of the Flower-Queen and the King's son with his bell and his wooing of the Flower-Queen's daughter.

There are many souls alive to-day who in those days heard such tales with inner delight, and the effects lived on in them. Their feelings and perceptions were converted into thoughts and experiences and their souls were transformed by new forces. These forces have changed into the longing for a higher interpretation of the same secrets, a longing for Spiritual Science. In those days the wandering minstrels did not go about saying that man strives towards his higher self and to that end must overcome his lower self which holds him back. They gave their message in the form of a story about a King's son who rode out into the world, heard moans coming from a ditch and thereupon performed a good deed. To-day we speak simply of a good deed, a deed of love and sacrifice. In earlier times the deed was described in pictures. To-day we say that man must develop a feeling for the spirit which will awaken in him an inkling of the spiritual world and create powers through which he can establish relationship with it. In earlier times this was expressed in the picture of the old woman who gave the King's son a bell which he rang. To-day it is said: Man has taken into himself all the kingdoms of nature and unites in harmony everything that lies outspread before him. But he must learn to understand how what is outspread in the external world lives within him and how he can overcome his lower nature, for only if he can bring what is at work in the kingdoms of nature into the right relationship with his own being can it come to his aid.

We have spoken often enough of man's evolution through the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon and of how he left behind him the other kingdoms of nature, retaining within himself the best of each in order that he might rise to a higher stage. To what stage has he evolved? To indicate what lives in the human soul Plato had already used the picture of the horse on which man rides from one incarnation to another. In the times of which we have been speaking the picture used was that of the bell which was rung to summon the representatives of the kingdoms of nature—the Eagle-King, the Fox-King and the Fish-King—in order that the being destined to become the ruler of these kingdoms might establish the right relationship with them.

Man's soul is unruly and can be brought into the right relationship with the kingdoms of nature only when it is tempered by love and wisdom. In earlier times this truth was presented in pictorial form and the soul was helped to understand what we to-day express differently. Men were told that the King's son rang the bell once and the Eagle-King appeared; twice and the Fox-King appeared; three times and the Fish-King appeared. It was they who brought back the horse. In other words: the tumults which rage in the human soul must be recognised; when they are recognised the soul can be freed from lower influences and brought into order.

In the modern age we say that man must learn how his passions, his anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven-year period to another. In other words, we must learn to understand the threefold sheaths of the human being. In earlier times a wonderful picture was placed before men: the King's son was given a mantle, a sheath, every time he rang the little bell—that is to say, when he had subjugated one of the kingdoms of nature. To-day we speak of studying the nature of the physical body; in earlier days a picture was used—of the Dragon-mother giving the King's son a cloak or mantle of copper. We study the nature of the etheric body; in earlier times it was said that the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a silver cloak on the second day. We speak of the astral body with its surging passions; in earlier times it was said that on the third day the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a cloak of gold. What we learn to-day about the threefold nature of man in the form of concepts was conveyed through the picture of the copper, silver and golden cloaks. Instead of the pictures of the copper, silver and golden cloaks we speak to-day in terms which convey an understanding of how the solid physical body is related to the other sheaths of the human being as copper ore is related to silver and gold.

We speak to-day of seven classes of Luciferic beings whose development was retarded during the Moon-evolution and who set about bringing their influence to bear upon man's astral body. The minstrels said: When the King's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the Flower-Queen's daughter, he encountered seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his task. We know that if our evolution does not proceed in the right way it will be corrupted by the forces of the sevenfold Luciferic beings. We say nowadays that by achieving spiritual development we find our higher Self. The minstrels said: The King's son was united with the Flower-Queen. And we say: A certain rhythm must be established in the human soul. You will remember that a few weeks ago I said that when an idea has arisen in the soul we must allow time for the idea to mature, and it will then be possible to detect a certain rhythm in the process. After seven days the idea has penetrated into the depths of the soul; after fourteen days the maturing idea can lay hold of the outer astral substance and allow itself to be baptised by the World-Spirit. After twenty-one days the idea has become still more mature. And only after four times seven days is it ready to be offered to the world as a gift of our own personality. This is the manifestation of an inner rhythm of the soul. A man's creative faculty can work effectively only if he does not try immediately to force upon the world something that occurs to him but is aware that the ordered rhythm of the external world repeats itself in his soul, that he must live in such a way that the Macrocosm is reflected in the Microcosm of his own being. The minstrels said: Man must bring the forces of his soul into harmony, must seek the Flower-Queen's daughter and enter into a union with her during which he spends half of the year with his bride and for the other half leaves her to be with her mother who lives in the depths. This means that he establishes a rhythm within himself and the rhythm of his life takes its course in harmony with the rhythm of the Macrocosm.

These pictures—and hundreds like them could be mentioned—stimulated the soul through the thought-forms they created; and the result is that souls living to-day have become sufficiently mature to listen to the different kind of presentation given by Spiritual Science. But before this could happen man had perforce to experience a sense of deprivation and intense longing. The spiritual longings of the soul had first to be engulfed in the physical world. This did in fact happen in the first half of the nineteenth century; and then, in the second half of the century, came the materialistic culture with its devastating effect upon spiritual life. But the longing grew all the stronger and the ideal of the spiritual-scientific Movement became all the more significant. In the first half of the century there were only few who in a kind of silent martyrdom felt that ideas once conveyed in the form of pictures in narratives still survived but only in a state of decline.

In the soul of a man born in the year 1803, echoes of the old wisdom of past times were still reverberating. Something closely akin to theosophical ideas was a living reality in him. His soul was completely engrossed in what we to-day call the spiritual-scientific solution of the riddle of world-existence. His name was Julius Mosen. His soul was able to survive only because for most of his life he was bedridden. Soul and body could not adjust themselves to each other because owing to the way in which Mosen had grasped these ideas without being able to penetrate them spiritually, his etheric body had been drawn out of his physical body which was paralysed as a result. His soul had nevertheless risen to spiritual heights. In 1831 he wrote a remarkable book, Ritter Wahn. He had learnt of a wonderful legend still surviving in Italy, an old Italian folk-legend. As he studied it he became convinced that it enshrined something of the spirit of the universe, that those who created its imagery were filled with the living spirituality of the World Order. The result was that in 1831 he wrote a truly wonderful work—which, needless to say, has been forgotten, in common with so much that is the product of spiritual greatness.

Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death and on his way he comes across three old men—Ird, Time and Space. Julius Mosen hit on the German word Ird to translate the Italian il mondo, because he knew that there was something particularly significant in it. Ird, Time and Space are the names of the three old men who, however, can be of no use to Ritter Wahn because they are themselves subject to death. Ird denotes everything that is subject to the laws of the physical body, and so to death; Time, the etheric body, is by its very nature transitory; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the perception of Space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation; but according to the Italian folk-legend, Ird, Time and Space represent our threefold sheath.

Who is ‘Ritter Wahn?’ Each of us, passing from incarnation to incarnation, looks out upon the world and faces maya, the great Illusion; each of us, in that we live a life in the spirit, goes forth to conquer death. On this quest we meet the three old men who are our three sheaths. They are indeed very old! The physical body has existed since the evolutionary period of Old Saturn, the etheric body since the period of Old Sun, and the astral body since the period of Old Moon. The Ego, the ‘I’, has been embodied in men in the course of the Earth period itself. Julius Mosen depicts Ritter Wahn seeking to overcome death. He uses the Platonic image of a rider on horseback—an image that was known all over Middle Europe and still farther afield. Ritter Wahn rides out in an attempt to conquer the heavens with materialistic thinking—like those who cling to the sense-world and are imprisoned in illusion and maya. But when through death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is faithfully described by Julius Mosen. Such human beings have not lived out their lives to the full and long to come down again to the Earth in order that their souls may continue to evolve. So Ritter Wahn returns to the Earth. He sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul, which is destined to be stimulated by whatever is earthly and—like the Flower-Queen's daughter—represents the union with what man can acquire only through schooling on Earth. He falls a victim to death through being again united with the Earth and the beautiful Morgana. This means that he passes through death in order that he may raise his own soul, represented by Morgana, to higher and higher stages during each succeeding incarnation.

It is from pictures like these which carry the stamp of their thousands of years’ life that ideas stream into artists of the calibre of Julius Mosen. In his case they were given expression by a soul too great to live healthily in a physical body during the approaching age of materialism and Julius Mosen had consequently to endure the silent martyrdom imposed on him by his passionate soul.—Such was the impulse at work in a man living in the first half of the nineteenth century. It will become active again but in such a way as to kindle human powers and forces; and it will enable us to have some understanding of what is meant by the spirit of Rosicrucianism—the spirit that must make its way into the souls of men.

We can now surmise that what we ourselves are cultivating has always existed. Were we to imagine that anything in the world can prosper without this spirit working in men we should be succumbing to the delusions suffered by Ritter Wahn.

Whence came the minstrels of the seventh, eighth or even thirteenth centuries, wandering as they did through the world to create thought-forms that would enable souls in our own day to have a different kind of understanding? Where had these minstrels learnt how to bring such pictures to men? They had learnt from the centres we think of to-day as the Rosicrucian schools. They were pupils of Rosicrucians. Their teachers said to them: You cannot now go forth into the world and clothe your message in concepts and ideas, as will have to be done later on; you must speak of the King's son, of the Flower-Queen and of the three cloaks, in order that from these pictures thought-forms may come into being and live in the souls of men. And when these souls return to Earth they will understand what is needed for their further progress.—Messengers are continually sent out from the centres of spiritual life in order that in every age what lies in the depths of the spirit may be made accessible to men.

It is a superficial view to believe that such tales can be invented by human fancy. The old tales which give expression to the spiritual secrets of the world came into being because those who composed them gave ear to others who were able to impart the spiritual secrets. Consequently we can say with truth that the spirit of all humanity, of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm, lives in them.

The minstrels were sent out to tell their stories from the same centres whence we to-day draw the knowledge on which the culture needed by humanity is based. Thus it is that the spirit in which mankind is rooted moves on from epoch to epoch. The Beings who in pre-Christian times imparted instruction to individuals in the temples, teaching them what they had themselves brought over from former planetary evolutions—these Beings placed themselves under the leadership of Christ, the unique Individuality who became the great Teacher and Guide of mankind. Stories which have come down through the centuries and have inspired in the whole of Western culture thought-forms expressing in pictures the same teaching about Christ as we give to-day, make it quite clear that in the period after the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual leadership of mankind, working through its centres of learning, was vested in Christ. All spiritual leadership is connected with Him. If we can make ourselves conscious of this fact we shall be turning our gaze to the light we need in order to understand the longings of human souls incarnated in the nineteenth century.

If we think deeply about souls who reveal the longings of earlier times, we shall recognise with a sense of profound responsibility that they waited for us to bring their longings to fulfilment. Julius Mosen, the author of Ritter Wahn and Ahasver, and others like him, were the last prophets of the West because the teachings once given by messengers from the holy temples in the form of pictures to prepare souls for later ages, were living realities to them. And their yearning is indicated in words written by Rothe of Heidelberg in 1847: ‘... if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered ...’ At that time a man who had these yearnings—thinking not only of himself but also of his contemporaries—could only say with resignation that all this lay in the womb of the future which he had no wish to anticipate. In 1847, men who were cognisant of the secrets of the Rosicrucian temples had not yet spoken in a way that could be generally understood. But what lies in the womb of the future can become living power if there are enough souls who realise that knowledge is a duty—a duty because we must not give back undeveloped souls to the World-Spirit. Were we to do that we should have deprived the World-Spirit of forces implanted in us. If there are souls who recognise their duty to the World-Spirit and endeavour to understand the riddles of the world, the hopes cherished by the best men of earlier times will be fulfilled. They looked to us, who were to be born after them, and longed that theosophy should become scientifically acceptable and lay hold of the hearts of men. But these hearts must exist! And that depends upon people who have identified themselves with our spiritual-scientific Movement being convinced of the need for spiritual illumination of the riddles of existence. It depends upon every single soul among us whether the longings of which I have spoken prove to have been empty dreams on the part of those who had hoped for the best in us or to have been dreams now brought to fulfilment.

When we see the barrenness of science, art and every domain of social life we must tell ourselves that we need not succumb to it but that there is a way out. For again an age has dawned when voices from the holy temples are speaking—not in pictures and stories but proclaiming truths which many people still regard as theories but which can and must become sources of life and nourishment to the soul. Each individual can resolve with the highest powers of his soul to receive this source of life.

This is what we must impress upon our souls as the epitome of the meaning and spirit of the guidance of mankind. If we allow this thought to be active in our souls it will be an impulse in us for many months. We shall find that it can grow into an impressive structure—quite independently of the words used to express it. My words may well be imperfect but it is the reality in the thought that matters, not the form in which it is expressed. This reality can live in every single soul. The totality of truth is present in every soul as a seed and can be brought to blossom if the soul devotes itself to the development of that seed.

• 1. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)

Recently I have become aware of mystics who have attempted to elucidate the nature of the human being in the following way. I will quote the result to which they believe they have arrived. They say something like this: If we look at the human being as he walks on earth, his whole existence is a kind of riddle. His soul-being towers mightily above what he is able to represent in his entire humanity, to reveal himself, as it were, in the living out of the interrelationship with other people. Therefore, one must assume - so such mystics think - that man is actually something quite different in his essence from what he appears to be here in his earthly walk. He must be a comprehensive cosmic being, who, according to his inner nature, is much, much more powerful than what he presents himself as being here on earth; he must have forfeited his place in the great cosmos for some reason and must have been banished into this earthly existence – as for example, a mystic follower of this direction - to learn modesty here, to learn to be modest here, to feel small here for once, while in truth he is a great, powerful cosmic being, but who in some way has made himself unworthy to live out this cosmic being.

I know that there are many people who just laugh at such an idea. But the one who understands life from a deeper point of view knows that even such a mystical idea ultimately arises from the great difficulty of solving the riddle of life, which difficulty imposes itself ever more sharply and sharply on the human soul, precisely the more this human soul seeks to delve into true reality. I do not, of course, want to cite anything in particular in support of this idea of a modern mystical trend, which I have just characterized. I just wanted to cite it as something that has also found a place in human souls as a concept. One could just as easily cite a dozen other, more or less philosophical or mystical solutions to the human riddle in abstracto.

If one then tries to understand the reason why the most diverse people try to understand in such different ways, sometimes in quite unusual ways, what it actually means to be human here on earth, one comes to different conclusions. Above all, it is found that precisely with regard to the great, real questions of existence, people do not want to fulfill one thing for themselves, which they certainly admit on a small scale on every possible daily occasion: on every possible daily occasion, man will admit that one should not obscure the truth with one's desires, that what one desires to be true cannot be decisive for the objectivity of the truth. In ordinary life, in small matters, man will readily admit this; but in the great matters we see, as it were, the impossibility for people to arrive at a realistic world view, precisely because people cannot help asserting their desires when it comes to grasping the truth. And most of the time, it is precisely those desires that play a major role that could be called unconscious desires, which a person does not even admit are desires in his soul. Yet these desires are present in the soul; they remain subconscious or unconscious. And that would be the task of spiritual training: to make one aware of such desires that remain unconscious, in order to rise above the illusory life and penetrate into the sphere of truth.

These unconscious desires play a particularly important role when the highest truths of life are to be asserted within the human being, the truths about the essence of human life itself, let us say now of this ordinary human life as it unfolds in the physical world between birth and death. A real, appropriate, realistic consideration must always look at the whole course of life if life is to be understood. And just imagine that such a realistic consideration of life should yield a result that man, even if only in his subconscious desires, does not desire at all. Then man would do anything to get away from such an inconvenient result by means of apparent logic.

Surely, if we consider only life on earth, there is nothing to suggest that the truth must correspond to human desires, even if these desires are unconscious. It could, after all, be that the truth about human life is also completely unpleasant.

Spiritual science shows that this is truly the case. Of course, a higher point of view can be found from which the matter may appear differently. But for the life that a person would like to lead on this earth, a truthful examination shows that the truth about man is such that most people who are too comfortable in life feel a slight shudder - albeit a subconscious shudder, but you will understand what I mean - a slight unconscious, sometimes very strong subconscious shudder. But then the whole of human life must be considered.

We know that this whole of human life, when considered objectively and in detail, breaks down into distinct periods. You can read about these periods in my little booklet The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science. We know that we can only understand the human being by observing life, first from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, from sexual maturity to the beginning of the twenties, let us say on average to the age of twenty-one; then again to the age of twenty-eight. We can understand the human being's life in the same way that we seek to understand anything scientifically, by looking at the seven-year cycles of human life.

Significant events occur in human life during each of these periods. From what we mentioned again yesterday, you know that the human being stands in life, integrating himself into the cosmos – I reminded you of the image of the magnetic needle yesterday – so that, for example, the formation of his head points far, far into the distant past, and the formation of his extremities points into the distant future, just as the magnetic needle points with one pole to the north and with the other pole to the south.

But this alignment with the cosmos is different in each of the main human periods. In each of the main human periods, different forces intervene in the organization of humanity. In the first seven years of our lives, something quite different prevails in us than in the second seven years. Everything that comes to expression in the seventh year, in that, one might say, all the growth is dammed up, as at a bank, by the eruption of the permanent teeth, everything that is dammed up in the eruption of the permanent teeth plays out of the forces of the cosmos in the first seven years of life. And again, there is something that the human being takes back in his education. What the human being takes back in his education, by becoming sexually mature, that with which he, I would like to say, tinges himself, it forms in that certain developmental forces, which are thoroughly grounded in the cosmos, develop in the second epoch of life and so on.

Now the thing is that one must say: in the whole human being, the various members do interact. The child, up to the change of teeth, also develops a certain psychic activity; and this psychic activity is extraordinarily important, especially in these first years of life. I am reminded of the truly wise saying of Jean Paul, who said that at the beginning of his life, one undoubtedly learns more for life from one's nurse than from all one's professors in the academic years. There is something very wise and very true in this saying. One must only assess things in the right way. One learns a lot in these first seven years of life, but what is learned remains, so to speak, intellectually and otherwise in the dullness of the soul life, which is still almost a physical life, down below. But if you read my booklet 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', you will see that this life, which the child develops in the first seven years, can also be evaluated differently from the usual way. In these first seven years, there is truly not much wisdom in the human organism. When the child - as the bourgeois expression goes - has seen “the light of day”, his brain is still quite undifferentiated. It only differentiates over time, and what emerges in terms of brain structures truly corresponds, when studied, to influences of a deeper wisdom than anything we can muster in later life when we construct machines or do anything scientifically. Of course, we cannot do this later in a conscious way, which we do unconsciously when we have just seen the light of the world, as I said. Cosmic reason rules in us, that cosmic reason of which we also had to speak when we mentioned the development of language. Truly, a high cosmic reason rules in the human being in the first seven years of life.

In the second seven years of life, this cosmic reason then focuses on tingeing the human being with what leads to sexual maturity; there it prevails, this cosmic intellectuality, to a small extent already. One might say: that which remains, which is not used inwardly, well, that just rises up into the head. And it affects the head – and usually it is afterwards! But what affects the head is actually something that is spared in the inner being, in the unconscious of the soul life. And then it continues in seven-year periods.

Nowadays, the usual approach is to study the whole of human life, the so-called normal human life; because to study this normal human life, a certain devotion is necessary, first to the real human being, but then also to the great cosmic laws. And however strange it may sound, what takes place in the first seven years of childhood cannot be understood, not as a child, not as a young man or woman, not even when one imagines that one has already grasped the whole of life in one's twenties. One cannot understand it. One can come to some understanding of what takes place in childhood if one seeks this understanding inwardly in the human being, in inner experience, say between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three. Old age, old age itself, only gives us the opportunity to gain a slight insight into what rules in us during the first seven years of childhood. This is an uncomfortable thing, because today, when a person has barely outgrown the young badger years, he wants to be a full human being. And today it is uncomfortable to admit to oneself that there is something in the world, even in oneself, that can only be understood at the turn of fifty. And again, if it is a matter of understanding, of inner-human understanding, as we can first achieve it as human beings, then we can learn to understand something of what takes place in human nature during the years in which sexual maturity develops, that is, from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. This takes place between the ages of forty-nine and fifty-six, at the beginning of the fifties.

It would be good if such truths were to be recognized, because through such truths one would learn to understand life, while the other truths that are usually established about human beings are such as one wishes. One just does not realize that unconscious desires are there. And again, what takes place in us from puberty to the age of twenty-one, one gets some inner, experienced insight into that, so that one can have a certain judgment about it between the forty-second and forty-nine, and again, what happens in the twenties up to the twenty-eighth year, about that one can get some information between the thirty-fifth and forty-second year. What I say about these things is based on real observation of life, which one must do by training oneself in spiritual-scientific observation, and not by engaging in the kind of nonsense of self-knowledge that is often called self-knowledge today, but by engaging in real self-knowledge, that is, by engaging in knowledge of human nature. And it is only in the period from about twenty-eight to thirty-five that one can experience something and at the same time understand it by experiencing it; there is a certain balance between understanding and thinking. In the first half of life one can think various things, one can imagine various things; in order to experience with understanding what one can imagine in the first half of life, one must await the second half of life.

It is an uncomfortable truth, but that is how life is. I can even imagine people saying: Yes, if the human being is so circumscribed in his or her entire inner conformity to law, where does that leave the free will of the human being? Where does freedom go? Where is the consciousness of humanity? - Certainly, I can also imagine that someone feels unfree because he cannot be in Europe and America at the same time, that someone feels unfree because he cannot reach down to the moon. But facts do not conform to human desires. Even when it comes to man gaining insight into himself, it is necessary to face the facts. These facts are as follows: We do not live a life that is constantly changing and metamorphosing for no reason. We live this life in such a way that each period of life has its meaning and significance in relation to others. And for that we live, as we say, the normal life, if we are granted such, until the age of sixty — we will also talk about early death from this point of view tomorrow — in a way that only in the second half of life does it become clear to us what prevails in the first half of life. People would be able to orient themselves in the world much more securely and correctly if this knowledge of life were to gain some ground. For then they would build on a true foundation of life, whereas today, because they do not base themselves on objectivity but on desires, they often simply cling to the idea that one must learn something until one's twenties, but after that one is a finished person, then one is ready for anything in life. In this way one completely overlooks the inner coherence of life. To get to know life is really an inner task. And one must not forget, especially when it comes to this intimate task, that desires must remain silent and that objectivity must be taken into account.

Now a certain balance is emerging in the course of human evolution. In earlier times the matter was quite different, as I have already presented: You remember how I spoke of the human development from the Atlantic time until today, of the ever-younger becoming of humanity. A certain equalization has occurred in that in the course of evolution it has been found that one element was related to the other. If that had not occurred, then one would simply have to keep the matter in life so: A person in their twenties would have to believe a forty-year-old when it comes to certain things that relate to truths in a person that can only be grasped as vividly as I have characterized them in the forties. It is not quite like that, but in the course of human development, the concepts themselves, the ideas, have become such that one can have a certain intuitive conviction at one age and at the other. If you are sufficiently devoted to let the forty- and fifty-year-olds tell you about their life experiences, provided, of course, that they have had any, today people usually don't, if you let yourself be told about these life experiences when you are still younger, you are not dependent on mere authority authority, that has already become the case through development; but by thinking – as a young person one can only think – there is more to the way and character that the thoughts have taken than what merely appeals to faith. There is already a certain possibility in it to also understand. Otherwise one would have to say: in youth man thinks, in old age he comprehends. But there is already something in it that can teach one more than a religious belief, a mere authoritative conviction. This gives a certain balance.

But take what I have said as a truth of life. If you take it as a truth of life, it will shed light on the practice of life. Just think, when what I have said is present in life, when it is thought and felt and sensed by people, how it expresses itself in the relationship between people! How it creates, as it were, binding links from soul to soul! A person who is still young looks at the old in a special way when he knows: He can experience something that, in relation to him, who can only think, is an understanding of what is thought. One is interested in a completely different way in the messages that a person in a different age can give, if one understands life in such a way. And one retains one's interest, even when one has reached a higher age, for what abounds as younger people, even as children. They remember how often I have said: The wisest can learn from the little child! Of course, the wisest of all will gladly and lovingly learn from a small child. Even if he does not want to be taught by a small child about morals or other views of life, he would be able to gain an infinite amount of wisdom from the child, especially with regard to cosmic secrets, which are expressed quite differently in a small child than in a later human being. The interest that prevails from soul to soul increases quite substantially when such things are not mere abstract theories, but when such things are wisdoms of life.

Real spiritual science has the peculiarity of strengthening, enhancing, and reinforcing the bonds of love that people have for one another, which must essentially be based on the bonds of mutual interest. Ordinary wisdom can leave people dry, as dry as some scholars are. Spiritual science, truly grasped in its substance, cannot leave people dry, but will, under all circumstances, make people love, wants to strengthen and increase mutual human interest.

I had planned to tell you a small number of such things today, things that are unpleasant for life, but are truths, are facts, because one does not progress spiritually if one does not get used to boldly facing facts, even if they are uncomfortable.

Another fact is this – it is already clear from yesterday's observations – that the intellect, as we can achieve it in the present cycle of humanity, is only suitable for awakening understanding over a certain period of time. I do not envy those people who today set about translating Aeschylus, or even Homer, the Psalms and so on, truly, I do not envy them! That faith can exist in our time, such philistine fibbing as Mr. Wilamowitz' translations of the Greek dramas, which really betray Aeschylus or whatever, that is just a sad sign of the times. You can't observe as soon as something big happens; often you don't even have the patience to observe small things. It would be good to try to observe small things as an exercise. I will give you an example of a very childlike, small thing.

Recently I read an article in one of these international magazines published here in Switzerland, in which the socialist writer Kautsky complained about a Russian socialist who quoted Kautsky in the most terrible way, so that the opposite of what is in Kautsky's books is given as Kautsky's opinion. That there was any intentional distortion of Kautsky's text was, given the nature of the matter and the personalities involved, quite out of the question. I then read the article by the person in question myself, but I also found it curious that what was quoted was presented as Kautsky's opinion. And while I was still reading, I formed an opinion about it, because I was interested in how something like this could be possible at all; but I very soon realized, by reading the essay, what must have happened, and this was also confirmed to me afterwards because the person concerned apologized; but I only saw that later. The person in question had not read Kautsky's book in German, but had read it in Russian translation, and, having written his essay in German, had retranslated it. So that was what had happened: translation from German into Russian and retranslation. In the process, the opposite of what was in the German book came out and was quoted!

All that is needed to turn things upside down is to translate a text from one language into another, honestly and accurately! It is not even necessary to talk about incorrect facts, but basically only about the principles that are commonly applied in translation today. The observation I have made is a small, childish one. But anyone who has the patience to observe such things in life should no longer find it incomprehensible when he is told that it is impossible to understand Homer with what is available to us today; it is only an imagined understanding.

Now, that is the external side of the matter. But there is also an essential internal side to the matter. The state of mind in Homer's time was so essentially different from the state of mind of today's man that today's man is also far removed from the possibility of understanding Homer. For today's state of mind is such that it is essentially tinged with intellectuality. That was not the Homeric state of mind. Man today cannot discard this tinge if he remains in the ordinary everyday state of mind. This state of mind forces man more strongly than he believes, and more strongly than he is aware of, to live in abstract terms, in which Homer did not live at all. But it is difficult for people to reconcile this with their subconscious or unconscious desires, so they say to themselves: Yes, with the understanding that is the normal understanding of the present, one must refrain from understanding something that comes from the time of Homer or even from the time of Aeschylus. This renunciation of man is something that does not correspond at all to the subconscious desires. This is where spiritual science must intervene, which does not remain with the ordinary state of mind, but evokes a comprehensive state of mind so that one can place oneself in states of mind that are different from the normal states of mind of the present. With the means of spiritual science, one can in turn penetrate into that which cannot be reached with the present-day mind, with the present-day state of mind. It would be of immense importance for the modern man to say to himself: Only over a certain stretch of the development of humanity does the understanding that we can have extend. Even with a view to the future, it is not entirely unimportant to keep such things in mind.

No matter how clearly you express yourself today, no matter how clearly you write or speak, record what is spoken, it will not be too long before, in the near future, times will move faster, if I may use the paradoxical expression, than they did in the past, it will be completely impossible to understand what we speak or write today in the same way as we understand it. It is only possible for our understanding to comprehend what we speak and write over a certain period into the future. The historian goes back to documents and wants to rely only on external documents. But it does not depend on whether one understands something or not, whether documents are there or not, but whether the possibility of understanding extends that far. Well, for more distant times, this possibility of understanding does not extend that far. And if one does not have resignation, then Kant-Laplacean theories or the like come out. I have spoken about this often enough. What, after all, is a Kant-Laplacean theory other than the impotent attempt to use the intellect of the present to think about the origin of the world, despite the fact that our understanding, our normal state of mind, has distanced itself so far from this origin of the world that what we think about time with our present understanding of the world, which should coincide with the Kant-Laplacean theory, can no longer resemble it at all.

This knowledge, that it is necessary to resort to other types of knowledge when going beyond a certain period of time and distance, is what spiritual science must also produce. Man cannot recognize anything beyond a certain age if he does not resort to spiritual scientific research, if he does not try to understand existence with senses other than those to which the intellect is bound. Now, if we consider what I have just said, we can see how narrow the horizon of the modern man must be if he does not want to resort to other levels of research, to other levels of knowledge, for those things that ordinary intellectuality, which is actually the prevailing one today, does not suffice to recognize. We know that one can ascend to imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. These types of knowledge then lead to other paths; only they can supplement what can only be seen as an island of existence if one relies on the present state of the soul.

That which comprises the present state of mind is actually bound to the human ego; you can read about this in my “Theosophy”, “Secret Science in Outline” and so on. But the human being also carries other aspects of their being within them: we know of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. But the soul's usual state today does not extend down into the astral body, not into the etheric body, not into the physical body. For what the anatomist recognizes from the outside is, after all, the outside. The inner recognition does not extend beyond the ego, let alone beyond the physical body. One must come to observe the human being from the inside with understanding, and the knowledge of life of which I spoke at the beginning of today's reflections is a beginning of this inner knowledge, and what one can comprehend in the second half of life is a beginning, albeit a weak beginning. When one takes hold of the human being inwardly, one descends from the mere intellect to the sphere of the will. Yesterday I mentioned that the subject of the will, the actual volition in us, preserves the cosmic memory. So one must descend into the human being. What the human being could develop if he had the will to do so, by developing normal wisdom in the second half of life, would be a beginning of this descent. It would not shed much light, but it would shed light on what the human being needs to live. But if he then descends with the developed higher knowledge, then by descending into his own being the memory of the cosmos opens up to him. Then, however, something different emerges than the Kant-Laplacean theory, for example, what we carry within us in our physical being. You know that, according to its nature, it is our oldest, going back to the fourth past incarnation on earth. If you go down there, you learn to recognize what this fourth past incarnation on earth was like in the Saturn era. But one can learn from the ordinary wisdom that opens up in the second half of life what one has to do to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nature of the human being, who is an image of the world, and by learning to recognize this image, to recognize the world.

It is usually subconscious or unconscious desires that dominate a person when he thinks up something with a light heart or in complete comfort, something that he should actually say is not accessible to his thinking, such as the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar. And so we touch again – we must, I would like to say, approach our tasks in circles – that which prevents people of the present from building the bridge between ideality and reality, which is of course of great concern to us now.

People of all ages have tried to find a way beyond these things. But it is difficult to fully understand these things, precisely because it is uncomfortable to approach the real facts. In our time it has become customary, I might say, everywhere to recognize half of the matter, the other half not. Here is a classic example: Karl Marx once said that philosophers had so far only endeavored to interpret the world with their concepts; but what was important was to change the world, one really had to find thoughts that would change the world. The first part is absolutely correct. Philosophers have endeavored, insofar as they are philosophers, to interpret the world, and if they were a little clever, they did not believe that they could do anything other than interpret the world. But the very archetype of all philosophical philistinism, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who taught in Leipzig from 1809 to 1834 and wrote a great many books on everything from fundamental philosophy to the highest stages of philosophy, demanded that Hegel's philosophers should not only deduce concepts but also the development of the pen – something that infuriated Hegel. But even in this field, resignation is necessary, resignation that says: Of course, we human beings are called upon to change the world as whole human beings, insofar as the world consists of human life. But thinking, the thinking of the present, is simply not capable of bringing about this change. One must have the resignation to say to oneself: This thinking, which the human being of the present has, which is so gloriously sufficient, which is really quite suitable for understanding nature, this thinking is completely unsuitable for achieving something when it comes to the will to act. But that is an uncomfortable truth. Because once you see through this, you no longer say: Philosophers have so far endeavored to interpret the world, but what matters is changing the world – and secretly believe that they can contribute to this through some dialectic; instead, you say to yourself: Philosophers have only been sufficient for interpreting things because philosophers can cite them. With nature, it is enough for us to merely interpret it, because nature is, one might say, thank God, there without us, and we can content ourselves with interpreting it. Social and political life is not there without us, and we cannot be content with merely grasping it with such concepts, which are only suitable for interpreting life and not for shaping it. It is necessary to rise from mere theorizing, which mostly consists of hallucinations, as I explained yesterday, and which is so truly the hobbyhorse of the present, to the life of reality. And the life of reality in the facts demands that one does not take it so straightforwardly, this life, as one is accustomed to taking it. Certainly, ideas that one person conveys to another lead to something; but they do not always lead to the same thing. There are no absolute truths, just as there are no absolute facts, and there are no absolute facts just as there are no absolute truths. Everything is relative. And the effect of something I say is determined not only by whether or not I believe it to be true, but also by the nature of the people in a particular age, and how they react to it, if I may use the expression. I will cite a significant case that is very important to consider.

If you go back to around the 14th century of the Christian era, you could present mysticism to people before that century. In those days, mystical concepts still had the power to educate and inspire people. The Oriental population of Asia, the Indian, Japanese, Chinese, has retained these qualities in many ways, because older qualities are preserved by certain members of humanity in later times. One can still study many things in the present that were also the case with European populations in earlier times; but the whole state of mind of humanity has changed. And anyone who passes on mysticism today, for example, must be aware that we are approaching the age when, by teaching mysticism, real mysticism – Meister Eckhart's, Tauler's, and the like, you teach them by the way they react to it, what Lucifer only coaxes out of man, what brings them to bickering and quarreling. And it may well be that there is no better way to prepare a sect for quarreling and fighting, for disunity, for mutual grumbling, than to give them mystically pious speeches. Now, when understood in a straightforward way, this seems almost impossible; but it is a factual truth. It is a factual truth because it depends not only on the content of what one says, but on the way in which the person reacts to things. And one must know the world. And above all, one must not base one's views on one's desires.

I can always remember the conversation I once had in a southern German town with two Catholic priests who were in my lecture, which I gave at the time on the Bible and wisdom. The two Catholic priests could not really object to anything. The lecture contained precisely the things about which they could not reasonably object. But priests, even if they cannot object, cannot of course accept something like that; so they have to object to something. So they said: Yes, in terms of content, we could indeed say roughly what you said. But what we say, we say in such a way that every person can understand it; you, after all, are only saying it for a certain number of people who have a certain education, and what is said for people must be understandable for everyone. - Then I said to them: Yes, you see, what you believe is understandable to all people, and what I believe about it, that is not the point. What matters is not our theoretical views about what people understand, but the study of reality. And there you can easily do a reality test yourself. I ask you: If you now apply these methods and present this in your church today in the way you believe that all people will understand it – will all people go to your church, or aren't some already staying away today? That some stay away is much more important than you believing that you speak for all people. Because the reality is that some do stay away. That you believe you speak for all people is your belief. And for those who no longer go to church with you, I speak for them, because I believe that one has to submit to reality and that one can also speak to those who no longer go to church but who are still entitled to seek the path to the spiritual worlds. Here, in a trivial example, the difference is illuminated between how one thinks realistically, letting one's views be dictated by reality, and how most people believe they know what they just imagine, think up and wish for, and then swear by it. The reality researcher is even prepared at any time to discard anything he considers right, and when the facts teach him, to come to a different line of thought, because reality is not as straightforward as people wish it to be.

And so it may well be, and will increasingly be the case – this is the trend of the development of human nature – that while you want to teach the most pious mysticism, the most heartfelt mysticism of a sect, the people of that sect become more and more quarrelsome and quarrelsome. But it is just as unwise to teach people one-sided scientific views. To gain scientific knowledge, one needs a great deal of acumen, and you know that I am not at all inclined to be in any way inferior to anyone in fully recognizing scientific truths. But the fact also exists that if one were to teach the world only scientific truths or scientifically-oriented truths, the acumen that is applied to finding scientific truths would contribute significantly to condemning people to a lack of freedom. Just as one-sided mysticism would increasingly lead to quarrels and disputes, one-sided natural science in the sense of today's time would lead people to inner bondage, to inner bondage. So you see, it is fully considered when spiritual science strives neither to be one-sidedly mystical nor one-sidedly scientific, but to do justice to each individual without underestimating or overestimating it, but progressing from duality to trinity. Not the either-or, but the both-and, illumination of the one by the other, that is what spiritual science leads to by itself. For example, a person with a purely scientific mind who rants about mysticism is always going to be in the wrong, because what he says will generally be nonsense. But it is just as wrong, as a rule, for a purely mystical person who knows nothing of scientific knowledge to rant about science. Only a mystic should grumble about mysticism, if I may vary it, and only someone who knows about natural science should grumble about natural science now and then. Then his things will be as he says, because they will be weighed correctly. But it will always be bad if someone who does not understand natural science and perhaps believes himself to be a great mystic passes judgment on it, or if a scientist does not understand mysticism and passes judgment on mysticism. It has often been said in spiritual scientific circles that certain truths must appear paradoxical to people because they so strongly contradict the complacency of ordinary life.

Today I have presented you with a whole series of things that have, so to speak, struck your soul without being resolved. I have presented you with some facts of life that have to be admitted even if one would like things to be different. Many a person who today considers himself a great person, who is capable of much, has no idea of these truths of life. But this is precisely the basis of the catastrophes of our time, that our time so urgently needs to get to know this life and does not want to get to know this life.

Tomorrow we will talk about some of the things that should lead to the resolution of some contradictions that have rightly been brought to your souls today.

For the reasons expressed in the previous chapter, it is impossible to speak adequately about the relation between anthropology (natural science) and anthroposophy (spiritual science) in connection with Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul. But I believe that this relation can become visible if I place here what I wrote with a different intention, in memory, namely, of the philosopher Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in March 1917. The departure of this man, whom I held in the highest esteem, had the effect of bringing before my soul anew his significant life's work; it moved me to express the following.

[ 2 ] At this moment when the death of this revered person has interrupted his work, it seems to me that I might make an attempt, from an anthroposophical viewpoint to arrive at a view of Franz Brentano's philosophical life's work. I believe that the anthroposophical viewpoint will not let me fall into a one-sided evaluation of Brentano's world view. I assume this for two reasons. Firstly, no one can accuse Brentano's way of picturing things of having even the slightest tendency in an anthroposophical direction. If he himself had had any cause to judge it, he would certainly have rejected it decisively. Secondly, from my anthroposophical viewpoint, I am in a position to approach the philosophy of Franz Brentano with unconditional reverence.

[ 3 ] With respect to my first reason, I believe I am correct in saying that if he had arrived at an assessment of what I mean by anthroposophy, Brentano would have shaped it the way he did his judgment on Plotinus' philosophy. As with it he would certainly also have said of anthroposophy: “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled fantasy roving into unknown regions.” As with neo-platonism he would have urged caution with respect to anthroposophy “so as not, enticed by empty appearances, to lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudophilosophy.” Yes, he may also have found anthroposophy's way of thinking to be too dilettantish even to be worthy of being reckoned to the philosophies which he judged the way he did those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In his inaugural Vienna address he said of them: “Perhaps the recent past has also been an ... epoch of decay, in which all concepts ran together in a muddy way, and no trace was to be found of a method in keeping with facts.” I believe that Brentano would have judged in this way, even though I also of course not only consider this judgment to be totally unfounded, but also regard as unjustified any pairing of anthroposophy with the philosophies with which Brentano would probably have paired it.

[ 4 ] Now with respect to my other reason for coming to terms with Brentano's philosophy, I must confess that for me his philosophy belongs to the most inviting accomplishments in soul research in modern times. It is true that I was only able to hear a few of Brentano's lectures in Vienna some thirty-six years ago; but from then on I have followed his literary activity with warmest interest. Unfortunately, when measured against my wish to hear from him, his publications came at too great an interval from each other. And these writings are mostly of such a kind that one peered through them as though through little openings into a room filled with treasures; one looked, so to speak, through occasional publications upon a broad realm of the unpublished thoughts that this exceptional man bore within himself—bore within himself in such a way that it strove in continuous evolution toward lofty goals of knowledge. When, therefore, in 1911, after a long interval there appeared his book on Aristotle, his brilliant book Aristotle's Teaching on the Origin of the Human Spirit, and his republishing of the most important sections of his Psychology, with its penetrating addenda, the reading of these books was a series of festive joys for me.

[ 5 ] With respect to Franz Brentano I feel myself imbued with a kind of soul disposition of which I believe I may say that one acquires it when the anthroposophical viewpoint— out of scientifically acquired conviction—in fact takes hold of one's soul disposition. I strive to gain insight into the value of his views, even though I am under no illusion about the fact that he could—yes, would even have had to—think about anthroposophy in the way indicated above. I am truly not saying this here in order to fall foolishly into a vain self-critique of my soul disposition when confronted by hostile or differing views, but rather because I know how many misunderstandings of my assessments of other spiritual streams have occurred through the fact that in my books I have so often expressed myself in a way stemming from this soul disposition. [ 6 ] It seems to me that the whole methodology of Brentano's soul research is permeated with the basic thoughts that moved him in 1868 to set up his guiding principle. As he was entering his philosophical professorship at that time in Wurzburg, he placed his way of picturing things into the light of the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that which is considered valid in natural-scientific cognition. “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est.” ¹ When he then published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874—at the time of entering his Vienna professorship—he sought to present soul phenomena scientifically, in accordance with the above guiding principle. What Brentano wanted to accomplish with this book and its further manifestations in publications during his lifetime pose a significant scientific problem for me. As is clear from his book, Brentano counted on a series of books to contain his psychology. He promised to publish a second book shortly after the first. But no sequel was ever published to his first book, which contained only the preliminary ideas of his psychology. When he published the lecture he had given in 1889 to the Vienna Bar Association, entitled The Origins of Moral Knowledge, he wrote in the preface:

It would be a mistake, just because of the chance request for this lecture to regard it as the passing work of the moment. It offers the fruits of years of reflection. Of everything I have published so far its contents are definitely the ripest creation. They belong to the thought complex of a "descriptive psychology" which I dare to hope I will be able to reveal in its full scope to the public in the not too distant future. Its far removal from any tradition and more especially the significant development of my own views as presented in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint will clearly show that I have not in fact been idle during my long literary retirement.

But this “descriptive psychology” also never appeared. By reading his Research into the Psychology of the Senses (1907), which is restricted to one small area, devotees of Brentano's philosophy can reckon what they would have gained from such a descriptive psychology.

[ 7 ] The question must be asked: What made Brentano hold back ever and again from continuing his publications, and then not to publish at all something he believed would be ready shortly? I confess that I was shaken to the core when I read the following words in the memorial to Brentano written by Alois Höfler in May 1917: “Brentano was working ahead so confidently on his main problem, proof of God's existence, that a few years ago an excellent Viennese doctor and close friend of Brentano's told me that Brentano had assured him a short while ago that he would now have his proof of God's existence ready in a few weeks ...” I felt the same way when I read in another memorial (by Utitz): “The work that he loved the most fervently, that he applied himself to his whole life long, remains unpublished.”

[ 8 ] It seems to me that Brentano's destiny with respect to his projected publications represents a weighty, spiritual-scientific problem. It is true that we can approach this problem only if we are willing to study, in its own special character, what Brentano was able to communicate to the world. [ 9 ] I consider it important to note that Brentano wants, with real acumen, to establish as a basis for his psychological research a pure mental picture of the genuine soul element. He asks himself: What is characteristic of all the occurrences that one must address as soulful? And he found what he expressed in the following way in the addenda of his Psychology (1911): “What is characteristic of every soul activity consists, as I believe I have shown, in its relation to something as object.” Mental picturing is a soul activity. Characteristic of it is that I not only picture but that I picture something, that my mental picture relates to something. Borrowing from medieval philosophy, Brentano calls this characteristic of soul phenomena an “intentional relation.” In another place he said:

The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called “consciousness,”—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading—i.e., it is a subjective activity, in a so-called intentional relation to something that perhaps is not real but nevertheless is given in an inwardly objective way. No hearing without something heard; no believing without something believed; no hoping without something hoped for; no striving without something striven for; no joy without something to be joyous about; and so on.

This intentional inner awareness, therefore, is something which in fact guides us as a kind of leitmotiv in such a way that through it one recognizes everything to which we can apply it as being of a soul nature.

[ 10 ] Brentano contrasts soul phenomena with physical phenomena: colors, sound, space, and many others. He finds that these last are different from the soul phenomena through the fact that an intentional relation is not characteristic of them. And he limits himself to attributing this relation to soul phenomena and to denying it to physical phenomena. But now, precisely when one learns to know Brentano's view on the intentional relation, our inner vision is led to the question: Does not a viewpoint like this require us to look at physical phenomena also from the same viewpoint? Now someone who, in the sense of Brentano, tests physical phenomena for a common element as he did with soul phenomena will find that every phenomenon in the physical realm exists through (by virtue of) something else. When a body dissolves in a fluid, this phenomenon of the dissolved body occurs through the relation to it of the dissolving fluid. When phosphorus changes color under the influence of the sun, this phenomenon points in the same direction. All the qualities of the physical world exist through the interrelations of things to each other. What Moleschott says is correct for physical existence: “All existence is an existence through qualities. But there is no quality that does not exist through a relation.” Just as everything of a soul nature contains something in itself by which it points to something outside itself, so conversely, a physical thing is so constituted that it is what it is through the relation to it of something outer. Someone like Brentano who emphasizes with so much acumen the intentional relation of everything of a soul nature, must he not also direct his attention upon a characteristic element of physical phenomena that results from the same train of thought? At the very least, it seems certain that a study like this of the soul element can discover the relation of this soul element to the physical world only if it takes this characteristic element into consideration.²

[ 11 ] Now Brentano discovers three kinds of intentional relations in our soul life. The first is the mental picturing of something; the second is the acceptance or rejection that expresses itself in judging; the third is the loving or hating that is experienced in our feeling. If I say, “God is just,” I am picturing something to myself; but I do not yet accept or reject what I am picturing; but if I say, “There is a God,” I accept what I am picturing through a judgment. If I say, “I like to feel pleasure,” I am not only judging, I am experiencing a feeling. From such presuppositions Brentano distinguishes three basic categories of soul experiences: mental picturing, judging, and feeling (or the phenomena of loving and hating). He replaces the usual division of soul phenomena (into mental picturing, feeling, and willing) with these three basic categories. So whereas many people put mental picturing and judging into the same category, Brentano separates them. He does not agree with combining them, because, unlike other thinkers, he does not regard judgments as merely the connecting of mental pictures, but rather, in fact, as the acceptance or rejection of what has been pictured, which are not activities of mere mental picturing. On the other hand, with respect to their soul content, feeling and will, which other people separate, merge for Brentano into one. What is experienced in the soul when one feels oneself drawn to do something, or repelled from doing it, is the same as what one experiences when one is drawn to pleasure or repelled by pain.

[ 12 ] It is evident from Brentano's writing that he sets great store in having replaced the traditional division of soul experience into thinking, feeling, and willing by the other one into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating. By this division he seeks to clear the way for an understanding of what truth is, on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. For him truth is based on right judgment; moral goodness on right love. He finds that “We call something true when its acceptance is right. We call something good when the love we bring to it is right.”

[ 13 ] One can see from Brentano's presentations that when he observes the right acceptance in judgment with respect to truth and the right experience of love with respect to moral goodness, he is taking a sharp look at soul phenomena and circumscribing them. But, within his thought sphere, one can find nothing that would suffice to make the transition from our soul experience of mental picturing to that of judging. No matter where we look in Brentano's thought sphere we seek in vain the answer to the question: What is happening when the soul is conscious of not merely picturing something to itself, but also of finding itself moved to accept this something though judgment?

Just as little can one escape a question with respect to our right love of the morally good. Within the region that Brentano circumscribes as the "soul element," the only phenomenon pertaining to moral action is right loving. But does not a relation to the outer world also belong to a moral action? With respect to a characterization of a deed for the world, is it enough to say: It is a deed that is rightly loved? ³

[ 14 ] In following Brentano's trains of thought, we mainly have a feeling that they are always fruitful because they take up a problem and move it in one direction with acumen and scientific thoroughness; but one also feels that Brentano's trains of thought do not reach the goal that his starting points promise us. Such a feeling can come over us when we compare his threefold division of our soul life into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating to the other division into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. One follows his views with a certain amount of agreement, but ultimately remains unconvinced that he has done sufficient justice to the reasons for membering the soul the other way. Let us just take the example of the conclusions he draws from his soul division about the true, the beautiful, and the good. Whoever members our soul life into cognitional mental picturing, feeling, and willing can hardly do otherwise than closely connect our striving for truth with mental picturing, our experience of beauty with feeling, and our accomplishment of the good with willing. The matter looks different in the light of Brentano's thought. There the mental pictures as such have no relation to each other by which the truth as such could already reveal itself. When the soul is striving to perfect itself relative to its mental pictures, its ideal cannot therefore be the truth; beauty is its ideal. Truth does not lie on the path of mere mental picturing; it lies on the path of judging. And the morally good does not find itself as essentially united with our willing; it is a content of our feeling; for, to love rightly is a feeling experience. For our ordinary consciousness, however, the truth can be sought, after all, in our mentally picturing cognition. For, even though the judgment that leads to the truth does not lie only in the connecting of mental pictures but rather is based on an acceptance or rejection of the mental pictures, still the acceptance or rejection of these pictures can only be experienced by our consciousness in mental pictures.

And even though the mental pictures in which something beautiful presents itself to the soul do manifest in certain relationships within our life of mental pictures, still, the beauty is experienced, after all, by our feeling.

And although something morally good should call forth the right love in our soul, still the essential factor in the morally good after all, is the accomplishment through the will of what is rightly loved.

[ 15 ] One only recognizes what we actually have in Brentano's thoughts about the threefold division of our soul life when one realizes that he is speaking of something completely different from what those thinkers mean who divide it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. The latter simply want to describe the experiences of ordinary consciousness. And this consciousness experiences itself in the different kinds of activity of mental picturing, feeling, and willing. What does one actually experience there? I tried to answer this question in my book The Riddle of Man ⁴ and summarized the findings presented there in the following words:

Human soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing, is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however, that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the same error as someone who believes that his actual form is brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent upon the form of the mirror, etc.; but what this image represents has nothing to do with the mirror. In order to completely fulfill its essential being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image of its being. It must have its image in consciousness; otherwise it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it. This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these, the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be there without the mirror. But what appears through this image, the soul element itself, is—in its essential being—no more dependent upon the bodily instrument than the person standing before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness of the soul is so.⁵

If one is describing the realm of consciousness that is dependent upon our bodily organization, one is correct in membering it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing.⁶ But Brentano is describing something different. Bear in mind to begin with that by “judging,” he means an acceptance or rejection of a content of mental pictures. Our judgment is active within our life of mental pictures; but it does not simply accept the mental pictures that arise in the soul; through acceptance or rejection it relates them to a reality. If one observes more closely, this relating of our mental pictures to a reality can only be found in a soul activity that occurs within the soul itself. But this can never totally correspond to what the soul produces when, through judging, it relates a mental picture to a sense perception. For there the compulsion of the outer impression holds sway, which is not experienced in a purely inner way, but only as an echoed experience, and as a mentally pictured, echoed experience leads to its acceptance or rejection. On the other hand, what Brentano describes corresponds totally in this respect with the kind of cognition that we called "Imaginative cognition" in the first essay of this book. In Imaginative cognition the mental picturing of our ordinary consciousness is not simply accepted; it is developed further in inner soul experience so that out of it the power emerges to relate the soul's experiences to a spiritual reality in such a way that this reality is accepted or rejected. Brentano's concept of judgment, therefore, is not perfectly realized in our ordinary consciousness, but only in the soul that is active in Imaginative cognition.

Furthermore, it is clear that, through Brentano's complete separation of the concept of mental picturing from the concept of judgment, he takes mental picturing to be mere image. But this is how ordinary mental picturing lives in Imaginative cognition. So even this second quality that anthroposophy attributes to Imaginative cognition is to be found in Brentano's characterization of soul phenomena.

What is more, Brentano addresses the experiences of feeling as manifestations of love and hate. Whoever ascends to Imaginative cognition must, in fact, for supersensible vision, transform the kind of soul experience that manifests in ordinary consciousness as loving and hating—in Brentano's sense of the words—in such a way that we can confront certain characteristics of spiritual reality that are described in my book Theosophy, for example, in the following way:

Among the first things one must acquire for an orientation in the soul world is the ability to distinguish between its different kinds of entities in the same way that one distinguishes in the physical world between solid, fluid, and gaseous entities. To attain this, one must know the two basic forces that are of primary significance here. One can call them “sympathy” and “antipathy.” The way these basic forces work in a soul entity determines its kind.

Whereas loving and hating remain something subjective for the life of the soul in the sense world, Imaginative cognition lives along with objective occurrences in the soul world through inner experiences that are equivalent to loving and hating. There also, where he is speaking about soul phenomena, Brentano describes a characteristic of Imaginative cognition through which this cognition already extends into the realm of a still higher kind of knowledge ⁷ and from the fact that he presents moral goodness as right loving one can see that he has a mental picture of an objective kind of loving and hating in contrast to ordinary consciousness' subjective kind of feeling.

Finally, one must pay particular attention to the fact that for Brentano willing is absent from the realm of soul phenomena. Now, the willing that flows out of ordinary consciousness belongs entirely to the physical world. Although in itself it is a purely spiritual being manifesting in the physical world, our willing, in the form in which it can be thought by ordinary consciousness, realizes itself totally in the physical world. If one is describing the ordinary consciousness present in the physical world, willing must not be absent from this picture. If one is describing the seeing consciousness, nothing from our mental pictures about ordinary willing must pass over into these descriptions. For, in the soul world to which Imaginative consciousness is related, what happens as the result of a soul impulse is different from what occurs through the acts of will characteristic of the physical world. So when Brentano focuses on the soul phenomena in that realm in which Imaginative cognition is active, the concept of willing must evaporate for him.

It really seems obvious that, in describing the essential being of soul phenomena, Brentano was actually compelled to depict the essential being of seeing cognition. This is clear even from certain details of his descriptions. Let us look at one example from the many that could be introduced. He says: “The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called ‘consciousness’—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading...” But, when one is only describing those soul phenomena which by belonging to ordinary consciousness are determined by the bodily organization, this term is not at all misleading. Brentano has a sense for the fact, however, that the real soul does not live in this ordinary consciousness, and he feels impelled to speak about the essential being of this real soul in pictures that, to be sure, must be misleading if one wants to apply the usual concept of consciousness to them.

[ 17 ] Brentano proceeds in his investigations in such a way that he pursues the phenomena of the anthropological realm up to that point where they compel an unbiased person to form pictures of the soul that coincide with what anthroposophy, following its own paths, discovers about the soul. And the findings on both paths prove to be in fullest harmony with each other, precisely through Brentano's psychology. Brentano himself, however, did not wish to abandon the anthropological path. He was hindered from doing this by his interpretations of the guiding principle he had set up for himself: “True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition.” A different interpretation of this guiding principle could have led him to recognize that the natural-scientific approach is seen in the right light precisely at the point when one becomes aware that tills approach, in accordance with its own essential nature, must transform itself in dealing with this spiritual realm. Brentano never wished to make the true soul phenomena—which he called soul phenomena “as such”—into objects of an avowed consciousness. If he had done this, he would have progressed from anthropology to anthroposophy. He feared this path, because he was only able to regard it as an erring into “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled roving of fantasy into unknown regions.” He would not permit himself to investigate at all what his own psychological view demanded. Every time he was faced with the necessity of extending his own path into the anthroposophical realm he stopped short. He wished to answer by anthropology the questions that can only be answered by anthroposophy. This effort was doomed to failure. Because it had to fail, he could not proceed in a satisfying way to develop further what he had begun. To judge by the findings in the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, if he had continued on with it, it would have to have become anthroposophy. If he really had produced his Descriptive Psychology, anthroposophy would have to have shone through it everywhere. If he had carried further the ethics in his book The Origins of Moral Knowledge—in a way corresponding to its starting point—he would have to have hit upon anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] Before Brentano's soul there stood the possibility of a psychology that could not be given a purely anthropological form. Anthropology cannot even think at all about the most significant questions that must be raised about human soul life. Modern psychology only wants to be anthropological because it considers anything going beyond it to be unscientific. Brentano says, however:

The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body... And if the difference between these two views really did signify the inclusion or exclusion of the question of immortality, this would have to be called an extremely portentous difference, and a metaphysical investigation of substance as the bearer of [soul] states would be unavoidable.

Anthroposophy shows that metaphysical speculation cannot take one into the region indicated by Brentano; the only way to enter it is through activation of soul powers which cannot descend into ordinary consciousness. Through the fact that in his philosophy Brentano portrays the essential being of the soul in such a way that the essen79 tial being of seeing cognition comes to clear expression in this portrayal, this philosophy is a perfect vindication of anthroposophy. And one can regard Brentano as a philosophical investigator whose path takes him to the very doors of anthroposophy, but does not wish to open these doors, because the picture he has made for himself of natural- scientific thinking created the belief in him that by opening these doors he would land himself in the abyss of nonscience.

The difficulties often confronting Brentano when he wishes to extend his picture of the soul stem from the fact that he relates his picture of the essential being of the soul element to what is present in ordinary consciousness. He is motivated to do this by his wish to remain in the thought mode that seems to him to be scientifically valid. But this approach, with its means of cognition, can only in fact attain to that part of the soul element that is present as the content of ordinary consciousness. This content, however, is not the real soul element but only its mirror image. Brentano grasps this image only from the side of intelligent understanding, and not from the other side, the side of observation. In his concepts he paints a picture of the soul phenomena that occur in the reality of the soul; when he observes, he believes himself to have a reality in his mirror image of the soul element.⁸

Another philosophical stream that Brentano met with the strongest antipathy—that of Eduard von Hartmann— also took its start from a natural-scientific way of picturing the world. Eduard von Hartmann has recognized the image character of ordinary consciousness. But he also utterly rejects any possibility of bringing its corresponding reality into human consciousness in any way. He consigns this reality to the region of the unconscious. He grants the power to speak about this region only to the hypothetical application of the concepts which one has formed through ordinary consciousness and extended beyond it.⁹ Anthroposophy maintains that spiritual observation can go beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. And that concepts are also accessible to this spiritual observation that no more need to be merely hypothetical than those acquired in the sense-perceptible world.

For Eduard von Hartmann the supersensible world is not known directly; it is inferred from what we know directly. Hartmann belongs to those present-day philosophers who do not wish to form concepts without having, as a starting point for forming these concepts, the testimony of sense observation and of their experiences in ordinary consciousness. Brentano forms such concepts, however. But he is mistaken about the reality in which they can be formed through observation. His spirit proves to be curiously divided. He would like to be a pure natural scientist, thinking in the natural-scientific mode that has developed in recent times. And yet he must form concepts that this mode would only consider justified if one did not consider this mode to be the only valid one. This division in Brentano's investigative spirit can be explained if one really studies his first books: The Manifold Significance of “Being,” According to Aristotle (1862), The Psychology of Aristotle (1867), and The Creationism of Aristotle (1882).

In these books Brentano follows Aristotle's trains of thought with exemplary scholarship. And in this pursuit he acquires a kind of thinking that cannot be limited to the concepts that hold sway in anthropology. In these books he has in view a concept of soul that derives the soul element out of the spiritual element. This soul element, stemming from the spiritual element, uses the organism—formed by physical processes—to form mental pictures for itself within sense-perceptible existence. What forms mental pictures for itself in the soul is spiritual in nature; it is Aristotle's “nous.” But this “nous” is a twofold being; as “nous pathetikos,” it only suffers things to happen to it; it allows itself to be stimulated to its mental pictures by the impressions given it by the organism. In order for these mental pictures to appear as they are in the active soul, however, this activity must work as “nous poetikos.” What the “nous pathetikos” provides would be mere phenomena within a dark soul existence; they are illuminated by the “nous poetikos.” Brentano says in this connection: “The ‘nous poetikos’ is the light that illumines the phantasms and makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the senseperceptible.” If one wants to understand Brentano, the point is not only how far he went in taking up Aristotle's mental pictures into his own convictions, but above all that he moved about in these pictures with his own thinking in a devoted way. In doing so, however, his thinking was active in a realm in which the starting point of sensory observation—and along with it the anthropological basis for forming concepts—is not present. And this basic characteristic of his thinking remained in Brentano's research. True, he wants to grant validity only to what can be recognized as conforming with the present-day, natural-scientific mode; but he has to form thoughts that do not belong in that realm. Now, according to the purely natural-scientific method, one can only say something about soul phenomena insofar as they are mirror images—determined by the bodily organization—of the real being of the soul; i.e., insofar as, in their nature as mirror images, they arise and pass away with the bodily organization. What Brentano must think the reality of the soul to be, however, is something spiritual, something independent of the bodily organization, in fact, that through the “nous poetikos” makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the sense-perceptible.

The fact that Brentano can move about with his thinking in such realms prohibits him from conceiving of the soul's essential being as something arising through the bodily organization and passing away with it. Because he rejects supersensible observation, however, he can observe within the soul's essential being no content that extends beyond physical existence. The moment he tries to ascribe a content to the soul that the soul could unfold without the help of the bodily organization, Brentano feels himself to be in a world for which he finds no mental pictures. In this frame of mind he turns to Aristotle and finds there also a picture of the soul that gives him no content other than that acquired in bodily existence. Characteristic in its one-sidedness is something Brentano wrote in this connection in his Psychology of Aristotle:

Now just as a person, when he has lost a foot or another limb, is no longer a complete substance, so, when his whole bodily part has fallen prey to death, he is of course much less a complete substance. To be sure, the spiritual part continues to exist; but those are very much in error who, like Plato, believe that the separation from the body is a benefit to them and, as it were, a liberation from an oppressive prison; the soul, after all, must now renounce all the numerous services that the bodily forces have rendered.

Brentano got into an extraordinarily interesting dispute with the philosopher Eduard Zeller over Aristotle's conception of the essential being of the soul. Zeller maintained that it is in line with Aristotle's views to accept a pre-existence of the soul before its union with the bodily organization, whereas Brentano denied any such view to Aristotle, and only allowed Aristotle to think that the soul is first created into the bodily organization; so the soul has no pre-existence, but does indeed have an after-existence when the body disintegrates. [ 19 ] Brentano maintained that only Plato accepted pre-existence, but Aristotle did not. It is undeniable that the reasons Brentano brings for his opinion and against Zeller's are weighty ones. Irrespective of Brentano's intelligent interpretation of Aristotle's relevant assertions, we are indeed faced with a difficulty in ascribing to Aristotle a belief in the pre-existence of the soul when we consider that any such belief seems to contradict a basic principle of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle states, namely, that a “form” could never exist before the "substance" that bears the form. A spherical shape never exists without the substance that fills it. Since Aristotle considers the soul element to be the “form” of the bodily organization, however, it seems that we cannot ascribe to him the belief that the soul could exist before the bodily organization arose.

[ 20 ] Now Brentano, with his concept of the soul, became so caught up in the Aristotelian picture of the impossibility of pre-existence that he could not see how this picture breaks down at a crucial point. Can one really think of “form” and “matter” in such a way that one accepts the view that form could not exist prior to the matter that fills it? The spherical shape could not after all be present prior to the substance filling it? The sphere, as it appears in a substance, is certainly not present prior to the balling up of the substance. Before the substance comes together like this, however, those forces are present which act upon this substance and whose effect upon the substance reveals itself in its spherical shape. And within these forces, prior to the appearing of this spherical shape, this shape is certainly living already in another way.¹⁰ Had Brentano not felt bound, through his interpretation of the natural-scientific approach, to find the content for his concept of the soul from observation of the bodily organization, he would perhaps have noticed that the Aristotelian concept of the soul is itself burdened with an inner contradiction. Thus, through his study of Aristotle's world view, he could only think up pictures of the soul that lift it out of the realm of the bodily organization, but without indicating a soul content that allows me, with unbiased thinking, to be able to really picture the soul as independent of the bodily organization.

Besides Aristotle, Leibnitz is another philosopher whom Brentano particularly appreciates. It is especially Leibnitz's way of viewing the soul that seems to have attracted him. Now one can say that Leibnitz has a way of picturing things in this realm that seems to be a significant extension of Aristotle's view. Whereas, Aristotle makes the essential content of human thinking dependent upon sense observation, Leibnitz frees this content from its sensory foundation. Following Aristotle one will accept the statement: There is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu); Leibnitz, however, is of the view that there is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses, except thinking itself (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus). It would be incorrect to ascribe to Aristotle the view that the essential being active in thinking is the result of forces working in the body. However, by making the “nous pathetikos” the passive receiver of sense impressions and the “nous poetikos” the illuminator of these impressions, nothing remained in his philosophy that could become the content of a soul life independent of sensory existence. In this respect, Leibnitz's statement proves to be more fruitful. Through it our attention is especially directed toward the essential being of the soul that is independent of the bodily organization. This attention, to be sure, is limited to the merely intellectual part of this essential being. And in this regard, Leibnitz's statement is one-sided. Nevertheless, this statement is a guideline that in our present-day “natural-scientific” age can lead to something that Leibnitz could not yet attain. In his time our picture of the purely natural origin of the characteristics of the bodily organization was still too imperfect. This is different now. To a certain extent today one can know scientifically how the organic bodily forces are inherited from one's ancestors, and how the soul operates within these inherited organic forces. To be sure, many who believe that they are taking the correct "natural-scientific standpoint" will not acknowledge the following view, even though, for a correct grasp of natural-scientific knowledge, it proves necessary: that everything by which the soul operates in the physical body is determined by the bodily forces that proceed from ancestor to descendant in a line of physical inheritance, with the exception of the soul content itself. This is how we can extend Leibnitz's statement today. And then it represents the anthropological validation of the anthroposophical way of looking at things. Then it directs the soul to seek its own essential content within a spiritual world, and to do this in fact through a different kind of cognition than that customary in anthropology. For, anthropology has access only to what is experienced by the bodily organization in ordinary consciousness.¹¹

[ 21 ] The view is quite tenable that Brentano had all the prerequisites, with Leibnitz as his starting point, for opening our vision to the essential being of the soul as an entity anchored in the spirit, and for strengthening the results of this vision through today's natural-scientific knowledge. Anyone who pursues Brentano's presentations can see the path laid out before him. The path that leads to a purely spiritual, recognizable soul being, could have become visible to him, if he had developed further what already lay in the sphere of his awareness when he wrote such statements as these:

But how are we to picture the engagement of the Godhead in the appearance of a human soul in a body? After creatively bringing forth the spiritual part of man out of all eternity, did the Godhead then connect it with an embryo in such a way that this spiritual part—existing up till then as a distinct spiritual substance unto itself—now ceased to be a real entity unto itself and became a part of a human nature, or did the Godhead only then bring forth this spiritual part creatively? When Aristotle accepted the first possibility, he had to believe that the same spirit would be connected again and again with ever different embryos; for, according to him, the human race perpetuates itself by endless procreation, while on the other hand, the number of spirits existing through all eternity can only be a limited one. All Aristotle interpreters agree, however, that he rejected palingenesis ¹² in his more mature period. Therefore, this possibility is out of the question, (see his book Aristotle and his World View 1911)

Although the validation of a spiritual vision of the soul's repeated earth lives through palingenesis does not lie in Aristotle's train of thought, it could have resulted for Brentano through his connecting his soul concept, which he had refined through his work with Aristotle, with the knowledge of modern natural science.

Brentano's receptivity to the epistemology of medieval philosophy would have made it all the easier for him to have taken this path. Anyone who really grasps this epistemology acquires a number of ideas able to relate the results of modern natural science to the spiritual world in a way that is not visible to the ideas arising in the purely natural-scientific research of anthropology. In many circles today one fails to recognize how much a way of picturing things like that of Thomas Aquinas can deepen natural science in a spiritual direction. In such circles one believes that modern natural-scientific knowledge requires a turning away from that way of picturing things. The truth is that one wishes at first to encompass what natural science recognizes as the being of the world with thoughts that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be incomplete in themselves. Their completion would consist in our considering them to be the kind of essential entities in the soul that they are thought to be in Thomas Aquinas' way of picturing things. And Brentano did find himself on his way to gaining the right relation to this way of picturing things. He writes, after all:

In writing The Manifold Significance of Being According to Aristotle and later my Psychology of Aristotle, I wished to further our understanding of his teachings in a twofold way: first and foremost, directly through an illumination of several of the most important points of his teachings; then secondly and indirectly—but in a more general way—by opening new and helpful sources of understanding. I drew the reader's attention to the incisive commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and showed that one can find in them truer presentations of many of Aristotle's teachings than are to be found in later interpretations.¹³

Brentano barred the path that such studies could have revealed to him, because of his inclination toward Bacon's and Locke's way of picturing things and toward everything philosophically connected with that approach. He regarded that approach above all as according with the natural-scientific method. Precisely this approach, however, leads one to think that the content of our soul life is utterly dependent upon the sense world. And since this way of thinking wants to proceed only anthropologically, only that enters into its domain as psychological results which, in truth, is not a soul reality, but only a mirror image of this reality, i.e., the content of ordinary consciousness.

If Brentano had recognized the image nature of ordinary consciousness, he would not have been able, in his pursuit of anthropological research, to stop short at the gates leading into anthroposophy.

One could of course counter my view with the opinion that Brentano simply lacked the gift of spiritual vision and so did not seek the transition from anthropology to anthroposophy, even though he was moved by his own particular spiritual disposition to characterize soul phenomena in an interesting form and so intelligently that this form can be validated through anthroposophy. I myself am not of this opinion, however. I am not of the view that spiritual vision is attainable only as a special gift of exceptional personalities. I must regard this vision as a faculty of the human soul that anyone can acquire for himself if he awakens in himself the soul experiences that lead to it. And Brentano's nature seems to me to be quite especially capable of such an awakening. I believe, however, that one can hinder such an awakening with theories that oppose it; that one keeps this vision from arising if one is entangled in ideas that from the beginning call into question the validity of such vision. And Brentano kept this vision from arising in his soul through the fact that for him the ideas that so beautifully validate this vision always succumbed to the ideas that reject it and that make one fear that through such vision one could “lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudo-philosophy.” ¹⁴

[ 22 ] In 1895 Brentano published a reprint of a lecture he had given in the Literary Society in Vienna with reference to a book by H. Lorm, Baseless Optimism. This lecture contains his view about the “four phases of philosophy and their present status.” There Brentano expresses his belief that the course of development of philosophical research can be compared, in a certain respect, with the history of the arts.

Whereas other sciences, as long as they are practiced at all, show a continuous progress interrupted only occasionally by periods of inaction, philosophy, like the arts, shows decadent periods, in addition to those of positive development, that are often no less rich—yes, even richer—in epoch-making occurrences than periods of healthy fruitfulness.

Brentano distinguishes three such periods in the course of philosophy's development where healthy fruitfulness has passed over into decadence. Each of these periods begins with the fact that out of a purely philosophical astonishment over the riddles of the world, a truly scientific interest stirs and that this interest then seeks knowledge out of a genuine, pure drive to know. This healthy epoch is then followed by another in which the first stage of decadence appears. The purely scientific interest recedes, and people look for thoughts by which to regulate their social and personal lives, and to find their way among them. There, philosophy no longer wishes to serve a pure striving for knowledge, but rather the interests of life. A further decline occurs in the third period. Through the uncertainty of thoughts that did not arise out of purely scientific interests, one loses confidence in the possibility of true knowledge and falls into skepticism. The fourth epoch is one of complete decay. In the third epoch, doubt had undermined the whole scientific foundation of philosophy. Out of unscientific dark depths one seeks to arrive at the truth through mystical experience in fantastical, blurred concepts. Brentano pictured the first cycle of development as beginning with Greek natural philosophy; according to him, this healthy phase ended with Aristotle. Within this phase he holds Anaxagoras in particularly high esteem. He is of the view that even though the Greeks stood at the very beginning then with respect to many scientific questions, still their kind of research would be considered valid by a strictly natural-scientific way of thinking. The Stoics and Epicureans follow then in the second phase. They already represent a decline. They want ideas that stand in the service of life. In the New Academy, especially through the influence of Aenesidemus, Agrippa, and Sextus Empirikus one sees skepticism root out all belief in established scientific truths. And in Neo-Platonism, among philosophers like Ammonius Sakkas, Plotinus, Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and Proklus scientific research is replaced by a mystical experience straying into the labyrinthine passages of pseudo-philosophy.

In the Middle Ages, though perhaps not so distinctly, one sees these four phases repeat themselves. With Thomas Aquinas a philosophically healthy way of picturing things begins, reviving Aristotelianism in a new form. In the next period, represented by Duns Scotus, an art of disputation holds sway—analogous to the first period of decline in Greek philosophy—that is taken to grotesque extremes. Then follows Nominalism, bearing a skeptical character. William of Occam rejects the view that universal ideas relate to anything real, and in doing so assigns to the content of human truth only the value of a conceptual summary standing outside of reality; whereas reality supposedly lies only in the particular individual things. This analogue of skepticism is replaced by the mysticism—no longer striving along scientific lines—of Eckhardt, Tauler, Heinrich Suso, the author of German Theology, and others. Those are the four phases of philosophical development in the Middle Ages.

In modern times, beginning with Bacon of Verulam, a healthy development begins again, based on natural-scientific thinking, in which then Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz work further in a fruitful way. There follows the French and English philosophy of Enlightenment, in which principles, as one found them compatible with life, determined the style of the flow of philosophical thought. Then, with David Hume, skepticism appears; and following it, the phase of complete decay sets in, in England with Thomas Reid, in Germany with Kant. Brentano sees an aspect of Kant's philosophy that allows him to compare it with the Plotinian period of decadence in Greek philosophy. He criticizes Kant for not seeking truth in the agreement of our mental pictures with real objects as a scientific researcher does, but rather in believing that objects should conform to our human capacity for mental picturing. Brentano believes, therefore, that he must ascribe to Kant's philosophy a kind of basic mystical character that then manifests a totally unscientific nature in the decadent philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Brentano hopes for a new philosophical upsurge arising from a scientific work in the philosophical sphere modeled upon the natural-scientific way of thinking that has become dominant in modern times. As an introduction to such a philosophy, he set forth the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition. He wanted to devote his life's work to this thesis.

[ 23 ] In the preface to the reprint of the lecture in which he presented his view of the "four phases of philosophy," Brentano states that:

His view of the history of philosophy might strike many people as odd in its newness; for me, however, it has been an established fact for many years and has been the foundation of academic lectures in the history of philosophy given by me and several of my students now for more than two decades. I am under no illusion about the fact that my view will encounter prejudices and that these may perhaps be too strong to dispel with the first clash. Nevertheless, I hope that the facts and considerations I present cannot fail to make an impression upon anyone who pursues them thoughtfully.

[ 24 ] It is altogether my opinion that one can receive a significant impression from Brentano's presentations. Insofar as from a particular point of view, they represent a classification of phenomena arising in the course of philosophical development, they are based on well-founded insights into the course taken by this development. The four phases of philosophy present differences that are founded within reality.

As soon as one enters into a study of the driving forces within the individual phases, however, one does not find that Brentano has accurately characterized these forces. This is evident at once in his insight about the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. The basic features of Greek philosophy from its Ionic beginnings up to Aristotle do, indeed, reveal many features that justify Brentano in seeing in them what he considers to be a natural-scientific way of thinking. But does this way of thinking really arise from what Brentano calls the natural-scientific method? Are not the thoughts of this Greek philosophy far more a result of what they experienced in their own souls as the essential being of man and his relation to the world-all? Anyone who answers this question in accordance with the facts will find that the inner impulses for the thought content of this philosophy came to direct expression—precisely in Stoicism and Epicurianism—in the whole practical philosophy of life of later Greek times. One can see how, in the soul forces that Brentano finds to be at work in the second phase, there lies the starting point for the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. These forces were directed toward the sense-perceptible and social form of manifestations of the world-all, and therefore could only appear in an imperfect way in the phase of skepticism—which was driven to doubt the direct reality of this form of manifestation—and in the following phase of a seeing cognition, which must go beyond this form. For this reason these phases of ancient philosophy appear decadent.

And which soul forces are at work in the course of philosophical development in the Middle Ages? No one who really knows the relevant facts can doubt that Thomism represents the peak of this course of development with respect to those relationships that Brentano is investigating. But one cannot fail to recognize that, through the Christian standpoint of Thomas Aquinas, the soul forces at work in the Greek philosophy of life no longer operate merely out of philosophical impulses, but have taken on a more-than-philosophical character. What impulses are working in Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is a philosopher? One need have no sympathy for the weaknesses of the Nominalist philosophy of the Middle Ages; but one will indeed be able to discover that the soul impulses working in Nominalism also form the subjective basis for the Realism of Thomas. When Thomas recognizes the universal concepts synthesizing the phenomena of sense perception to be something that relates to a spiritually real element, he thus gains the strength for his Realistic way of picturing things out of his feeling for what these concepts signify within the existence of the soul itself, apart from the fact that they relate to sense phenomena. Precisely because Thomas did not relate the universal concepts directly to the events of sense-perceptible existence, he experienced how in these concepts another reality shines through to us, and how actually they are only signs for the phenomena of sense-perceptible life. Then, as this undertone of Thomism arose in Nominalism as an independent philosophy, this undertone naturally had to reveal its one-sidedness. The feeling that the concepts experienced in the soul establish a Realism in relation to the spirit had to disappear and the other feeling had to become dominant that the universal concepts are mere synthesizing names. When one sees the being of Nominalism in this way, one also understands the preceding second phase of medieval philosophy—that of Duns Scotus—as a transition to Nominalism. However, one cannot but understand the whole force of medieval thought work, insofar as it is philosophy, out of the basic view that revealed itself in a one-sided way in Nominalism. But then one will arrive at the view that the real driving forces of this philosophy lie in the soul impulses that, in keeping with Brentano's classification, one must designate as belonging to the third phase. And in that epoch which Brentano calls the mystical phase of the Middle Ages it becomes quite clear how the mystics belonging to it, persuaded of the Nominalistic nature of conceptual cognition, do not turn to this cognition but rather to other soul forces in order to penetrate to the core of the world's phenomena.

If, in line with Brentano's classification, we now pursue the activity of the driving soul forces in the philosophy of our time, we find that the inner character traits of this epoch are completely different from those indicated by Brentano. Because of certain of its own character traits, the phase of the natural-scientific way of thinking that Brentano finds realized in Bacon of Verulam, Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz absolutely resists being thought of purely as natural-scientific in Brentano's sense. How can one deal in a purely natural-scientific way with Descartes' basic thought: “I think therefore I am;” how is one to bring Leibnitz's Monadology or his “predetermined harmony” into Brentano's way of picturing things? Even Brentano's view of the second phase, to which he assigns the French and English Enlightenment philosophy, creates difficulties when one wants to remain with his mental pictures. One would certainly not wish to deny to this epoch its character as a time of decadence in philosophy; but one can understand this epoch in light of the fact that, in its main representatives, those non-philosophical soul impulses which were energetically at work in the Christian view of life were lamed, with re result that a relation to the supersensible world powers could not be found in a philosophical way. At the same time the Nominalistic skepticism of the Middle Ages worked on, preventing a search for a relation between the content of knowledge experienced in the soul and a spiritually real element.

And if we move on to modern skepticism and to that way of picturing things that Brentano assigns to the mystical stage, we then lose the possibility of still agreeing with his classification. To be sure, we must have the skeptical phase begin with David Hume. But the description of Kant, the “critical” thinker, as a mystic proves after all to be a too strongly one-sided characterization. Also, the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the other thinkers of the period after Kant cannot be regarded as mystical, especially if one bases oneself on Brentano's concept of mysticism. On the contrary, precisely in the sense of Brentano's classification, one will find a common basic impulse running from David Hume, through Kant, to Hegel. This impulse consists in the refusal, based on mental pictures gained in the sensory world, to depict any philosophical world picture of a true reality. As paradoxical as it may seem to call Hegel a skeptic, he is one after all in the sense that he ascribes no direct value as reality to the mental pictures taken from nature. One does not deviate from Brentano's concept of skepticism by regarding the development of philosophy from Hume to Hegel as the phase of modern skepticism. One can consider the fourth modern phase as beginning only after Hegel. Brentano, however, will certainly not wish to bring what arises there as the natural-scientific picture anywhere near mysticism. Still, look at the way Brentano himself wishes to situate himself with his philosophizing into this epoch. With an energy that could hardly be surpassed he demands a natural-scientific method in philosophy. In his psychological research he strives to keep to this method. And what he brings to light is a validation of anthroposophy. What would have to have arisen as the continuation of his anthropological striving, if he had gone further in the spirit of what he pictured, would be anthroposophy. An anthroposophy, to be sure, that stands in complete harmony with the natural-scientific way of thinking.

Is not Brentano's life work itself the most valid proof that the fourth phase of modern philosophy must draw its impulses from those soul forces that both Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism wished to activate but could not, because they could not arrive with their inner soul activity at the kind of experience of spiritual reality that occurs with fully conscious clarity of thinking (or of concepts)? Just as Greek philosophy drew its strength from the soul impulses which Brentano sees as realizing themselves in the second philosophical phase out of a practical philosophy of living, and just as medieval philosophy owes its strength to the impulses of the third phase—that of skepticism—so must modern philosophy draw its impulses from the fundamental powers of the fourth phase—from that of a knowing seeing. If, in accordance with his way of picturing things, Brentano can regard Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism as decadent philosophies, so one could recognize the anthroposophy that complements anthropology as the fruitful phase of modern philosophy, if one leads this philosopher's own ideas about the development of philosophy to their correct conclusions, which Brentano himself did not draw but which follow quite naturally from his ideas.

[ 25 ] The picture we gave of Brentano's relation to the cognitional demands of our day explains why his reader receives impressions that are not limited to what is directly contained in the concepts he presents. Undertones sound forth all the time as one is reading. These emerge from a soul life that lies far deeper behind the ideas he expresses. What Brentano stimulates in the spirit of the reader often works more strongly in the latter than what the author expresses in sharply-edged pictures. One also feels moved to go back often and reread a book by Brentano. One may have thought through much of what is said today about the relation of philosophy to other cognitional views; Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, will almost always rise up in one's memory when one is reflecting in this way. This is a reprint of a lecture to the Philosophical Society in Vienna in 1892 which he gave in order to oppose—with his view of the future of philosophy—what the jurist Adolf Exner had to say on this subject in his inaugural address on Political Education (1891). This publication of the lecture contains notes that offer far-ranging historical perspectives on the course of mankind's spiritual development. In this book all the tones are sounded of what can speak to an observer of today's natural-scientific outlook about the necessity of progressing from this outlook to an anthroposophical one.

[ 26 ] The representatives of this natural-scientific way of picturing things live for the most part in the belief that this outlook is forced upon them by the real being of things. They are of the opinion that they organize their knowledge in accordance with the way reality manifests itself. In this belief they are deluding themselves, however. The truth is that in recent times the human soul—out of its own active development over thousands of years—has unfolded a need for the kind of mental pictures which comprise the natural-scientific picture of the world. It is not because reality presented this picture to them as the absolute truth that Helmholtz, Weisman, Huxley, and others arrived at their picture, but because they had to form this picture within themselves in order through it to shed a certain light upon the reality confronting them. It is not because of compulsion from a reality outside the soul that one forms a mathematical or mechanical picture of the world, but rather because one has given shape in one's soul to mathematical and mechanical pictures and thus opened an inner source of illumination for what manifests in the outer world in a mathematical and mechanical way.

Although generally what has just been described holds good for every developmental stage of the human soul, it does appear in the modern natural-scientific picture in a quite particular way. When these mental pictures are thought through consistently from a certain angle, they destroy any concepts of a soul element. This can be seen in the absolutely not trivial but most dubious concept of a “soul science without soul” that has not been thought up only by philosophical dilettantes but also by very serious thinkers.¹⁵ The mental pictures formed by natural science are leading to ever more insight into the dependency of the phenomena of ordinary consciousness upon our bodily organization. If the fact is not recognized at the same time that what arises in this way as the soul element is not this soul element itself, but only its manifestation in a mirror image, then the true idea of the soul element slips away from our observation, and the illusory idea arises that sees in the soul element only a product of the bodily organization. On the other hand, however, this latter view cannot stand up before an unbiased thinking. To this unbiased thinking, the ideas that natural science forms about nature show a soul connection— to a reality lying behind nature—that does not reveal itself in these ideas themselves. No anthropological approach, out of itself, can arrive at thorough-going mental pictures of this soul connection. For, it does not enter ordinary consciousness.

This fact shows up much more strongly in today's natural- scientific outlook than was the case in earlier historical stages of knowledge. At these earlier stages, when observing the outer world, one still formed concepts that took up into their content something of the spiritual foundations of this outer world. And one's soul felt itself, in its own spirituality, as unified with the spirit of the outer world. In accordance with its own essential being, recent natural scientists must think nature in a purely natural way. Through this, to be sure, it gains the possibility of validating the content of its ideas by observation of nature, but not the existence of these ideas themselves, as something with inner soul being.

[ 27 ] For this reason, precisely the genuine natural-scientific outlook has no foundation if it cannot validate its own existence by anthroposophical observation. With anthroposophy one can fully endorse the natural-scientific outlook; without anthroposophy, one will again and again want to make the vain attempt to discover even the spirit out of the results of natural-scientific observation. The natural-scientific ideas of recent times are in fact the results of the soul's living together with a spiritual world; but only in living spiritual vision can the soul know about its living together with that world.¹⁶ The question could easily arise: Then why does the soul seek to form natural-scientific pictures, if precisely through them it is creating for itself a content that cuts it off from its spiritual foundation? From the standpoint of the beliefs that see the natural-scientific outlook to have been formed in accordance with the way the world does in fact manifest to us, there is no way to find an answer to this question. But an answer is definitely forthcoming if one looks toward the needs of the soul itself. With mental pictures, such as only could have been formed by a pre-natural-scientific age, our soul experience could never have arrived at a full consciousness of itself. In its ideas of nature, which also continued a spiritual element, it would indeed have felt an indefinite connection with the spirit, but it would not have been able to experience the spirit in its own full, independent, and particular nature. Therefore, in the course of mankind's development, our soul element strives to set forth the kind of ideas that do not contain this soul element itself, in order, through them, to know itself as independent of natural existence. The connection with the spirit, however, must then be sought in knowledge not through these ideas of nature but through spiritual vision. The development of modern natural science is a necessary stage in the course of mankind's soul evolution. One understands the basis of this development when one sees how the soul needs it in order to find itself. On the other hand, one recognizes the epistemological implications of this development when one sees how precisely it makes spiritual vision a necessity.¹⁷

[ 28 ] Adolf Exner, whose views are opposed by Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, confronted a natural science that wishes, it is true, to develop its ideas of nature in purity, but that is not prepared to advance to anthroposophy when it is a matter of grasping the reality of the soul. Exner found “natural-scientific education” to be unfruitful in developing ideas that must work in the way people live together in human society. For solving the questions of social life facing us in the future, therefore, he demands a way of thinking that does not rest on a natural-scientific basis. He finds that the great juridical questions confronting the Romans were solved by them in such a fruitful way because they had little gift for the natural-scientific way of picturing things. And he attempts to show that the eighteenth century, in spite of its attraction to the natural-scientific way of thinking, proved quite inadequate in mastering social questions. Exner directs his gaze upon a natural-scientific outlook that is not striving scientifically to understand its own foundation. It is understandable that he arrived at the views he did when confronted by such an outlook. For, this outlook must develop its ideas in such a way that they bring before the soul what is of nature in all its purity. From such ideas no impulse is gained for thoughts that are fruitful in social life. For, in social life souls confront each other as souls. Such an impulse can arise only when the soul element, in its spiritual nature, is experienced through a knowing vision (erkennendes Schaueri), when the natural-scientific, anthropological view finds its complement in anthroposophy.

Brentano bore ideas in his soul that definitely lead into the anthroposophical realm in spite of the fact that he wished to remain only in the anthropological realm. This is why the arguments he mounts against Exner are so penetrating, even though Brentano does not wish to make the transition to anthroposophy himself. They show how Exner does not speak at all about the real abilities of a natural-scientific outlook that understands itself; they show how he tilted with windmills in his battle against a way of thinking that misunderstands itself. One can read Brentano's book and everywhere feel in it how justified everything is that points through his ideas in one direction or another, without finding that he expresses fully what it is that he is pointing toward.

[ 29 ] With Franz Brentano a personality has left us whose work, when experienced, can mean an immeasurable gain. This gain is completely independent of the degree of intellectual agreement that one brings to this work. For, this gain springs from the manifestations of a human soul that have their source much deeper in the world's reality than that sphere in which in ordinary life, intellectual agreement is to be found. And Brentano is a personality destined to work on in the course of humanity's spiritual development through impulses that are not limited to the extension of the ideas he developed. I can very well imagine someone's total disagreement with what I have presented here as Brentano's relation to anthroposophy; regardless of one's scientific standpoint, however, it seems to me impossible—if one lets work upon oneself the philosophical spirit that breathes through the writings of this man—that one could arrive at anything less than the feelings of high esteem for the value of Brentano's personality that underly the intentions of this essay.

• 1. He later spoke about his setting up of this thesis in the lecture he held in the Vienna Philosophical Society in 1892 (published under the title The Future of Philosophy). What I refer to as Brentano's later reference to his thesis is on page 3.
• 2. Please see the last part of addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul from What Is External to the Soul.
• 3. Please see addendum 5: The Real Basis of an Intentional Relation.
• 4. Published by Mercury Press, 1990. See pages 132f. Ed.
• 5. Although the following comment is superfluous, lam sure, to many readers, I would still like to add that, by the very nature of the matter, with my comparison of consciousness to a mirror image, I am not referring to the usual practice of calling our world of mental pictures a mirror image of the outer world; I am calling the soul's experiences in ordinary consciousness a mirror image of the genuine soul element.
• 6. Please see addendum 6: The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being.
• 7. The first form of a “seeing cognition”—Imaginative cognition—passes over into the second form, which is called "Inspired cognition" in my books. In addendum 6, The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being, there is a description of how an Imagination that has already passed over into Inspiration actually lives in Brentano's definition of loving and hating.
• 8. Please see addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul Element from What is External to the Soul.
• 9. This view is expressed in his two books Modern Psychology, Leipzig 1901, and Outline of Psychology, Bad Sachsa 1908.
• 10. A mistaken view about the validity of the assertion that form cannot exist prior to the matter filling it can arise in connection with crystal formation only because there the form seems to emerge directly out of the forces dwelling in the matter. Nevertheless, unbiased thinking cannot do otherwise than situate the formative forces within the material element before the formed matter actually arises. Aristotle's picture becomes completely untenable, however, when we consider the plant, whose formative forces can certainly not be sought in the conditions within the seed alone, but rather in the effects of the outer world that are present long before the formation of the sense-perceptible plant.
• 11. There are thinkers who are repelled by the view that the essential kernel of one's soul is not inherited from its physical ancestors but originates from the spiritual world, because this view demeans the process of human procreation. The philosopher J. Frohschammer is one of these thinkers (see his book The Origin of Human Souls). According to him, we must believe that even children's souls stem from their parents, since "these living human beings do not beget mere bodies or animals" (see also Frohschammer's book on The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). An objection based on this opinion does not apply to the view we are presenting in this book. For, one need not think that the soul kernel, descending from the spiritual world and uniting itself with what is inherited from the ancestors, is unconnected with the souls of its parents before birth, even though one does not picture this soul kernel as arising through the act of procreation.
• 12. Literally, “rebirth.” Ed.
• 13. See Brentano's Aristotle's Teachings on the Origins of the Human Spirit, 1911.
• 14. Please see addendum 8, An Objection Often Raised against Anthroposophy.
• 15. This picture of a “soul science without soul” also belongs to the realm of the riddles described in this book as existing at the “borderland of our knowing activity”; and if this picture is not experienced in such a way that it is taken as the starting point of a seeing consciousness, it then walls off the entryway to true knowing of the soul, instead of showing a path to such knowing.
• 16. Where the genuine natural-scientific approach leads is convincingly shown in a book by Oskar Hertwig, which is outstanding in many respects, The Development of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance, 1916. Precisely when a work, like that underlying this book, is so exemplary in its application of the natural-scientific method, it can lead to innumerable soul experiences at the “boundaries of our knowing activity.”
• 17. What is expressed here is presented in a detailed way in my book The Riddles of Philosophy. One of the basic thoughts of that book is to show how natural-scientific cognition proves its power in the soul progress of humanity.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, I tried to show that the aims and essence of spiritual research, as it is meant here, correspond to the urge and yearning of the present time, that they essentially meet the needs of human souls, which have been preparing for a long time up to our present day and which are now clearly perceptible to everyone who wants to see, to everyone who just wants to understand themselves correctly. One can now, especially when considering the question of the significance of this spiritual research or spiritual science for life, for the immediate, one might say fully active life of the human being, take up yesterday's remark, because one can best understand the significance of a thing for life when one first sees certain urges and needs arising from life that this thing demands. Today, many people expect a [satisfying] worldview. Spiritual research or science will provide it.

What the soul needs when its I wants to develop its character is what many people today expect from a kind of conclusion that can be drawn from the truly advanced natural science of our time. For certain things this is certainly justified; however, an attentive observation of what is happening in our time clearly shows us how many things cannot be achieved in this way, how the life of the present so longingly, so strongly longs for a research, for the spirit.

Many facts could be cited; only one of the most recent will be presented here. On September 18 at the Naturalists' Assembly in Münster, Professor von Wettstein gave a lecture on the importance of biology, the science of life, for culture and life; that is, [he pointed out] with complete justification, how one could see in the course of the nineteenth century that a worldview should be given in a popular way that should be based on the achievements of natural science. And he emphasized how natural science has progressed steadily, and how it had to be broken by science with what was to be shown for the human soul in the materialistic age; and with full justification, he endeavored to remain calm in observing the fact and not to draw hasty conclusions about those world-view questions that may very much enter into the realm where human thinking goes astray into what is indeed unjustified.

In fact, spiritual science wants nothing more than to follow such advice in its own way and in its own field; not by arriving at the truth of life through all kinds of conclusions and circumstantial evidence of the world view from external sensual facts , but by awakening the slumbering powers of the soul, that which Goethe describes as “spiritual eyes”, observing what is behind the world of the senses, behind being in the senses in general, and with which the human soul thinks itself connected.

This is what our time and life craves. And if spiritual science is about fathoming the truth, then the way in which it can relate to life in a way that fertilizes and heals it must be such that every soul finds satisfaction. Therefore, this demand may well be made in response. And here one thing can be said: spiritual science must fulfill one thing if it is to meet the needs of life: it must have the power, independently of a certain higher education, independently of the development of this or that fact of science, independently even of a certain height of philosophical worldview, to also enter into the simplest mind that has to do its daily work as a human being and does not have time to deal with this or that individual science in a detailed way. Spiritual research must be generally accessible. In order to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to add that spiritual research must be in complete harmony with the science of the time, and must not contradict its just demands. The strictest researcher with his strictest demands may come, and spiritual science must be able to answer to him. And anyone who engages with the serious literature of spiritual science will see how this can be.

But it is also important that it brings things to light that every soul, regardless of education, can understand. And here I would like to respond, not with a theory, but with a kind of fact. I would like to mention not a fact that is taken directly from spiritual science itself, but a fact that actually points to something that happened before spiritual science emerged, but which shows how souls that long for an inclination towards the spiritual world understand each other in a remarkable way, regardless of their level of education. I will cite something that bears witness to such understanding, and which will occur to an increased degree when spiritual science becomes more and more established in the souls that need it.

Moriz Carriere, one of the most amiable and thoughtful philosophers of the present day – it can only be noted here that he was one of those who always held philosophy's idealism in high regard at a time when materialism was sweeping in over the great questions of world view – of his work on the cultural development of humanity, he not only shows how the spiritual works in the development of humanity, but also how true science can be reconciled with the genuine needs of the soul in terms of the big questions of existence, and with the relationship between world view and religion. Now Moriz Carriere himself relates a remarkable experience that he had just as he was trying to show how the spiritual works in the pursuit of human development, and how the great figure of Christ Jesus in particular fits into human development. Then he received a series of manuscript pages in the mail. They came from a simple man. His name was never known either. His name was Karl Zeuner. At a time when the waves of revolutionary life were running high, he had somehow broken the law and was imprisoned. He was thrown into prison. And now he tells how he despaired of the friends who had striven with him for external goals, of the remnants of what was left to him from the religious education of the school, how he was lonely. He recounts how he then heard a familiar song from afar in his prison. He recounts how that inspired his soul, how special powers stirred in his soul. He wrote down thoughts that gradually came to his reawakening soul in prison.

Right when you start reading these pages, you come across strange sentences, especially at the beginning. He says something like: “When I look at my own soul and then at what surrounds me, I feel in my soul the same essence that lives in all things outside, and I feel in my own soul like a part of the whole world soul.” And from there he starts to form his ideas about the course of world history, describing how the spirit in people, who have gradually developed, is active.

Why did Moritz Carriere find this so surprising? It is surprising when you compare these pages of the simple man with what Moritz Carriere wrote based on a knowledge of contemporary science and studies of the cultural development of the world. If you take his main ideas, they are almost an agreement down to the last word between the two, the simple man and the highly educated philosopher. The simple man in his solitude, who only calls upon his innermost soul forces, writes something that is the same as what the philosopher draws from the wells of learning. That is, when he comes to questions of worldview, if a person only wants to search, there is an understanding between the one who searches in his soul and the one who searches this path on the basis of comprehensive learning.

This shows us how understanding through the spirit is possible between the most educated and the simplest, most primitive soul. And if in a particular case it was possible even without spiritual science, on the basis of certain concepts and ideas, then we may say: Firstly, the promotion of such an agreement corresponds to an urge of our present life. It corresponds to the spirit of our time that souls of all stations and degrees of education should communicate about their deepest needs; and secondly, such communication will be all the more necessary when souls need not come to the spirit through concepts and ideas that they squeeze out of their inner being – which are like shadows compared to what spiritual science has to give – but through spiritual science, this will be achieved all the more.

This means that our time in particular is faced with the challenge of finding a way to achieve general understanding of the fundamental questions of existence, and we have arrived at the gateway to their practical solution through spiritual science.

This means that spiritual science is able to intervene directly in life. However, there is an objection to this spiritual science, as some people emphasize, especially when it comes to putting this generally understandable knowledge in its proper perspective. They say: Yes, but first it is taught that the one who penetrates into the spiritual world awakens the slumbering soul. And what is said in my “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” requires a long journey before one can gain insight into this spiritual life. How can one speak of general comprehensibility when only one who has transformed one's soul can penetrate it?

This objection is understandable and yet not entirely justified, because this is a necessary requirement for the spiritual researcher to establish the facts of the spiritual world for himself. The spiritual researcher can investigate spiritual facts that are important for life. He can then formulate them, express them in words, concepts and ideas, and communicate them to the general public. Spiritual training is necessary for research; but when these facts are there and, formulated in concepts, words and ideas, then even the simplest mind can understand them, anyone can understand them. Nothing more is needed than to surrender to these ideas, concepts and words without prejudice; for it is the case with these spiritual facts that when we let these ideas take effect on us, they prove themselves. They can give us everything we need from them for the purposes of practical life — the upliftment, strengthening and recovery of our health that we require from them. What true spiritual researchers can give to the world can always be tested by science! These things may not, of course, stand the test of superficial criticism, but they can stand the true test. But what more or less everyone says and feels is that they have to admit a general turning of human knowledge towards the higher world. But as soon as one goes into the details of spiritual research, as soon as one begins to describe the observations of the spiritual world, to describe what happens between death and a new birth, what is called the development of humanity, according to the impulses given by spiritual science. In short, when details are given, our contemporaries still often recoil. They seek a general indication, without this - they admit - human life, the strengthening, healthy one, could not exist. But when one goes into details, when one describes the nature and things of the spiritual world, then the same objection immediately arises: no one can penetrate up there, we cannot know anything about that. Here we are at the point, honored attendees, where spiritual science will first have to make itself understood to what are indeed expressed needs of life, but what one only wants in generalities.

Let me give you another specific example of how humanity is seeking a new answer to the needs of the soul. The former president of Harvard University, USA, spoke of it, calling it the need for a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion; spiritual science has nothing to do with forming sects; it wants to understand the old ones, wants to explore in the spiritual what the human soul needs. Our contemporaries believe that this urge for spiritual research is an urge for a new religion. Dr. Eliot has pointed out how our needs in life are pushing us towards spiritual science. Dr. Eliot, who was at the forefront of science for a long time and was president of a university, expressed the following in essence: People have always assumed that the soul is different from the body, although it is inherent in it. Everyone believes that there is in man a living, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something as fundamentally real as the body. It is the most active part of the human being and is recognized as such: and this has always been the case and will always be the case.

When one hears such words, one can conclude that even people who have a broad education have this urge and aspiration.

Many examples could be given; everywhere one will see that the spirit is indicated out of the need for life, not out of knowledge, but in a peculiar way that shows what aversion still exists to the details of how they are to be presented through spiritual science.

When someone, like Dr. Eliot, points out the needs of the time, then this reference is somewhat as if one were to say with regard to natural science: No one can deny that there is a nature, a nature that brings forth beings in space, a nature that causes events to occur in time that have a beginning and an end, and so on. Someone who points to nature in this way can be compared to someone who points to the spirit as Dr. Eliot does. But can anyone be satisfied with the fact that there is a nature with various living beings and events?

What is satisfying is that a person can go out and perceive the individual concrete entities. Not the abstract satisfies people, but the details; facts must come before our soul. What could never satisfy anyone in relation to nature is what should still satisfy many in relation to the spiritual – an empty generality, an abstraction.

But people still refuse to go into the details, the details, the facts of the spiritual world, which shine out of spiritual science just as the individual facts of nature shine out of natural science.

Spiritual science today stands on the same ground as natural science did four centuries ago, when it began to look at nature through its means. While yesterday it was pointed out that one goes into the details of natural scientific matters, today it must be pointed out that one must first get used to thinking about the details of spiritual life in the same way as about the details of natural processes; and how it is not enough to know that there are general natural products, how the natural scientist must distinguish, for example, between oats and wheat, so man will also need more and more the details of spiritual facts. Just as one cannot approach natural needs in the same way with wheat and oats, so one cannot approach spiritual needs with general references to the spiritual world. When this or that consolation is needed or when this or that character trait is to be poured into the soul, then details and facts must be given. This is the path that spiritual science has to take. And because this tendency towards the general dominates the world today, we see from the individual things that are demanded how, although people admit that their present life contains a yearning for the spirit, which has a fertilizing effect on the soul that it fills when it is satisfied, no one can say anything accurate about the most essential things, because people generally resist the individual.

From this speech by Eliot, we can also take out another sentence in which he talks about how the spiritual worldview that is being built seems to apply to all the scientific achievements of the new era, and will deal with joy and life.

He thus opposes old age, death, and so on. We have before our eyes a distancing from death and mourning, death and sin, on the part of those who tell people what the life of the soul should be when they have passed through the gate of death. Dr. Eliot demands that all this is unnecessary in the new world view, that it should be concerned with life and joy. This is entirely in keeping with the outlook of our time, which focuses on the living deed and sees reasons to make life strong and joyful. That is fully justified. It is also justified to say that the new view of life must deal with life and joy; and in contrast to this, the sentence sounds wonderful: the new world view should ignore death and mourning. There is still a weighty objection: however much human thinking does not want to deal with it, death and mourning will deal with man and show their existence to man, and life will always demand, so that one can understand it, to know something about death and its riddles, and joy will demand forces that lift us up again when mourning weighs us down.

But this is precisely the aim of spiritual science: to awaken in the soul that which brings one to the justified, certain conviction that what is human existence in its true nature is not part of the external sensual world, but is of an eternal nature, passing from life to life. And this realization of the deepest life in its individual life will only bring the knowledge of true life that Eliot demands, because as knowledge it knows how the truly living always conquers death. And this knowledge will know how to draw out of the depths of the soul the forces that arise from the spiritual and that know how to lift us up again when the outer life depresses us through grief or something else.

We can take a fact from human life, a fact from the spirit of our time, and then draw our conclusions as to what the life of the individual can get from the results of spiritual research.

Everyone experiences that their life has a youth, progresses, and that a point of culmination is finally reached, and that they then descend again. They experience how gradually withers that which they call their physical body. A superficial science has just concluded from this fact that the spiritual depends on the physical. Because the brain withers so that an external stimulus of the intellect is not possible, one draws the conclusion that the soul-spiritual withers with the physical. This is as if one concludes from the unusability of a piano that the player would no longer be there.

If spiritual science is allowed to flow in, what it knows from the spiritual world, then the soul will have powers towards old age, which intervene in life in a healing way. In my little writing about the education of the child, you can see how spiritual science also intervenes in the details of practical education. How often one hears people giving all kinds of educational advice. Those who know life are often alarmed by such general sentences and rules, and those who follow the literature attentively will see how inadequate these reformist ideas of today are for the growing human being. But when one knows from spiritual research how, under completely different conditions, the human being grows up in the different years and periods of his life, how the physical body develops up to the seventh year, how then the educational measures have a completely different effect in the seventh to fourteenth years, when the etheric body is forming, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, when the astral body develops. Only when one knows how these epochs in human life are differentiated, and how the human being progresses in precisely differentiated stages, only then is one able to establish such principles from the nature of the human being that truly bring forth what lies in the soul. The future will show how life can be enriched by such pedagogy, which is taken from spiritual science; for anyone who approaches life in such a way that the conditions are created for us to give the soul the forces that awaken life at certain times must then always see for himself what spiritual science can become for all people. Wherever the human being stands, he cannot only acquire theoretical knowledge. Instead, spiritual science gives the human soul truly spiritual substance, spiritual nourishment that works in the soul and is digested, if I may use the trivial expression, and always keeps the soul soft, inwardly active, full of content, and aware of itself. This is knowledge that is needed in life and will be needed more and more.

Then, when life begins to decline, when wrinkles start to appear on our faces and our hair begins to turn white, then we not only have theosophical knowledge, but, through a spiritual-scientific view of life, we carry within us a living core that is full of content, experiences itself more and more as the outer shell falls away, and the human being feels within: You lay aside the shell and the body, the physical, but within you carry the strength to go through the spiritual world, to get new strength there for building a new life. Saying this to yourself inwardly gives security.

This applies in general to all people. In a sense, spiritual science will help people more and more to overcome what must naturally arise if one does not feel the living spirit.

Another fact that is particularly important in our time is nervousness. In a certain way, everyone today feels what is meant by the age of nervousness, because it is inwardly connected with certain concepts that have been formed. How often does a person feel this or that powerlessness, this or that fault, this or that vice, in the sense of the materialistic world view, so that the person looks at his ancestors, at his line of inheritance.

In poetry, it is often depicted how a person, feeling burdened by his ancestors, says to himself: This is inherited disposition, this cannot be changed. The product of such a state of mind is weakness, desolation - no observer should fail to see how this actually makes people weak.

Today, one encounters strange experiences. Materialistic researchers, in particular, speak of the nervousness of our time, as materialistic explanations have always done. Only recently a book was published by an Austrian scholar who, curiously enough, attributes the whole predisposition with one expression: that everything in man is based on the physical and chemical composition of his organism, even his character. And if you read the book further, something strange happens: the author gives advice. You would think that you could expect some kind of remedy to be taken to help with the chemical-physical imbalance; the gentleman in question does not recommend any pills, at least not for many cases, but rather recommends strengthening the character through moral means, through all kinds of soul things!

We do not want to argue with our time in such areas. We want to focus our attention on the question: where should the things be taken from that make a person who is desolate with this or that ailment - physical-chemical conditions that make up his character - where should the means be taken to make him a fighter against his nervousness, against his neurasthenia?

Spiritual science will answer: When people realize that it was just as much a mistake to claim that the complex of characteristics of the child arises solely from the inheritance from the parents, when one draws that conclusion, it is just as much an error of observation as it once error of observation when in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth, it was said, and not only laymen but also learned researchers believed it, that higher animals, even fish, can arise from inanimate substance.

And there was a great revolution when the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi stated: Living things can never arise from non-living things. Living things can only arise from living things. With great difficulty, Francesco Redi escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The same must be said for the spiritual and soul: the spiritual and soul can only emerge from the spiritual and soul. We look back to the spiritual and soul, which is the seed in earlier times for our present life. We feel the injustice of what we carry within us as fate, as predispositions, as spiritual-soul possessions, being supposed to be only something inherited from our ancestors, and we recognize that it is rooted in the spiritual that we acquired in earlier times. Then the human being becomes aware that there is something in him besides the inherited traits. And to the extent that he recognizes this, he need not look at his inherited traits and say to himself, “I have to bear these.” No, the spiritual researcher, when he has recognized his soul core, must seek to strengthen his powers and help them develop.

In this way spiritual science will have an effect on life, making it healthy, and the individual will place himself firmly in life.

This basically indicates the other result of life research: the social. Our time has initially only the tendency - albeit justified - to study the external arrangement, how one should make this or that institution so that people can find their existence. The inner tendency brings spiritual science, how people should bring their inner being out, in order to grow into life and stand in life.

All this will include the fact that this time must become aware that it is not dealing with dead theory in spiritual research, but that life forces themselves are being awakened. As a result, the age will recognize the reality of what comes from spiritual science, will experience it, because spiritual science will grasp itself in life. Thus the human being who carries spiritual science within himself will face life in a different way, which is impossible without spiritual science, but which life will foster more and more. When the spirit, the soul, is grasped as reality, when it is realized that the soul is reality, then there will no longer be a lack of understanding for the serious fact of life that out of a healthy, powerful grasp of the soul's core, forces also flow that can protect the outer physical body from damage, weakness, and even illness.

In this respect, the view of our time is shown in the common use of a saying that is, however, increasingly dying out: “A healthy soul dwells in a healthy body,” which means that if you just make the body healthy, then a healthy soul dwells in the body. In spiritual science, this will be understood quite differently, that a healthy soul dwells in a healthy body, because the innermost soul, in its health, forms the physical life in the body. People will recognize the healing powers that spiritual science instills into the soul, although not with the means that people want to use for recognition today, because today they will look and say: There is a person who has studied spiritual science but still became ill. The answer to this is that spiritual science or spiritual research has not yet come very far in terms of its dissemination, and secondly, of course, nothing can be done directly against external damage to the physical body if this damage comes only from the physical, just as you cannot heal a broken leg from the soul.

But there is also something that we recognize through the peculiar way in which the insights of spiritual research work, that the soul transforms back to an external coexistence with existence, as it had before the alienation from nature. We see in the child, and also in the animal, an instinctive growing together with the existence of the spiritual world. We see how the animal does not eat too much, how the instinct is healthy, but we see how certain things are conditioned in the cultural human being by the fact that he is alienated from nature. Sometimes one can look at this with a shudder, how humanity is moving away from this direct experience and coexistence with existence. Just the other day I saw a person who weighed out a certain amount of food for each meal. In the current transformation into a purely mechanical science, we even treat the human stomach and digestive tract like retorts. There it remains - the mechanical - not only in science, there it goes over into the treatment of human life. In contrast to this is the stream of spiritual research. With knowledge, the human being returns to existence in such a way that he instinctively protects himself in the higher sense from that which should not be. And then, of course, the healing effect of spiritual research will have to be assessed somewhat differently than it is today.

If questions now arise, such as: How many illnesses does the healing of spiritual science actually protect us from? — is difficult to answer, because the illnesses don't come; nevertheless, it is more reasonable that man, by living in the instinct life, is protected by spiritual science from illnesses than that he has to heal himself afterwards. Thank God, it cannot be proven, because the result is that these damages no longer occur.

Thus we see how a return to nature, in the very modern sense, is brought about for life through spiritual science. Much more could be said; in the end everything would clearly indicate that spiritual science brings about healing, advancement in life, and the right place in life, in the natural context of life.

Thus not only knowledge, the most valuable possession, but significant consequences for life are brought about by spiritual science, consequences that one can only imagine when one considers them as they have been, albeit only briefly, hinted at today. But all this will come about because man will penetrate into the spiritual worlds, not only in general, but by recognizing the individual spiritual facts. Just as he speaks not only of general nature in nature, but recognizes the details, the individual minerals, the individual plants and the individual animals, so he will also recognize the spiritual world in its details. Then the spiritual nature around him will be as nature itself is meant to foster, fertilize and even sustain physical life.

Then man will feel himself embedded in the spirit as he otherwise feels embedded in the physical in the substances of nature. One will learn to feel that one lives in the spirit as one lives in the physical. Just as one feels the processes that take place outside in the universe in the physical organism, one will feel the spiritual relationships, to grief and joy, to suffering and desire, to desire and contemplation in their own world, and life will find that which promotes life and health from the spirit.

That is what can be hoped for from spiritual science, because this spiritual science is to fulfill the soul's desire to feel at one with everything that is going on in the universal spiritual realm. When man will no longer think that everything is just an event, a life, what is going on in him, and his will like a power that has no significance for the environment, when he will know that what is going on in him is as interconnected with the spiritual as with the physical of the physical body, then man will receive strength and power, health through such science health; then will man find what I sought to indicate in my drama 'The Test of the Soul', as a soul expresses this sense of security in the spiritual, that man knows himself in the spirit, experiences himself in the spirit, thinks in the spirit and really breathes in it and in this real breath of life attains a life-filled existence.

This soul health will emanate from spiritual science when it is fulfilled, when it is given through spiritual science, which is expressed in those words, where it is said what can take place in a seeking soul. What has been said today can be summarized in what a soul that feels at home in the spirit can say to itself:

In your thinking live world thoughts

— do not dwell in man merely temporarily, but are eternal world thoughts —

In your feeling weave world forces
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts
experience yourself through cosmic powers,
create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is worldly remote,
through the play of thought-dreams – –;
begin in the expanses of the spirit,
and end in the depths of your own soul: –
you will find divine goals,
recognizing yourself within yourself.

I said yesterday that although it is a somewhat hazardous venture to speak of individual karmic connections, I intended to do so, and that I would take as examples the personalities of whom I gave you certain biographical details. Later on we shall also be able to study the karma of less representative personalities, but I have chosen, in the first place, examples which show clearly how in the karmic course of repeated phases of existence, the evolution of mankind as a whole goes forward. In modern civilisation we speak of history as if it were one continuous stream of happenings: events of the 20th century are related to events of the 19th century, these again to events of the 18th century, and so on. That it is men themselves who carry over things from one epoch of history to another, that the men now living have themselves carried over from earlier epochs what is to be found in the world and in life at the present time—this knowledge alone brings reality to light and reveals the true, inner connections in the historical life of mankind.

If we speak merely of “cause” and “effect,” no real connection comes to light. The connecting threads running through the evolution of humanity are woven as human souls pass over from epochs in the remote past to more recent times, entering again and again into new incarnations on the earth.

These connecting threads can be perceived in all their significance when we study really representative personalities.

In the lecture yesterday I spoke, firstly, of the aestheticist Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the “Swabian Vischer” as he is called, telling you something of his character. I said that I shall choose only examples that I have actually investigated. These investigations are a matter of vision, and are pursued by means of the spiritual faculties of which I have spoken so often and about which you can read in anthroposophical literature. Accordingly the only possible way of describing these things is that of narrative, for in this domain it is only what presents itself to direct vision that can be communicated. The moment we turn from one earthly life to an earlier life in the past, all intellectual reasoning comes to a standstill. Vision alone is the criterion here. A last vestige of intellectual understanding is possible when it is a matter of relating earthly life to the last phase of existence between death and rebirth from which it has directly proceeded—that is, to the life of soul-and-spirit just before the descent to earth. Here, up to a point, an intellectual approach is possible. When, however, it is a matter of showing the relation between one earthly life and a preceding incarnation, this can be done only in the form of narrative, for vision is the sole criterion. And if in contemplating a personality like Friedrich Theodor Vischer one is able to apprehend what is eternal in him—what passes over from one earthly life to another—then such a personality as he was in an earlier incarnation will emerge into one's field of vision, provided always that the right currents can be found in the whole series of earthly lives. Investigation leads back, first of all, of course, to the pre-earthly experiences. But in speaking now I shall give second place to these pre-earthly experiences and indicate how, behind the earthly lives of the three personalities in question, their previous incarnations can be perceived.

In undertaking such investigations it is absolutely essential to get rid of all preconceived notions. If, because of some opinion or view we may hold concerning the present or the last earthly life of a human being, we imagine that it is justifiable to argue intellectually that because of what he is now, he must have been this or that in an earlier incarnation—if we make judgments of this kind, we shall go astray, or at any rate it will be very easy to go astray. To base an intellectual judgment of one incarnation upon another in this way would be just as if we were to go into a house for the first time, look out of the windows facing north, and seeing trees outside were to conclude from these trees what the trees look like from the windows facing south. What must be done is to go to the south windows, see the trees there and look at them with entirely unbiased eyes.

In the same way, all intellectual reasoning must cease when it is a matter of apprehending the Imaginations which correspond to the earlier earthly lives of the personalities in question.

In the case of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, one is led back to the last incarnation of importance—in the intervening time there may have been one or another unimportant or possibly brief earthly life, but for the moment that is of no consequence—one is led back to the incarnation in which the karma of his present life was prepared—I mean “present” in the wider sense, for as you know, Vischer died at the end of the eighties of the 19th century. The incarnation in which the karma of his latest earthly life was prepared lies somewhere about the 8th century A.D. We see him among the Moorish-Arabian peoples who crossed over at this time from Africa to Sicily and there came into conflict with the peoples who were making their way down to Sicily from the north.

The essential point is that in this previous incarnation of importance, the individuality of whom I am speaking had received a thoroughly Arabian education, Arabian in every detail, containing all the artistic, perhaps also the inartistic elements in Arabism; it was characterised, too, by the vital energy with which in those days Arabism forced its way to Europe; and, above all, it brought this individuality into close human relationship with a large number of other men belonging to the same race.

This individuality, who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, tried in the 8th century to establish close comradeship with many men belonging to the same Arabian stock and the same Arabian culture, who had already made strong contacts with Europe, were endeavouring to establish themselves in Sicily, and had to face heavy fighting; or rather it was really more the Europeans who had to face the fighting. The individuality we are considering took a full share in these conflicts. One may say that he was a person of genius—in the sense in which genius was conceived in those times. This individuality then, is to be found in the 8th century A.D.

Then he passes through the gate of death into the life between death and rebirth, during which there is naturally intimate fellowship with the souls with whom one has been together on earth. Here, in the spiritual world, were the souls with whom this individuality had tried, as I have just told you, to establish close relationship.

Now between these human beings—in language that has been coined for earthly relationships it is difficult to find expressions for describing super-sensible conditions—between the human souls with whom this individuality was now together, after he and they had passed through the gate of death, there existed through all the following centuries, right into the 19th century, a spirit-bond, a spiritual tie.

You will have understood from the lecture I gave here a week ago that what takes place on earth is lived through in advance by the Beings of the highest Hierarchies, by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, and that a human being who is passing through the life between death and a new birth looks down to a heaven of soul and spirit as we look up to the heavens. There, in that heaven of soul and spirit, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones live through what subsequently becomes our destiny, what is brought to realisation as our destiny when we descend again to the earth.

Now, in the conditions obtaining in the spiritual world, it was foreseen by the souls belonging to the community into which the individuality we are studying had been drawn, that through the coming centuries it would be their destiny to preserve a line of progress that would be quite uninfluenced by Christianity. What I am now saying will seem very strange, for the idea often prevails that the ordering of the world is as simple as we humans like to have it in everything we arrange ourselves. But the ordering of the world is by no means so simple. While on the one hand the mightiest of all impulses poured from the Mystery of Golgotha into the whole of Earth evolution, on the other hand it was necessary that what had been contained in earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha should not be allowed at once to perish; it was necessary that what was, I will not say “anti-Christian” but “non-Christian,” should be allowed to stream on through the centuries.

And the task of sustaining this stream of culture for Europe—as it were of enabling a phase of culture not yet Christian to continue on into the Christian centuries—fell to a number of individuals who were born into Arabism in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Arabism was not, of course, directly Christian, but neither had it remained as backward as the old heathen religions. In a certain direction it had made steady progress through the centuries. A number of souls born into this stream were to carry forward in the spiritual world, untouched by the conditions prevailing on earth, that which the spirit of man, separated from Christianity, can know, feel and experience. They were to encounter Christianity only later, in later epochs of earthly evolution. And it is in truth an experience of shattering grandeur, full of deep significance, to see how a large community lived on in the spiritual world removed from the development of Christianity, until in the 19th century the majority of these souls came down to incarnation on earth. As you may suppose, they were very different individualities, with every variety of talent and disposition.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer was one of the first souls from this community to descend in the 19th century. [Vischer was born in 1807 and died in 1887] And he was as remote as can be from any possibility of direct experience of Christianity.

On the other hand, while still in his pre-earthly existence, he was able to receive impulses from those leading spirits who had been more or less near to Christianity but whose views of the world and conceptual life had developed in a direction not primarily and intrinsically Christian.

For a soul such as the one we now have in mind, the incarnation in the 7th/8th century was an especially good preparation—(it is of course paradoxical to speak of these things as one speaks of earthly affairs, but as I said, I intend to make the venture)—for coming together in the spiritual world with souls like that of Spinoza and others of a similar type, and with a large number of bearers of non-Christian culture, particularly, too, of Cabbalistic culture, who died during those centuries and came up into the spiritual world.

Thus prepared, this particular soul came into earthly existence in the 19th century, rather earlier than the others. All the others, for the reason that they descended somewhat later, became bearers of the natural-scientific outlook prevailing in the second half of the 19th century. For in point of fact the secret of the peculiar evolution of natural-scientific thinking in the second half of the 19th century is that well-nigh all the bearers of this stream at that time had been Arabians in their previous incarnations of importance; they were companions of the individuality who then came down as Friedrich Theodor Vischer. But Vischer came down earlier than they—it was like a premature birth in the sense of soul-and-spirit.

This, moreover, was grounded deeply in his karma, owing to his association, before his descent to earthly life, with the souls with whom Hegel was connected. With these souls, too, Friedrich Theodor Vischer had been associated in the spiritual world. This expressed itself in a strong personal bent for what Hegelianism became on earth, and protected him from growing into a purely materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world. If he had been born somewhat later, as were his companions in the spiritual life, he too, as an aestheticist, would in the natural course of things have headed straight for materialism. He was protected from this by his experiences in pre-earthly life and by his earlier descent to earth. But he could not adhere permanently to this Hegelian influence. And that is why he came to write the destructive critique of his own aesthetics—because here was something that was not quite in the line of his karma but was the result of a deflection of his karma. It would have been entirely in line with his karma to have been born at the same time as men who were steeped in the natural-scientific thinking of the second half of the 19th century, men who had been his associates in the earlier incarnation, belonging, as he did, to Arabism. His karma would have led him naturally to the same orientation of thinking.

The strange fact is that through a deflection of karma—which will be adjusted in later earthly lives—Friedrich Theodor Vischer was torn away from the straightforward line of his karma. This deflection was determined by his pre-earthly existence, not by his earthly karma. But when he reached a certain age he could no longer sustain it; he was impelled to enter right into his karma. And so he rejects his five-volume work on aesthetics and succumbs to the temptation of approaching the subject in the way of which the natural scientists would approve. In his first work on aesthetics he looks down from above, starting from principles and then passing to sense-phenomena. This he now criticises root and branch. He wants now to build from below upwards, starting from material facts and gradually rising to principles. And we witness a tremendous struggle: Vischer working at the destruction of his own aesthetics! We see how karma had been deflected and how he is hurled back into it, led to those whose companion he had been in a previous earthly life.

It is shattering in its significance to see how Vischer never really makes progress with this second work on aesthetics, how a kind of chaos seems to creep into the whole of his spiritual life. I told you yesterday about his curiously philistine attitude even towards Goethe's Faust. It is all due to the fact that he feels unsure of himself and is striving to get back to his old companions. But we must remember how strongly the unconscious works in karma. At a higher stage, of course, it becomes conscious. We must also remember how deeply certain philistine scientists hated Goethe's Faust! I told you yesterday what du Bois-Reymond said on the subject: that it would have been much more sensible of Goethe to let Faust make some real discovery rather than call up spirits, evoke the Earth-Spirit, associate with Mephistopheles or seduce young girls and not marry them afterwards. du Bois-Reymond regards all this as tomfoolery. According to him, Goethe should have presented a hero who invents an electrical machine or an air pump! Then there would have been social propriety about it all and the hero would have become Mayor of Magdeburg. Above all, there ought to have been no Gretchen-tragedy, and instead of the Prison Scene a correct and proper civic wedding! Well ... it is a point of view that is not without justification; but it was certainly not what Goethe had in mind!

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, as I said, was not completely sure of himself after his karma had been deflected in this way. But something was always pulling him back, and unconsciously, although he was a really free spirit, he was always delighted when he heard the philistines running down Goethe's Faust. He was witty, of course, and clever, and it was like snowballing going on between them. It is precisely when one observes things about a human being that are more a matter of vision, that one lights upon the Imaginations which lead behind the scenes of material existence.

Truly it is a grand spectacle! There, on the one side, stand the philistines of the first order, like du Bois-Reymond and the others, saying that Goethe ought to have represented Faust as Mayor of Magdeburg, inventing the electrical machine and the air-pump, and marrying Gretchen—verily these are philistines of the first order! Something is at work in the subconscious, because a karmic connection is in operation here. All these men had been Moors, associated with Vischer in Arabism. He was attracted by it all, he felt related to it ... and yet in another respect he was not. In the intervening time he had come into contact with other streams which had brought about a deflection of his karma. And now when the philistines of the first order threw their snowballs, he threw back his, saying that someone ought to write a thesis on a subject like the relation of Frau Christine von Goethe's chilblains to the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! That, you will agree, is philistinism with a touch of real wit in it, it is philistinism of the second order!

To assess these things at their true value is a matter of vision, not of merely intellectual apprehension.

In what I have told you of Vischer, my aim, to begin with, was to give you some indication—I shall return to these things again—of how the one earthly life can be understood from foregoing earthly lives.

There was something extraordinarily significant about the figure of Vischer going about in Stuttgart. I mentioned to you yesterday the wonderful blue eyes, the reddish-brown beard, the arms held out in the way I described. The Imagination of him, however, did not tally with the physical stature of the Swabian Vischer as he went about Stuttgart, for even to occult sight he did not look like a reincarnated Arabian. Again and again I left the matter alone, because one becomes—I cannot say “sceptical” in regard to one's visions, but one does become distrustful, one wants to have definite confirmation. Again and again I let the matter drop, until the riddle was solved in the following way.

In the 7th/8th century—that was also a male incarnation—this individuality regarded the men from the North, especially those he encountered in Sicily, as his ideal. In those days, as you may imagine, it was very easy to be carried away by people one greatly admired. And so he “caught” as it were, his bodily characteristics in the later incarnation from those against whom he had once waged war. Here is the solution of the riddle in regard to his physical stature.

In the last lecture we considered a second personality, namely, Franz Schubert, in connection with his friend Spaun, and with his own volcanic nature which on rare occasions, such as the one I related to you, could flare up in rage, making him into a thorough brawler; on the other hand he was extraordinarily tender and sensitive; he was like a sleep-walker, writing down his lovely melodies directly after waking in the morning. It was extremely difficult to get a picture of this personality, but the connection with Spaun gave the clue. For in the case of Schubert himself, when one looks back in the occult field and tries to find something definite, one has the feeling that he gives one the slip—if I may use this colloquialism. It is not easy to go back to his former incarnation; he eludes one all the time.

There is in truth something of a contrast here with the destiny of Schubert's works after his death. At the time of Schubert's death his compositions were very little known; only a few people had heard of him. After the lapse of some years, however, he became more and more renowned, until in the seventies and eighties of last century, fresh works of his were published every year. It was very interesting: suddenly, long after his death, Schubert turned out to be a most prolific composer. New works of his were constantly appearing.

When, however, we look back spiritually from Schubert's life in the 19th century into his earlier earthly life, the tracks disappear; it is not easy to find him.

On the other hand it is comparatively easy to find the tracks in the case of Baron von Spaun. And this line also led back to the 8th or 9th century A.D., to Spain. He was a Prince of Castile who had a name for being extraordinarily wise. He busied himself with astrology and with astronomy in the form current in those days, amending and drawing up astronomical tables. At a certain time in his life this Prince was forced to flee from his home, and he found refuge among those who were actually the bitterest enemies of the Castilian population at that time, namely the Moors.

He was obliged to stay here for a considerable time, and he formed a relationship of great tenderness and intimacy with a Moorish personality in whom the individuality of the later Franz Schubert was then incarnated. And this Prince of Castile would certainly have met with his end had it not been for the tender-spirited personality among the Moors who cared for him with every kindness. His earthly life was thus safeguarded for many years, to the great joy of them both.

What I am now relating to you is utterly remote from intellectual deduction in any shape or form. I have indicated the roundabout way which the research had to take. But along this roundabout way one is led to the fact that in Franz Schubert we have a reincarnated Moorish personality, one who had little opportunity of cultivating musical talent in his life among the Moors, but who, on the other hand, steeped himself with impassioned longing in whatever was to be found in the way of art and, I will not say of subtle “thinking” but rather of subtle “reasoning,” which in the train of Arabic culture had come from Asia, passed across Africa and finally reached Spain.

During that incarnation this personality developed the gentle, unassuming and yet vital flexibility of soul which quickened to life the poetic, dreamlike phantasy in the later incarnation as Franz Schubert. On the other hand this personality was obliged to take part in the fierce conflicts now again taking place between the Moors and the non-Moorish inhabitants of Castile, Aragon, and so forth. And this accounted for the suppressed emotion which like a pent-up stream burst forth—but only in unusual circumstances—during the Schubert-existence.

It seems to me that just as the earlier life of Friedrich Theodor Vischer can be understood only when one can view it against the background of Arabism, so the essence of Schubert's music, especially the undertone of many of his songs, can be discerned only when one perceives (I have not constructed anything, it arises from the facts themselves) that there is something spiritual in this music, something Asiatic which was shone upon for a time by the desert sun, took on greater definition in Europe, was carried through the spiritual world between death and rebirth and as something essentially human, removed from all the artificialities of society, came to birth again in a penniless schoolteacher.

The third personality of whom I spoke yesterday was Eugen Dühring. [Born 1833, died 1901.] I shall give brief indications only, for we can always return to these subjects again. Eugen Dühring was of particular interest to me because as a young man I was deeply engrossed in the study of his writings. I was fascinated by his works on physics and mathematics, especially by the treatise Neue Grundmittel und Erfindungen Zur Analysis, Algebra, Funktionsrechnung, and by his treatment of the law of corresponding boiling points. I was irritated to distraction by a book such as Sache, Leben und Feinde which is a sort of autobiography. There is something terribly self-complacent about it, self-complacent to the point of genius; not to mention traits which came out in utterly malicious pamphlets such as Die Ueberschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden. On the other hand I could admire Dühring's History of Mechanics as long as the lion was not in evidence, but only the lion's claws. There was, however, one unpleasant impression: for a history of mechanics, too much is said about all the gossip associated with Frau Helmholtz; abuse is hurled at Hermann Helmholtz, but the emphasis is upon the gossip that went on in the circle around Frau Helmholtz. Well ... such things do happen; gossip goes on in all kinds of circles! ... As I have said, I experienced every shade of feeling in regard to Dühring and his writings: respect, deep appreciation, criticism, irritation. And you will understand the desire to see how these traits had developed against the background of at any rate the immediately preceding earthly life.

But here again it was not easy, and at first—I have no wish to keep back these things—at first, the pictures were deceptive. Deceptive pictures arise very easily, because everything often depends upon starting from what is actually the most significant feature in some particular life of a human being in order to be led back along the right path. And in the case of Dühring it was a long time before I succeeded in finding any really significant feature.

The procedure I adopted was as follows.—I pictured to myself everything about him that appealed to me most, namely his materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world—materialistic, but yet, in a certain respect, spiritual, intellectually spiritual. I turned over in my mind how it all has to do with a finite world of space, a finite world of time; I constructed Dühring's whole conception of the world again for myself. That is not difficult. But when one has done it and looks back to earlier incarnations, numbers and numbers come into view and again there is delusion. One finds nothing essential; countless incarnations appear, but there cannot, of course, possibly have been so many: they are nothing but reflections of the present incarnation. It is just as if you were to have mirrors in a room, one here and another there: you would see numberless reflections. Then I went on to ponder with all intensity: What is Dühring's world-conception in reality, expressed in terms of clear thought? For the time being I left aside all the spiteful criticism, the abuse and other such non-essentials. I left all that aside and concentrated upon what is really grand and impressive in a world-conception which, as such, has always been antipathetic to me, but which, on account of the way in which Dühring presented it, attracted me. I pictured all this vividly to myself and then tried to get a clear grasp of the reality. From a certain age onwards he was totally blind. A blind man does not see the world, and his mental image of it is quite different from that of a man with sight. In point of fact, ordinary materialists, ordinary mechanistic thinkers, are on a different level altogether from Dühring. In comparison with them, Dühring has genius. All these men who have evolved conceptions of the world, Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, Spiller, Wiessner and the rest—“twelve to the dozen” as the saying goes—with them it is a very different matter. The way in which Dühring builds up his world-conception is utterly different. We can perceive, too, that the urge to give a certain shape to this view of the world was in him even before he became blind, and it really tallied with the fundamental trend of his mind only when he had lost his sight and space was dark around him. For the principles according to which Dühring builds up his world-conception belong essentially to dark space. It is a fallacy to imagine that this was the work of a man with sight.

But just think of it. In Dühring this is intrinsic truth. Other men—twelve dozen of them if you like—have evolved such conceptions of the world, but with Dühring there is a difference: with Dühring it is true. The others have sight and construct pictures of the world as if they were blind; Dühring is blind and evolves his world-conception as one who is blind. And that is an astonishing thing! If one realises what it means, if one observes this man and knows: here is someone who in his soul-evolution was like a blind man, whose outlook becomes mechanistic because of his blindness—then one finds him again. Two incarnations come into consideration here. We find him associated with the movement in the Eastern Church, about the 8th or 9th century A.D., which at one period was iconoclastic, bent upon the destruction of all images, and then, later on, reinstated them. In Constantinople, particularly, this conflict developed between religion employing pictures and images, and religion in which none were permitted. And there we find the individuality who was born in a later age as Eugen Dühring battling ardently, good fighter as he was, for a cultural life devoid of pictures and images. Here, manifesting in purely physical conflict, one can see all that later comes to expression in words.

One point was extraordinarily interesting to me. A strange word occurs in the second volume of the work on Julius Robert Mayer. One actually sees the whole thing! In the earlier incarnation, when Dühring was engaged in destroying images, he had a special way of brandishing his scimitar, the hooked scimitar which already then was being tried out and developed. In the book on Mayer—these things, you know, often turn on pictorial details—I found a word that seemed to ring in unison with the scimitar. There is a chapter in this book entitled Schlichologisches (“trick-ology”). “Trickology” in German University life and so forth—getting in from the side by a cunning manoeuvre.

Dühring coins the word “Schlichologisches,” as well as the amusing expression “Intellectuaille,” connected with canaille. He invents all kinds of words. As I said, details that seem quite unimportant may be very revealing. And paradoxical as it may appear, one does not really arrive at the connecting links between different earthly lives unless one has an eye and a feeling for symptoms of this kind. Anyone who cannot discern a man's character from the way he walks, how he steps on the soles of his feet, will not easily make progress in such matters as those dealt with in the present lectures. One must be able to see the very swing of the scimitar transferred into words that were coined by this individuality in his subsequent life.

Dühring was always heaping abuse on the savants—“men of unlearning,” as he calls them. He said he would be thankful if there were no more names to remind him of ancient erudition. He wants no logic, he wants anti-logic; no Sophia, but anti-Sophia; no science, but anti-science. He says explicitly that he would like best of all to make everything “anti.” Now in the incarnation before the one when he was a rabid iconoclast, this man who so fiercely abused everything in the way of erudition had belonged to the School of the Greek Stoics, was himself a Stoic philosopher. In days of antiquity Dühring was himself one of the kind of men he now abused so vehemently; in the third incarnation back he was a professed philosopher, a Stoic philosopher at that, therefore one who in a certain sense withdrew from earthly life.

What dawned upon me first of all was that very many of Dühring's thoughts, or rather the forms in which his thoughts are expressed, are to be found in the Stoics! The matter is not, of course, as simple as all that. Indeed a whole course of lectures might be given on the forms of thought in Dühring and in the Stoics.

Thus we are led back, first, to the age of iconoclasm in the east of Europe about the 9th century A.D., when Dühring was a rabid iconoclast; then to the 3rd century B.C., the period of Stoic philosophy in ancient Greece.

And now again it is astounding: this Stoic, who makes no demands upon life, who holds back from everything that is not absolutely essential to life, renounces earthly sight in the second of the subsequent incarnations. And in this he brings truth to expression, for he illustrates in a magnificent way the blindness of the modern conception of the world.

Whatever may be one's attitude to Dühring's conception of the world, the moving tragedy of it is that Dühring personifies what the world-conception prevailing in the 19th century truly is; he expresses it through his very make-up as a man. The Stoic, who would not face the world as it is, becomes blind; the iconoclast, the destroyer of images, who will not tolerate imagery, makes the history of literature and poetry into what it became in Dühring's two volumes on Great Men of Letters, where not only are Goethe and Schiller put aside but where at most a man like Bürger plays any definite rôle. Here we have the truth of what is presented elsewhere in a false light. For men assert that the mechanistic thought, the materialism of the second half of the 19th century, sees. There lies the untruth, for materialism does not see; materialism is blind. And Dühring presents it as it truly is.

And so a representative personality, viewed in the right light, is an illustration of world-historic karma, the karma of civilisation as represented by its conception of the world in the second half of the 19th century.

In the next lecture we will speak further of these matters.

A great deal of course could still be added to all that I have touched upon in these lectures, but we shall endeavour today to conclude them with a summary of the whole subject.

The approach we have taken throughout these lectures raises an important issue: What is the attitude to Anthroposophy, to spiritual investigation as presented by Anthroposophy? What is the position in regard to the understanding of anthroposophical teachings seeing that few today can have immediate access to spiritual exercises and practices which enable them to perceive and test thoroughly for themselves the anthroposophical descriptions of other worlds? This is a question that lies close to the hearts of those who feel an urge and even a longing to take up Anthroposophy. But this question is always seen in a false light, and is the more likely to be misinterpreted precisely because they are unable to grasp the right procedures such as I have advocated in these lectures.

People may ask: what is the use of all these descriptions of the spiritual world if I cannot look into that world myself? I should like, therefore, to touch upon this question in my cursory analysis today.

It is not true to say that one cannot acquire an insight into anthroposophical teachings and an understanding of them unless one can investigate the spiritual world oneself. I t is essential to distinguish, especially at the present time, between the actual discovery of facts relating to the different worlds and the comprehension of those facts. This distinction will be clear to you when you recall that man, as we know him today, belongs in fact to different worlds and that his experiences are derived from different worlds. Man as he is constituted today acquires his stock of knowledge and his consciousness of everyday existence in the course of his day to day experiences. During his waking life this consciousness which was the starting-point of our enquiry gives him a certain perspective over a limited field, over that aspect of the world that is accessible to sense-observation, and which can be grasped and interpreted by means of the intellect which he has developed in the course of evolution.

With his understanding man penetrates in his dreams into this world concealed behind the phenomenal world, in a vague, indefinite way as I have already pointed out. In his psychic life man contacts the world through which he passes between death and rebirth only in dreamless sleep, where he is surrounded by spiritual darkness and where he lives out a life which normally he cannot recall.

Man knows three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But he does not live only in the worlds to which this threefold consciousness gives access, for he is a being whose kingdom has many mansions. His physical body lives in a different world from his etheric body, his etheric body again in a different world from his astral body and both live in different worlds from the Ego.

And this threefold consciousness—clear waking consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness (one would like to say absence of consciousness but one can only describe it as diminished consciousness)—belong to the Ego as it is today. And this Ego when it looks inwards has also three states of consciousness. When it looks outwards, it knows waking (day) consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness. When it looks inwards, it knows clear intellectual consciousness; a sentient consciousness, a sentient life, though this is far more opaque and dreamlike than one usually imagines; it knows als1˃ a sentient life and finally the dim, twilight will-consciousness that resembles the state of deep sleep. Normal consciousness can no more explain the origin of willing than it can explain the origin of sleep. When a man performs an act of will it is accompanied by a thought which is clear and lucid. He then shrouds this thought in feeling which is more indefinite. The thought that is imbued with feeling passes down into the limbs; the process cannot be experienced by normal consciousness. To the kind of investigation of which I spoke yesterday and the day before, willing presents the following picture: whilst a thought wills something in the head and is then transmitted to the whole body through feeling, so that a man wills in the whole of his body, something akin to a delicate, subtle and intimate process of combustion sets in meanwhile.

When man develops Initiate-consciousness he is able to experience this life of will which is subject to the influence of warmth, but it remains wholly subliminal to ordinary consciousness. This is merely one instance which shows how what lies in the subliminal consciousness can be raised to the level of Initiate-consciousness.

When the information in the book I mentioned yesterday is made progressively more accessible to the public, people will realize that when we contemplate with Initiate-consciousness an act of will performed by man, we have the impression that we are watching the lighting of a candle or even the kindling of a warmth-giving light. Just as we have in this instance a clear picture of the external phenomenon, so we shall be able to see the thought as it is precipitated into the will. We then say: the thought develops feeling and from feeling—it follows a downward direction in man—proceeds a sensation of warmth, a flame in man. And this flame wills; it is kindled by degrees. We can represent schematical1y this normal consciousness in the following way:

Now although, in order to investigate the spiritual world, we must of necessity direct our consciousness to that world which we seek to apprehend cognitively, none the less, if the fruits of our investigations are to be communicated honestly, the ideas communicated verbally must be expressed in the language of other forms of consciousness.

You can now understand, perhaps, that this is a twofold process. In the first place, for example, we investigate the world of the human organs as I explained yesterday. We investigate the phenomena in question by utilizing the emergent forces in man as he draws near to the spiritual world during the course of his life. We then discover the relevant facts as they are revealed to the understanding. And there are men in the world who are aware of these facts and who communicate them to the world. When they are imparted to the world by such men they can be comprehended by normal consciousness if we look at them with the necessary objectivity. In the course of human evolution there has always been a minority who devoted themselves to investigation of the facts relating to the spiritual world and who then communicated to others the fruits of their investigations.

Now one factor today militates against the acceptance of such knowledge, namely, that as a rule people grow up in a social environment and under an educational system that conditions their habitual responses to such an extent that they can believe only in the world of fact, in the sensory world, and the rational information derived from the world of the senses. This habit is so strongly ingrained that people are inclined to say: At the university there are graduate members of the teaching faculty who, in addition to teaching, investigate certain factual aspects of the phenomenal world or confirm the findings of other research workers in this field. Everyone accepts their findings. Even though one does not investigate the facts oneself, one still believes in them. This boundless credulity is reserved especially for modern science. People believe things which, to those who have insight, are not only problematical, but definitely untrue. This situation stems from centuries of education. I would like to point out that this form of education was unknown to men of earlier centuries. They were far more inclined to believe those who made researches into spiritual facts since they still preserved something of the old insight into, and participation in the spiritual world that was consistent with their will and feeling. Today people are strangers to such knowledge. They are accustomed to an outlook which on the Continent is more theoretical and in England and America more practical, and which has now become firmly established.

On the Continent there exist detailed theories about these matters whilst in England and America there is an instinctive feeling for them which is by no means easy to overcome. During the course of centuries mankind has become inured to a scientific outlook that is related to the phenomenal world and has come to accept the findings of astronomy, botany, zoology and medicine, for example, in the form in which they are presented in recognized schools or centres of learning. A chemist, for example, undertakes a piece of research in his laboratory. People have not the slightest understanding of the technique involved. The work is acclaimed and they unhesitatingly declare: “Here is truth, here is knowledge that makes no appeal to faith.” But what they call knowledge is, in effect, an act of faith.

And amongst the methods adopted for investigating the phenomenal world, for ascertaining the laws of the phenomenal world through the instrument of reason, not a single one gives the slightest information about the spiritual world. But there are few who can afford to dispense wholly with the spiritual world. Those who do so, are not honest with themselves, they persuade themselves into it. Mankind feels an imperious need to know something about the spiritual world. As yet men ignore those who can tell them something about the spiritual world as it is known today, but they are prepared to listen to historical traditions, to the teachings of the Bible and sacred scriptures of the East. They are interested in these traditional writings, because otherwise they cannot satisfy their need for some sort of relationship to a spiritual world. And in spite of the fact that both the Bible and the Eastern scriptures have been investigated only by individual Initiates, people claim that they reflect a different kind of outlook, which bears no relationship to the knowledge of the phenomenal world, scientific knowledge, and depends upon faith and appeals to faith. And so a rigid line of demarcation is set up between science and belief. Men refer science to the phenomenal world and belief to the spiritual world.

Amongst the theologians of the Evangelical Church on the Continent—not amongst the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church who have retained the old traditions, and who do not accept the dichotomy of the Evangelicals or the natural scientists—there exist innumerable theories showing that there are definite boundaries to knowledge and thereafter faith steps in. They are convinced there can be no other possibility.

England is less hag-ridden because theorizing is unpopular. Here the traditional attitude is, on the one hand, to listen to what science has to say, and, on the other hand, to live reverently—I will not go so far as to say sanctimoniously—in faith and to keep the two spheres rigidly apart.

For some time past, laymen and scholars have adopted this point of view. Newton laid the foundations of a theory of gravitation, i.e. of a conception of space which, by its very nature, excludes any possibility of a spiritual outlook. If the world were as Newton depicted it, it would be devoid of spirit. But no-one has the courage to admit it. One cannot imagine a divine-spiritual Presence that lives and moves and has its being in the Newtonian world.

But not only the devotees of these ideas ultimately accept a conception of space and time that excludes the spiritual, but also those who undertake independent research work. Newton offers an excellent example of the latter, for he not only laid the foundation of a world-outlook which excluded the spiritual, but at the same time in his interpretation of the Apocalypse he fully accepted the spiritual.

The links between knowledge of the phenomenal world and knowledge of the spiritual world have been severed. Today the theorists set out to give solid proof of this dichotomy and every effort is made to inoculate the thoughts and feelings of those who distrust theory with this idea, so that ultimately they become conditioned.

On the other hand, man's intelligence, power of comprehension and ideation, his capacity for ideas, have today reached a point where, if he keeps them under conscious control, he can grasp by reason, though he cannot investigate by reason, the teachings of Initiation Science.

It is essential that the following point of view should find wider acceptance: that investigations into the spiritual world must be undertaken by those who, in their present life on Earth are able to call upon forces from earlier incarnations, for it is these forces which release the necessary powers for spiritual investigation; and further, that the results of these investigations shall be accepted by increasing numbers of men and incorporated into ideas which are comprehensible; and that, when the results of spiritual research are accepted by healthy understanding, a way is prepared for these other men, by virtue of this understanding, to have real experience of the spiritual world. For I have often said that the healthiest way to enter the spiritual world is first of all to read about it or to assimilate what we are told about it.

If we accept these ideas, they become inwardly quickened and we attain not only to understanding, but also to clairvoyant vision in accordance with our karmic development. In this respect we must give serious thought to the idea of karma. Today man is not concerned with karma; he believes that just as we analyse sulphur in the laboratory, so we can analyse by laboratory techniques the origin of so-called trans-normal phenomena; and that, as with sulphur, we must subject the individual who manifests abnormal forms of knowledge to experimental tests.

But mineral sulphur has no karma. Only the sulphur associated with the human body has karma, for only human beings are subject to karma. We cannot assume that it is part of man's karma to be experimented upon in a laboratory which would be a necessary prerequisite if the investigations were to have any value.

For this reason we have need of Spiritual Science. It would first of all be necessary to enquire into the karmic conditions which enable us to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the agency of another. I have explained this clearly at the end of the later editions of my book Theosophy. But mankind today is not yet ready to accept this idea, not from incapacity, but from conservatism; but it is of immense significance.

It is essential to realize that we must not immediately undertake investigations into the spiritual world; but on the other hand if we do not adopt undesirable practices, such as experimenting with karma when there is no karmic necessity, or with mediums whose procedure we do not understand; and if we rely upon the everyday consciousness, which is the right condition of consciousness for this world, then we will attain to a perfect understanding of the communications of Initiation Science. We are greatly mistaken if we imagine that we cannot have such an understanding without first being able to experience the spiritual world for ourselves. To say, “what avails the spiritual world, if I cannot experience it for myself?” is to encourage yet another of the errors commonly committed today. This is to commit one of the greatest, most dangerous and most obvious of errors and must be clearly recognized by those who are associated with a Movement such as the Anthroposophical Society.

Man's existence here on the physical plane is bound up with existence in other worlds. To the unprejudiced mind this can be explained by the fact that man's experiences, as seen in the light of total human experience, are such that, in relation to the most vital questions in life they meet with incomprehension on the part of the ordinary daily consciousness because they appear unrelated, whereas in certain instances they are in effect closely associated.

In this brief account, therefore, I should like first to speak of man's entrance into the physical world and his exit, of birth and death.

Birth and death, the two most momentous events of our life on Earth, appear to ordinary consciousness to be isolated phenomena. We associate all that precedes birth, all that is related to human incarnation, with the beginning of our life on Earth, and death with its end. They appear to be dissociated. But the spiritual investigator sees them drawing ever more closely together. For if we take the path leading to the Moon mysteries and woo the night into the day in the manner described yesterday, then we perceive how, during the processes of birth, the physical body and etheric body progressively grow and flourish: how they develop out of the germ, gradually assume human form, and how during earthly life their vitality progressively increases up to the age of thirty-five, when it gradually decreases and a decline sets in. This process, of course, can be observed externally. But he who follows the lunar path, which I described yesterday, perceives that whilst the cellular life of the physical and etheric bodies grows, develops and assumes embryonic form, another form of life, which in Anthroposophy we call the astral body and Ego, is subject to the forces of decay and death.

When we uncover the hidden recesses of life—I gave a concrete description of this yesterday—we become aware of the birth of the physical and etheric and the death of the astral and Ego. We perceive death interwoven with life, the winter of life allied to its springtime.

And again, when we observe man with Initiate-consciousness, we are aware that, as his body declines, there is a burgeoning of the Ego and the astral from the thirty-fifth year onwards. This burgeoning life is retarded by the presence of dying forces in the physical and etheric being. Nevertheless a definite renewal does take place. And so by means of spiritual investigation we come to recognize the presence of death in life and life in death. Thus we prepare ourselves to trace back that which is seen to be dying at the time of birth to its pre-earthly life where it is revealed in its full significance and greatness.

And because we perceive the gradual burgeoning of the astral and Ego within the declining etheric and physical (for they are imprisoned within the etheric and physical), we prepare ourselves to follow them into the spiritual world after their release from the physical and etheric bodies at the moment of death. Thus we see that birth and death are interrelated, whilst to ordinary consciousness they appear to be isolated events.

All this information which is revealed by spiritual investigation can be grasped by ordinary consciousness as I indicated in the first part of today's lecture. At the same time one must be prepared to abandon the demands of ordinary consciousness for factual or scientific proof.

I once knew a man who maintained that, just as a stone falls to the ground, so if I pick up a chair and let go, it also falls to the ground since everything is subject to gravitation. Wherefore if the Earth is not supported, as it is claimed, it must of necessity fall. But he failed to realize that objects must fall to the ground because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, that the Earth itself however moves freely in space like the stars which mutually support and attract one another.

Those who, like the modern scientist, demand that proof must be supported by the evidence of the senses resemble this man who believed that the Earth must fall unless it is firmly underpinned. Anthroposophical truths are like the stars which mutually support each other. People must be prepared to see the whole picture. And if they can do this by means of their normal understanding they will begin really to grasp anthroposophical ideas such as the interrelationship of birth and death.

Let us go a little further and take the case of the man who is well grounded in the principles of modern science, but whilst alert and receptive to anthroposophical ideas has not yet learned to take the whole man into consideration, but only the separate organs in the manner described yesterday.

Through this knowledge of the organs acquired in the course of Initiation we are not only aware of birth and death, but of something quite different. In the light of this knowledge of the organs, birth and death have lost their usual significance, for it is only the whole human being who dies, not his separate organs. The lungs, for example, cannot die. Science today dimly realizes that when the whole human being has died, his single organs can be animated to a certain extent. Irrespective of whether a man is buried or cremated, his separate organs do not die. The individual organs take their path into that sphere of the Cosmos to which each is related. Even if man is buried beneath the earth, every organ finds its way into the Cosmos through water, air or warmth, as the case may be. In reality they are dissolved, but they do not perish; only the whole human being perishes.

Death, then, can only have meaning in relation to the whole human being. In the animal the organs die, whereas in man they are dissolved into the Cosmos. They dissolve rapidly. Burial is the slower process, cremation the faster. We can follow the individual organs as they take their path towards the infinite, each towards its own sphere. They are not lost in infinity, but return in the form of the mighty cosmic being whom I described to you yesterday. Thus, as we observe the organs with Initiate-consciousness, we see what really befalls the organs at death, namely, this streaming out of the organs into those regions of the Cosmos to which they are severally related. The heart takes a different path from the lungs; the liver from lungs and heart. They are dispersed throughout the Cosmos. Then the Cosmic Man appears; we see him as he really is, integrated in the Cosmos. And in the vision of this Cosmic Man we become aware of what is the source of successive incarnations, for example. We need this vision which has its origin, not in the whole man, but in the perception of the several organs, in order to be able to recognize once more, clearly and distinctly, the karmic return of former Earth lives in the present life.

It is for this reason that those who approached the spiritual world through the Moon path, mystics, theosophists, and so on, perceived the strangest phenomena—human souls as they had lived on Earth, gods and spirits—but could neither recognize nor decide what they were, nor give any definite assurance whether they were in the presence of Alanus ab Insulis, Dante or Brunetto Latini. Sometimes the entities were given the most grotesque appellations. And they were unable to determine whether the incarnations they contacted were their own or other people's, or what they were.

Thus the spiritual world is associated with the realm of Moon consciousness that has been wooed into the day; then, under the influx of the Venus impulses, this vision is lost and we now behold the spiritual world in its totality, but without that clear definition which it should possess. It is in this realm that we first begin to realize man's situation in the world as a whole and his position as a cosmic being.

In this connection, however, we cannot escape a tragic realization. For if man were simply the complete physical man he appears to be here on Earth, what a virtuous, docile and noble being he would be! Just as little as we can investigate death with normal consciousness—we can always understand death in the sense already suggested—just as little can we discover by means of the ordinary consciousness why human beings, with their candid faces—and there is no denying they have candid faces—have a capacity for evil. It is not the whole man who can become evil. His outer tegument, the skin, as such is noble and good; but man becomes evil through his individual organs; in his organs lies the potentiality for evil.

And thus we come to recognize the relationship of the organs to their respective cosmic spheres and also from what spheres obsession with evil originates; for fundamentally, obsession is inherent in the slightest manifestation of evil.

Thus our knowledge of the total man reveals first, birth and death; secondly, a knowledge of his organization reveals his relationship to the Cosmos in health and disease, namely, evil.

And so we can only perceive spiritually that Figure who experienced the Mystery of Golgotha when we are able to behold Cosmic Man through human organology. For it was as Cosmic Man that Christ came from the Sun. Until that moment He was not earthly man. He approached the Earth in cosmic form. How can we expect to recognize Cosmic Man if we have not first prepared ourselves to understand Cosmic Man as he really is! It is precisely out of this understanding of the Cosmic Man that Christology can grow.

Thus you see how true paths lead into the spiritual world, to a knowledge of birth and death and of the relationship of the human organism to the Cosmos, to the recognition of evil and to knowledge of Christ, the Cosmic Man. All this can be understood, when it is presented in such a way that the various aspects are shown to support each other. And the best means of finding one's own way into the spiritual world is through understanding and by meditating upon what is understood. Other rules for meditation then serve as additional supports. This is the right path into the spiritual worlds for human beings today. On the other hand, all experimenting with other paths which fail to use and maintain the normal channels of consciousness, all experimenting with trance conditions such as mediumism, somnambulism, hypnotism and so on, all investigation into world-events that cannot be apprehended by a consciousness that is a travesty of modern natural science—all these are false paths, for they do not lead into the true spiritual world.

When man is sensitively aware of the findings of spiritual investigation, namely, that through knowledge of the organs the Cosmic Man returns, that this “return” can to some extent lead to an understanding of Christ when all that is disclosed to occult investigation and insight is admitted into the Initiate-consciousness and becomes an integral part of his sentient life, then, through feeling, the Divine manifests in the terrestrial. And this is the province of art.

Through feeling, art embodies half consciously that which man receives from the spiritual world along those paths of return of which I have spoken. In all ages, therefore, it was those who were predestined to do so by their karma, who clothed the spiritual in material form.

Our naturalistic art has abandoned the spiritual approach. Every high point in the history of art depicts the spiritual in sensuous form, or rather raises the material into the realm of the spiritual. Raphael is valued so highly because, to a greater degree than any other painter, he was able to clothe the spiritual in sensuous representation.

Now in the course of the history of art there existed a general movement which tended more to the plastic or graphic arts. Today we must once again inject new life into the plastic arts, for the immediacy of the original impulse was lost years ago.

For centuries the impulse towards music has been growing and expanding. Therefore the plastic arts have assumed a musical character to a greater or lesser extent. Music, which includes also the musical element in the arts of speech, is destined to be the art of the future.

The first Goetheanum at Dornach was conceived musically and for this reason its architecture, sculpture and painting met with so little understanding. And for the same reason, the second Goetheanum will also meet with little understanding because the element of music must be introduced into painting, sculpture and architecture, in accordance with man's future evolution.

The coming of the figure of Christ, the spiritually-living figure, which I referred to as the culminating point in human evolution, has been magnificently portrayed in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting, but in future will have to be expressed through music.

The urge to give a musical expression of the Christ Impulse already existed. It was anticipated in Richard Wagner and was ultimately responsible for the creation of Parsifal. But in Parsifal the introduction of the Christ Impulse into the phenomenal world where it seeks to give expression to the purest Christian spirit, has been given a mere symbolic indication, such as the appearance of the Dove and so on. The Communion has also been portrayed symbolically. The music of Parsifal fails to portray the real significance of the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth.

Music is able to portray this Christ Impulse musically, in tones that are inwardly permeated with spirit. If music allows itself to be inspired by Spiritual Science, it will find ways of expressing the Christ Impulse, for it will reveal purely artistically and intuitively how the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth can be awakened symphonically in tones.

To this end we only need to be able to deepen our experience of the sphere of the major third by an inner enrichment of musical experience that penetrates into the hidden depths of feeling. If we experience the sphere of the major third as something wholly enclosed within the inner being of man and if we then feel the sphere of the major fifth to have the characteristic of “enveloping,” so that, as we grow into the configuration of the fifth, we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos, then, in the mystery enacted between the spheres of the major third and major fifth, we can experience musically something of the inner being of man that reaches out into the Cosmos.

And if we then succeed in setting free the dissonances of the seventh to echo cosmic life, where the dissonances express man's sentient experiences in the Cosmos as he journeys towards the various spiritual realms; and if we succeed in allowing the dissonances of the seventh to die away, so that through their dying fall they acquire a certain definition, then in their dying strains they are ultimately resolved in something which, to the musical ear, resembles a musical firmament.

If, then, having already given a subtle indication of the experience of the ‘minor’ with the ‘major,’ if, in the dying strains of the dissonances of the seventh, in this spontaneous re-creation of the dissonances into a totality, we find here a means of passing in an intensely minor mood from the dissonances of the seventh, from the near consonance of these diminishing dissonances to the sphere of the fifth in a minor mood, and from that point blend the sphere of the fifth with that of the minor third, then we shall have evoked in this way the musical experience of the Incarnation, and what is more, of the Incarnation of the Christ.

In feeling our way outwards into the sphere of the seventh, which to cosmic feeling is only apparently dissonant and that we fashion into a ‘firmament,’ in that it is seemingly supported by the octave, if we have grasped this with our feelings and retrace our steps in the manner already indicated and find how, in the embryonic form of the consonances of the minor third, there is a possibility of giving a musical representation of the Incarnation, then, when we retrace our steps to the major third in this sphere, the “Hallelujah” of the Christ can ring out from this musical configuration as pure music.

Then, within the configuration of the tones man will be able to conjure forth an immediate realization of the super-sensible and express it musically.

The Christ Impulse can be found in music. And the dissolution of the symphonic into near dissonance, as in Beethoven, can be redeemed by a return to the dominion of the cosmic in music. Bruckner attempted this within the narrow limits of a traditional framework. But his posthumous Symphony shows that he could not escape these limitations. On one hand we admire its greatness, but on the other hand we find a hesitant approach to the true elements of music, and a failure to achieve a full realization of these elements which can only be experienced in the way I have described, i.e. when we have made strides in the realm of pure music and discover therein the essence, the fundamental spirit which can conjure forth a world through tones.

Without doubt the musical development I have described will one day be achieved through anthroposophical inspiration if mankind does not sink into decadence; and ultimately—and this will depend entirely upon mankind—the true nature of the Christ Impulse will be revealed externally.

I wish to draw your attention to this because you will then realize that Anthroposophy seeks to permeate all aspects of life. This can be accomplished if man, for his part, finds the true path to anthroposophical experience and investigation. It will even come to ~ass that one day the realm of music shall echo the teachings of Anthroposophy and the Christian enigma shall be solved through music.

With these words I hope to have concluded what I could only indicate in these lectures, to indicate the purposes I had in view.

I should like to add, however, that I hope to have succeeded in awakening in your souls some recognition of anthroposophical truths; and that these truths will grow and multiply and fertilize ever wider fields of human life.

May this cycle of lectures be a small contribution to the far-reaching aim which Anthroposophy sets out to achieve.

Let us now consider once more from a different point of view what this healing of sins consists of. We look first into human nature and compare it with

what it is in its earthly environment. Let us imagine for a moment this duality before the soul: earthly human nature, that is, the inner nature of earthly human nature, and now the whole earthly environment. We cannot do otherwise if we proceed calmly than to imagine, in the sense of a truly spirit-imbued cosmology - which is also a Christian cosmology - that this environment of ours, if we want to use religious terms, is a revelation of the divine that permeates this earthly environment. But it will not be difficult for you to imagine that within human nature, something else is at work than in the earthly environment of man. In his inner nature, man is actually only completely similar to the outer world in what are intermediate earthly processes, which take place between water and air on the one hand and between water and solid earth on the other. Processes are constantly taking place in the outer world between the airy and the liquid, which play into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Processes take place between water and the earth, external processes that natural science observes as geology, geognosy, mineralogy, paleontology, but also as biology, and which, insofar as they take place between the solid and the aqueous, play into human nature almost unchanged. All that takes place in this interplay between the airy and the watery and between the watery and the solid, and what also takes place in this relationship in the environment of man, was described by an earlier clairvoyant art, which, however, was able to see through these things to a higher degree than the mercurial.

Now, however, we also have those processes that take place between air and warmth, air and light, which, to a certain extent, lie above the mercurial. These are processes that take place primarily in the human head and are quite different from those processes that take place between air, warmth and light outside of the human being. Only the middle earthly processes, the mercurial ones, are almost the same outside and inside the human being. What takes place, on the other hand, in the sulphuric processes, as they were called in earlier times – for solid sulphur is indeed a Maja image of the actual effects of sulphur – which essentially take place between air, warmth and light and also in the life ether, these are processes that take place within human nature in a very different way. And the processes that take place in the middle human being, which are quite similar to external natural processes, undergo a strong metamorphosis in the human mind, so that something completely different takes place in the mind than outside of it.

Likewise, the metabolic processes that extend into the movement processes of the limbs involve completely different processes than those outside in nature. The external natural processes that, for example, lead to the formation of phosphoric acid lime in nature are quite different from those processes that take place within the human body to form phosphoric acid lime in the bones or teeth. Such processes, which, for example, cause a human thigh bone to develop in such a way that it appears as a wonderful framework, these processes, which form the phosphoric acid lime and the carbonic acid lime as mineral processes in the human being, are not found in the external natural world. But such processes, which are not found in nature, which are found in the head processes and in the organization of movement in the human being, are, because they are also connected with the soul and spirit of the human being, now also dangerous for this soul and spirit again, and indeed the head processes become dangerous in the luciferic sense, the metabolic-limb processes in the ahrimanic , and external healing can only be brought about – as I described yesterday – by supplying the head processes with the salt that remains almost unchanged in the human nutritional process and the limb processes with the volatile, fluctuating phosphorus present in grape juice, which then continues to work in the metabolic organization and permeates the limb system. Thus we have [in humans] a chemo-biology that brings about something quite wonderful, namely that something happens to the salt that in the external world has actually only been done by the gods. For we have to imagine that in the human environment the Luciferic and Ahrimanic are not present in the same way as in the human being; after all, it works from the human being into nature and is present in the salt effects [of nature]. By consuming salt, we therefore send a decisive fight against the luciferic processes into our head, while by absorbing the phosphorus and causing it to overflow into our limbs, we send a fight against the ahrimanic into them. This is the outer process, which the believing person must also follow in his inner soul processes. If it is the outer process that you bring about in the souls of the faithful through Communion, then Communion can naturally only work in the right way if the inner inspiration is also renewed again and again from time to time. This must be done by taking the healing of sins in the broadest sense, so that everything that can be a temptation to sin through the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in human nature is now truly healed through the priestly work.

And so the priestly work must add to the communion, if not to everyone, then at least now and then, that which is no longer preserved in its purity in the Catholic Church, but only in a terrible distortion . It is necessary to add the counseling of the person that precedes Communion, that which in the Catholic Church has become confession, especially auricular confession, which is an entirely Ahrimanic distortion of what needs to be willed. That is what makes up the difficulty with respect to Catholicism. If, for example, a Catholic anthroposophist asks whether he can participate in the overall practice of the Catholic Church, one is always confronted with the Ahrimanic aspect of auricular confession, which one cannot advise the [anthroposophical] Catholic to take; but by doing so, one deprives him of Holy Communion, because the Catholic Church has the coercive law that Communion can only be given if auricular confession has been made beforehand. This is, of course, the most difficult of spiritual requirements. But if you handle the counseling, which must be linked to Communion at certain intervals, correctly, you will not only be able to appear as enthusiastic priests proclaiming the word, but also as priests who forgive sins, and you must be clear about what you can also be as a counselor to your parishes. You will need to take a stand on the matters with which your parishioners come to you as their inner soul concerns. You will not, of course, introduce compulsory confession, but you will notice when the community is properly established how much the community members will come to you with trust and will entrust you with the most diverse inner matters, and how most of them will even feel a certain relief in being able to entrust these matters to you.

This is all you have to do in your movement, going beyond what anthroposophy will essentially remain as teaching and knowledge and what should not, to some extent, be adapted to the individuality of each person: counseling individuals with regard to what can inwardly trouble them in their soul condition as a result of sinful human nature. Of course, you will achieve the least if you indulge in general, theoretical and didactic phrases when counseling your parishioners before Communion. At this moment, anything doctrinal is actually the least appropriate. Only a priest who, when he is such a “confessor”, can put himself in the position of how the difficulties in the soul of the penitent actually arose, what role they play, and how far back they go in time, will give this advice correctly. In short, I would say that you will have to implement in a pure form what has already emerged as nonsense in the development of culture because the churches have withdrawn from it. The Catholic Church has so thoroughly Ahrimanized confession that the confession of children and young people is often a source of moral aberration in the Catholic Church. There are areas where what Catholic children are supposed to do in the so-called examination of conscience is preprinted - I cannot say in small “booklets” because it is usually four pages long - where the possible sins that someone might have are printed in advance, so that some boys, who see through these things, simply cross out what they do not want to have sinned and then just read their confession according to the form. But this also leads to great harm in many other respects. These forms often state, for example, that the child should ask itself whether it has the habit of keeping its hands under the blanket. You can imagine that, from a very early age, the child is made aware of sexual mischief precisely through the obligation required of him by confession. In short, what has become of auricular confession is already a great, great difficulty. That is one side of it; the other is the following.

People live strangely blindly in the world. You know that in Spengler's “Decline of the West” it is said that the priest actually has no influence on world events, that he is a kind of theorizing, contemplative person, and that the world is basically run by people of the nobility, princes and so on. Spengler really talks as if he did not know that there are confessors, that princes, before they come to their decisions, first sit with their confessors, and that from the way the auricular confession is handled there emanates the greatest possible influence on the great affairs of the world. You must realize that in the world, the origins of the most important events must be sought with the confessors. But people are blind; they describe what happens on the outside and have no sense of where things come from. No, you must not forget that this is something that tends to be extremely secretive and that it is something through which one can rule the world in a very wonderful secretive way. The Pope sits in Rome, the Archbishop N.N. in some very distant place and has his archdeacons, canons, provosts and the lower clergy; all of whom, through the confessional, have access to the most intimate affairs of those people who are subject to them. Of course, the Pope in Rome does not need to know what the individual penitent says to the confessor, but he knows that he has someone sitting in these places who carries out the Roman orders with an enormous amount of in-depth knowledge. In this way, the Catholic Church has made confession extraordinarily difficult, both for the individual and for the whole world context. And the Protestant Church? It is not just one Protestant preacher, but a whole series who, in the course of my life, have been with me and said: We long to have something that is like the Catholic confession; we need a method to gently enter into the matters of the heart with which people come to us; we need a kind of active catechesis. Some Protestant pastors have clearly presented this to me. I then advised them to develop the idea from “How to Know Higher Worlds,” whereby, if adopted from the priestly side, one could actually arrive at a tactful confession. That was too difficult for them. So some of them came to me and said: Yes, insofar as these instructions morally coerce, I can agree with them, but where it becomes a matter of inner technique for a person, we certainly do not need such a thing in religion. — In short, the difficulty is this: First one is asked: what should we do? —, one says so, and then the person concerned replies: We have no need of it.

This shows that precisely these innermost things point to something that must come. And because it is not offered to people by either the Catholic or the Protestant side, psychoanalysts do it. Familiarize yourself with the methods of psychoanalysts, to whom people flock in droves today, and see how psychoanalysis is praised by outstanding writers. You will see: What psychoanalysis wants to give to people in a crude way is what the churches of all denominations actually withhold from them. Today we have a psychoanalysis that is spreading more and more every day, from a neglect that can be attributed to the churches. Take any English weekly or monthly magazine. I have convinced myself: you will find an essay on psychoanalysis in it almost every time. This is the materialistic degeneration of what should have been the duty of the pastor, and the matter takes on its serious character when one then comes to what takes the place of communion at the psychoanalyst. One cannot think of the development of Christianity without thinking of all that has been left out of the development of denominations out of human complacency.

You must be aware of these things. You must educate yourself to be able to live with the inner difficulties that people approach you with. You can only do this if you approach everything humanly, without emotion, if both joy and indignation essentially remain silent, and if you can immediately raise the judgment of what you have to approach to a higher sphere, to the sphere of spiritual life. Then you will find that even in the most specific details you have the opportunity not to teach theories or doctrines to the penitent, but to formulate little by little what is indeed doctrine, always in the specific case, and thus to bring it into your teachings. You must, of course, make it clear to the penitent how he has an inner tendency to sin in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic sense, but do not speak of Luciferic and Ahrimanic every time; rather, the treatment of each individual case must always be an essentially individual matter, formulated in concrete terms. You must make it clear to the penitent how the person belongs to another earth, from which he has brought in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic as an inclination, and how he helps himself by really experiencing the means of his religious community to overcome what gives him difficulties within.

In this direction you must become an adviser. You must be able to advise the penitent on some point of difficulty, so that he may rise above it. This will come to you if you apply yourself to a constant and careful study of human nature, in the sense in which it is possible today. The various representations that have been given on an anthroposophical basis contain so many indications of how one or the other aspect of human nature is connected with karma, with the individual destiny, and even with the physical human organization, that they will shed light on many things for you if you study the subjects not just by take a book or a cycle, read it and then be able to say what you have read, but when you study it in such a way that, immediately after you have read it, you bring it to life in your own thoughts, bring it to life as it lives in one or other case during earthly existence, when you study it in a lively way. This is how anthroposophy should be studied. I often have to say to people: you should not read an anthroposophical book like any other book, but in such a way that you feel you want to 'eat it up', so that it then works in you as a force. The comparison can really be taken to the extreme: what you have eaten up has disappeared for the others. That is how one would like an anthroposophical book to disappear, to no longer be there, but to go through a process in the person. If it is read in this way, one learns to understand human nature in a concrete way.

In this way, an enormous amount can be done in the preparation for the act of communion. And every such consultation should actually, I would say, end with a half or three-quarters ritual, in that the penitent is released in a living way with a thought that I would like to put before your souls in the following six lines. It is not necessary for you to express this thought in a formulaic way to each person after every confession, as the Catholic Church does, but the direction that the end of every communion counseling should take is indicated in these six lines.

Learn to sacrifice your thoughts to the Divine
And receive thy will by God's grace.
Then your soul will feel peace;
you will lovingly admire God's revelation and lovingly serve people.
Love for God will enter into your entire being,
love for people will enter into your heart.

If the penitent experiences what lives in these words through you, then you have certainly achieved something with the confession. In this way, you have developed the whole meaning of Johannine Christianity at the end of each confession and can then lead your penitent to Communion with what really inspires them in that Communion. That is what essentially needs to be said about what confession should become through you, what makes confession a real sacrament in connection with Communion.

It will then be my task tomorrow to familiarize you with the last rites and perhaps with some of the things you have notified yourself. But then I will have given you everything I think you need to start your work. After tomorrow's session, we will only need to complete the fundamental issues we have discussed in our joint deliberations, and it will be necessary to say a mass before you leave, with communion for the others.

A participant asks a question about the confession formula. (The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: The difficult sentence of the creed was already felt by me in its difficulty, but it already had a little history from us. The point is that we formulate it - in the real it is not about craziness, but about activity - so that this is expressed in a sentence in the creed: He who joins this community recognizes that what he has become through this community, can only initially become through this community; that is to say that he receives the rituals and what radiates from the rituals from this community and also receives from it the right, in the sense of these rituals, to found communities. So that the person in question has received the evaluation from the supreme leaders and leaders of this community for everything he does on behalf of this community, and that he acknowledges that he has no right to carry out these rituals other than as a member of this community. But you must not make that dependent on whether his will is to recognize this today and may be different in three years, but you must decide today that his will must not be different in three years. So it would not be for him to decide, but for the community. He would have to acknowledge that, with regard to everything he has received on behalf of the community, the community can decide in its superiors, and also that he renounces deciding on it himself in the future. That is the meaning of the matter. We cannot get around this meaning, otherwise you make the rituals a free gift, otherwise you do not establish something, but teach something, and it is gradually carried into the world in dilution, in change, without connection to what it started from. So what I am saying now should be taken into account in some way. But I only want to be available to advise on these matters.

Then someone asked me what the relationship between the community and the Waldorf school teachers will be, since they not only teach the children but are also active in the religious services in the Sunday and other celebrations; and since at the beginning of this course there was the view that Mr. Uehli should not participate in this course, there was something dubious about this relationship. A real basis for such things must be found within the constitution. I do not know whether there is still a rule for this within the community, but there must be. For it is undoubtedly the case that the Waldorf School - and it would be very similar in other schools set up in this way - already has religious education in the sense sought here, and also religious practice. You should be aware that the whole of the teaching in a Waldorf school is imbued with this, so that at least something should be struck in this respect.

A participant: How should we imagine the early development of the work in the community? How should the community be led, and who should take part in the first service? How should we counter the accusation of stealing the mass from the Catholic Church? Rudolf Steiner: With such things, we have to be clear about how the natural process will be. So let's start with this case of the mass. Here we must place ourselves on very firm ground. The Catholic Church regards the reading of the Mass as something that is an outgrowth of apostolic succession. It therefore recognizes as having the right to read a valid Mass only that person who can prove his apostolic succession in the way that the Catholic Church understands this apostolic succession. The Catholic Church interprets succession in such a way that it only recognizes it if it itself effects it, so that in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church only those can read masses who can trace their authority back to a priest ordained by the church itself. Among the Old Catholics, the Old Catholic priests themselves claim that they also fulfill the apostolic succession, also in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church, that they can trace it back to those who were ordained by the Roman Catholic Church in the sense of the apostolic succession. That is what will lead to the Catholic Church not recognizing your masses as valid. But you cannot expect that either. Since there is no Catholic among you or, insofar as there is one here, he is not a priest – a Catholic priest is not with you, otherwise the whole thing would have had to take a different course, we would have had to count on the Catholic priest, but we did not need to – so it is therefore a matter of the Catholic Church not being able to apply the disciplinary measures it has against a renegade Catholic priest who has been deprived of the right to say mass and who then does say it anyway. So there remain the Catholics who are within your community; you must have some. These Catholics naturally expose themselves to excommunication. One must realize quite clearly that the Catholic Church will also apply the disciplinary measures it has, and there is no objection at all within the Catholic Church to excommunication for reading Mass and hearing confessions. If the Catholic Church now decides that it would be wise not to make a fuss about it, then that would be wise of her. That may well be the case as long as you have not exceeded the third thousand, because the Catholic Church does not concern itself with trivialities. If you do not sit together too much or too intensely on one point, you are a bagatelle for the Catholic Church. It already said in 1909: As long as the anthroposophical movement is small, we will only observe it, but not deal with it. But in 1919, she found that she had to deal with it very strongly. And it will also come about that all Catholics who read mass or hear confessions [at your place] will be excommunicated. Of course, she will also take issue with priestly ordinations in the first place, while she will take less offense at all other ceremonies.

That is the one thing that can happen, and a theoretical justification that the Catholic Church itself got the mass from somewhere else is of no significance at all; it does not recognize that and it decides it as a mere question of power. So any theoretical objections would naturally be ignored by the Catholic Church with a wave of the hand. The important thing is that you simply have to accept the excommunication and count on those who are your followers remaining so despite being excommunicated Catholics. That is the real process. The more you enter into the real practice of religion, the more you have to get rid of Protestant theorizing, which aims to prove something to someone. This has even less significance for the Church than it has for the sciences. In the real world, 'proving' something has basically no real meaning. So you can't make anything dependent on the fact that you want to prove to the Catholic Church that you are reading the mass “by right”. You are reading it in the sense of the Catholic Church absolutely wrongly, and you can put forward the most cunning or spiritual proofs, so that would not be able to help you the slightest bit on this point. You cannot take any other direction than the one in which you succeed in getting more and more people to recognize that you are right to read the mass. You cannot do this in any other way than by winning your followers through the three means I have mentioned. In general, this will not be particularly difficult for you at the present time. If you look at the matter superficially, you will find that there is a very strong yearning for worship in humanity today throughout the civilized world, except that this yearning for worship and also for confession is not being met in the right way by the religions.

Of course, you can deal with the faithful by making an impression of truth through your whole behavior, through the way you work and through the inspiration of your work, when you tell them in the appropriate way: The property of the Catholic Church is the Latin Mass; this has taken on a dead character because the Latin language itself is dead. We do not in the least deny that the Latin Mass was once the right Mass; but we must point out that only the German Mass - or the French Mass or the English Mass and so on - which we read, is the present form of the Mass, and that we hold this in the sense of the living Christ, just as the Roman Catholic Church reads the Latin Mass in the sense of mere remembrance of Christ. And you must make this concept understood. It is important that you do everything so that this concept simply prevails. That is not so difficult. Because there is a deep need in humanity for a renewal of the forms of worship. The Latin Mass is also felt by Catholics today as something insufficient. The only thing you have to do is to show by your whole behavior that you have a spiritual impact, that your holding of Mass is not from men, but from God.

With regard to the Mass, you have only one task with regard to those who join you as parishioners. Even in Luther's time, it was possible to discuss with the Roman Catholic Church, as Luther did. Of course, you can't do that anymore, but you can only gather followers who assert what you yourself assert. The Catholic Church today no longer enters into a discussion in the same way as it did in Luther's time. So I think that everything depends on your strength, whether you can get the reading of the mass recognized or not.

I have already told you this in connection with other things a long time ago. You must be clear about one thing: a movement like the one you have in mind has the peculiarity that it should only be started when you are sure that it will succeed! And as far as this certainty is based on your own inner strength, it depends on you simply not letting up. You must have this certainty. And for that you will need a certain broad-mindedness today, both in the way you deal with religious matters and in the way you deal with the faithful, and especially in administrative matters. I can only express such things radically, they are perhaps a little gentler in reality. You feel today that Breitbrunn has bound you together. It has done that, and you must hold on to it. But if you do not continue what you began in Breitbrunn, then the picture of a large part of you hitting your heads in no time at all is not so far-fetched. You must therefore realize that you need to keep that which you believe to be firmly established in constant exercise and liveliness. For think for yourselves how it is with those who join you – after all, you will not always remain just these forty. You must bear this in mind when you begin to found your communities. You have already begun. A large number of you will return to these communities, but for another part the communities will have to be sought. And above all, you will first have the task of dealing with the proclamation of the word in a somewhat freer way, in connection with advising the people who come to you. And if you succeed in speaking about Christ as you speak, if you take into account everything that we have been going through for a long time, especially in these days, then you will see that you will win your followers through your speaking, much more easily than followers can be won on the basis of anthroposophy, where you have to speak in different terms. And you will find that precisely because you are also taking on the task of healing sins, you will be able to retain these followers as very loyal ones.

You must be satisfied with every small flock, for only by being satisfied with a small flock will that small flock gradually become larger. This is not possible in any other way. Those who want a large flock right away will not get one. So you have to be satisfied with everything that arises out of the world as a possibility, and you will see what can be meant by this loyalty in the first instance. And if you are careful enough with the teaching and with the confession-like treatment of the faithful, you will be able to move on to the cultic acts very soon. It is much easier to move on to the cultic acts than the Protestant preacher or the one who wants to become one imagines. The more naturally you let the community arise, the better it will be.

That is it, [what is to be said about it,] how just such a thing would be treated, which lies in such questions as they have been asked here. I will begin to answer the other questions this evening.

A participant: What about the criteria for worship and what would be advisable for the beginning of worship? In Bremen, for example,

people are already prepared for it, and there is even a church available. Would it be advisable to exclude the public?

Rudolf Steiner: The early Christians also had guidelines, but they did not formulate them, because it was often necessary for the early Christians to hold services underground in order to create the possibility of holding them at all. It has happened that such a longing was present in the first priests to hold services that they held the service even when they were tied hand and foot, but were surrounded by a wall of believers who prevented anyone from watching. And only gradually did it actually emerge in the post-Constantinian period that services could be held in public.

I find it hard to believe that you will have any particular luck if you say a German mass in a public church in front of unprepared people. On the other hand, I think it's a very good thing that you say this mass as soon as possible in front of people who will all say yes. So you have to prepare your people, and for a long time you will simply be forced to say your mass in such a way that you only say it in front of prepared people and only allow prepared people. Because of course, if a dyed-in-the-wool atheistic social democrat goes into your mass today and afterwards starts his things, which he will most certainly start, then you will see that you will most certainly have difficulties that you should actually avoid. You have to take such things into account and you have to look out into the world in what you do every day. The smaller the movement still is, the more you will be able to do that. The more it grows quickly, the more others will do what you shouldn't do.

It is, of course, only possible to give aphoristic indications here of what will have to be communicated in detail as time goes on, if your connection with the movement at the Goetheanum is to be continued in any real way.

It must be emphasized, above all, that in the very nature of things, one cannot heal in opposition to karma. The fundamental attitude of the physician must be that no healing is possible if it runs counter to karma. In his will-to-heal, the physician's attitude must, from the very outset, tend in two directions. First of all, there must be the unconquerable will that karma be fulfilled. The physician needs this above all for himself, for as you have heard, in a sense, he loses, so far as he himself is concerned, the effect of what he uses for his patients. It can, of course, be transformed so that it will also be effective for him, but all you need to know, in the first place, is what I have already said on this subject. The physician, too, is naturally subject to karma so far as his own health and illness are concerned. But when the proper attitude is present, when therapeutic knowledge penetrates deeply into the human soul, it can be said that the consciousness of karma becomes more and more an actual revelation of karma.

Karma has its two sides. You must regard karma in such a way that you relate your destiny to the earthly life immediately preceding the present one. Karma, in this aspect, is the expression of what the previously earthly lives have brought. But you have also to think of karma in the fifth or sixth subsequent earthly life, in the fifth or sixth life following the present one. Then you will have the results of what is happening now. If you carry this thought to its conclusion, you will realize that karma, too, is in the becoming, that what is happening now adds one thing or another to karma. It can also be said that here and there our deeds may give a turn to karma. Nobody who understands karma can ever be a fatalist.

The one direction of the physician's attitude is, therefore, towards karma. This leads to a sense of security and sureness in life, gives a firm standpoint. The other direction, however, is this; that the will-to-heal must always be present. This will must never, under any circumstances, weaken. It must be at work in therapy all the time, so that it can be truly said that everything possible is being done, even when one is of the opinion that the patient is incurable. You must suppress this opinion and do everything possible about healing. I merely indicate this, aphoristically.

What we have to do today is to deepen, in the esoteric sense, those things that may result in the awakening of soul forces in medical study. The content of the esoteric teaching must assume a particular form, must become a special activity, for the physician. The physician will not be able to content himself with looking at things as they are looked at in ordinary life. This is just what ordinary science does. Science does not call upon forces of soul which are not applied in ordinary life; on the contrary, science throws all its weight upon the side of not calling upon such forces. But the ordinary, current view of life does not enable us to know that some substance or process in the world contains healing forces. The healing forces are only revealed by things when we approach them with certain awakened powers of soul. It will be for you, step by step, to awaken these powers of soul in order that things may speak to you in such a way that in your work as physicians you are able to help human beings by their means. What is of importance is that what I have said to you about the attitude of the physician shall be infinitely deepened in your souls.

I will take a simple subject, to begin with, and treat it in the way in which it ought to be treated in medical study. It will seem aphoristic here, but when there is time, it will be developed.

Think of the form that is revealed to you in the bony skull. We can take this bony skull and draw it. Look at its form and contrast this form with what is revealed to you by a long bone—let us say the thigh bone. These bones are not quite on their own, for manifold physical forces play around the bony skull; equally manifold forces play around the long bones. But the reality of a long bone will only be revealed to you if you study it in connection with the whole universe.

Just think of a long bone. Its forces are such that they pass through its length, and when the human being assumes his true earthly posture, they actually go down to the central point of the earth. But that is not the essential. The essential thing about a long bone is that it introduces these forces into the connection that exists between the central point of the earth and the moon. Therefore whatever is placed in the body like the long bone of the thigh or the bone of the upper arm, or a muscle lying in a similar position, is really inserted into the forces which connect the earth with the moon. You can picture it like this. Here you have the earth. (See diagram below.)

Forces stream up to the moon from the earth and these forces include everything that is involved, let us say, in the position in which the thigh is when the human being is standing or walking.

On the other hand, everything that has a position like that of the skull-covering is membered into the Saturn movement. In the skull there are the rotatory forces which belong to Saturn. So that we can say: The human being is formed from below upwards through the connection between earth and moon. He is rounded off, finished off, by the rotatory forces of Saturn. But these two kinds of forces are counter to each other. In the forces which are contained in the connection between earth and moon there lies everything that gives the human being his plastic form, everything that builds him, plastically. One might say: There is a secret sculptor in these forces; whereas the other forces give rise to a perpetual process of demolition, in which the substances which build up the human being plastically are again disintegrated or dispersed. When you cut a nail, you with your scissors are in the Saturn forces; when you eat, this takes you into the realm of the forces working between earth and moon. All these latter forces are up-building forces. All the other forces pulverize the human being. In this interaction between pulverization and plastic up-building live the soul of man and the spirit of man. Therein they manifest themselves.

All that is connected with the etheric body of man both in the outer world and within man himself is connected with these peripheric forces. Silver is connected, in a certain respect, with the forces of up-building. So that when you notice in a human being that the up-building forces are being overpowered by the forces of demolition, you can as a rule correct this by means of some medicament derived from silver. But if you notice that the up-building forces are rampant, that they are maintaining the human being too strongly within his form, hindering as it were the process of pulverization, you will have recourse to the remedies that come from Saturn, from lead. When we know how the human being is built up, we begin to see how we must act.

What we have to do is find our way into this kind of perception. You see, my dear friends, the true world, the world of the spirit, has always been said, and rightly said, to lie on yonder side of a threshold. The human being lives on this side of a threshold. He has to pass over this threshold in order to attain true knowledge, true insight into the constitution of the world. Speaking generally, it is dangerous for the human being to cross this threshold without preparation. For if he carries with him into the spiritual world on yonder side of the threshold his ordinary sense-perception, permeated with thoughts as in ordinary life, he calls forth illusion, downright illusion before his spiritual eyes, because he then judges things on yonder side of the threshold just as he does here, in the physical world. Therefore there stands at the threshold that spiritual being from whom we learn that quite different concepts are necessary when we cross the threshold, that illusions paralyze our life if we pass over into the spiritual world with the ordinary concepts derived from the world of the senses. This Guardian of the Threshold warns us that we must first acquire the ideas that are needed in the spiritual world. People as a rule do not believe that the concepts which correspond to facts in the spiritual world are so very different from those which are suitable in the physical world. In the physical world, for example, the part is always smaller than the whole. This is an axiom. But it is not so in the spiritual world. There, the part is always greater than the whole.

We understand this from an example drawn from the being of man. If we think of a force which the human being has within him when, for instance, he is building up his body out of mineral matter and then think of the nexus of forces which one part of him contains, then, in the face of the cosmos, that which forms the organ—which is the part—is essentially greater than the whole human being. It is not easy at once to visualize the maxim that the part is greater than the whole because you are accustomed to the sense-world; but in face of the super-sensible world it is absolutely true. We must attain to the insight that in the spiritual world the part can be greater than the whole. Our laws of mechanics and physics do not hold for the super-sensible world, rather precisely the opposite. Here, in the material world, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. In the spiritual world, it is the longest, because there, if we go in the straight direction, we have the most obstacles to overcome. Every other direction is shorter, there, than the straight one.

We must be absolutely clear that if we want to enter the spiritual world, ideas and concepts are needed that are quite contrary to what is a matter of course in the physical world. Courage is required so that we shall not enter into the spiritual world in confusion. We must have courage enough to pass over the spiritual threshold, over the abyss. If we cross over to the spiritual world, if we pass the Guardian of the Threshold and reach the spiritual world yonder in the soul and spirit, in astral body and ego, consciously, then all is well. But if we do not pass through this experience in the ego and astral body, illusion arises and when this illusion shoots back upon the human being, illness is the result. Whenever a man is ill, he really has the Guardian of the Threshold within him, but in a kind of demonic counterpart.

There again I come to the demonic element of which I already had to speak. When we look at a human being with ordinary perception, all his members are intermixed. On the one side there is the ego and the astral body of the man; on the other side there is the etheric body and the physical body. All seems to be intermixed when we look at him with ordinary sight. And what is essential above all is to learn to distinguish what is of the soul in a human being from what is of the body. When the soul is in the body, and you are looking at a human being, the soul does not appear as it really is. Indeed and in truth the soul is light. You must learn more and more to realize that the human soul, when we behold it in its absence from the body, is light. It belongs to what surrounds us as the etheric elements—it belongs to the light. The human soul belongs entirely to the realm of light. We see it rightly when we see it within light.

On the other hand, the body belongs to heaviness. I have shown how heaviness is overcome, how the brain becomes much lighter than its external weight. But the physical body, in the form in which we perceive it, belongs to heaviness. Just as through chemical analysis you get hydrogen and oxygen out of water, so, if you want to behold man in his true being, you must member him into the soul with its power of radiance and the body with its might of heaviness. These two realities—the soul with its power of radiance, and the body with its might of heaviness—are interwoven in confusion when they are looked at with physical eyes. And because they are thus interwoven in confusion, we cannot see in the body, or in the human being as a whole, the essential nature of the illness. By so adjusting your soul that you can observe the human being in such a way that you see how the nature of the illness is revealed, then, gradually, when you look at lead, or silver, you will realize what healing forces are contained in these substances.

But you must take your medical life in tremendous earnestness. You must take the meditative life with such strength into your soul that through this meditative life you grasp the world differently. And that is why I want to give you now words which, if they are added to the others (see Lecture Four) and truly meditated upon, will bring you into the same relation with particular substances which these substances themselves have to the healthy and the sick human being. You must let the words, which I am now going to write on the board, awaken your souls to the realization that what you see of the human being in ordinary life is not the reality. When you vitalize your souls with what lies in these words, then you will perceive the truth, the true reality of the human being.

What I have said up to now will help you, in a general way, to understand the human being in his relation to the cosmos. Today I should like to give you something that will help you to meditative knowledge of, say, a tiny piece of gold. I hammer it into a thin leaf and when I look through it I see green. In its green appearance it awakens, not from mere vague analogy, the same inner experience as green meadows, the green plant covering of the earth; it does indeed awaken this experience if I look at the gold leaf with deeper forces of soul. If then I really steep myself, with all my forces of soul, in the tiny, shimmering piece of gold, the opposite power of soul is awakened. Then, as well as the green shimmering gold—as I look now towards it and now away from it—a whole world comes to me, a whole world shimmers towards me in a kind of pale bluish-red light. And in that moment I know that the whole world is present in that tiny piece of gold. This little piece of gold which, to begin with, has a green shimmer, is, in reality, a whole sphere. Every tiny piece of gold is a center of a whole sphere and I learn to live and weave in the bluish-red, the bluish-violet colors of a sphere. And then, if you learn to know other qualities of gold you will realize their living connection. For instance, you will experience, but fundamentally and basically, the known quality of gold, namely, that it will not combine with oxygen. Then, you will say to yourselves: The human being lives through having oxygen; he lives through perpetually working in oxygen. In the etheric body, as you know, everything is different. The etheric body is related to what is not anchored in the physical body. Gold is related to the etheric body because it refuses to be combined with oxygen. So that by virtue of this very quality, gold works as a healing power in the etheric body for what oxygen, for example, may give rise to in the physical body. For this reason, gold is, as it were, a remedy that works from the center of the human being.

Through this impression of radiance in the pale bluish-red light, you get at the inner truth of the saying: “Gold is sun; gold is wholly sun.” This one piece of gold reveals to you that in cosmic space, gold is the sun, and that this gold-sun is related to your etheric body.

But this means that you are led to those qualities of a substance that are needed in therapy. But you will only really come to this realization by taking the following meditation, not as mere words, but in all earnestness, and as an unceasing challenge to the soul:

See in thy Soul
Power of Radiance;
Feel in thy Body
Might of Heaviness!

Schau in deiner Seele
Leuchtekraft,
Fühl in deinem Körper
Schweremacht.

But this must be a real exercise. You must practice with the aim of making your soul into something that really streams out into space and is like light, the power of radiance; and you must practice with the aim of making your body into something that through its own inner heaviness is connected with the inner being of the earth. You must have a real inner experience of this tremendous contrast, and then you separate your soul and body, as they should be separated. The verse continues:

In Power of Radiance
Rays the Spirit-I.

In der Leuchtekraft
Strahlet Geistes-Ich.

The human “P” rises up as an inner experience in the soul. It is a picture that you must understand. In the soul that is streaming out, radiating out into the universe, the “I” unfolds. To these words you must add:

In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

In der Schweremacht
Kraftet Gottes-Geist.

The men of earlier times spoke, not merely in trivial analogy, but as something in profound correspondence with truth, of the human being, the human body, as being a temple of the Godhead. Just as it is true that the “I” is the ruler within the soul when the soul is conscious, so it is also true that the Divine, the Godhead, is the ruler in the body. You may not really speak of your body as your own, for the body is not of man, but of God. It is so indeed. The body of man grows out of the Divine forces. To man belongs only the soul that is within that body. In the instrument that is your body you must see the temple of God. It is of tremendous importance to know this:

In Power of Radiance [of the soul]
Rays the Spirit-I;
In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

In der Leuchtekraft [der Seele]
Strahlet Geistes-Ich
In der Schweremacht
Kraftet Gottes-Geist.

The Divine Spirit is mighty in the human body, just as the “I” is mighty in the human soul. And now comes the important thing:

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness.

Doch darf nicht
Leuchtekraft
Ergreifen
Schweremacht.

When the human being is asleep it is clear to you that his soul is separated from his body. He has separated soul and body. During sleep the soul has not got hold of the body. But in waking life, too, the condition must be such that although the ego and astral body come down in the physical and etheric bodies, there must be an inner separation, and inner apartness between the power of radiance and the might of heaviness. Chemical combination between the power of radiance and the might of heaviness must not arise; these two powers must be inwardly separate. They must not mingle with each other mechanically nor be inwardly united in any way. The might of heaviness of the body, the power of radiance of the soul must work side by side, the former downwards, the latter upwards, within the same space. For that reason, the following words are important.

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness,
Nor may
Might of Heaviness
Permeate
Power of Radiance.

Doch darf nicht
Leuchtekraft
Ergreifen
Schweremacht
Und auch nicht
Schweremacht
Durchdringen
Leuchtekraft.

The last two lines merely express the opposite of the first two. That which our external, sense-knowledge continually mixes together, must, in reality, be separate within the human being. When you look at the human being with knowledge that comes from the senses, everything is intermixed; and if the human being were indeed what he appears to be to ordinary perception, he would be ill all the time. The human being can be healthy, but our material perception of him is a condition of illness. As we see him, the human being is perpetually ill, but such perception is, of course, Maya, illusion. In his true being, a man must never be as we see him. In his true being of man, power of radiance and might of heaviness must not be intermingled. They must be inwardly separate from each other. There must be nothing of what happens in water, where hydrogen and oxygen enter into a chemical combination with each other and, in themselves, really disappear. This is what ordinary sense-perception does; it has had the bad taste to adopt chemical ideas and to look at the human being as if he were a combination of the power of radiance and the might of heaviness. These two are separate and must so remain—just as if in water, hydrogen and oxygen were separate, although united.

For when Power of Radiance seizes
Might of heaviness,
And when Might of Heaviness enters
Power of radiance,
Then in World-confusion Soul and Body
Bind each other
Unto Perdition.

Denn fasset Leuchtekraft
Die Schweremacht
Und dringet Schweremacht
In Leuchtekraft,
So binden in Welten-Irre
Seele and Körper
In Verderbnis sich.

In perdition is illness. You must take this in full seriousness, so seriously that it forms your body that you can really look at the human being according to the power of radiance and might of heaviness and that you have the feeling when they take hold of one another, they are enemies. In illness they do lay hold of one another. When the power of radiance lays hold of the might of heaviness (weight), bodily illnesses arise; when the might of heaviness presses into the power of radiance, the so-called mental illnesses arise. Just think of it—in the body lives the Divine Spirit. If the power of radiance seizes upon the might of heaviness, the human being is wrongly appropriating the Divine within him.

If you learn to think about these things with the moral impulses that are necessary, to feel them deeply and then to will with what you have felt, you gradually begin to perceive the things and processes of the world in such a way that when the power of radiance has laid hold of the might of heaviness you realize how you can separate the power of radiance from the might of heaviness through something that gives support to the etheric body from out of the astral body, through some substances or else through some process in the human being. If you really feel these things, you will also understand the healing forces of curative eurythmy. The healing power in curative eurythmy is something that reckons very specially with the cosmic forces in the process of healing. When you do exercises with the consonants in curative eurythmy, you are within the moon forces. When you unfold the powers of the vowels in curative eurythmy you are within the Saturn forces. Through these two kinds of forces in curative eurythmy the human being feels his way directly into the cosmos.

Therapy, of course, is the essential thing in medicine, but there can be no therapy without absolutely useful diagnosis. Suppose we are able to confirm that the formative principle is too strong in a human being, that this formative power is coming from salts or carbohydrates which he cannot keep within bounds; there is too much form in him. If you really observe the more delicate workings of the organism—and the symptoms may be only very subtle—you will find that vowels in curative eurythmy which work against form will have an extraordinarily favorable effect.

Or suppose a child shows a slight tendency to stuttering. I am not, of course, going to make any dilettante statements about stuttering being due to this or that cause; naturally, all kinds of things may be wrong and so be the cause of it. But whatever the trouble may be, in cases of stuttering a predominating formative force is present, and therefore vowel exercises in curative eurythmy will be good, carried out in the sequence that is natural in the being of man, the true manifestation of the being of man. So that much can be achieved with children who have a tendency to stuttering by taking the vowel sequence: A(ah), E(ay), I(ee), 0, U, in curative eurythmy provided one has the necessary patience and love.

If you think about all these things, my dear friends, you will realize the importance of regarding the esoteric principles which I gave you a few days ago and have given today, as a kind of morality in medical study. By morality I mean the feeling of being bound to a duty, the feeling of being obliged, through meditation, to bring the soul into the necessary and lasting attunement for facing the world in the true and right way. If lectures could be given you for a whole year, a great deal could be said in detail and this would be of concrete use to you in practice. But as in these lectures we could only make a beginning, it has been of very particular importance to speak of the development of the medical and therapeutic powers which lie within the human being—to place these powers within your reach. For if, with these esoteric hints, you go to your medical studies, you will see that things become different. Maybe they will become more difficult. If someone of a rather dull intellect (and education makes the intellect dull today) takes up medical studies, a certain inner persistence will carry him through the first and second years and help to master things if, as the result of social circumstances, he feels a moral whip behind him. But he does not become a physician in the real sense. He becomes a person whom society appoints to play the part, but he does not become a physician.

If you let these things work upon you, a more delicate force of soul will develop in you. And in many respects the physiology, psychology and pathology on which medical science is based today will cause you pain. It will really be as though you were being offered stones instead of bread. But you yourselves will, nevertheless, be able to get something out of these stones. What is offered to you will, after all, not be without purpose. It will not be easy for you to learn. There must inevitably be difficulties, for the world with its materialism is still mighty and we must, in some way, find our place in it. Having found this place, it is for us to work our way beyond it. Thus we must certainly become physicians in the way the world demands and then medical studies must be permeated with what can be given from here.

Therefore let me say once again that opportunity will be given for you to link yourselves with us here in the way I have indicated. You must have complete confidence in the way in which the medical section of the Goetheanum will be led by me in association with Dr. Wegman. It is precisely medicine, as it can be pursued here, that can show you how human life can really be experienced—strange as this expression is. Therefore when you are once again out in the world and one thing or another occurs to you, write your wishes and your hearts' desires and an answer will be given to everybody in the monthly circular letter. And in this way—which is, to begin with, the only practicable one—external medical studies will be able to be permeated with what can be given here.

You see, there are extraordinarily few people yet—and they can only be the young ones really—who are able to build the bridge between the spiritual aims of Dornach and the materialistic science that holds sway in the outside world. At the present time it can only be a few, and really only those who are still at the stage of their studies. Why?

I once had to give a lecture about a particular chapter of therapy which was attended by medical students and also a professor, a professor of medicine. I was able to watch this man. He came to the lecture thinking that he would find confirmation of his belief that it would be the usual kind of superficial twaddle talked of by quacks. I was able to make a real study of metamorphosis in watching this professor, for on the one side he was inwardly resisting, but on the other side he was astonished. He was obliged to come to the conclusion that it was not rubbish, but naturally he could not say “Yes” to it, because it completely contradicted what he had regarded for decades as being true and correct. I spoke to him after the lecture and it emerged that he was saying to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all that.” He could not have gone as far as this if he had really thought it nonsense.

If he had thought it nonsense he would easily have kicked it away in the usual manner. He thought he could kick it away, too, but in reality he could not, and the very most that one could have hoped for from a professor was that he should have said to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all that.” One could not expect more than this. But a young person must have quite a different attitude. A young person has no antecedents and he, therefore, is still able to absorb things which can lead to the healing of humanity. And if this happens, my dear friends, it will really come to pass that gradually perhaps more quickly than we thinkGoetheanum spirituality will enter into medicine.

But what must happen first is that these things shall be continued with real earnestness, and that you go on doing as Dr. Wegman has told me you have done—that you go on coming to her to make the link in full confidence with the true kind of medical studies and with those things that must flow as time goes on, into the materialistic medicine of today. You can do much for yourselves and also much for the world and for sick humanity if you do not regard what you have now heard as something merely transitory, but as a starting-point for that with which such a good beginning has been made. In this sense we will remain united, my dear friends, remain so united that the center to which you adhere here in Dornach, at the Goetheanum, can work in the world, through you. That is what I wanted to say to you as a kind of warning. Then things will go well and much will be added to what we have spoken of here. It may be an ideal in your life of feeling, but it can become, in very truth, life. And as such we will maintain it, my dear friends.

Dear attendees! After yesterday's lecture, which I was allowed to give here, some of the listeners may perhaps be astonished that one can speak of spiritual science or theosophy as a way of life. For what I tried to explain yesterday, as the fundamental, the basic principle of the study of the spiritual worlds, presupposes a vigorous, patient, long-lasting exercise of the human soul. Only through this can what was spoken of yesterday be achieved: that the soul becomes so strong and powerful within itself that it can feel itself to be a spiritual being and actually leave the physical body, thus living in such a way that, in the true sense of the word, the soul itself becomes a spiritual being among other spiritual beings in its experience, that it enters a new world in this spiritual world.

That was the purpose of yesterday's paths. If we allow ourselves to be guided very briefly once more by the soul, what has emerged is that the human soul is capable of doing spiritual chemistry; that it is capable of extracting itself as a spiritual-soul being from the context in which it stands in everyday life with the body, just as one is capable of extracting hydrogen from water. And we have seen that by vigorously continuing the exercises we characterized yesterday, the soul really does come to know its physical body first as something external, like the other things, but to know itself as being lifted out and transferred into a spiritual world. And in the further progress of the soul's practice, it turns out that the soul also leaves what it experiences in a soul-like way in everyday life – which only brings back the memory of its life to the point where our ordinary memory, as at a point in our childhood, emerged before our self-awareness – but that then this inner content of the soul changes and that what comes out can be called the spiritual core of the human being , which, when it is experienced, contains the eternal part of the human being, which passes through the gate of death and of which one can then know from real knowledge that he [the human being] goes through repeated earthly lives, that he leads a life alternating between a life on earth that runs between birth and death, and a life in the spiritual world that runs between death and a new birth.

Now it could be said: Is it not in the nature of things that this leaving of the physical body, this experiencing oneself as a spiritual-soul being in a completely different world, which can only be achieved after great efforts, that it is perhaps suitable for few people in the present, [that] therefore not everyone can become a soul researcher? Is it therefore not unnecessary to make that which only a few can really do, that which only a few can know, into common knowledge? One could object: How can someone who does not become a spiritual researcher themselves have any understanding of the messages that are given to them by the spiritual researcher about processes, conditions and entities in the spiritual world? For individuals, for a few people, one might say, the attainment of spiritual science may be a life asset; but for those who do not want to go this way, who do not reach a certain point on the path described yesterday, for them spiritual science cannot be a life asset. And yet! Even to the abstract thought it must appear as if that which can be attained in the indicated way must be a real inner good.

In today's lecture, the term “theosophy” is used. One could say that spiritual science is a theosophical world view. For this has always been understood to mean a world view that gives the human soul certainty and knowledge that the deepest, innermost core of our being can be reached, and thus it turns out that in its essence we experience that as the root of our existence, is connected with the root of all existence in the world, with the divine-spiritual existence of the world. Through our essential core, we ourselves are rooted in the divine-spiritual. This is what is meant by the term theosophy. And a theosophical world view does not just want to say that one can sense and believe that the human being is connected in his nature to the divine spiritual world, but it wants to say that the human being can also recognize this connection, that he can penetrate to this point within himself where he is connected to the divine spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. And from the consciousness of this cognizable connection, a theosophical world view wants to create strength and hope for life.

Thus, a theosophical world view should actually be a true asset in life. But even if someone has gained the conviction through the path of the soul described yesterday that one can recognize how our soul is connected to its source, it might still seem as if only those who are able to undertake such research of the soul themselves can have a real awareness, a consciousness of this connection. But it is not so. This must be emphasized again and again: the conditions, processes and beings of the spiritual world can only be investigated by the method described yesterday. Only by going out of our physical body ourselves through the application of the described method and being among spirits, can we recognize the spiritual foundations of the world. But once they have been recognized by the spiritual researcher, the person to whom they are communicated need not be a spiritual researcher himself to find them understandable and comprehensible, to apply them in the fullest sense in life, to permeate life with them.

To be able to research something in the spiritual world, one must be a spiritual researcher, just as one must be a painter to be able to paint a picture. But once the picture is there, it would be sad if only the painter could understand it. And so it is with what can be found through spiritual research. If it is presented in the right way, then the human soul is attuned to truth and not to error. And just as we can understand the picture that the painter, who can paint, has painted, so we can understand and grasp everything that the spiritual researcher has to say and put it at the service of life, without being a spiritual researcher ourselves.

However, in our present time, it is still a long way before this can be achieved for a wider circle of people. For there is much that stands in the way of the modern soul if it wants to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say to the world. Today, people come from an admirable scientific culture. It has equipped him with habits of thought directed towards the external. Today, man is not accustomed to living in the very different concepts that the spiritual researcher brings out of the realm of the spiritual world.

But this will change when people's habits of thought have recognized that what stands in the way of spiritual research is prejudice. Then people will find that the descriptions of spiritual science can be understood by everyone. Just as chemistry, physics and any other science cannot be used to benefit life, even though not everyone can become a chemist, physicist or whatever, and people use what comes from chemistry and physics without being chemists and physicists, it is certainly true that what the spiritual researcher has to say can be put into the service of life, can become part of our soul, can penetrate the soul.

But then the concepts and ideas that the spiritual researcher has to give directly from the spiritual world have a different effect on the soul than the external concepts and ideas. And only when one has considered what spiritual research can be as a theosophical world view does one come to realize what a valuable asset this spiritual science is. Of course, one might say: When the spiritual researcher speaks of a vital good, this spiritual science cannot give bread and external goods at first. But what it has, it gives; and what it gives is food for the soul, but such food for the soul as it gives is more and more needed by souls due to the particular configuration that our life has taken on in our time.

Now, in order to understand the essence of spiritual science, we must first think of one thing. That is, spiritual research differs from ordinary research in the sensory world in that the human being allows himself to be passively impressed by the truth through the other sciences; that the human being must devote himself and the world transmits the truth to him from the outside. In spiritual research, however, the soul must be active from the very beginning, developing inner energy.

We have seen how the soul must ascend in three ways to the purely supersensible states, processes and entities. By placing itself in these states, it develops an inner facial expression, a purely spiritual mimicry. One cannot merely let what the states of the spiritual world are shine in from the outside. One must unite with it; one must become so one with it that one expresses it in oneself, but expresses it in one's soul, emancipated from the body. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one enters the spiritual world. As long as one remains passive, it says nothing. Only when one expresses what it has to communicate, when the inner spiritual expression is an expression of what one experiences, only then does it speak. And the gesture, the movement of the soul, it enters into the spiritual world, but again actively, not by living into it as in the outer science, by speculating, but by letting thoughts live within you, you grasp the processes of the spiritual world. Only by imitating them with your own spiritual being can you become aware of them. And the third way was that the human being penetrates through spiritual physiognomy by immersing himself in the spiritual being and raising up the forces in himself from his depths that make him similar in his spiritual and mental state to the moments when he wants to immerse himself in a spiritual being, this spiritual being.

Thus the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual world in three ways: through spiritual facial expressions, through spiritual gestures and postures, and through spiritual physiognomy, but always actively, always in activity. And what he brings forth from the spiritual world must be formulated in concepts. And here we arrive at the point where it turns out that it is actually more difficult to communicate the insights of the spiritual world than it is to communicate the insights of the physical world. A person in our time claims that spiritual science also expresses itself externally in exactly the same way as external science expresses itself. Now, external science expresses itself in such a way that it presupposes the object it wants to recognize. And only afterwards does it want to give the concepts about it. And it does right from its point of view. The spiritual researcher actively immerses himself in the spiritual world and he must himself become an expression of what he experiences in the threefold way as described; and his concepts are formed in such a way that they arise within him vividly, and testify to their truth not as an image, but through their content and their power. The external researcher communicates what he has seen, what he has observed. The spiritual researcher is different: He gives conceptual expression to that which he has experienced, that which has become a part of himself, that which he has struggled to understand; these concepts must be fluid and must illuminate each other so that the concepts are like living beings. But they are such that they arise out of what the deepest essence itself is.

When the spiritual researcher forms his concepts and presents them to the public, these concepts contain information that he can only experience by bringing together the depths of the human soul with the foundations of the world, insofar as they are accessible to us, with the spiritual foundations of the world, so that his concepts are drawn from the depths of the soul. And these depths of the soul are present in every human soul. The spiritual researcher speaks of something that is present in every human soul. When he has researched it and expresses it, he expresses it in such a way that he lets a sound ring out with which the strings of the soul can resonate, to which it can bring full understanding because it is precisely the sound of one's own being.

But these concepts, these ideas, these feelings, in which the spiritual researcher must clothe what he experiences, have the effect of impressing the innermost part of our soul so that it feels drawn to them, because the concepts are active and lead to activity. One cannot understand spiritual science with a casual mind that does not want to be alive within itself. It can only be understood by trying to follow it with the living life and activity of the concepts. Thus spiritual research arises from the activity of the soul and at the same time challenges it to be understood, the activity of the soul.

From this we see that when we respond to spiritual research, we awaken the active power of the soul. It appeals to everything in our soul that wants to be active. The centuries-old scientific education of people has, however, pushed this active power of the soul into the background. But when a force is stretched to its highest degree, the counterforce asserts itself. And anyone who can look into the depths of today's souls knows that the souls long to get out of mere looking and observing, to do what calls for the innermost activity. In this way, the human being learns to feel and experience that he is in the midst of the spiritual world, but not as an understanding being that participates in its life.

Thus, the concepts and ideas and feelings of spiritual science are themselves the educators of the soul, which they seek to guide to participate in the reasons for existence in which we are rooted. First of all, this is realized in the fact that our thinking is oriented – and we can truly speak of an inner soul-good that permeates us through the understanding we bring to the ideas of spiritual research – that our thinking habits, our way of understanding, our soul mood is seized. And while it is otherwise possible to experience that in our presence, especially with well-meaning thinkers, there is something about the orientation of thinking that leaves much to be desired, spiritual science, the messages of spiritual research, can really bring people to orient his thinking in such a way that he imbues this thinking with habits that have a certain natural tendency towards truthfulness; that have a tendency not to get involved in the contradictions of life; to notice how thinking must penetrate into external things. The education of our thinking, the sharpening of our thinking, is what will emerge first when spiritual science enters into our cultural life.

I would like to give an example that can really show what the sharpness of thinking is like in our time. Let us assume that a very important thinker of the present day, who is regarded in the broadest circles today as an astute mind, has done many things that are noticed by those who have trained their thinking in what thinking must not do. There is a recent book by a thinker in which two assertions are found, separated by thirty or forty pages. The thinker in question wants to explain in what sense people today can still be Christians. And one approaches the soul of today's free-thinking people in a pleasing way when one says – and he says it –: Today we must go beyond the demon stories told in the Bible. All right, he may be of that opinion. Thirty pages later, however, one reads the remarkable sentence in the same book: When the spiritual and the physical touch in the soul, then demonic powers arise. You tell that to someone, and he can say: Well, the second time he didn't mean it like that, then he meant it figuratively. Yes, my dear audience, that is precisely the point: people are allowed to use such phrases and are not aware of the grotesque way in which they contradict all orderly thinking.

But people do not notice this today. And we are only on the way to our thinking being corrupted by mere passivity in this direction. This is how it is for those who can see through and observe things. In another famous book, you can read today - there is talk of combating a certain philosophical school of thought - that an author uses the image: This philosophy moves like a clown who pulls up the ladder he has climbed up to him and falls down. The book is quite witty, but I would like to ask you how the clown is supposed to pull the ladder up to him. You only think and write something like that when your thinking is disoriented. But today we are only at the beginning; such books are full of impossible thinking.

But since external culture is, as it were, the imprint of what people think, our culture must gradually be permeated by disordered thinking, unless this thinking is educated in such a way that it can respond with a fine feeling for what can and cannot be said. What can be said must be felt as connected with the essence and weaving of reality. Through orientated thinking, we can become familiar with reality, and this will be the fruit of spiritual science. Everyone will notice that this fruit of spiritual science harmonizes our lives; that it pours something into the soul that is able to bring this life into harmony with reality. In this way, spiritual science already has an educational and training effect on our thinking, making it inwardly active and alive.

And something else results from this. Those who gradually absorb what educated thinking in spiritual science can form in them will feel within themselves the independence of their inner being, the wisdom, the spirituality of their actual core. And there would be no materialism and no monism if one were to really engage in truly trained, energetic, inwardly self-gathering thinking. The strengthening and invigoration of our soul is the fruit of what we have for our thinking from spiritual science.

But spiritual science also brings forth as a second fruit of life that which belongs to the field of self-knowledge. Just as a diseased organism sometimes cannot endure the freshest air, but it can be seen from this that the organism is not healthy, so it can also be seen by some people in relation to spiritual science that they cannot tolerate it, that it makes an impression on them, this spiritual science, that it is fantasy, illusion. One will gradually come to realize that this is a form of self-knowledge; that from it one can see how one should struggle upwards in the soul in order to be able to understand what the spiritual researcher can obtain from the depths of the world.

How far you are from self-knowledge can be recognized by measuring yourself against the demands that the spiritual researcher places on the soul. Therefore, no one should be deterred if they notice that, through spiritual science, their thinking is at first somewhat numbed, disturbed, or their memory no longer seems as coherent to them as it used to. All these are transitional phenomena. We must recognize ourselves in this and say to ourselves: We must struggle to bear the stronger demands in the soul. But then this spiritual science will communicate its healthy spiritual life to us all the more.

And if we go further, we may find that perhaps even today spiritual science is not universally respected as a valuable possession because its value is not so immediately apparent. Nowadays, material goods are of course valued much more than spiritual goods because people do not really understand how material goods depend on spiritual goods. But if many a person could really ask himself out of a certain realization of things – and we can hear this question in our time from many souls who do not quite know how to begin with this or that, who lack a healthy direction in life, who lack the ability to give themselves direction and strength out of a powerful inner being – if many a person could ask himself: Where does all this come from?

These things affect even our physical well-being. Today more than ever, we have to speak of the nervousness of our age, of how unbalanced people are, how they lack balance. Where does this lack of balance come from? Ultimately, it is rooted in the soul. An example of this: that which can most lead to an external feeling of unease, to all possible symptoms of nervousness, to everything else that makes our social life so difficult, what can lead to this is spiritual barrenness, emptiness of the soul, a non-connection of the soul with what spiritual research wants to give, what spiritual research wants to fill the soul with.

Of course, there are some people today who say they have no need for the concepts of spiritual science. That is certainly true. But that is only in their conscious mind. In the depths of the soul there is always a longing for the sources of existence. And what we do not give to the soul asserts itself in it as emptiness, desolation, doubt. And, not overnight, but over decades, what is missing in the soul, what is present as chaos in the soul, pours out into the physical organization. We are no longer up to life. We can no longer pour the soul's strength into the physical because the soul is empty. Because people have become accustomed to paying attention to outward appearances in a natural way over the centuries, they have become estranged from that which can permeate the soul with spiritual content. A great many unhealthy symptoms, which go as far as the physical body and make people unable to cope with life, stem from this. And it will get worse and worse if spiritual science does not intervene and give the soul what it craves without knowing it with the higher consciousness.

Have we not seen that in our time – I do not want to say that there is pessimism in general, but that it has been examined in a peculiar way? If one speaks of pessimism in general, one would have to mention all sorts of misunderstandings. One could mention that some older religions also contain pessimism. But that is not the point, but rather the way in which one tries to support pessimism in our time. This support shows something very peculiar. Perhaps some of you will see what I am about to say as a curiosity. In our time, Kant has found followers. And one of these followers has written Studies in a Psychology of Pessimism. He undertook a strange investigation that takes a completely objective, passive scientific approach to the human being and seeks to examine whether life contains more suffering, more unpleasantness than pleasure, happiness, etc. This professor [Kowalewski] first tried to determine whether this is really the case by asking schoolchildren. He had the children write down what they call happiness in life and what they call suffering in life. They wrote down the following as suffering: illness, death, flooding. As for pleasure, they wrote down: ice cream, playing, gifts. We should not be surprised at the quality of this zest for life. But for the positive researcher, it depends on numerical relationships, and Kowalewski did indeed not just come up with ordinary numbers, but difficult integral terms. His reasoning about pessimism is therefore not easy to read. He was able to determine that in 39 cases suffering was emphasized, in 25 to 27 cases pleasure. So one can conclude from the children's minds that life offers more of the painful than of the pleasurable. And he thought: That doesn't quite go into the positive, you have to do it differently. He also used the diary of a well-known contemporary philosopher. He always wrote down when he felt pleasure and when he felt suffering. And when Professor Kowalewski looked through this diary, he found that suffering outweighed pleasure. So he had the second piece of evidence. But he went further, he was looking for something more certain. He observed people who walk quickly and people who walk slowly. When you are sad, he says, you walk slowly; when you are happy, you walk quickly. That is the professor's premise. And lo and behold, it turns out that there is a far greater number of sad, slow walkers. And so a book has been written in which these numerical relationships have been expressed in mathematical integral forms, and one can say, so to speak, equipped with these: Well, if you examine the external life, the pessimistic world view turns out to be justified, because the external life contains much more of the fatal, the sorrowful, than of the beneficial, the pleasurable. Science has now proved that!

Now there is no need to smile at such ideas. I am not going to talk about the value of such research, in what way it characterizes certain sciences. I just want to ask: What is actually being looked at here? Well, it is what touches man from the external world, what makes an impression on man, for nothing else can be investigated with such methods. No attention is paid to what man is capable of opposing to the impressions from outside, in the way of the unity and self-contained nature of his inner being.

I would like to quote something else that Mechnikov said in his 'Contributions to Optimism'. He talks about someone who was a friend of his, a person who was very nervous, who experienced the disinclination of life in the deepest sense. He could no longer hear a carriage rattle. He could not hear that someone was ringing his bell. He could not see that many people were coming to meet him. And many other things as well. You can imagine what was unbearable for this person. In the end, he knew of no other way to save himself than through morphine, in order to have a sense of stability within himself. Often he was close to taking such a large morphine dose that he could find death. He was also close to death more often, but was saved again and again. Then Mechnikov continued: So that was the man, but it got better and better with his pessimism. And actually Mechnikov says quite rightly why this is so: his external perception, so to speak, became more and more dulled; the outside world no longer made such a strong impression on him as it had done before.

Now we ask ourselves: What led to a greater balance of the soul in this person? That he became duller to the impressions of the outside world, that he was able to close himself off to these impressions. But throughout his life, his inner being was weak. But it can never be a matter of weakening us for everything beautiful and sublime that may come from the world, not to become nervous, but only for what I would like to express as follows: Could not man have had the same earlier, if a strong inner being, permeated with soul substance, had opposed the perceptions of the outer world? But that is precisely what spiritual science strives for: to make man strong within himself against the changing impressions of the outside world; so that we need not become dull to the world, and yet stand securely in the world.

Then it will no longer be necessary to examine the questions of a better or worse life according to purely external things. Kowalewski has done an even more precise experiment and a careful analysis has shown that we have every reason to approach the outside world when we are confronted with it as being much richer in suffering than in pleasure. He did the following. He says: Let us assume that we are examining the sense of taste. Now he has established – in external science you need concepts; where the spirit is absent, you need concepts and words – he called what makes a taste impression in us in the smallest amount of any substance the 'gustie'; and so he established what the gustie is of quinine, which makes an unpleasant impression; sugar makes a pleasant impression. And so he had a number of people take quinine and sugar together to see how much of each was needed to balance it out. And lo and behold, he found that almost twice as much sugar gusti had to be used than quinine gusti if the sugar gusti was to balance the quinine gusti. That means that, in terms of taste, we have to double the pleasant if we want to eliminate the unpleasant.

What I am reflecting on is that we cannot measure something that has an impact on our lives. And the mistake is that one does not take into account that one is actually not at all suited to assess the sugar level in the right way in relation to one's outer life. We take it for granted, but we estimate the quinine level quite strongly. As is well known, we are very much affected by the disease, but we rarely feel the full extent of our desire for health. And this is connected with the mistakes that are made in such investigations.

But we can also fill our health, which must gradually become boring to us when the soul emptiness remains, with what comes to us from the spiritual world, and we can hold out, so to speak, what flows in from the spiritual world to us, which can always hold and carry us, against the obviousness of the disaffection of the outer world. One should not treat a pessimistic mood by asking: Is the world good or bad? but in such a way that one says to oneself: The person who does not find the strength to stand securely in the world has not drawn enough from the spiritual world. What the person of whom Mechnikov speaks acquires through the deadening of his outer organization flows into our soul as a true asset of life when we take up spiritual-scientific concepts and ideas. Just as the most important things for the development of the soul of the spiritual researcher himself flow from the soul's harmony, so the soul's harmony and balance flow out again as a vital asset from the communications of spiritual research.

And we can cite another thing. We have now spoken of the influences of spiritual science on our thinking and imagining, on our minds. We can also speak of an influence on our will, on the initiative of our actions. The fact that we receive such concepts from the spiritual researcher, which are brought down from the spiritual worlds, means that these concepts also penetrate into our soul in such a way that they are suitable for pointing our soul to what is independent in it from the external sense world.

But now, how much arises in our will as a result of external stimulation? I see something that stimulates me. Perhaps I see a flower, I pick it; I am stimulated by it. I do something in life in one way or another. Once the educators taught me something; as a result, the skill arose in me for this or that. If we examine our will, we find external stimuli everywhere. This is precisely what characterizes the will in everyday life: it is stimulated from the outside to a greater extent than is usually believed. Even people who believe themselves to be the freest are dependent on this or that stimulus. They believe they act freely, but they only act according to what has been exerted as a stimulus from the outside world. In particular, we can often see that when people resist this or that in the name of the freedom of their soul, they are in fact resisting because of their stubbornness, their lack of freedom, and not because of the freedom of their mind. In short, the will is rooted everywhere, so to speak, in the external world.

When we take in spiritual science, what flows from its insights has a strengthening and invigorating effect on this will in particular. It works in such a way that this will in the soul becomes independent. But when it does that, we feel it as a force in the soul, as something that can only receive stimulation from within. We are enriched in our soul when we strengthen our will in this way. The external causes no longer affect that part of our inner being that we have acquired through our own will. We withdraw from external causes with our will. When someone becomes more and more deeply involved in spiritual science, they feel their will growing stronger. They can say: “I can now want more than I could before.” But this can only be achieved through devotion to spiritual science.

But if there is no external stimulus for the will, where must impulses come from? Again, what arises as new will not remain in rest, in inactivity, if it receives impetus from within. There is only one thing that no longer compels: what we call love in the broadest sense. This means that the motives of our will must be warmed through by love through the influence of spiritual science. We learn to recognize more and more the deep meaning of the word:

[duty]: where one loves what one commands oneself,

where that which leads us to action leads us entirely through our love for the task at hand, and we strive to accomplish it with the strength of soul with which we strive to accomplish everything that arises from love. With this, we have gained a beautiful fruit of spiritual science as a treasure for life. We have achieved the transformation of our will into the will to love. The treasure of the will to love grows ever greater when spiritual science becomes our life's treasure. Again, it is not something that provides us with material goods. But this will to love is a strengthening, valuable good for our external security in life, which we will see grow and grow as we properly penetrate into spiritual science through the concepts and ideas of spiritual science.

And again, a piece of self-knowledge can be linked to it. We often hear that people think highly of themselves when it comes to their will to love. But this is not the case. For when people, in wise self-observation, become aware of how the ideas and concepts of spiritual science make them aware of the selfishness and lack of love that still exists in them, spiritual science is once again the beautiful corrective, the genuine guide to self-knowledge. On the one hand, it gives us the will to love; on the other hand, it makes us aware of how much we still lack of this will to love. Thus, spiritual science is also the highest form of life, which can be described by the word self-education.

And further, spiritual science leads us beyond what the concepts borrowed from the external world can give us. It leads us to what the spiritual researcher finds by going out of his body with his soul and connecting with the roots of the world from which he, spirit from spirit, is taken. It thus leads us to what is deepest in our soul.

More and more one will see, as I also tried to explain yesterday - through the parable at the end - that science, which is built according to the pattern of external science, must stop at a certain point if it wants to become a worldview. I could explain this for many ideas that are important life ideas. I will explain it for only one idea now. Let us suppose that some philosopher, who at first wants nothing to do with spiritual science, Lotze, a man of spirit - I will stick to my habit of quoting those whom I consider worthy of opposition, those whom I regard as authorities - Lotze, who has written a book, 'Microcosm', which contains many significant works on philosophy, has also tried to present a philosophy of religion. But he arrives only at a conception of truth, at a recognition of such a conception of truth, which is won according to the pattern of those conceptions and ideas that are far removed from outer reality, that are won passively. Lotze therefore attempts to win a philosophy of religion by building it up in the sense of outer science. And, lo and behold, Lotze goes as far as is humanly possible. From his presuppositions he arrives at the assumption of a spiritual being, a divine being, that permeates and pervades the world, that is creatively active. He arrives at being able to conceive of the laws of nature as shaped and spiritualized by a unified divine essence. But every time a religious philosophy of this kind seeks to show how that which is shaped according to the pattern of external truth, like a natural law, is connected with the moral commandments, with that which, as inner impulses, inspires us in life, then it must come up against a duality for which it knows no connection. On the one hand, there are laws that operate with rigid, cold necessity. Where, in this whole system of natural laws, does that which lives in us as our moral impulses arise, as that which drives us to be noble in our human existence, that which permeates us with morality? Where does it spring from out there? If philosophy is to become a way of looking at life, then this question becomes relevant. It takes on significance. If philosophy is to become a regulator of our view of life, pointing out that on the one hand there is the world of necessity, and on the other the world of moral commandments, which, however, lives in us as if cut off from the world - how is it rooted in the world? As long as we remain with the passive concept of truth, we will never be able to bridge this gap, because there is a relationship between necessary truth and its legitimacy and moral truth and its legitimacy that cannot be seen in the external world, that cannot be passively grasped. The relationship between the natural order and the moral order cannot be grasped any more than the relationship between a mother and her child can be grasped through natural laws alone. The father could be there without the child being there. If the child is there, the child emerges from the father, but the father could be without a child. There is no necessity in the father, yet the father leads to the child. Perhaps one of the most significant conceptions and ideas of Christianity is that the relationship of the one God to the God who is to permeate our innermost being is presented in our morality as the relationship of the Father to the Son, the Christ. Theosophy or spiritual science shows us that there is a relationship between the moral world order and the natural-law necessity and world order, such as that of the Son to the Father.

But this relationship can only be understood by going beyond what can be given in passive terms to what can be grasped in the spiritual world; which stands before us in such a way that Goethe can coin the words - he looked to Kant, who tried to set limits to human knowledge, who wanted to regard as mere belief that which is moral world order ; he called it an “adventure of reason” that should not be undertaken. Goethe, who had to reject the kind of world view that Kant represents; he said that if one could truly rise to the upper regions through virtue and faith in the moral order, then one should bravely endure the adventure of reason and also go up with the whole soul to a higher world.

Then, at the same time, something is poured into the natural order as well as into the moral order that is as communal as that which exists between father and son, because nature, if we look at it as it is, could exist without morality, like the father without a son. Only when we look at what has really happened do we find the right relationship between father and son.

So we have to go to what has really happened in the world, and there we come to the very core of Christianity.

I wanted to give you an example of how religious concepts, which the human mind needs to feel its connection with what pulses through the world as divine-spiritual, how the human being can be strengthened in his religious life through spiritual science. For spiritual science shows him that one can really still grasp and understand that which, according to a great philosopher such as Kant, one should only assume and only be able to believe.

Our time, however, is living into an epoch in which it is once again quite clear to the spiritual researcher how souls are increasingly longing not only to accept religious deepening based on the authority of faith, but also to be able to recognize as we recognize nature, that which binds people together with the Divine-Spiritual in the cosmos outside.

Another asset for life will be that the newly awakening religious needs - for they will awaken, the religious needs appropriate to our time - will give these spiritual scientific concepts of inner support, of being set within, again.

The spiritual researcher himself is familiar with all the objections that can be made. If someone wants to say, for example: Now you have presented spiritual science as a special bringer of love. Doesn't Christianity do that for itself? — Yes, of course. The person who says that is fully convinced of it, and perhaps from his point of view he is quite right. But one could give him an answer, which I once had to give to a clergyman who said to me: Yes, what spiritual science says about Christianity, at least in many respects one can certainly go along with that. But one thing strikes me. The way you speak, you only speak to a few educated people who fulfill certain conditions. But we speak to all people. And that must be a true teaching that speaks to all people. I replied, “Pastor, have you found that all people go to church with you?” He could not say that. You see, I said, I want to speak to those who do not go to church with you, because they also have a living yearning for an understanding of Christianity. The fact shows that you are not speaking for them. So you are not speaking correctly for all people. And we do not have the right to say: something is right because we like it; we have to observe the facts. You may think you can dress your teaching in words that will appeal to everyone, but what we think is not always right, the facts must speak. For those who do not go to church but still long for an understanding of Christianity, we must also speak.

Of course, Christianity also speaks of love, but the point is not just to talk about the way to love; the point is to find the way that is the right way for a particular time. You must not be so selfish as to say: I want nothing to do with such a way to love, because the old way is good enough for me. That is egoism, which does not want to pay attention to the longings and tendencies of the souls that are touched by what will touch more and more souls in the future. But it is these souls that need the new paths, and the number of these souls will grow. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to inspire them. It wants to give life goods of the kind that have been discussed here.

I could speak about many other life goods that can flow from spiritual science, but the principle is how spiritual science creates life goods, how spiritual science brings forth that which is immortal in us. But through this, what consciousness evokes in us is awakened and activated: You are an independent being; within you is a source through which spiritual life can bubble, which empowers you, which can give you strength, which can give you everything you need for your life.

Spiritual science is indeed gradually transformed into feelings and sensations. We not only experience immortality theoretically. From the whole structure of my lecture, you could see that the concepts of spiritual science bring to life and resonate within us what the spiritual researcher explores. This is particularly the case with one of the most important questions in life, the question of immortality.

If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will receive a spiritual doctrine of immortality, a teaching about the core of the human being that can be clothed in concepts and ideas so that we not only know about immortality, but feel within us what is immortal in us. We become like a plant that could feel how the germ grows within it into a new plant. We feel what passes through the gate of death; we learn to experience it. And the time will come when principles such as those set forth in my book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' will be applied to the education of the child, when the soul will be so stimulated that it will live on in us, that we will have acquired a feeling through the concepts we have absorbed, that we will know: by living towards death, you develop more and more what your eternal part is. In the second half of life, when we see wrinkles forming on our skin and our hair turning gray, we will feel how all this is like the fading blossoms of plants, but how there is something in us that is emerging ever stronger, overcoming what fades away in us. And as we live towards a new life, we will feel that life. Old age will not be filled with an empty hope, but with the experience of what is felt within as a reality, which will be carried through death into the realm of the spiritual. This, however, will give certainty in life. It will dispel all superficiality, all incoherence of the spirit, all chaos in life. Thus, in addition to the other possessions of life, there will be a particularly intimate possession for our soul.

Just as I have pointed out that with the insights of spiritual science from the depths of human inner and outer perception, one can feel in harmony with all those who, in the right sense, have sensed the significance of human soul life and its relationship to the whole spiritual world through the whole development of humanity, so I would like to conclude by speaking of a thinker who is often forgotten today; a sincere, courageous thinker who, in a small booklet, which is really what is written on its title page, a “Dietetics of the Soul” - I would like to remind you of this dear connoisseur of the human soul, of Feuchtersleben.

The human soul cannot deny that ultimately its happiness consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possessions.

Yes, the soul's true happiness and, we may add, the soul's true spiritual possessions consist in the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And if spiritual science is what I tried to present yesterday and today, then it is indeed entirely that which, with all its impulses, strives for the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And truly, with what spiritual science gives, one feels oneself standing within what the best minds of humanity have longed and thirsted for, because the soul needs it for its inner spiritual nourishment. Therefore, one is in harmony with such a fine, delicate soul as Feuchtersleben, one that nevertheless thinks and feels on a grand scale. And to sum up, if one wants to collect together in a general feeling what spiritual science can give as its best, one may say: spiritual science gives life's goods; it promotes the genuine, true happiness of the soul. It is held in the sense in which Feuchtersleben's saying is meant:

The human soul cannot hide the fact that its happiness ultimately consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possession.

Question & Answer: Question: Can you slap children on the hand?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not so easy to answer. Such questions take on a new significance and importance in our time. There is not always a simple answer to a simple question. Simplicity is convenient, but even a clock is not simple. The universe is even less simple, with less power in it than in a clock. Spiritual science does not make things more comfortable, but through it one sees into areas that are indispensable for shaping life. Then one finds that simple things are complicated. Spiritual science gets one used to taking things more precisely, taking things more seriously. Farm children are quite properly tapped on the knuckles, with proper taps, decorated with an iron ring, but they have not become nervous. City children, who have never been tapped on the knuckles, are often nervous. Life is complicated. What is achieved in one nature through something is not always achieved in the other nature through it.

Goethe is right when he says, “One thing is not suitable for all”; we must take people as individuals and not judge abstractions. We cannot say that one thing or another is generally harmful or useful. Spiritual science will lead us from the abstract to the concrete, to an immediate understanding of immediate, concrete life. Then one will find that the question of nervousness will not have much to do with it; but much more important is the question of education from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Then one can completely dispense with what is indicated here. But this education requires much more of the activity of the soul of the educator, who is able to find his way into every soul.

Beating is usually required by the nature of the educator, not the person being educated. In general, it can be said that corporal punishment is not particularly recommended as a means of education, regardless of whether it is on the fingers or elsewhere.

Question: Is clairvoyance possible while awake? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: As a rule, one cannot see the physical-sensory world and the spiritual world at the same time. The physical world is then like a sinking, and simultaneous seeing is usually caused by bringing something like a having [raising?] of the soul into the spiritual vision. What matters is not the state, but the fact that one is so present in the spiritual vision with one's ego, with one's consciousness, that one does not experience it as if in a trance, but consciously. Only then can one seek the connection between the two worlds. It is said that matter does not appear to be present when this state occurs. Yes, it was said yesterday that one has a picture in front of oneself and that one must first learn to read these pictures. You cannot relate them to reality as in the physical world, but must first learn to read them.

Question: Is the concept of God actually set aside in Theosophy, or at least not emphasized as it is in the Christian religion?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange question, because theosophy is named after the concept of “God” or “Theos”. It is as if one speaks of Selters water, from which the watery, liquid part has been completely removed. Such objections can only be made if one has not studied the subject. We do not have the immodesty to constrict God into a limited concept; in him we live and move and have our being, and so do our concepts. One can only gradually become familiar with the divine. Most of the time, such a question only wants to say: I do not want any other Christianity than I have always understood. Question: Should flawlessness be achieved?

Rudolf Steiner: That is an abstraction. Questions are often asked about the beginning and end of the world and so on, but the human being can only gradually ascend to understanding. The concepts that are usually brought up are usually as unsuitable as possible. Spiritual science places us in life and keeps us from abstract speculation. Through theosophy, morality is also led into the concrete.

Question: Is there not a danger for the theosophist of being withdrawn from his fellow human beings by the cult of the ego?

Rudolf Steiner: Where there is strong light, there is also strong shadow. There must be a transformation into the will to love, so that the ego is sought much more outside than inside.

Question: Christ's suffering and death is only an archetype for us, since we have to atone for our mistakes later anyway.

Rudolf Steiner: I first have to familiarize myself with this question. It is based on a misunderstanding of the idea of karma. One then says: Why should I help a person who is in need and misery? One should help him first, that is written on his karmic account and has a further effect. How I can help one person, I can help two, three, five, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, and a mighty being like the Christ can help all people in karma.

Question: How can I be released from a sin of thought that I cannot make amends for because the person concerned has since died?

Rudolf Steiner: This must be balanced out in the further course of life. One must not judge this from a merely earthly point of view. We are not dissatisfied with our fate from a higher point of view. Between death and birth, we would be very dissatisfied if we did not have the suffering that flows from our deeds; we do not feel it as suffering at all, but as a relief to be able to balance it out; we strive to balance it out. There is a completely different state between birth and death than between death and a new birth.

Question: What influence does anesthesia have on the finer bodies?

Rudolf Steiner: Wherever it is possible to avoid anesthesia, it should be avoided. Normally, the soul and spirit leave the body during sleep; with anesthesia, they are forced out, that is, they are subjected to force. If it is necessary, it should be used, of course. Question: Does a stillborn child have an ego?

Rudolf Steiner: No more than a corpse. It may have been an attempt at incarnation of the ego before it died in the mother's body.

Question: We have often heard about the effects of karma. What about the cruel punishments in the Middle Ages?

Rudolf Steiner: It is like an account book. The punishment is, so to speak, on the debit side and balances with the other side. There is no need for an absolute balance to be there immediately when a punishment occurs. The soul would not even be satisfied with that after death, because it wants to balance.

Question: Some of the Theosophists look unusual in their hairstyles and clothing. A stranger can feel uncomfortably touched!

Rudolf Steiner: This is certainly not a result of the spiritual current! One must be tolerant of the tastes of others; this is perhaps one of the assets of Theosophy. If you want to wear what you like, why shouldn't others be allowed to do the same? Hopefully it doesn't happen too often that Theosophists become Theosophists through hairstyles and clothing. And, ladies, wearing what you like is something that other women do too, and the Theosophists don't say anything, even if they don't always like it.

Question: [Is there a] sense of self after death?

Rudolf Steiner: Self-awareness is rooted in what remains after death. Only after death we have other tools for perception. Eyes and ears fall off. The soul produces other tools. [The] sense of self is preserved, indeed with a much more intense character. Other theosophists are said to have stated that after death there is only consciousness but no self-awareness? This may be stated in some books, but it has nothing to do with the spiritual science referred to here.

Question: On the other hand, the seer of Prevorst: the people she speaks of still show remorse.

Rudolf Steiner: This does not exclude self-awareness.

The other questions are not of a nature that would be suitable for answering here.