The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Esteemed Attendees!

As I did last winter, I would like to take the liberty of speaking this evening about a topic that is intimately connected with the development of German intellectual life, and thus deviate from what I have been privileged to do for many years, both in this city and in other cities in Germany: to speak about a narrower topic of the spiritual-scientific worldview.

This deviation is certainly close to the human heart due to the great, momentous events in which the German people find themselves, due to the facts unfolding around us, which on the one hand represent a severe test, but on the other hand must become the source of many significant hopes for the future.

And besides, I don't think there's any need to speak out of a narrow-minded nationalistic spirit when one ties the great periods of German intellectual life to the spiritual-scientific considerations that have been cultivated here over the years. For it is my conviction, not based on some obscure feelings, but, as I humbly believe, on the recognition of the facts, that precisely what I have often shown here as a striving into the spiritual worlds is contained in its most significant germ in the most diverse endeavors of German intellectual life, in the flowering of this intellectual life.

If spiritual science wants to be science, then one could very easily – I would say – from a certain point of view, a matter of course, a matter of course that is superficial after all – one could very easily say: science must be international. And wanting to tie science to certain popular endeavors is unacceptable from the outset. So many people say. And it is so obvious when one speaks in this way that the matter of course already becomes superficial.

I will just say about this comparatively: for example, the moon is international, dear attendees, the same moon for all peoples; but what the different peoples have to say about the moon, from the soul, arises from their different dispositions. Now one could indeed say: that may apply to poetry, to literature. But if science is to become a worldview, then what science has to say must be objective, must be exactly the same for all people. But whether science penetrates deeply into the sources of existence or remains on the surface – to name only these two extremes – depends on the different dispositions of the individual peoples, on the impulses that the individual peoples have to give to humanity with what science is to them. And it is of the greatest importance that these impulses, these forces [...] arise out of the inherent qualities of the peoples! This is what is important for the overall development of humanity, not what can be common to all in the abstract sense!

To [hint] at what is actually meant here, one need only recall a saying of Goethe. When Goethe, on his great journey to the south, had not only viewed and explained the most diverse works of art in his own way, but had also studied natural facts and natural beings, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After all that I have seen of knowledge and nature, I would most like to make a trip to India - not to discover something new, but to see what has already been discovered in my way.

The way of looking at what one is able to bring from the soul to the world phenomena and the world weaving is what matters. And that is intimately connected with the folk souls. And when one speaks, most honored attendees, of the German national soul and its effect within the German nation, it seems immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the course of German development that the summit reached by the German national soul at the end of the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, must be reached. There, a worldview background was created, a background of knowledge, by minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which, within European intellectual life, became a second [...] flowering period after the Greek one, through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and others who belong to them. Behind Goethe's “Faust” and the other great poetic and artistic achievements stands what German world view has created in the field of thought development in those days.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, appears first before the souls of today in such a way that it seems so obvious to consider German minds in connection with the development of their nationality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte appears first as the great orator in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. If you consider what was achieved by those speeches, each word of which must still ignite in the German soul today, for the simple reason that in one of the most difficult times in German history, every mind was invigorated and strengthened by these words, and how they actually shed light on the possibilities for German development. And because these speeches arose from the most intimate feeling for German national character and from the most intimate kinship with the innermost forces of the German national soul.

But how easily one would say: Yes, what Fichte spoke to the German people in his enthusiastic, fiery speech back then will easily find its way into every soul. But if you start from what Fichte's world view actually is, then you come to something difficult to understand. Oh, honored attendees, if only this prejudice of the difficulty of understanding such creations as Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's could fade away: Never could a personality like Johann Gottlieb Fichte have delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” if one had not experienced that world view in one's soul, which only appears difficult to understand and which he felt, always felt, had arisen in him as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. For that is how he felt about what he had to say!

Now, spiritual science, esteemed attendees, as it is meant here, is based entirely on the premise that there are dormant forces in the human soul that are not used in ordinary external life, not even when one intelligently observes this , nor in ordinary external science; but which must first be developed, [which must first] be brought out of the depths of the human mind, and developed into what can be used for Goethe's expressions: spiritual eyes, spiritual ears - through which one can look into, listen to, the spiritual world - spiritual eyes, spiritual ears!

Spiritual science assumes that such a real inner sense is not bound to a physical organ, but slumbers purely in the soul, but can be brought out of it. Spiritual science assumes that such a sense is able to perceive a real spiritual world that is around us and to which we belong with our souls and with our spirit, just as we belong to the physical-sensual world with our body. Only that when we look at the physical-sensual world with the organ of the physical-sensual body, it presents itself to us, which dies with our death. Whereas when the inner sense of man proceeds just as scientifically as the other senses or external science and through the external mind bound to the brain or nervous system, when the inner sense proceeds in this way with regard to the spiritual world, then man comes to the observation of those forces that are within him and that permeate the entire external world. [He comes to the observation] of those forces that represent for him the eternal, the immortal forces of the soul that go through births and deaths.

To awaken such an inner sense, such inner forces, was Fichte's, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's, unchanging striving for a worldview. He strove for such a sense. He could only do so because this unique quality - we will see later why I say “unique” - of the German national spirit lived in him, this will to acquire in one's own soul, through an elevation, through a strengthening, through a development of the soul forces, something that cannot be acquired if these soul forces are not strengthened , but which is one and the same – not a vague fantasy is meant here – which is one and the same as that which, as spirit, as real, objective spirit, is as objective as the external natural objects are objective for the senses, which, as spirit, permeates and interweaves the world.

For Fichte, the human self was able to live into this human self if the human self was able to grasp itself inwardly in such a way as to grasp what pulses and weaves and lives through the world as its secrets.

Fichte believed that when a person comes to experience this inner self, this center of the soul, in the right sense, in a truly direct and powerful way within themselves, then not only does he live as an individual human being in such inner experience, but then the life of the world, the world spirit, that which is the creative spirit in all things of existence, lives in this inner experience.

This desire to recognize with the innermost sense organ is what is so characteristic of Fichte. And it is characteristic of him because it was in his very nature. It was in his nature to grow together with that which made an impression on him. He did not just hear something, he did not just see something, but when he heard something, when he saw something, he put the whole feeling and life of his personality into what he heard, into what he saw. He was so immersed in what he perceived that he felt creatively immersed in it – recreating the world, recreating nature, recreating every other human life. This was present in him as a personal disposition.

To illustrate this, I would like to mention a few episodes from the life of Fichte, or rather Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was a small boy of seven years old, a simple weaver's son; there he stood once at the edge of a stream that flowed past his father's small house. He had thrown a book into the stream! And he stood there crying, watching the book float away. Then his father came along and saw what had happened. The fact was that last Christmas his father had given the boy, who was precocious and did well at school, the “Horned Siegfried” as a present. On the boy, on the seven-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, the child of simple people, the mighty, the primeval Germanic deed of “Horned Siegfried” made such a powerful impression that he became completely absorbed in it. And then it turned out that one had to say: Although he used to be so diligent, conscientious and dutiful at school, he is now less attentive. He was reproached for this.

What did the seven-year-old boy do? He said to himself: “I like ‘Siegfried’, I love him, I am attached to him; but he must not take my duties from me, so I throw him into the water.

And again: He had turned nine years old. The neighboring landowner had come to the village where Fichte lived to hear the pastor's sermon there on a Sunday. He had arrived too late to hear the sermon. Then someone came up with a solution. They said: “There is a boy of nine who is so good at listening to sermons that he might be able to repeat the most important parts by heart.” And so they brought in nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He stood there awkwardly in his blue peasant's smock. Once the ice was broken, so to speak, he began to develop the sermon as he had heard it. But not, as children relate, by reciting the words from memory. Rather, he recreated them! So that one could see: the inner fire of the soul had grown together with what had reached him from the pulpit. Even as a boy, he was so intimately united with what was around him that he absorbed everything from the world. That was what he realized, and what led him to his world view, [what led him] to his world view in such a way that he felt: What lives as will in the individual person does not live merely as will in that individual person, but what lives as will in the individual person is like that drop taken from the sea, but which is of the same kind as the whole sea. The will that man learns to recognize in his ego, that throbs, lives and weaves through all existence as the will of the world. And when man pronounces “I,” the will of the world speaks in him.

Thus in his world view, the individual ego grew together with the will of the world. And as if on the wings of the will, what radiates from the divine-spiritual existence, from the divine-spiritual will existence, shines into the human soul as duty.

To him, duty became the highest, the most significant, that which enters a person as a duty – in relation to the world and its phenomena – as a task; this was an immediate inspiration of the divine spirit of will, which pulses and weaves and lives through the world.

And so, in his will as in his ego, Johann Gottlieb Fichte felt at one with the existence of the world. He believed that when he spoke, he spoke not out of personal arbitrariness but out of that which the God who wants to speak in the soul wants to say. And one really cannot imagine that anyone could have been more earnest than Fichte was when, for example, he spoke to his audience in Jena and tried to convey to the souls of his listeners what he had experienced in his soul as a world-certainty.

It was not a matter of merely communicating certain content, certain sentences, so that they would be heard, as was the case with other speakers; no, but for him, when he ascended the lectern, it was a matter of carrying in his soul something to carry in his soul something of which he knew - in true humility, in all modesty: “The world-will, ruling through the world, speaks through me; it must be carried into the souls of my listeners on the wings of my words. And there must be established that connection between the souls of my listeners and the divine-spiritual world-will, by which I myself am aglow and inspired.

And deep within his soul – within Fichte's soul – was the realization that the deepest thing in the world must be grasped by the innermost part of the soul. In turn, here is a short story, which is familiar to those who have studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, about how he made the following demand of his listeners, for example. As an example of how he sought to establish an immediate personal connection with his listeners, he said: “Gentlemen, think the wall.” And so the people thought about the wall; it was easy for them. After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said: “And now think about the one who just thought about the wall!” Then the people were already somewhat strangely touched; they did not really know what they should do; they were referred to their own inner being. They should become strong in themselves, in their own inner being, that which, as something impersonal and spiritual, permeates and interweaves the world.

In this way he sought to reach his listeners. And his words were not words shaped in the ordinary way. People who knew him well said: His speech rolls along like thunder, and his words are discharged like individual lightning bolts. He sought not merely to educate good souls, but to educate great souls.

And another said of him: Oh, with Fichte it is so that he lives and moves in the realm of the invisible world of thought; not like one who dwells within, but like one who rules this invisible world.

It was out of such a spirit that Fichte then, in his Berlin lectures from 1811 to 1813, said things that were probably not often uttered before a university audience. He spoke of a “new sense”, of a spiritual sense that is necessary for man if he wants to know the eternal in contrast to the temporal. He spoke of this by comparing this sense with another sense that prevails in ordinary life. He said: “My dear listeners! If a single soul – he meant Fichte's soul – were to appear among a number of people who cannot see Fichte and have never seen Fichte, would they not declare what he has to say to be fantasy? But it is the same with everything that your senses can see compared to what man can see when the new sense - as Fichte called it - the spiritual vision, opens up to him, through which a new world arises.

A genuine spiritual-scientific striving is developed here out of German scientific striving! And Fichte said, being aware of the contrast between this German striving and the Romance striving in relation to knowledge, Fichte said: This striving, that is a striving that emerges from the original source of the living, and that does not merely want to establish a knowledge of the dead.

Even more thoroughly than Fichte was able to do, one can point to certain Western views of eternity, which show quite clearly how different Fichte is from the world development of humanity than, for example, similar spirits from the Romance, French tradition. Take the excellent philosopher Descartes, Cartesius, who was active in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In a similar way to Fichte, he wants to start from what is in the soul: “I think, therefore I am” - “Cogito ergo sum”. But what does it represent? An endeavour to use the intellect to clarify what one already has. Fichte's energetic activity strives to develop in the soul something that one does not yet have, in order to recognize the actual, deep secrets of the world. And one need only mention one thing that comes to light particularly strongly in Cartesius, in Descartes. Descartes also tried to gain clarity about nature from the innermost depths of his spirit, from the innermost depths of the human spirit. About that which is around us. But he does not start from the living and therefore cannot come to the living. And it is characteristic of Cartesius, of Descartes, that he regards not only the other natural phenomena, but also the animals as inanimate, as moving, soulless machines. This is no exaggeration, this is a genuine Descartesian theory: only man, who experiences a soul within himself, actually has a soul in the true sense of the word. The rest of nature is soulless.

Compare this view of nature as something soulless, compare the directly living in Fichte: the soul of man stands in it in the divine will, which pulses and weaves through the world. He looks at external things, but he looks at them in such a way that man is called upon to see in external, material things that in which he has to see the divine will... ... and living everywhere, everywhere ensouled.

The time will come, honored attendees, when people will indeed pay attention to these differences between the individual nations, because the realization of these differences of such outstanding minds must bear fruit. We Germans have no need to prove all that we have now heard from some outstanding personalities on the enemy side. We Germans have no need to join in the tone of not only the misjudgment but the slander of German intellectual life, as we can hear it everywhere. But we do have reason to penetrate into the peculiar, into the essence of German intellectual life.

And then, like Fichte's follower, we see standing before us, also unrecognized, but as a personality who will already celebrate his resurrection, Joseph Wilhelm Schelling. Schelling does not stand there like Fichte. That is precisely what is significant in German intellectual life, this versatility, this diversity. He does not stand there like Fichte; Fichte stands there as if emerging from the contemplation of the individual personality, becoming aware of the world-will pulsating and interweaving through the world. Fichte's entire personality is active out of the will. Out of the soul, out of this German soul – for which the other languages of the West do not even have a literal translation – out of this German soul, Schelling creates his magnificent view of nature and spirit, which only appears difficult to understand.

For Schelling, nature is not something dead, something merely mechanistic; rather, nature is that which has been created out of the same forces over the course of millennia and millennia, out of the same forces that the human soul feels within itself when it truly goes within. And then Schelling looks at nature and can say to himself: That which lives and moves out there in nature – the same powers of the human soul that now come into being in human souls – have created that, have created a foundation for themselves, a preparation; so that they can arise and appear internalized in the human mind, in the human soul.

And so, for Schelling, soul and nature grow together in such a way that he coins the certainly one-sided sentence: To recognize nature is to create nature!

It does not matter at all whether one becomes a follower or an opponent of these great people, whether one agrees or declares oneself to be an opponent of what these great minds have expressed; today this can even appear childish; it does not matter; but what matters is to look at these personalities and to see the best in their personalities, their spiritual striving. It must not be a matter of repeating what someone has said out of the spirit of his time, but of strengthening and empowering oneself in relation to one's own soul forces, in order to perhaps create something completely different today from what Fichte can give than what Fichte gave.

If you see it the way those who heard Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling, did – I myself met people who heard him in his old age and who fully confirmed what those who were young when Schelling was young had to say, when Schelling was at the University of Jena at the end of the 1790s. This is how they spoke, for example – I am telling you what Schubert, who himself was a deep spirit who wanted to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, wrote in his diaries after hearing Schelling in Jena: If someone came during a few afternoon hours on a weekday, Schubert says, you saw an eventful life in Jena. But this eventful life did not come from some kind of frequent celebration, not from some other kind of gathering; rather, this eventful life was because the hour was approaching when not only students, but mature men of all professions went to Schelling's lecture hall. Schubert continues: “The personal impression Schelling made on me was of a great, powerful man.” When Schelling spoke, it seemed to him as if he were standing there and his spiritual musings were directly connected to the spiritual world and his words were shaped in such a way that he grasped what he had to say from what he looked into: the spiritual world.

Fichte came across as a powerful person, as a powerful representative of the German essence. Schelling came across as an educator, a philosophical educator, who appeared to his listeners as if he was surrounded by an aura of spirituality, which he knew how to communicate even as a young man to those who listened to him. And those who heard him in his old age – as I said, I myself still knew people like that – [they] assured that the eye, which still sparkled in old age, spoke of the immediate personal nature of nature, which presented itself to him in the communications that he sought to give to humanity, not out of prudent wisdom, but out of an inner vision of the spiritual world. And Schelling speaks of the so-called [intellectual] views. In this way we have coined the word in his way for the new sense, for the spiritual sense, the spiritual sense that can be awakened in man and is able to look into the spiritual world. Schelling's way of speaking of this spiritual sense may be one-sided; but the fact that it could be spoken of with such earnestness in German intellectual life is one of the most significant intellectual blossoms, in the presence of which one must feel in the right sense.

The third person to be considered among those who created the world view from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other works of art emerged is Hegel. In Hegel, we again notice how he strives to relive in what the soul experiences in itself as an individual soul that which permeates the world, that which pulses through the world. But while Fichte sought this in the will and Schelling in the mind, Hegel sought it in pure, senseless thought. And when thought becomes completely pure, when thought does not lean on that which the senses observe externally, but when thought creates itself as free thought out of the soul, then for Hegel it is not the human soul alone but for Hegel it is the divine world-being that penetrates into the soul and that now kindles its world-thoughts, which gave rise to things outside, in the human soul as the light of the soul itself.

In Hegel, we have a remarkable kind of mysticism that does not want to revel in dark feelings, not a mysticism that wants to live only in feeling, because it believes that in feeling alone it is more closely in touch with the secrets of the world than in thinking. We have a mysticism in Hegel that is intellectually clear and yet not intellectually superficial, a mysticism that is suffused with the light of ideas, with the light of thought. But Hegel seeks to bring to life in his soul those thoughts that truly bring man together with divine thoughts. I would like to say: mystical, but not mystical darkness, but mystical light, mystical brightness.

Hegel did indeed oppose the idea that the new meaning, the inner meaning, should become something that man could only receive through a special disposition; and that is why he criticized Schelling, who spoke of [intellectual] intuition. In a sense, Hegel was right, because for every human being – you only need to read about it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” , for every human being, this new sense is attainable if only he wants to develop it. And this new sense, basically it lives most beautifully, most gloriously in that man, in the German, to whom Fichte, when he showed him his seemingly so dark, arbitrary teaching, wrote in 1794: Philosophical endeavor, like every pure philosophical endeavor, weaves itself into the spirituality of your feeling; for this pure spirituality of your feeling is actually the touchstone. - So Fichte wrote to Goethe in 1794.

And Goethe himself, in the beautiful essay he calls “Contemplative Judgment,” spoke of the fact that there cannot be only one way of looking at the world that relies on the external senses. Rather, just as the power of judgment judgment otherwise judges only about the external sensory experiences, so the power of judgment can develop an impulse in itself, which unfolds an inner life, so that it sees the spiritual, as the senses see the sensual.

Kant still had this inner vision, this vision of the spiritual through the human spirit, of the divine spirit through the human spirit. Goethe said: Let us then bravely face this adventure of reason! And it is from this inner sense that everything Goethe wanted to offer to science was created. And Goethe, in his scientific and cognitive struggles, showed most clearly how the German mind must understand the world differently than the Western mind.

In his early youth, Goethe encountered what Descartes' worldview had become within the development of the French world view. While Descartes still regarded animals as machines, de La Mettrie had already written the book “Man a Machine”! The mechanistic worldview, rooted in the French national character, is a mechanistic view of the world, a view of the world as a mechanism.

And when this worldview was presented to young Goethe, he said, from his German worldview: “Now they are telling us about atoms that collide with each other; this great world machine. If only they would explain to us how this beautiful and diverse world can arise from these colliding atoms. But after they have shown us how the atoms collide and push each other, they do not explain anything more about it!

Now, this striving has been preserved in the mechanism to this day. The mechanistic world view is actually the French world view. Of course, esteemed attendees, this is not meant to apply to the individual members of a nation; individuality can rise above nationality, above that which has been discussed and which arises from the character, from the inner nature of nationality. And here I believe that the right thing has been said. I would like to let the voice of a man be heard, the voice of a man who may perhaps be heard when considering the striving of the French nation towards a scientific world view. This man says:

"Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

This was not written by a German out of one-sided national sentiment, but rather, dear honored attendees, it was written in 1875 by Amiel, Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss at the University of Geneva! He could know as someone who, although he was deeply familiar with German intellectual life, was bound to French intellectual life by his blood ties. And in 1862, Amiel wrote the following:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are nevertheless sufficiently different from one another, while French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control all of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a sense of order, art for art's sake, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves.

One does not want to present a one-sided view, not out of national sentiment; therefore one must choose something that is said by someone who says it out of his own attachment, out of his blood ties to the French nation.

But the time has come when, just as other things, the relationship between the individual elements of the nation must be recognized objectively. And once one has achieved something like Fichte's achievement – Fichte, for whom that which lives outside in the world of the senses is, so to speak, the nationalized field of duty – if one compares that with what lives in the British, in the English world-view, then one need only point to where one will, take old Baco of Verulam, who would accept nothing except what the senses see externally – everything else is an 'idol' to him; and his book about idols is an attempt to prove that what man can grasp in his soul has no objective validity beyond sensuality. And if we go up to Spencer and all those who have a similar view, we arrive at the latest English world view, which has been developed out of the English view: it calls itself pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? It is not something that applies to us Germans. For us Germans, as with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, it is something that experiences truth, and by experiencing truth, one lives together with the world spirit. But the Romance peoples and the British have no conception of the objective world spirit at all. It is something that will only be fully recognized in the future. [...] Truth [...] is something that arises in the soul as a result of this soul growing together with the world spirit itself. Then the soul brings this truth to bear on external things, and the external things become a revelation of spiritual truth. What are they to pragmatism, to this pragmatic product of a worldview? A caricature! I say this, as I said, out of pure fact, not out of any antipathy. For this pragmatism, truth is only of value insofar as one connects concepts and ideas in the spiritual, which are actually only brackets, only bands that bind together the external sensual facts, so that one can find one's way in the external sensual world. Truth has no meaning in itself, has no value in itself.

A person, for example, commits an act; he has thoughts. All this is expressed. We seek the soul for thoughts and actions. The soul is a real being for us. And as we grow together with the truth, the soul itself becomes a reality for us, it is grasped as a reality.

For pragmatism, the soul is a concept that was formed to orient oneself, to hold together the otherwise disintegrating thoughts of man as with a bracket. Truth is what is useful if one wants to understand the world. - The pragmatist forms concepts and ideas with a view to usefulness, so that he can find his way in the world.

One has only to compare this with what lives in the characterized summit of German intellectual life, and one will be able to get an idea of the spiritual world position of the German within the developmental history of humanity.

But now something else comes. If you look at Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, they are great, important minds, geniuses; they represent the coming together of man with the secrets of the world from three different sides: from the side of will, from the side of thought, and from the side of feeling. If anyone today still thinks – and most people do, in fact, think – that it must be so, that they are difficult [to read and understand], then I may well express my conviction that there is a way to present what these spirits have achieved in such a form that even the simplest mind can grasp what it is about, if it only wants to. These spirits can be fruitfully employed in schools; [that they cannot be fruitfully employed there] is merely a prejudice. But the peculiar thing that confronts one when one contemplates these spirits, esteemed attendees, is that in their triplicity something like a unity hovering over them asserts itself! One has the feeling that something is being expressed in three ways, invisibly prevailing over the three. It is what one might call: the German folk spirit itself.

Amiel - again the French Swiss - has sensed something of the fact that the German folk spirit itself seeks to grow together in the souls with the innermost reason for things. Therefore Amiel says:

“Perhaps only the Germanic spirit has the need to think for itself, to search for the very basis of things.”

Amiel therefore goes on to say:

“The German spirit, like the collective inspiration, passes into these characteristic personalities; it speaks through them.”

Therefore, dear attendees, it could happen that personalities actually came along, personalities whose work is largely forgotten today. Therefore, I may speak today by wanting to reopen this as if it were a faded, forgotten pursuit of the development of German thought. Personalities who are largely forgotten today, they appear after the great personalities just mentioned. And the strange thing is that, while these personalities are smaller minds, less ingenious, after the three greats, they even show greater achievements in the field of spiritual searching, more penetrating achievements than the great ones who preceded them. Of course, the great ones need stimulation; but the lesser ones who follow usually achieve greater things, at least more penetrating things, from what has once been stimulated within German intellectual development. They are closer to the soul's inner search for the concrete spiritual world, for the search for spiritual entities that can be found with the characterized sense, just as one finds concrete external natural objects and natural facts through the external senses.

And among these lesser spirits is the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Certainly, there are not many today who still occupy themselves with this Immanuel Hermann Fichte; but Immanuel Hermann Fichte – to mention only that – already stands there and says: the human being whom we observe with our outer senses, the human being who is made of flesh and blood, is bound to the perishable earthly in terms of his material and his powers. But in this human being there is another human being. This other human being – I mentioned him earlier in these lectures. People still laugh about it a lot today. But they will not always laugh! That other person, whom Immanuel Hermann Fichte calls the “ethereal man”, is a supersensible, higher person who has certain higher powers through which he is just as connected to the eternal spiritual aspect of existence, to the whole universe, as his perishable body is bound here to the physical-sensory powers of the earth. And the etheric body, which Hermann Immanuel Fichte assumes, is what first builds the physical body!

And another spirit can appear before us, again more or less forgotten, but no less significant and no less characteristic for the innermost freedom and for the innermost strengthening of the forces of German intellectual life: that is Troxler. Who still knows him today? But how he stands before him who got to know him! Troxler wrote his beautiful lectures on a world view in the 1840s. In them, we see emphasized, again and again, how the human being who stands before us with his senses lives within a spiritual world, a spiritual human being who has a spiritual world around him just as the sensual human being has a sensual world around him. Troxler speaks of abilities that the soul has, which are only hidden in ordinary life. Troxler speaks of what he calls the “super-spiritual sense”.

What does he mean by that? When Troxler speaks of the super-spiritual sense, he means that the senses we usually call that and that have different organs are not the only organs of perception for humans; but that humans can perceive another world with new organs, with new senses, with purely spiritual senses, which is just as full of content as the external physical world.

I have said here before that many people today believe that there is a spiritual world in general. And anyone who bandies a few pantheistic terms about, thinking they are talking about a spiritual world – spirit, spirit and more spirit – is merely bandying abstract terms! Spiritual science speaks of the individual spiritual beings that can be seen; just as one does not always say only “nature, nature, nature!” when faced with the external physical world, but rather “lilies, tulips, carnations” and so on. Specifically, one shows what physical nature produces individually. In the same way, one can show what spiritual nature shows individually. This is what Troxler means when he speaks of the 'super-spiritual sense'. And then he speaks of the 'supersensible spirit', which is not dependent on sensuality, but which knows itself within the spiritual, which feels itself as a body within the spiritual.

But Troxler goes even deeper in his discussion of this spiritual, this higher human being, who goes through births and deaths. And it is wonderful how Troxler – not in an abstract, indefinite way – addresses the higher human being in a very definite way. Even if this is a faded, forgotten tone in the development of German thought, it lives in it. And whether one notices what is alive there or not is certainly important for understanding; but even if one has not noticed it, it lives in the development of German thought and will be noticed! It will celebrate its resurrection as an actual spiritual science!

Then Troxler sees that in the human soul, insofar as it experiences itself between birth and death in the outer physicality, three forces live - as the most beautiful forces according to Troxler's world of vision. First there is the power of faith - that which man has as the power of faith. What a person has as love power, he has it as the power of his soul, but in the soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body. Behind the power of faith, however, there is another, higher power for the soul itself, and Troxler calls this spiritual hearing. That is to say, he believes that the human being can develop the outer form, so to speak, the shell for a spiritual hearing, through which the human being, when he becomes aware of it, can perceive the language of spiritual beings, which speak of the eternal secrets of existence. Thus, faith appears as the outer shell of a much deeper power, an eternal power in man. Spiritual hearing is love, the power of love, which expresses itself in the body as the most beautiful, greatest flowering of the human soul. Nevertheless, for Troxler this is only the outer expression of the power of spiritual touch, of spiritual feeling. The one who loves has the most beautiful flowering of human existence on earth. For him, love is the shell for the powers of which he can become aware, which extend the spiritual organs in the material world so that he can touch the spiritual world as he touches physical things with his physical senses of touch.

And what lives in us as the power of hope is in turn the shell for Troxler, the power of spiritual vision.

So that Troxler sees a higher person in the ordinary person - a higher person who has a spiritual sense just as the physical person has a physical hearing; who has a spiritual feeling just as the physical person has a physical feeling and who has a spiritual vision, a spiritual soul. And that we can be seeing, loving and hearing people in the body, that is for Troxler because, when we go through the gate of death, our soul goes out of the body. The power of faith then appears as spiritual hearing, the power of love as spiritual touch, the power of hope as spiritual strength.

It is in this spirit that Troxler also expresses the following very beautifully. He knows that, in terms of feeling, we are closer to things on a human and spiritual level than with the mere abstract mind. But one can develop such thoughts that are just as close to the direct experience of the thing as feelings usually are. Nor does Troxler seek a sentimental mysticism. This is foreign to the essentially German nature! That vague, hazy sentimentality of mysticism is not part of the German character; it is also foreign to Troxler. But Troxler nevertheless speaks of “thoughts felt” - of thoughts that, like feelings, live as thoughts in the soul. He speaks of “intelligent feeling” and of sensitive thoughts - thoughts that touch the spiritual life!

Troxler is completely imbued with this view. And he once speaks of how he feels in harmony with the entire spiritual life of the German people through such a view, insofar as this spiritual life has appeared in great personalities after Christ. There Troxler says once - I will read these words to you myself:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire internal spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the external one on his spirit body. Lavater writes more and thinks the same; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonn under-skirt and the Platner soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body-skirt and , we also hear him asking: “What is the purpose of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from that lie dormant in us, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cutting through our earthly shell? ... In the stony limbs of

of man

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us... We could”

says Troxler further.

"cite a myriad of similar ways of thinking and creating, which in the end are only different perceptions and representations in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

Troxler also speaks of the possibility of a science of man on the path of knowledge he sought, through which – to use his own terms – the “super-spiritual sense” in union with the “supernatural spirit” can grasp the supernatural essence of man in his “anthroposophy”.

Troxler cites these [individual personalities], and many others could be cited who, entirely from the essence of German national identity, sought the way to the real, true spiritual world. And before Troxler's [inner eye] stood a certain science. He thought: When man observes man himself with his senses and explains this observation with his mind, which is connected to the senses, then anthropology arises – the science of man through the senses. But anthropology arises from man observing man as a sensual being; but the spiritual man, the higher man with the awakened senses that we have already spoken of, can also observe man; then a higher science arises. In 1835, Troxler spoke beautifully of this higher science, as anthropology is, saying:

Although it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... must reveal itself, is moving upwards, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts it with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

This German spiritual life developed entirely out of the German national character. And is it not wonderful to experience such a phenomenon as this: In the 50s of the last century, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck published a simple little book, a wonderful little book that is at the height of spiritual science, that stands apart from all materialism, but also from all mere intellectual and conceptual considerations, that sets out to consider the human soul in such a way that it can grasp spiritual reality.

Some of the simple Rocholler writing, which is simply written for seeking circles, may seem fantastic, but that does not matter; what matters is that we have here a simple person, at the pinnacle of education, leading a way into the spiritual worlds. It is the intention that counts. That is why intentions such as this little book, which was published in Waldeck in 1856, are so infinitely important. And anyone who might think that I am choosing to present these phenomena in order to prove something is quite mistaken.

However, over the past few decades, circumstances have developed in such a way that even the vast majority of scholars were numbed by what Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had created, and descended from this height, thinking: the one-sided, materialistic Darwinism had proved powerful, the French materialism had proved powerful.

But what I am characterizing is not something that can be explained away by German intellectual life alone; rather, hundreds and hundreds of such phenomena could be cited. When people actually become aware of this, they will see the depth of German insight that can be drawn from German national character. For that is what really strives for a German world view, from German intellectual life.

Perhaps it may be mentioned, just as an aside, how profound these things actually are. Who among physicists, overwhelmed by French mechanism and English utilitarian philosophy, does not laugh inwardly when he praises them outwardly? I may well speak about the matter, for more than thirty years have passed since I endeavored to bring out the deep significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in opposition to that theory of colors which is completely overwhelmed by Newtonism and by mechanism in general. Whenever you talk to a modern physicist about Goethe's theory of colors, all you get is, “Goethe's theory of colors doesn't tell you anything.”

This is quite understandable for someone who is familiar with today's circumstances; but there is something here. And that is that Goethe, through his direct coexistence with the mystery of the color spectrum, has created a tremendous work about nature and dared to oppose the intellectual appropriation by the British in Newton, and that the world has not understood it. But the chapter has yet to be written: Goethe - also in the theory of colors - is right against Newton, when one will grasp even more deeply what Fichte calls Germanness within Europe.

I could point to many other minds. As I said, you only need to pick them out. For example, I could point out a soul researcher - Schultz-Schultzenstein is his name, that is certainly a German name: Schultz-Schultzenstein - who tries to place the soul life of man under the concept of “rejuvenation” in the 1850s of the last century. Schultzenstein was able to offer some wonderful insights! He said that the human soul can only be properly understood in its life here between birth and death by observing the experiences it has as feelings and thoughts at the various stages of its life. And as it progresses, one can follow how the soul, like a previous skin, sheds what has already been experienced, and something continuous, something alive is renewed and rejuvenated within the soul.

I can point to another mind, whose literary activity also began in the 1850s and who died unnoticed in 1880. In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - [...] already in the first edition, which appeared in 1900 - I referred to Karl Christian Planck. He was a mind that was aware of how it created from German national character. Who knows him! But that does not matter, because what was in him as a force is at work in the German character, is at work in Central Europe and brings forth what belongs to the best life in Central Europe.

I would like to mention just one thing to show Karl Christian Planck's originality. Today, from the point of view of natural science, anyone who believes that they understand everything – to look at it the way the French look at the earth, the way the English observer looks at the earth, the way the geological observer looks at the earth – they look at the universe that consists of matter. For Planck, such an observer of the earth is like someone who would look at a tree only in terms of the trunk and the wood, and not in terms of the essence of the tree, the leaves, the blossoms and the fruits! For Planck, we do not see the earth in its entirety if we do not also see the whole human being on the earth. Planck looks at the earth as a spirit would, from the outside. And in what the geologist sees, we see only part of the earth, like the trunk, the wood of the tree, but nothing else of the nature of the earth. For Karl Christian Planck, the Earth is not only a living being, but a living, spiritualized living being. And what the physical human being himself is – as a flower, as a fruit – that belongs to the essence of the Earth. – A spiritual – Goethe would say – a spiritual worldview. And Christian Karl Planck is aware that he comes to such a spiritual worldview from the depths of the German people. Planck already expresses this beautifully in the 1860s. He has written several books; the books he has written breathe the breath of such a worldview. In 1864, in his book “Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur” (Foundations of a Science of Nature), he expresses beautifully how he is aware that he has come to his view, which sees the spirit in nature, from the depths of the German essence. I will read the words to you myself:

What power

writes Planck

deep-rooted prejudices from the previous view from his

the author's

writing, the author is fully aware of this; but just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances, which, according to the author's

situation and professional position,

a work of this kind has been opposed, but has fought its way to its realization and its path into the public, so he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times mature. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which was met with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival)

In 1864, before Wagner, these words were truly written!

finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest; it looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.

Karl Christian Planck died at the age of eighty. He left behind a writing that he called “The Testament of a German”; the first edition was published in 1881; the second edition by Diederichs Verlag in 1912. Who has dealt with it?

Well, people had other things to do! For example, they had to deal with the books published by the same publishing house by a man who lives in a rigid spirit - of course, that is not meant as a criticism of him at all; they also dealt with the books by the French philosopher - his name is still Bergson - a French name! He is the one who, since the beginning of the war, has not found enough defamatory words for the German worldview and German intellectual life. I think I actually said last year that this Bergson kept saying to his Frenchmen in Paris: the Germans once had a significant intellectual life, but now they have completely degenerated; all that can be seen is their mechanistic life. I said last year that in earlier times, good Henri Bergson would recite Novalis and Goethe and Schiller to you, in a time when he might not yet have called it “mechanical.” It cannot be emphasized enough. One looked out into the world with admiration. Not only now, during the war and the period of hatred – I have also tried to point out before what Bergson's “philosophy” is like.

A special feature of Bergson's philosophy is the following: He comes up with an idea; but he puts it forward in a light-hearted way. It consists in saying that one does not proceed correctly when one looks at the development of the world in such a way that one regards the subordinate beings as the origin of what man descends from, because one must start from man. That is indeed a very good thought: we must start from man. Man is the most original thing before any other being of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom existed. This is not understood today, but it is nevertheless founded in the writing on the reorganization of the world view of Bergson.

This also emerged in Planck's work: before the other things were there, man was there, albeit in different forms, and then he pushed away certain things that he could not use in his development, and so man came into being by excluding the plant and animal kingdoms. Just as man secretes his bones inwards, so that which is placed at the top, the plant kingdom, the mineral kingdom, secretes itself out of itself. This is a thought, esteemed attendees, that will become established in German intellectual life once the material colorations of Darwinism have been refuted and correctly illuminated.

All right, Bergson presents this; but I was able to show – as I said, just before the war, so that people would not think that it is only under the influence of the war events that things are now being characterized as they are here – I was able to show that precisely this idea, which – in a somewhat simplified form – the French philosopher Henri Bergson – that this idea, which already in the 1870s, 1882 [published], lived in the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – also a faded, forgotten aspiration of German intellectual life – was powerfully and energetically advocated by Preuss!

I am quoting a few words in which I have cited this Prussian, this German view of the matter; I am quoting these words from Pruss's book “Geist und Stoff” - 1899 in second edition already published. It says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had arisen, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human germs. What did arise became animal or plant...

and so on. Bergson, the Frenchman, either does not know this German predecessor – which, in the case of a philosopher, would of course be just as big a mistake as if he knew him and did not name him; but the latter is to be assumed in the case of Bergson! He accuses today's Germans of mechanism! In the meantime, it has been possible to show that entire pages in Bergson's books have been copied from the Germans, whom he now disowns. Entire pages of arguments have been copied from Schelling and Schopenhauer by Henri Bergson! This is perhaps not a mechanical way of constructing intellectual life.

I would like to say: With something like this in the background, Germany's enemies now dare, insofar as they are represented by such personalities, to defame and belittle the German essence. But precisely from what is now at stake, in the world-historical development, this German essence will learn to assert that which lies at the bottom of its being, also in world-historical becoming.

Dear attendees, what is happening now – before world history – needs little saying to characterize it as one might imagine an objective act is characterized: There are enemies surrounding Central Europe. One need only mention a few figures that will speak strongly in the future, when things will be seen differently than Germany's enemies see them now: 777 million people, not counting the Italians, stood around Central Europe facing a group of 150 million. 777 million against 150 million. Do they need to be envious of this Central Europe? Well, the property of these 777 million people covers 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers of property owned by the 150 million in Central Europe. And these 777 million – multiplied by Italy – against these 150 million, they are in a position where they not only want to fight with weapons, but also want to have the better part of the rest of the world, want to starve the 150 million people. And leading people - people called “great personalities” from Germany's side - they indulge in the most vicious accusations and slanders of the spiritual life that has emerged in the 6 million square kilometers in the middle of Europe and show how little they understand of what is alive there.

Besides Bergson, there is, for example, the French philosopher Boutroux – shortly before the war, he was still traveling around in Germany, even giving lectures in German about the close scientific relationship between Germans and Frenchmen! Now he is saying things like this to his fellow Parisians: The Germans imagined that they had come to the end of all searching. With this, they also imagined that they were at the center of the divine order of the world and that they could rule over all men. [...]

We do not need to fall into this tone; but it is necessary to point out such facts and to get to know the facts. After all, Boutroux also managed – well, the Frenchman is witty – to make a joke not too long ago: the Frenchman, the Englishman and the German are talking about the pursuit of a worldview, of knowledge of external things; Boutroux said to his partner: the Frenchman, if he wants to get to know a camel, goes to the menagerie, looks at a camel and then describes it. The Englishman goes to the area where camels live, looks at the camel and then describes it. The German neither goes to the menagerie to see a camel nor to the area where camels live in distant lands, but goes into his room and studies the camel in its inwardness in its being and creates the camel in himself out of his being. The French are witty! Just this joke about Boutroux comes from Heinrich Heine!

And so much more could be said. It must be said: the German does not really need to fall back into the ways of those around him! But the German has all the more need to engage with that which is currently the best part of his nature in the pursuit of knowledge. The German nature will also overcome those prejudices which arise from the fact that, under the influence of French and English materialism, a person who searches for spiritual science is still considered today to be a dreamer, a person who does not live in reality: Oh, when you see someone like Planck or [someone like] Preuss – well, these people can spin theories, but to engage with reality, to see what lives in reality, that's what the “practitioners” are for; someone like Planck, you can't use him for life!

I could give many examples; I will just mention one in connection with Planck, since I was allowed to discuss him: about 35 years ago (Planck died in 1881) he wrote words that I will even read out. He was not a diplomat; he was not a politician; he was not one of those preachers who believe that they have a complete understanding of the workings of the world, that they have “lived it all,” who know how to speak authoritatively about everything from a broad perspective and disdain those who live only in the spiritual world. He was none of these. He was a simple man of vision! But a man who was able to see into the course of events. And what he developed before 1881 is written in his Testament of a German. He died in 1881. In it he wrote about what presented itself to him in the development of Europe. And he looked at it with discerning eyes. He wrote that war must come. And about this war he wrote the following words:

“If a people, universalistic and central by its very nature, is now in the sharpest contrast to its earlier history, unites to form a pure nation-state and, for all others, increases to the highest military armament, what else can be the consequence in a time of the highest national aspirations than ultimately the most comprehensive clash?”

So says the “impractical man of world view”! How many people who were practically inside the circumstances did not believe, when the war broke out, that the Italian would also stand against Central Europe! But the impractical man of conviction knew how to say this in 1881. Not only will the Russian East rise up against Central Europe, but as in the past we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South.

“It is not only the antagonism of political interests that must provoke him,”

"but, as it is now becoming increasingly clear, above all the conflict of economic interests in their still nationally bound, still inorganically opposed form. And the more the contradictions and evils that this state of affairs brings about in relation to the universalistic increase of means of communication, which have already been discussed earlier, must come to the fore, the sharper the tension that arises on all sides as a result.

And to this is added another contrast, in which the inherent one-sidedness of our Western culture has created an enemy, and which, by the nature of things, must become hostile above all to the German spirit. From the very beginning, as we saw, Western Christianity and its striving for a full, humanly present mediation of the divine content has gone hand in hand with the rigid otherworldliness and bondage of the Oriental and Byzantine essence, for which ecclesiastical and political power and authority directly coincided. In this rigid unity, the Christian East remained just as unfreely confined as, conversely, in the West, the free national development overgrew religious unity and pushed it into the background. But the one-sided, secular, and outwardly material character of Western culture, which is rooted in this, has also made it possible for the unfree East to appropriate these external cultural means without having to absorb the deeper, free, spiritual side of that development. On the contrary, it only helped him to confront the West, which had fallen into a one-sided national separate existence, all the more consciously in the self-confidence of his distinctive religious and political unity, and thus, in view of the still unfinished state of other Slavic tribes and the disintegrating Turkish Empire, to claim an even more far-reaching significance for himself. And precisely because of this, by the very nature of things, he becomes an opponent of the nation, which also in this respect has its central and unifying human and universal calling, of the Germans, and especially of that empire, which for a long time has based its existence precisely on the comprehensive interweaving of German and foreign elements.

No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all cleverness is the nature of the circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the east, we will also have to defend ourselves in the west and south at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

But it is precisely the realization that in this last and most difficult struggle the completely inadequate nature of all previous purely national orders comes to light, that above all the universal position of the German nation, linked as it is to a series of foreign elements, is completely incompatible with it and could only lead to unending struggles. This realization will give this bloodiest of struggles its forever decisive significance and will open the minds of the nations, which are now still trapped in dull externalities, to their ultimate and lasting calling. The realization will dawn, amidst blood and tears, that it is never the mere nation-state and its commercial society that can bring peace and reconciliation, but only that of the universal law of vocation, that only in it lies the renewing rebirth for all the inner wounds, for the relationship of states to one another, for the degenerate conditions of the Orient, and for the corruption and externalization of one's own education. If the first struggle, which was intended to prevent our national awakening, has brought it to completion precisely for that reason, then conversely the second, which is caused by the very inadequacy of all this national order, will also lead beyond it forever to the humanly universal goal.

It is from the German spirit that a renewal of humanity must come, so that there may be a victory over that which lives in a sense indicated by these facts and which has come from an un-German spirit, especially in more recent times, and which can be characterized by saying: the power of incompetence that crushes all justified striving must be recognized. The German spirit is strong and vigorous and will recognize this in this area and will heal the world in this area when it becomes aware of what still lives in German intellectual life as a forgotten pursuit in many cases.

We have been able to glance over to the West on many an occasion. Finally, let us glance over to the East with a few words. This whole East, yes, how does it present itself? Central Europe?

The German essence: can it be characterized in relation to the West in such a way that one can say that one truly does not need to belittle the West in any way. One can know that the scientific spirit emanated from Italy before the dawn of the newer intellectual life. This scientific spirit has emerged from the south. One can know that the French spirit also gave rise to the rational conception of the world; that the sense of utility emerged from the English spirit, the view of the world in such a way that everything is placed in the utility. But just how far removed this British spirit is from the German spirit, well, you can tell by the fact that if someone wanted to try to characterize Fichte's theory of knowledge, where he repeatedly attempts to describe the self feeling and experiencing itself in the world spirit, if you are able to fully penetrate this field of knowledge, it would look strange linguistically alone...

If I say: “I represent the I” – not even that could be adhered to, [instead of the German word “ich” the English “i”] – not even that could be adhered to, that one [in English] goes from the lower-case “i”, as one writes in German, to the capital “I”, when you have experienced the “I” – Fichte calls it “reproduction”, the progression of culture in the “I” – within yourself, how should you call it when you want to move from the small “I” to the large “I”, since grammatically the personal “I” is written “I” everywhere.

You could say: the German essence relates to the Western essence in the same way that the Italians were the contemplatives, the French shaped reason, the utilitarian principle shaped the English; but the principle of internalization is part of the German essence. The Italian looks at the world. By looking at the world, he says: the world is quite right; but it just needs to be reshaped a little, it needs to be made to correspond to our ability, not a compulsory language, but a word that has been experienced. It is precisely when you look deep, deep inside, especially into the best sides of intellectual life, that this word is true.

The Frenchman says: This world is also worth / gap in the transcript ]. The Englishman says: [gap in the transcript] The German says: I also like the world. And within himself, he wants to create a small image of the world. The Russian, yes, one only needs to think of such characteristic figures as Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov”. But this type of Karamasov character is poured out over the whole of the East in the nineteenth century. [...] Ivan Karamasov himself says: I would still accept God; but I cannot accept the world from God. The world, in the Russian sense, is actually something that should be replaced by another, namely by the one that is made for the Russian people.

It is a seemingly radical word, but anyone who follows the development of Russian thought in the nineteenth century will find it to be true. For it is indeed strange: from the first decade of the nineteenth century in Russia it is emphasized that in the Russian countryside there lives - Dostoyevsky said it, for example, despite the greatness of Dostoyevsky, one must also bear in mind the greatness of Dostoyevsky -: the Russian person is the one in all people who, through his universal humanity, must place his spiritual life in the place of others. And man faces the world in such a way that one can say: in the nineteenth century, he is increasingly coming to say to himself: European intellectual life is decrepit and has had its day. That must be eradicated. Russian intellectual life would be young; it must dominate. The Russian language means joy, means love. The West – and that includes Central Europe, but also France, Italy, Spain and England – means struggle, means war, means selfishness. This is the underlying tone of all [Russian] intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

Outwardly it does not appear so strongly; but it is so. Only strange: Who is then actually the first to have pronounced the nature of the Slav, from which they then want something quite different than lies in the Russian national spirit? They claim that a noble man spoke of it first, and they have built on that. Who was it that first characterized the matter so beautifully, coined a word, an idea, on which they then based the whole of the nineteenth century? Herder! Herder was basically the first Slavophile. But the word of a Slavophile has degenerated into megalomania. And it came to pass that it resounded again and again: Europe is decrepit, and Russian intellectual life must take the place of European intellectual life.

Dear attendees, as I said, just one more fact: in 1885 a book was published that was written by the Russian Yushakov. Yushakov stands on a somewhat different cultural ground than the one I have just mentioned – the literary counter-image, presented for that which has emerged up to the present day and up to our current terrible events – Yushakov, 1885, a remarkable book! He does not look to the West, but to the East, to Asia, to the Asian peoples. Now, as Jusakhov says in his, as I said, remarkable book: These poor Asians, they have shown themselves how they have gradually struggled from their cultural life up to the corresponding present culture, they have shown it as the struggle between two spiritual beings. But this struggle represents a reality in Asia. According to Yushakov, the two spiritual powers under whose influence the Asians were, were represented as the good Ormuzd and the evil Ahriman.

Ahriman was always the one who was the negation of Ormuzd. Jushakow says to the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Indians also belonged: Ahriman, the evil spirit, took away these fruits of both material and spiritual culture from them.

But what have the European peoples of the West done? - Jushakow asks. They have squeezed out of those Asian peoples what those peoples had acquired under the influence of the good Ormuzd! Russian culture must intervene here. Russian culture is the only one capable – Jusakhov says, I am not saying this – of lovingly embracing the Asian peoples. Two powers stand in the world that will bring happiness in the future – and above all happiness to the Asian peoples; these two powers are – I am not saying this, Jusakhov is saying it! , these two powers are: the Russian peasant and the Cossack, the two great representatives of [Russian] humanity - says Yushakov in 1885. And he does not go to Asia to bring love to the Asians, to bring love to the Asians in turn, sooner or later the evil that the Western peoples have brought over Asia, which he could not really talk about in those days in the case of Germany, will be brought to light.

Strangely enough, the book is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And there Yushakov says in relation to this: The English show by their treatment of the Asian peoples as if they believed that these Asian peoples were only dependent on this unloving English love. And then Jushakow says how he imagines the relationship between his people and the English. He says to England - these are his words, his own words:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that

my Russian fatherland [according to Yushakov]

is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as splendid as it is sad.

Thus in 1885 the Russian Yushakov on England.

He is probably not primarily concerned with the alliance between Russia and England, but with restoring the blessings of Ormuzd to the Asians. Russia will now cross over to Asia, says Yushakov, because in Russia the alliance between the all-fertility developing farmer and the all-chivalry bearing Cossack is rooted in a deep culture, Yushakov believes, and they will prefer to spread Russian spirituality across Asia first.

Thus writes one of those minds that thought this way in Russia and already expressed it in the 1820s – in 1829: Western Europe and Central Europe are decrepit, have outlived their usefulness. But we in Russia, we have the right to bring this Europe under our rule. And when we have it – so says Kireyevsky – when we have it, then we will share what we have with the others, insofar as it is right.

This is not only the “right” thing to do in the political sphere, since the falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but also in the entire intellectual and cultural life. And what is going on through this Russophile: the excellent Russian philosopher Solowjow has said it himself. And you can read this in my book 'Thoughts During the Time of War' – it is not available at the moment, but it will be published again in a while. Solowjow himself said it: what is alive in Russian intellectual life comes from what one could call: Russia still has a long way to go before she attains the maturity of her own nature; for Russia is still today, in fact, in the midst of it, thoroughly in the midst of unclear mysticism. That is all. One has to be 'mystical' if one is to be able to say: This German spiritual life seeks the tool of mystical endeavor. On the contrary: fully conscious thoughts, light-imbued, thought-filled views, clear views; the German seeks an image of the world in order to shape his own being as similarly as possible to this image of the world.

The other nations should not be disparaged. But what can they recognize that the German strives for, that he strives for consciously, so that he makes his own image of man similar to the image of the world? The Italian cannot strive for it so consciously if he only strives from his nationality. He would have to be taught this, as it were, by suggestion, so that what is a striving for knowledge in him would have more of an effect than a morality.

The Frenchman wants it more as an intellectual art, to give the mind pleasure, to give the mind a sense of well-being. This is basically something that lies in the fundamental character as a French imprint of the mechanistic view of nature.

The Englishman wants – he would certainly also accept Fichte's science if one could transform its truths into a principle or a machine, if one could place it in the pragmatic order of life, could make pragmatism out of it, as it was mentioned today.

The Russian still needs unclear, hazy mysticism everywhere today. I have already mentioned Ivan Karamazov from Dostoyevsky's work “The Brothers Karamazov”, who is a true representative of the Russian who has absorbed Western European culture. God would be there, yes, God, but in mystical obscurity. And one can say: when the Russian becomes atheistic, he wants a mystical atheist. The Russian can become atheistic, but he almost wants the atheist to be revealed to him by God! You could also teach him Fichte's philosophy, you could also teach him Hegelianism; but then it would have to be found mysteriously on an altar somewhere or at least bear the imprint that it came into the world in a mysterious way!

In short, the various nations surrounding the German nation still stand today in such a way to this German spiritual life that there is truly every reason for the German to become aware of the germs and roots and diversity in his spiritual being! And the fruits and blossoms will come when the German becomes truly aware of this, aware of it precisely through the difficult time of trial in which he is currently mired.

Yes, what has been attempted to be presented in brief, dear attendees, developed on the 6 million square kilometers in the center, compared to the 68 million square kilometers in the surrounding area! And as if by bonds, which are also bonds of the spirit, this Central Europe is held together. The alliance between Germany and Austria is truly such a bond, one that is also based on the commonality of the spiritual life flowing through the two countries, through the two national territories.

I may say this because I have lived in Austria for more than half of my life, almost thirty years, and have participated in all the times of these thirty years in the way in which the German essence must live there in Austria, must live in multiform Austria. I have come to know what it means to take the word of one of the most German of Austrians – Robert Hamerling, the greatest son of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century – and to feel it in the innermost being of someone who grasps the sense of belonging in Central Europe. Robert Hamerling said: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland”.

Robert Hamerling, as early as 1862, in his wonderful poem 'Germanenzug', spoke of this inwardness of the German world-view. Does it not appear to us in a beautiful form, this inwardness of the German world-view, when we see, for example, how Jakob Böhme, in very early times, speaks of how the German strives for knowledge, but in such a way that he wants to use it to enter into the spirit of the world? He expresses it so beautifully:

“When you look at the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

“And the stars and the earth, you see your God. And in you live and are you also. And the same God rules you also.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge is in this God. And when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

Fine words! If we take this, which I have tried to illustrate today: it turns out that in this internalization of the German essence – in this desire to grasp what, as divine spirituality, permeates and animates the world within one's own inner being – lies the profound world-historical calling of the German. And it is so intrinsic to the German that it really stands out like a second wave in the great upheaval of the human race. If we look across to the Orient – looking differently than the Russian Yushakov – then we find in the Asian peoples how they have dreamed of, how they have also once tried to penetrate into the spiritual that lives and breathes through the world. They tried to bring the I so close that it was as if asleep, [that] the actual human inner being was asleep, and so the human being could merge into what the life of the world spirit in the principle of the All interweaves and lives through the world. Now that the greatest impulse for the evolution of the Earth has been introduced – the Christ Impulse – the Asiatic type is no longer the one that can dominate the human race.

The German nature has found the right way to penetrate into the spiritual world in the sense of the Christ impulse, so that the ego is not eradicated as it was in Asia; [but that which is sought in the future of the world as a divine-spiritual, that is achieved through the elevation, through the strengthening - not through the weakening - of the ego. But the I is precisely exalted, strengthened, in order to grow together with the whole world. Thus ancient human striving continues in the newest form, as in historical vocation the essence of the German spirit.

This is beautifully shown by Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, in his “Germanenzug”, in which he describes in beautiful words how the ancient Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, once migrated from Asia to Europe, so that we take part in it, that we take part in the setting sun, in the mild twilight that spreads; and when everything sinks into a deep sleep, only one remains awake: the blond Teut. While everyone else sleeps, he is occupied with the thoughts of the future German being, the German task. The genius, the spirit of the German people, appears before the blond Teut and speaks to him of the future of the German people. This is how Robert Hamerling feels it and expresses it through the genius of the past to the blond Teut just as the Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, are crossing over from east to west. Thus speaks the genius:

"To whom will break the word from soul depths
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly in string sounds
His innermost? Who zich'n the sense so magnificent
Into the heavenly blue, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
Of the inquisitive thought to the stars
So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is so high, so deep, his urge, his hunch?
Who grasps the near and far so faithfully?
Where is every earthly and heavenly zone
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And how related, but on a higher level, appears the spiritual search for the divine reason of the world. Here, too, the genius of the German people speaks to the blond Teut as if through Robert Hamerling's mouth, from that which I just hinted at through the words of Jakob Böhme, where devotion becomes knowledge, where devotion becomes the world view, devotion to the divine spiritual forces of the world. This is how Hamerling has the blond Teut say to the genius of the German people:

"But however proudly you may strive,
Soaring high above other swarms,
You will always retain the ancient, sacred fire:
The dream-filled drunkenness of God
of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire, will glow in your chest and soul, remain with you and be your pilot at the helm! You only strive because you love: your most daring thought will be a devotion that seeks to merge with God."

Yes, the German needs to become aware of his German essence. Then he will find the right relationship to the events of the present! For he may trust in that which exists as the source, the root and germ of spiritual striving within the German nation. And whatever has such germs may be felt with hope and confidence that its blossoms and fruits will develop, despite everything that rises in hostility in the world against this spiritual foundation in German development.

I think that a truly objective, not a narrow-minded, consideration of the German nature says this. And the German can rely on such an objective consideration. Then he can also look objectively at the way in which one not only simplifies but also defames what extends over 6 million square kilometers compared to 68 square kilometers.

Anyone who looks at this, at the roots and the hoped-for seeds, blossoms and fruits of the future, may summarize what today's contemplation was, summarize it sentimentally in a few words. Words that are intimately connected with the whole feeling of the German essence, all German essence. They, too, are by Robert Hamerling, and they, too, prove how Central Europe has been welded together from this side and from the other side of the Ore Mountains, but has also been welded together by this common spiritual weaving and essence in this Central Europe.

Therefore, let us conclude today's reflection with a word from Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, a word that summarizes in a sensitive way what I have tried to bring before your soul in a longer exposition - an unfortunately all too long exposition. Robert Hamerling says out of the sentiment from which he said “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland”:

“And if ever the day
Should prove hostile to the German name,
From ocean to ocean shall run
The course of the German spirit!”

The subject of today's lecture is a kind of principle or rule for the explanation of fairy tales and legends. In a wider sense this principle can be extended to the world of myths, and we will indicate in a few words how this can be done. Naturally it is impossible in one hour to specify exactly how one should satisfy a child today with the fairy story itself and then later, when the child is older, with the explanation of it. I would now rather try to clarify what should exist in the soul of the one who wishes to explain such stories, and what that person ought to know.

The first thing we must determine when relating fairy tales, legends or myths is that we should certainly know more than we are able to say, indeed, a great deal more; and secondly, we should be willing to draw the sources of our explanation from anthroposophical wisdom; that is, we must not introduce into the fairy tales just anything that may occur to us but must be willing to recognize anthroposophical wisdom as such, and then try to permeate the fairy tales with it. Not everyone will succeed at once. But even if at first we cannot unriddle it all, we should gradually be able to find the right meaning. What is built on a good foundation will work out well, but where it is not, it follows that all manner of things can be construed into it. We speak both for those who are narrating and also for those to be instructed. Examples of the clearest possible kind will be given, to let us picture what it is all about. The first fairy tale we have to discuss can be told in the following manner:

Once upon a time it happened—where did it happen? where indeed did it not happen?—there was a tailor's apprentice. He had only one penny left in his pocket, and with this penny in his pocket he felt driven to wander forth. He soon became hungry, but with his penny he could only afford to buy some milk soup. When the soup was placed before him, a swarm of flies flew into it and when he had finished his meal the plate was covered with buzzing flies. He struck the plate once or twice with his hand, counting how many he had killed, and found it amounted to a hundred. So he got a slate from the innkeeper and wrote on it: “He killed a hundred at one blow!” And having hung the slate on his back he went his way. As he passed a king's palace, the king was looking out and seeing someone passing who had something written on his back, he sent his servant down to see what the writing was. The servant saw: “He killed a hundred at one blow!”—and told the king. “Ho!” said the king to himself, “That is someone I can make use of!” and he sent down and had him brought in. “I can make use of you,” said the king to the tailor. “Will you enter my service?” “Yes,” said the other, “I will willingly enter your service if you will give me a proper reward, but what that is I shall tell you later.” “Very well,” said the king, “I shall reward you handsomely if you keep to what you have promised. You shall eat and drink well, as long as you like. After that, you must do me a service, equal to your strength. Every year a number of bears come to my country and do fearful damage. They are so strong that no one can kill them. You will of course be able to kill them, if you live up to the statement on your slate.” Then the apprentice said: “Certainly I will do this, but till the bears come I must ask for as much to eat and drink as I want.” For the apprentice said to himself: “If I cannot slay the bears, and they kill me, I shall at least have eaten and drunk well.” And so it went for a while. When the time came and the bears were due to appear, he arranged the kitchen, set up a little table and left the door wide open; on the table he placed all manner of things that bears like to eat and drink—honey and suchlike; then he hid himself. The bears came along, ate and drank till they were gorged and then had to lie down. He cut off the head of each bear and in this way killed them all. When the king saw this, he asked: “Now how did you do it?” And the apprentice said: “I simply killed the bears and then cut off their heads.” The king took this on trust and said: “If you have done that, you can render me an even greater service. Every year great strong giants come to our country. No one can kill them or drive them away; perhaps you can.” The tailor replied: “Yes, I will do it, if afterwards you will give me your daughter as my wife.” Now it was very important to the king to have the giants driven away, and so he promised, and again for a time the tailor lived a good life.

When the time came for the giants to appear, he took all manner of things that giants like to eat and drink, and went to meet them. On the way he added to the rest a piece of cheese and a lark, and then with all his many things and the piece of cheese and the lark he met the giants. The giants said: “We have come again to wrestle with the strongest; no one has overcome us!” Then said the tailor's apprentice: “I will wrestle with you!” “It will go badly with you!” said one of the giants. The tailor said: “Show me your strength and what you can do!” The giant took a stone and pulverized it between his fingers. He then took a bow and arrow and shot the arrow so high into the air that it did not come down for a long time. “If you want to see my strength, if you want to wrestle with me, you must be able to do something better than that,” said the giant. The tailor took a small stone, and covered it secretly with a little cheese, so that when he pressed it between his fingers the cheese spurted out milk. Then he said to the giants: “I can press liquid out of a stone and that you cannot do!” It made a great impression on the giants that he could do something different from them. Then he also took a bow and arrow, but when he shot, unobserved by them he let loose the lark, which flew up and did not return. So he said to the giants; “Your arrow came down again, but I shot so high that mine never returned to earth!” The giants were astonished to find anyone stronger than themselves and said to him: “Will you be our comrade?” He agreed. Certainly he was small, but for all that he would be a good addition, so they took him into their company and he stayed a while with them. But it was galling to them that there should be anyone stronger than themselves, and once when he lay awake in bed he overheard them arranging to kill him. Therefore he made preparations. He got a big meal ready with the things that he had brought with him. The giants ate and drank all they could until they were gorged. Still they were determined to kill him. So he took a pig's bladder and filled it with blood, fastened it on his head and went to bed. The giant who had been chosen to kill him came and stabbed at his head, and when the blood ran out they were delighted, for now, they thought, they were rid of him, and they lay down and slept. But he got out of bed and killed one giant after another as they slept. Then he went to the king and related how he had slain one giant after the other.

The king kept his word and gave him his daughter for a wife, and the tailor was married to the king's daughter. The king marveled greatly at his son-in-law's strength, but neither the king nor his daughter knew who this man really was, whether a tailor or a king's son; they did not know it then, and if they have not found it out since, they do not know it even today.

This is one of the fairy tales that we want to take as an example. But before we go into it, let us put another beside it, for if you collect fairy tales, from whatever period or people, if they are genuine fairy tales you will find that certain basic ideas run through them all. I must call your attention to the fact that the giants were overcome by cunning. Now make a plunge back through the centuries and recall Odysseus and the giant Polyphemus in the Odyssey. Let us put the following fairy tale side by side with the first one:

Once upon a time it happened—where then was it? where indeed was it not?—there was a king who was so beloved of his people that he was always hearing them wish that he would take a wife as good and noble as himself. It was difficult for him to find anyone suitable for him and for his people. Now he had an old friend, a poor forester, who lived simply and contentedly in the forest and who was very wise. He might very easily have been rich, for the king would willingly have given him everything, but the forester wished to remain poor and retain his wisdom. So the king now went to his friend the forester and asked his advice. The latter gave him a branch of rosemary, saying: “Take care of this; the maiden before whom it bends is the maiden you ought to marry.” So the very next day the king had a number of damsels brought before him. He had pearls spread out before them, and every girl's name was written on the table in pearls; then he made it known that the maiden before whom the branch bent should be his bride; the others would have only the pearls. So he went around with the branch of rosemary, but it did not move; it bent before no one. The girls were given their pearls and went away. The second day the same thing was arranged, and again the same thing happened, and likewise on the third day. The next night, while the king slept, he heard something tapping on the window. It proved to be a little golden bird; it said to him: “You do not know it, but twice you have done me a great service; I will also do you a service. As soon as day breaks, get up, take your branch of rosemary and follow me. I will lead you to a place where you will find a horse; it has a silver arrow piercing its body; you must pull it out, and the horse will lead you to where you will find your bride.”

The next morning the king went out and followed the little golden bird until they came to a horse that was very weak and ill and that said: “A witch has shot an arrow into my body!” The king pulled out the arrow and at that moment the weak animal was changed into a wonderfully swift horse. The king mounted it, the golden bird flew on in front, and the rosemary branch waved ahead of the king on his magic horse. At last they reached a castle made of glass. Long before they reached it, they heard a buzzing and a buzzing and a buzzing, and when the king entered with the branch of rosemary and the little golden bird, he saw another king standing there, fashioned entirely of glass, and in the stomach of the glass king was an enormous bluebottle fly; it was this bluebottle fly that made the buzzing, and it was trying to work its way out. The king asked the glass king what it all meant. “Well,” said the latter, “just look towards the sofa: there sits my queen in a pink silk gown, and the secret of it all you will soon discover. The web that has been spun around the queen has just been torn away by a thornbird and will soon be quite torn off her. Then there will come a wicked spider to spin a new web around the queen, and while I am bewitched here in a glass body, my wife will be enmeshed by the spider's web. We have already been imprisoned like this for several hundred years and must remain here until we are released.” Presently the wicked spider appeared and spun her web around the queen, but while the spider was at work the magic horse stepped up and wanted to kill the spider. He was just about to put his hoof on her, when the buzzing bluebottle fly, which had worked its way out, came to the help of the spider, but the magic horse killed them both. Then instantly the glass king was turned into a quite human king. The thornbird was changed into a charming waiting-maid, the queen was freed from the cobweb, and the glass king related how it had all come about:

As soon as he became king he had had to suffer from the persecutions of a wicked witch who lived in a forest on the edge of his domain. The witch wanted him to marry her daughter, but as he had already chosen a wife from a neighboring fairy castle, the witch swore to be revenged on him; she changed him into a glass king and her daughter into a bluebottle fly, who gnawed at his stomach. The queen was tormented by the witch, who changed herself into a wicked spider and spun a cobweb around the queen; the maid was changed into a thornbird, and the king's horse was shot by the witch, whose arrow remained in its body. Now everything had been set right through the horse being freed and able to free the others.

Then the king asked the former glass king if he knew where he could find a suitable wife. The latter showed him the way to the neighboring fairy castle. The little golden bird flew on in front and when they came to the castle they found a lily. The branch of rosemary led them straight to it and bent before the lily, and at the same moment the lily was changed into a wonderfully beautiful maiden who had also been bewitched, for the queen of the neighboring castle was her sister. Now she was released, because of what had just taken place. The king took her back to his home, the wedding was celebrated, and they lived in great happiness, they themselves and all their people. They lived for a long, long time. No one knows how long, but if they have not died, they must still be alive today.

The first thing we must do in order to understand the meaning of genuine fairy tales and myths is to stop regarding them as fantasy derived from folk imagination; they are never that. The starting point of all true tales lies in time immemorial, in the time when those who had not yet attained intellectual powers possessed a more or less remarkable clairvoyance, the remains of the primeval clairvoyance. People who had preserved this lived in a condition between sleeping and waking where they actually experienced the spiritual world in many different forms. This was not like one of our dreams today, which have for most people (but not for everyone) a somewhat chaotic nature. In those ancient times, people with the old clairvoyance had such regular experiences that everyone's were the same or very similar.

What then really happened to human beings in this intermediate state between waking and sleeping? When people are in their physical bodies, they perceive the world around them as far as they can with their physical organs of perception but behind that world is the spiritual world. In this intermediate state it was as though a veil were lifted, the veil of the physical world, and the spiritual world became visible. Everything in the spiritual world was seen in some particular relationship to what lived inwardly in the human being. It is much the same in the physical world; we cannot see colors with the ear nor hear tones with the eye. The outer accords with the inner. In such an intermediate state, the external senses were silent, while the inner soul became active. Just as the eye and the ear connect themselves with the surrounding world, the different parts of the human astral body make their own connection, in this intermediate state of consciousness, with their surrounding world. When the outer senses are silenced the soul comes to life.

We have, to begin with, three members of the soul: sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. As the eye and the ear each have a different relationship to the surrounding world, so has each of these three members of the human soul its quite distinct relationship to its surrounding world. We become aware, in this intermediate state, of one or another part of our soul, which is directed to its surroundings. If the sentient soul especially is directed to its spiritual surroundings, we will see all those beings that are intimately connected with the ordinary forces of nature. People do not themselves see the active forces of nature, but they do see what lives in that activity: wind, weather and other natural phenomena. The beings that express themselves within it are perceived through the sentient soul. When that soul is especially active, it is exactly as if we were still living at the time when neither the intellectual soul nor the consciousness soul had yet been developed; we are transported back and see our surroundings as we did in ancient times, just as when we did not know how to use our intellectual and consciousness souls.

In those ancient times we were in very close touch with all the forces of nature and still bound up with them. We consisted, as everyone on earth did at that time, of physical body, etheric body, astral body and sentient soul alone. We ourselves were able then to do what now those beings around us that are active within the lower nature forces can do; they appear to us as the expression of what we once were, when in the howling windstorm men could tear up trees, when they could control the weather, the mist and the rain. The beings around us appear to us just as we ourselves once were when we still had the strength of giants, before we had withdrawn so completely from the forces of nature. The figures that appear around us are the facsimiles of our own former appearance, people with gigantic strength, “giants.” In such an intermediate state of consciousness, we see giants as real figures, representing a quite definite kind of being, men possessed of gigantic strength. The giants are also stupid, because they belong to a time when people could not yet use an intellectual soul—they are strong and stupid.

Now what can the intellectual soul see in such an intermediate state? It can see that things were fashioned in accordance with a certain wisdom. Through strength, through the giant in man, everything was formed and brought about; through what is in our intellectual soul when we are alive to it, we see beings around us who bring wisdom into everything, who regulate everything wisely. While the giants are generally seen in male form, we see the images of the intellectual soul as constructive female beings who bring wisdom into the activity of the world. These are the “wise women” of the tales, working behind everything that is formed and themselves forming everything. In these figures we see ourselves over and over again as we once were when we had acquired an intellectual soul but not yet a consciousness soul. Because we see ourselves intimately connected with such wise rulers at the back of things, we often feel when we enter an intermediate state of consciousness: “The wise female beings I see there are really related to me.” Therefore the idea of “sisters” often arises when these female beings appear.

Now there is something else our soul experiences when in this state of consciousness and this can be understood only very inwardly. In such a condition of soul we have withdrawn from ordinary physical perception, so that we say to ourselves, “Yes, what I see now in my soul is certainly contained in what I see during the day, in what is clear then to my intellectual soul—but when I see it by day, it is exactly reversed.” When in the intermediate state of consciousness we remember the impressions of the day, they appear to be the reverse of what we remember during the day of the perceptions we had during the intermediate state, of the various fleeting forms of our astral organization. When we recall the impressions of the day, it seems as though the subtle etheric forms behind ordinary reality were changed into stiff figures. Things during the day appear to us as though they were bewitched, with their real nature held prisoner within them. Wherever a plant or being appears bewitched, it has happened like this: we see the substance of a wise being behind the physical appearance and we remember, “Yes, by day that is only a plant; it is separated from my intellectual soul so that I cannot really reach it during the day.” When we feel this estrangement between the objects by day and what is behind them, for example the perception of the lily in the daytime and the form behind it related to our own intellectual soul, we will perceive that our intellectual soul has a strong kind of longing to unite with what is behind the object or the lily; it would be a “marriage,” a union of the night-form with the day-form.

The consciousness soul originated in human beings at a time when we had already distanced ourselves from the forces of nature and no longer could look into the mysteries of existence. What the consciousness soul is able to do is far removed from those strong forces we have described. Shrewdness is its essential quality, not strength nor any rough force. By means of the consciousness soul we can see all those spiritual beings that have remained behind at the stage where the human being had only the sheath of the ego. We see them living at that point, not able to do much with their minute strength, and as we see their forms in images according to their inner nature, they appear to us as dwarfs. In intermediate periods when we free ourselves from sense perception, we find the whole realm that lies behind sense perception peopled with such forms. In our more or less higher moments, when we feel our connection to the spiritual world, the outer events in life appear to be what they genuinely are: an imprint or reproduction of this whole relationship to the spiritual world.

If a person is especially shrewd in life and not only dry and prosaic but able to conceive the relationship of life to spiritual reality, particularly in such states in which human beings can still know something of spiritual reality, the following may happen. If he is a somewhat thoughtful person, he will observe that certain people with shrewdness are able in all sorts of clever ways to overcome the crude forces that otherwise dominate people's lives. He will then tell himself: “What actually happens in life is that rough strength is overcome by cleverness; for this we can thank the powers behind us, to whom we are related, for they have allowed a force to become conscious in us that overcomes rough strength with cleverness, the rough strength that we ourselves possessed when we were at the stage of the giants.”

The incidents of our inner life appear to us as mirror-images of events in the outer world that have passed away but can still be perceived in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world are reflected the struggles of those beings who, though weaker in bodily strength, are in consequence stronger in spiritual strength. Whenever the overcoming of the rough forces or the giants appears in fairy tales it is founded on the perception taking place in such an intermediate state of consciousness. Man wishes to gain a clear insight about himself; he has lost sight of the spiritual world, but he says to himself: “I can gain a clear insight when I am in such an intermediate state. Then I shall be so wise that intelligence and shrewdness will gain the victory over the rough forces!”

Powers appear and act and enlighten man as to what happens in the spiritual world. He then recounts what has happened in the spiritual world, and must recount it in such a way that he says: “What I have seen and related happened once upon a time, and is still happening behind the world of sense in the spiritual world, where there are different conditions of life.” It may be that every time he has seen it under such conditions, the event is already past, together with the conditions which made such an action possible. Yet it may still be there. It depends on whether someone entering an intermediate state observes that event. It is neither here nor there but everywhere where there is anyone who can observe it. Therefore, every genuine fairy tale begins:

“Once upon a time it happened—where then was it? Where indeed was it not?” That is the correct beginning of a fairy tale, and every fairy tale must end with, “I once saw this, and if what happened in the spiritual world did not perish, if it is not dead, it must still be alive today.” That is just the way every fairy tale should be related. If you always begin and end this way, you will create the right sort of sensitivity to what you are telling.

Suppose—like the king in the second tale—someone has to find a wife. He looks for a being in the human world who is as nearly as possible a picture of what he can find in the spiritual world as his archetype, and this can be found through the wise guidance of the powers that the intellectual soul can recognize. But in the outer world it cannot be found; therefore we have to subordinate the outer to the more inward element in ourselves. On the physical plane we are subject to error. Therefore we must allow deeply inward powers to rule, when we make such a search as the king is doing. Even today we are able to do this by putting ourselves in that intermediate state of consciousness, in order to make a connection with the powers ruling there. The persons who possess such powers, however, live in retirement where they are not distracted by the immense happenings of the world. And so the king has to go to his friend, the hermit, living alone and in poverty, who knows the secrets of the forces guiding human beings to the spiritual world. He is able to give the king the branch of rosemary.

The king cannot find, through any outward contrivance, what can be determined only by his archetypes in the spiritual world. Therefore he dreams first of all that a little golden bird comes to him and then he remains in a sort of waking-dream state. In this condition, through the transparent touch one has as a sense in the spiritual world, he experiences everything I have shown. Gradually he comes to find out, through the powers opposing human purity and nobility, something that has been preserved even into our own time: the possibility of being blessed with pure joy. None of the powers bound to the physical world today can bring him to this, only the power that appears to him when the intellectual soul or his general inner soul strength is directed towards the spiritual world. And this power comes to him in the image of the “magic horse.” In the physical world the horse is only the shadow picture of what lies behind it in the spiritual world. The harmful powers of soul embodied in the physical world have shot the arrow into the horse's body. The moment that these forces are plucked out and the horse is freed from them, the powers are aroused that enable the king to understand and assess all these relationships, so that by looking not only on outer appearance, he is able to find what is right for him. With ordinary intelligence, he might wander far into the world and find people here, there, and everywhere, but he would pass by the wife he is looking for; he would not understand at all what conditions are involved or what hindrances there are. The earlier conditions would be preserved.

The conditions he is looking for are there, but they are distorted by the outer physical world, where indeed most things do appear altered. We certainly do not have—in the physical world—the forces in their true reality. However, the transformed glass king finally appears in his true form and is the very personality who can point out where the other should look for a wife. Through the opposing forces of the outer world the glass king has been transformed; these forces assert themselves when the human being is completely entangled in the concerns of the external world. At first the glass king is completely enmeshed in outer circumstances and this has made him different inwardly from what he actually could be. We often have things like wrong-doing in our karma that are like an evil bluebottle fly. The truth lying at the bottom of all this is revealed in such pictures. We must be able to imagine the situation: what lies behind physical phenomena can be found in the forces awakened in the king. As his soul forces awaken and when he directs them well, he finds what the outer physical forces had hidden from him, his “bride.”

When some external happening like searching for a bride is pictured in such tales, it usually takes place not in an ordinary way but in circumstances where someone comes into contact with a sort of soul-shepherd, who will awaken the deeper forces within him, as the hermit did for the king. He is led thereby to the forces that make everything in the physical world appear unreal for a time; he needs this if it is going to be possible for him to discern the truth. And so we see that while outer conditions seem to be the source, other states of consciousness are present, calling forth genuine vision.

Every fairy tale can be explained in this way, but the explanation should come forth out of the spiritual reality that lies in back of the whole world of fairy tales. Everything that occurs in a tale, including all the small details, can gradually be found and interpreted. For example, the mysterious connection between the active forces of perception and the hidden forces of ordinary life can become visible when we begin to look at it more inwardly. This is beautifully symbolized in the touch of the little golden bird on the lily. Delicate, significant spiritual forces are indeed latent in the lily, but they only appear when they have been aroused by the golden bird.

The established belief that everything around us is bewitched spiritual truth and that we attain the truth when we break the spell, is the basis of the realm of the fairy tale. We must be quite clear that a fairy tale is primarily the account of an astral event. But by its constant repetition minor details are altered—people have an extraordinary talent for changing things! We carefully collect the tales as they are told again and again by simple people, and indeed these are remnants of an ancient picture seen in the astral world, but many of the details may well have been altered. And then the mistake is made to explain these alterations in a clever way. To explain fairy tales correctly, we must always go back to their original form and recognize it as such. Everything has to correspond to those astral experiences.

The question may arise whether the human being has the same form today as in those earlier times that are still contained in the spiritual experiences we have in the intermediate state of consciousness. The answer is no, we do not. We have passed through very different forms before developing into what we are today. However, what we have overcome and cast forth appears in a quite distinct, external form. In order to estrange ourselves from our giant power, we had to cast forth our giant shapes and overcome them, refining our forces and raising them to the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. There are indeed beings who have remained at the stage of the rough forces. Wherever something evil appears and has to be overcome, something that has remained stationary on the astral plane, it always appears as a “dragon” or something similar; this is none other than the grotesque form, transformed in the spiritual world, of what human beings had to change and cast forth from themselves. We must be aware that this corresponds to an absolutely certain fact.

In conclusion, I should like to relate another fairy tale for you to ponder over for yourselves. It will contain the various motifs that come into play when the human being makes a connection with the astral world. If you apply what I have been describing to this somewhat complicated tale, you will be able to unravel the threads almost entirely for yourselves. This particular fairy tale is a kind of synthesis, bringing together the most varied, interweaving forces:

Once upon a time it happened—where then was it? Where indeed was it not? There was an old king, who had three sons and three daughters. When he was about to die, he said to his three sons, “Give my three daughters to those who first ask for them in marriage, that they do not stay single. That is my first charge to you. And my second is this: you must never find yourselves at a certain place, especially at night.” And he showed them the spot, under a poplar tree in the forest.

When the old king died, his sons were resolved to carry out his directions. On the first evening, something or someone shouted through the window, asking for a king's daughter. The brothers were willing and they threw one of their sisters out of the window. The second evening again someone or something shouted through the window, asking for a king's daughter. The brothers threw their second sister out of the window. And on the third evening again someone or something shouted through the window, asking for a king's daughter, and the brothers threw their third sister out of the window.

Now they were alone, but they began to be curious. They wanted above all to know why they should avoid the poplar tree in the forest. So they went out one evening and sat under the poplar tree, lighted a fire, and fell asleep. The eldest was to keep watch. While he walked backwards and forwards, armed with his sword, he saw something eating the fire; on looking closer he saw it was a three-headed dragon. He fought the three-headed dragon, he vanquished and buried it, but he said nothing about this to his brothers, and in the morning they went home. The next evening they went out again, lighted a fire, and lay down beside it. This time the second brother had to keep watch. Soon he saw something eating the fire, and on looking closer saw it was a six-headed dragon. He fought the six-headed dragon, vanquished and buried it, but said nothing about it, and the others thought nothing had happened; the next morning they went home. The third night the same thing happened; they lighted a fire, and the youngest brother had to keep watch. Almost as soon as the others were asleep, while he was walking up and down carrying his sword, he saw something eating the fire. He looked closer and hesitated a little, losing a few moments' time. Then he began to fight the dragon, which was a nine-headed one; but by the time he had finally vanquished it, the fire had gone out. Now he did not want to catch the others by surprise, so he set about finding a light. He saw a little light between the twigs, which he tried to get, but it was not enough. Then he saw something fighting in the air, and asked what it was, and the fighting Creatures replied: “We are the sun and the dawn, we are fighting for the day.” So he loosened a cord which fastened up his garments and tied the sun and the dawn together, so that the day might not begin. Then he went further to fetch light and fire, and came to a spot where three giants slept by a mighty fire. He took some of the fire, but as he tried to step over one of the giants, some fire fell on the giant and woke him. The giant seized him with his hand, showed him to the others and said:

“Look at the midge I have caught!” The king's son was greatly alarmed, for the giants wanted to kill him; however, they struck a bargain with him. There were three princesses they wanted to get hold of but a dog and a chicken at the door made such a noise that they could not get to them. The king's son promised to help them, and so the giants let him go free. A ball of thread was attached and the king's son went forward, carrying the ball of thread. It was arranged that every time he pulled the thread one of the giants should follow. He soon came to a river he could not cross. (All this time the brothers still slept.) He pulled the thread and one of the giants came and threw the trunk of a tree across the river so that he was able to go on. Now he came to the king's palace, where he expected to find the princesses. He went in and entered one of the rooms. There he saw one of the princesses. She lay on a copper bed and had a little gold ring on her finger. This he took off and put on his own finger and went on. Then he came to a second room where the second princess lay on a silver bed; she, too, had a little gold ring on her finger, which he took off and put on his own finger. Then he came to the third room, where the third princess lay on a golden bed, and he also put on her golden ring. Then he looked about him and discovered a very small opening which was an entrance to the castle. So he pulled the thread and the first giant came along; but the moment that the giant tried to get through the door, his head inside but his body outside, the king's son quickly cut off his head. He did the same with the second giant and the third, and so he killed them all. Then he went back to his brothers, after he had first unbound the sun and the dawn. They looked at each other and said; “Oh! what a long night!” “Yes,” he said, “it was a long night!” But like the others, he said nothing further, and they all went home.

Some time after this the brothers wanted to marry, and the youngest brother told the others he knew where there were a king's three daughters, and he led them to the castle. The three brothers married, the youngest marrying the most beautiful princess, the one who had lain on the golden bed. The youngest brother was the heir of his wife's father and had therefore to live in a foreign land. After a time he wished to visit his native land and to take his wife with him. But his father-in-law said to him: “If you set forth on this journey, your wife will be taken from you at the border, and perhaps you may never see her again!” They wanted to go, however, so they set out and took thirty horsemen to protect them. But when they came to the border, the wife was torn away as if by an unknown power. He went back and asked his wife's father how and where he could find his wife again. His father-in-law said;

“If you find her at all it will only be in the White Country.” So he set out to find his wife. But he did not know the way to the White Country.

At last he came to a castle, and went in to ask the way to the White Country. There he met the lady of the castle and saw that she was one of his own sisters whom her brothers had thrown out of the window. He asked for her husband, who was called in, and lo! he was a four-headed dragon! They asked him the way to the White Country; he did not know where it was, but his animals might know. The animals were called in, but none of them knew the way to the White Country. So the king's son went on and came to a second castle. There he found his second sister. He asked for her husband, and he was called in. He was an eight-headed dragon, and he, too, knew nothing of a white land. “Perhaps,” said he, “the animals might know.” The animals were called in, but none of them knew the way to the White Country, and so the king's son had to go on. After a time he came to a third castle, and there he found his third sister. He told her what he wanted, and she answered him very sadly. Her husband, a twelve-headed dragon was called in, and asked about the White Country; he said he knew nothing of it, but it might be that one of his animals did. The animals were therefore called in, but none of them knew the White Country. As the very last came a lame wolf. “Yes,” said he, “I once came to such a land; there I was wounded, and am now lame for evermore. I know the White Country, unluckily for me!” Said the king's son: “I want to be taken there.” But the wolf would not go, even though they promised him whole herds of sheep. At last he was persuaded to guide the king's son as far as a hill from which he could see the White Country. They came to this hill, and the lame wolf left him there.

The king's son found a spring from which he drank and felt greatly refreshed by the water. Then a woman came by, whom he recognized at once as his stolen wife. She also recognized him, saying immediately: “You cannot carry me off yet, for if you do, the magician who imprisons me here as his wife will at once bring me back on his magic horse. It flies through the air as quickly as thought.” Whereupon the king's son said:

“What then shall we do?” She answered: “There is only one way: we must have a swifter horse. Go to the old woman who lives at the border. Hire yourself out to her as a servant; she will set you hard tasks, but you will soon find out how to accomplish them. You must demand as wages the youngest foal and a saddle. Say to the old woman: ‘I want the old saddle that lies over there on the ground, covered with dirt.’ Thirdly, you will demand a very old bridle.”

With these instructions the king's son went on his way and came to a stream. As he rested beside it, he saw a fish lying on the bank. The fish begged him, “Take me and throw me back into the water; you will be doing me a great kindness!” He did so, and while he was doing it the fish gave him a whistle and said to him: “If you ever want anything, just whistle, and I will do you a service!” He took the little whistle and went on. After a while he met an ant who was pursued by her enemy, a spider. He freed her, and in return the ant gave him a small whistle, and told him that if he were ever in trouble and whistled, help would be sent him. He took it and went on his way. Soon he met a wounded fox, who had a silver arrow stuck in him. The fox said, “If you will draw out the arrow, and give me some herb roots for my wound, I will help you if ever you are in great trouble.” The king's son did this, and the fox also gave him a whistle. With these three whistles in his pocket the king's son went to the old woman who lived at the border. He told her he wished to hire himself out to her as a servant. “That you may,” said she, “but service with me is very hard; so far no one has been able to stand up to it.” Saying this she led him out into a field where ninety-nine men were hanging. “All these men hired themselves out to me, but none could do what I wanted. If you still wish to come and are also not able to stand up to it, you may be the hundredth.” However, he entered her service for a year.

Now in that district a year has only three days. On the first day the old woman made him a soup that sent people to sleep, a dream-soup, and then she sent him away with three horses. Having taken the soup he soon fell asleep, and when he awoke the three horses were gone. He bethought himself of the three whistles; he took the first one out and whistled. There was a kind of spring at that spot, and three little goldfish came swimming along. As soon as he touched them, they turned into the three horses, and so he brought the horses back to the old woman. She herself had changed the horses into goldfish. When she saw him return with the horses, she lost her temper and threw herself from side to side with rage.

The next day the old woman again made him a dream-soup, and sent him away with the horses. The soup sent him to sleep, and when he awoke the horses had disappeared. Then he whistled with the second whistle, and three golden ants instantly appeared. As soon as he touched them, there were his three horses again, which he brought back to the old woman. Then the old woman was quite wild, because she herself had enchanted the horses, and she railed against the horses. But the king's son was saved. The third day the old woman said to herself: “I must set about this much more cleverly.” She again made him a dream-soup, and sent him out with the horses. When the soup had sent him to sleep, she changed the horses into three golden eggs, which she placed under herself and sat down on them. When the king's son awoke, the horses were gone, and so he whistled on the third whistle. Now just imagine how cleverly everything happened. The fox came by and said:

“This time the task is a little more difficult, but we shall manage it. I shall go to the hen-yard and make a great commotion there. The old woman will spring up and go out, and at that moment you will touch the eggs and they will be changed.” And so it happened. The fox went to the farmyard and made a disturbance, and as the old woman sprang up and ran out, the king's son touched the eggs; when she came back there were the three horses! The old woman was now obliged to ask the king's son: “What will you have for your reward?” She expected he would want something very special. But he said: “I only want the foal that was born last night, the old saddle over there covered with dirt, and an old bridle.” These she gave him. The foal was so small he had to carry it on his back. When evening came the little foal said; “Now you can sleep while I go to a spring and drink.” Next morning it returned, and could already gallop with great swiftness. The second night the same thing happened, and the third day it led him to the place where his wife was. His wife was placed on the little horse—and this is the point that proves to anyone who understands these things the occult origin of fairy tales—and the king's son asked, “How fast shall we travel through the air?” His wife answered: “With the swiftness of thought!” Now when the magician who had imprisoned her noticed their flight, he mounted his magic horse to hurry after them. The horse asked him: “How fast shall we travel through the air?” And he replied: “With the swiftness of will or of thought!” He rushed after them, getting nearer and nearer—and when he was quite near, the magic horse told the one in front of him to stop. “I will only stop when you are quite close,” was the answer. At the same moment the magic horse reared, threw the robber off, and joined the little horse. So the queen was freed. The king's son was now able to go home with his wife, and they lived again in their own country. And if what happened did not fade away, they must still be alive today.

That is a somewhat more complicated fairy tale, containing the most varied features. Until the time comes when we can say more in explanation of this tale, we should just let it penetrate our souls in order to decipher the different features that are here harmonized so wonderfully. Of course, all that has been brought in through false tradition must naturally be sifted out of it. But you will be able to find the threads leading to every event if you follow the principle described here: the dragon-theme; the theme of the three sisters who were thrown out of the window; the theme of the conquest of the dragons at the fire; the theme of cleverness; the marriage theme (the intellectual soul with the outer world); and once again in a unique manner the theme of the cleverness of the magic forces. Then Nemesis or fate appears in a wonderful way when the king's son meets his sisters: the three brothers had thrown out their higher sisterly nature—hence the death of the dragons at the fire, and so on.

Such fairy tales are the experiences of certain individuals among people who are in the intermediate state of consciousness. The great popular myths of the gods are also representations of everything the initiates experience on the astral and higher planes. Fairy tales stand in relation to the great popular myths of the gods in the following manner: The myths can be understood when we realize the huge comprehensive circumstances of the cosmos underlying them, and fairy tales can be understood when we realize that the different happenings and pictures are nothing but the repetition of astral events. In far remote times everyone had astral experiences. They became fewer and fewer. One person told them to another, the other took them up, and so the fairy tales were carried from place to place. They appeared in the most varied languages, and we can note the similarity of the fairy tale treasures the whole world over, when we unveil the astral events that serve as their basis.

Any thoughtful person who travels about can even now find the last remnants of atavistic clairvoyance. Somewhere or other he may meet someone who relates what he has seen in the astral world as his own personal experience. Such a person in traveling about the world will hear fairy tales told by those who still possess a presentiment of the real truth. In this way they have been inscribed in our literature, and thus did the brothers Grimm collect their fairy tales; in like manner others have collected them, who were usually not clairvoyant themselves, but got them at second, third, or even tenth hand, so that they encountered them in a very mutilated form. But the time when people were still in such close touch with the spiritual world is approaching its twilight. Human beings are withdrawing more and more from the spiritual world. Atavistic clairvoyance is becoming rarer and rarer, at least, what may be called healthy clairvoyance, and true clairvoyance tends more and more to be attainable only through training, so that in the time to come most people who know anything of the matter will say about what people saw in ancient times: “Once upon a time old people related this or that from their astral experiences. Where was it then? It could have been everywhere.”

Nowadays, however, we can very seldom find anyone who can relate things from a genuine source, and it will be said of fairy tale experiences: “They happened once upon a time, and if they did not perish, these fairy tale experiences are still alive.”

But for most people, who are inwardly entangled with the physical plane, they have long since been dead.

Today it is my task to speak about a topic that has millions of enthusiastic followers in the world, on one side, that has found the most violent adversaries, on the other side, not only adversaries who combat this field of the so-called spiritism the sharpest, but also those who ridicule it who lump together it with the darkest superstition or what they call dark superstition; adversaries who want to ignore it only with empty words of joke and scorn.

It may be not easy to speak just in our present about such a topic where as a rule with the “pros and cons” the most violent passions are aroused straight away. I would like to ask those listeners among you who may be enthusiastic followers of spiritism not to roundly condemn me immediately, if to you any of my explanations seems to correspond not completely to your views, because we representatives of theosophy, nevertheless, are combined with the spiritists in one matter in any case: we have the intention to investigate the higher spiritual worlds, those worlds which are beyond the everyday sense-perception. We are in agreement on that. However, on the other side, I would like to ask the scientists also to realise that that movement in whose name I myself speak has not chosen the slogan only like a signboard, as a phrase, but in the most serious sense of the word: no human opinion is higher than truth.—I would also like to ask the scientist to keep in mind that he may take into consideration that the views of science were subjected to change in the course of times, and that is why the scientific views of today cannot be regarded as being fixed.

Let me now outline the development of the spiritistic movement without taking sides, because no human opinion is higher than truth.

I would like to emphasise above all that the founders of the theosophical movement, Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, and the great organiser, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, went out from the spiritistic movement. They were experts of the spiritistic movement and turned to the theosophical movement only, after they had vigorously searched for truth before within the spiritistic movement, but had not found it.

Theosophy does not want to combat spiritism, but to search for truth where it is to be found.

I would like to emphasise something else that will surprise some of you, however, that will not at all surprise others who are in the know. Allow me to express it: you can never hear the last word about spiritism and similar matters from people like me who are forced to speak about that. You know that there is in any science a rule which is simply justified by the scientific methods, and the rule is that one shows the results of science before a bigger audience in popular way. If one wants to do more intimate acquaintance with these results, if one wants to get to know the more intimate truth, then a longer way is necessary: a way using the different methods in any detail. As a rule the researchers are not able to report in popular talks what takes place inside of the laboratories, of the observatories. That applies to the physical science. On the other side, in the great spiritual movements of the world somebody who is reasonable and allowed to express the words with regard to the spiritual views has to withhold the last word because the last words are still of quite different kind. They are of such a kind that they can hardly be discussed publicly. That is why you can never hear the very last word of this matter from an occultist—unless you are able and want to go his ways most intimately. But to those who are in the know of the matter something becomes clear from the way how a matter is said, what is said not only between the lines, but perhaps also between the words.

After this introduction I would like to move on the topic which certainly has a tremendous cultural-historical significance even for somebody who wants to make it ridiculous. I would like to speak about the matter in a sense which really throws light from this point of view: what does spiritism search for today? Does it search for something new, or is it something ancient that it searches? Are the ways on which it looks absolutely novel, or has humankind gone on them since centuries or even since millennia?—If anybody puts these questions to himself, he reaches his goal concerning the history of spiritism the fastest. What the spiritists search for is at first the knowledge of those worlds which are beyond our sensory world, and secondly the significance of these worlds for the goal, for the determination of our human race.

If we ask ourselves: were these problems not the tasks of humankind, since it strives on our earth and wants anything?—Then we must say to ourselves: yes. And because they are certainly the highest tasks, it would already appear as something absurd from the beginning if in the world history something absolutely new had appeared with regard to these questions. It seems if we look around in the old and new spiritistic movements, as if we deal with something absolutely new. The strongest adversaries refer to the fact that it has brought something absolutely new into the world, and other adversaries say that the human beings had never needed to combat this movement like nowadays. There a change must have happened in humankind with regard to the way to look at the case. This is illuminated to us like lightning if we get clear in our mind that humankind has behaved in three different ways to the questions which we call spiritistic today.

There we have one way which we can find in the whole antiquity, a way which changes only in the Christian times. Then we have the second way to position ourselves to these questions, the whole Middle Ages through, till the 17th century. Only in the 17th century spiritism basically starts taking on a certain form that one can rightly call spiritism today.

The questions that the spiritist wants to answer today were the object of the so-called mysteries the whole antiquity through. I try only to characterise with few lines what one has to understand by mysteries. It was not the custom in antiquity to announce wisdom publicly. One had another view of wisdom and truth. One believed the whole antiquity through that it is necessary to train super-sensible organs to the knowledge of the super-sensible truth at first. One realised the fact that in every human being spiritual forces slumber which are not developed with the average human being, that spiritual forces slumber in the human nature which one can wake and develop by means of long exercises, through steps of development, which the disciples of the mysteries describe as very difficult. If the neophyte had developed such forces in him and had become a researcher of truth, one was of the opinion that he is to the average human being in such a way as a sighted is to a blind-born. This was also the goal within the holy mysteries. One aimed to achieve something similar in the spiritual field as today the doctor aims to achieve with the blind-born if he operates him that he becomes sighted. One was clear about the fact that—like with a blind-born who is operated the colours of the light and the forms of the things appear—a new world appears to somebody whose internal senses are woken, a world which the everyday reason cannot perceive. Thus the follower of the mysteries tried to develop a human being of lower level to one of higher level, to an initiate. Only the initiate should be able to recognise something of the super-sensible truth by immediate beholding, by spiritual intuition. The big mass of human beings could get the truth by means of pictures. The myths of antiquity, the legends about gods and world origin, which simply appear today—indeed, in certain sense rightly—as childish views of humankind, they are nothing but disguises of the super-sensible truth. The initiate informed people in pictures of that which he could behold within the temple mysteries. The whole Eastern mythology, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Germanic mythology and the mythologies of the savage peoples are nothing but metaphorical, symbolic representations of the super-sensible truth. Of course, only somebody can completely understand this who occupies himself not in such a way as anthropology and ethnology do it but also with their spirit. He sees that a myth like the Hercules legend shows a deep inner truth; he sees that the conquest of the Golden Fleece by Jason shows a deep and true knowledge.

Then another way came with our calendar. I can indicate only roughly what I have to say. A certain basis of higher, spiritual truth was determined and made the object of the confessions, in particular of the Christian. And now this basis of spiritual truth was removed from any human research, from the immediate human striving. Those who studied the history of the Council of Nicaea know what I mean, and also those who understand the words of St. Augustine who says there: I would not believe in the truth of the divine revelation unless the authority of the church forces me.—Faith that determines a certain basis of the truth replaces the old mystery truth which retains it in pictures. Then follows the epoch when the big mass is no longer informed about the truth of the super-sensible world in pictures, but simply by authority. This is the second way how the big mass and those who had to lead them behaved to the highest truth. The mysteries provided it to the big mass on account of experience; it was provided by faith and fixed by authority in the Middle Ages.

But beside those who had the task to retain the big mass by faith and authority were also those in the 12th and 13th centuries—they existed at all times, but they did not appear publicly—who wanted to develop by immediate own beholding to the highest truth. These searched for it on the same ways on which it had been searched for within the mysteries. That is why we find in mediaeval times beside those who are only priests, also the mystics, theosophists and occultists, those who talk in an almost incomprehensible language hard to be understood by modern materialists and rationalists. We find people who had reached the secrets on the ways which avoid the senses. In an even more incomprehensible language those people spoke who had the guidance of the spirit as mystery priests. So we hear from one that he had the ability to send his thoughts miles away; another boasted that he could transform the whole sea into gold if it was permitted. Another says that he could construct a vehicle with which he would be able to move through the air.

There were times when people did not know how to do with such sayings, because they had no notion of how they were to be understood. Moreover, prejudices flourished against such a kind of investigation since the oldest times. That becomes clear to us at once where these prejudices came from. When in the first centuries of our calendar the Christian culture spread over the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, it appeared that the cult actions and the ceremonies of Christianity and also most of Christian dogmas agreed with ancient pagan traditions, and were not so different—even if in a watered way—from that which had took place in the old pagan Mithras temples. There said those who had the task to defend the reputation of the church: bad spirits gave the pagans these views; they aped within the pagan world what God revealed to the Christian church.—However, it is an odd imitation which leads the way of the original! The whole Christianity was aped in the pagan mysteries—if we apply the word of the accusers, what the church has later found! It is comprehensible that every other way than that of the authoritative Christian faith, as Augustine characterised it, was wrong and in the course of time it was regarded as such which was not given by good powers; since the church had to provide the good powers.

Thus these traditions continued through the whole Middle Ages. Those who wanted to come on their own ways, independently to the highest super-sensible truth were regarded as magicians, as allies of the bad or of the bad spirits. The mark stone is the Faust legend. Faust is the representative of those who want to get by own knowledge to the secrets. Hence, the bad powers must have captivated him. One should only do research in the writings handed down from earlier times, only the trust in authority should lead to the super-sensible powers. In spite of that, initiated minds realised—even if they were defamed as magicians and were prosecuted—that the time must come again when one has to progress to truth on own, human ways.

Thus we see occult brotherhoods originating in Europe from the middle of the Middle Ages on which led their members on the same ways as the old mysteries had done this to the development of higher intuitive forces. So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries—I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. I cannot explain in detail how this happened; I can only give one example, the great representative of the occult science of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robert Fludd. He shows for those who have insight into these fields in all his writings that he knows the ways how to get to truth that he knows how to develop such forces that are of quite different kind than the forces in us which see any body of light before themselves. He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate.

I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. He says of them that everybody who has arrived at the lowest level must be able to answer them with understanding. These questions and also their answers may appear quite futile to the rationalists and materialists. The first question which anybody must answer who wants to rise in worthy way to higher spiritual spheres is: where do you live?—The answer is: I live in the temple of wisdom, on the mountain of reason.—Understanding this sentence really, experiencing it internally means already to have opened certain inner senses.

The second sentence was: where truth comes from to you?—The answer is: it comes to me from the creative , and now there comes a word which cannot be translated at all into German: from the highest ..., mighty all-embracing spirit who has spoken through Solomon and wants to inform me about alchemy, magic and the kabala ...—This was the second question.

The third question is: what do you want to build?—The answer is: I want to build a temple like the tabernacle, like Solomon's temple, like the body of Christ and ... like something else that one does not pronounce.

You see—I cannot go into these questions further—that one veiled the super-sensible truth in a mysterious darkness for all non-initiates in such brotherhoods, and that the non-initiate should make himself worthy at first and had to get to a moral and intellectual summit. Somebody who had not stood the trials who did not have the force in himself to find the experiences inside was not judged as worthy, was not admitted to the initiation. One considered it as dangerous to know this truth. One knew that knowledge is connected with a tremendous power, with a power as the average human being does not suspect at all. Only somebody is able to possess this truth and power without any danger for humankind who has got to that moral and intellectual height. Otherwise one said: without having reached this height he behaves with this truth and power like a child that is sent with matches into a powder magazine.

Now one was of the opinion in these times that only somebody who is in the possession of the highest super-sensible truth can explain the phenomena as they are told everywhere and since millennia in a popular way—phenomena which the modern spiritism shows again. The matters were nothing new but something ancient that spiritism recognises today. In ancient times one spoke about the fact that the human being can have such an effect on the human beings as it is not the case, otherwise: certain human beings cause that knocking sounds are to be heard in their surroundings that objects move, contrary to the laws of gravitation, with or without touch that objects fly through the air without applying any physical force et cetera. Since the oldest times one knew that there are human beings who can be transported into certain states, today we call these states trance states, in which they speak about things about which they can never speak in the waking consciousness that they also tell about other worlds not belonging to our sense-perceptible world. One knew that there are human beings who communicate by signs about that which they see in such super-sensible worlds. One also knew that there are human beings who are able to see events which are far away from them and also to report about that; human beings who could foresee and forecast future events with the help of their prophetic gift. All that—we do not verify it today—is an ancient tradition. Those who believe to be able to accept it as truth consider it as something natural. Such not physical, not sense-perceptible phenomena were regarded as true through the whole Middle Ages. Indeed, they were considered by the church of the Middle Ages in such a way, as if they were caused by means of bad skills, but this should not touch us. In any case, the way to the super-sensible world was not searched for on the way of these phenomena in the time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nobody claimed till those times that a dancing table, an anyhow appearing ghost which is seen with eyes or in any way in trance could reveal anything of a super-sensible world. Even if anybody told that he saw a blaze in Hanover from here, one believed it; but nobody saw anything in it that could seriously give information about the super-sensible world. Reasonable people considered it as a matter of course that one could not look for the super-sensible world that way. Those who wanted to get to super-sensible perception searched for it by developing inner forces in the occult brotherhoods.

Then another time came in the development of the West, in which one started looking for truth scientifically. There came the Copernican world view and the researches of physiology; technology, the discoveries of the blood circulation, of the ovum et cetera. One attained insights into nature with the senses. Somebody who does not approach the Middle Ages with prejudices but wants to get to know the world view of the Middle Ages in its true form, convinces himself soon that this medieval thinking did not imagine heaven and hell as localities in space, but that they were something spiritual to it. In mediaeval times no reasonable human being thought to advocate that world view which one attributes to the medieval scholars today. Copernicanism is nothing new in this sense. It is new in another sense; in the sense that since the 16th century sense-perception became decisive for truth; what one can see what one can perceive with the senses. The world view of the Middle Ages was not wrong as one often shows it today, but it was only a view which was not got with bodily eyes. The bodily sensualisation was a symbol of something spiritual. Also Dante did not imagine his hell and his heaven in the earthly sense; they were to be understood spiritually.

One broke with this point of view. The real psychologist of the human development finds out this. The sensuous was raised, and now sensuality conquered the world gradually. However, the human being got used to it without noticing it. Only the searching psychologist rushing behind the development is able to make a picture of it. The human being gets used to such changes. With his feeling, with his senses he looks at everything, and accepts the sensuous only as true. Without knowing it, people considered as a principle of the human nature to accept only what they can see in any way of what they can convince themselves by sensory inspection. People did not think much of such circles that spoke of an initiation and led to super-sensible truth on occult ways; everything had to be sensually shown.

What about the super-sensible view of the world? How could one find the super-sensible in the world in which one wanted to seek for truth only in the sensory effects? There were rare, so-called abnormal phenomena which were not explicable by means of natural forces known till then; phenomena that the physicist, the naturalist could not explain, and which one simply denied because one wanted to accept the sensually explicable only. There were these phenomena which were handed down through millennia to which the human being sought refuge now: now one went to them. Simultaneously with the urge to keep only to the sense-perceptible appearance the urge for the super-sensible resorted to such phenomena. One wanted to know what scientific criticism could not explain; one wanted to know how it is. When one started searching for evidences of another world in these matters, the birth of modern spiritism took place. We can give the hour of birth and the place where it happened. It was in 1716; there a book was published by a member of the Royal Society, a description of the western islands of Scotland. Everything was collected in it that was to be found out about the “second sight.” This is that which one cannot perceive with the usual eyes, but what one could find out only by super-sensible research. Here you have the precursor of everything that was later done by the so-called scientific side to the investigation of the spiritistic phenomena.

Now we also stand already at the gate of the whole spiritistic movement of the newer time. That person from whom the whole spiritistic movement started is one of the strangest of the world: Swedenborg. He influenced the whole 18th century. Even Kant argued with him. A person who could bring to life the modern spiritistic movement had to be disposed like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life he was a naturalist who stood at the head of the natural sciences of his time. He encompassed them. Nobody has a right to attack Swedenborg as an illiterate man. We know that he was not only a perfect expert of his time, but he also anticipated a lot of scientific truths that one discovered on the universities only later. So he stood in the first half of his life not only completely on the scientific point of view which wanted to investigate everything by the appearance to the senses and by mathematical calculations, but he also was far ahead of his time in this regard. Then he completely turned to that which one calls visionariness. What Swedenborg experienced—you may call him a seer or visionary—was a particular class of phenomena. Somebody who is only somewhat initiated in these fields knows that Swedenborg could only experience this class of phenomena.

I only give a few examples. Swedenborg saw a conflagration in Stockholm from a place which was removed sixty miles from Stockholm. He informed the guests, with who he was in a soirée, about this event, and after some time one heard that the fire had happened in such a way as Swedenborg had told it. Another example: a high-ranking person asked for a secret which a brother had not completely told before his death because he died before. The person turned to Swedenborg with the strange demand whether he could not discover him and ask what he wanted to say. Swedenborg ridded himself of the order in such a way that the person in question could have no doubt that Swedenborg had penetrated into this secret.

Still the third example to show how Swedenborg moved within the super-sensible world. A scholar and friend visited Swedenborg. The servant said to him: you have to wait for some time, please. The scholar sat down and heard a discussion in the next room. However, he heard always only Swedenborg speaking; he did not hear answering. The case became even more noticeable to him when he heard the discussion taking place in wonderful classical Latin, and particularly when he heard him intimately talking about states of the emperor Augustus. Then Swedenborg went to the door, bowed before somebody and spoke with him but the friend could not see the visitor at all. Then Swedenborg came back and said to the friend: excuse that I let you wait. I had lofty visit—Virgil visited me.

People may think about such matters as they want. However, one thing is certain: Swedenborg believed in them, regarded them as reality. I said: only a person like Swedenborg could get to such a kind of research. Just the fact that he was expert naturalist of his time led him to this view of the super-sensible nature. He was a man who got used to accepting nothing but the sensuous, the sense-perceptible in the time of the dawning natural sciences. Everybody knows it who knows him; the reasons become clear in the talk which I hold next time here about the topic “Hypnotism and Somnambulism”—and that is why he also depended on it as such a man who sees the spiritual in the world. As well as he insisted to recognise only as right what he could calculate and perceive with senses, the super-sensible was brought by him into the shape which it had to have for him; the super-sensible world was pulled down to a deeper sphere under the influence of the ways of thinking of natural sciences. Because it approaches us in such way like the views of the sensory world, I cited the reasons. We hear next time how such a thing comes about. However, the preconditions are given by the own spiritual development of the human beings who got used to the sense-perceptible.

I do not want to speak now about the significance and core of truth of Swedenborg’s visions, but about the fact that somebody sees—as soon as he enters this field which forms the basis of Swedenborg's views—his dispositions in this area, what he has developed in himself. A proof of it may be a simple example.

When the wave of spiritism spread in the second half of the 19th century, one also made experiments in Bavaria. It became apparent there that with the experiments at which also scholars were present and took place at different places quite different spiritual manifestations happened. In such an event one asked whether the human soul is received via heredity from the parents, so that also the soul is hereditary, or whether it is made new with every human being. In this spiritistic séance it was answered: the souls are made new. Almost at the same time the same question was put in another séance. The answer was: the soul is not created, but is passed on from the parents to the children.—One thought that at one séance followers of the so-called creation theory were, and at the other séance some scholars were present who were followers of the other theory. In the sense of the thoughts which lived in them the answers were given. Whichever facts may be there, whichever reasons of these facts may be there, it became clear that the human being receives as a manifestation what corresponds to his view. It is irrelevant whether it faces him only as an intellectual manifestation or as a vision; what the human being sees is founded in his own dispositions.

This search for sensuous-extrasensory proofs became just a child of the natural sciences of the materialistic time. The principle was actually drawn up that one had to seek for the extrasensory world as one had to seek for the sensuous one. Just as somebody convinces himself in the laboratory of the reality of forces of magnetism or light, one wanted to convince oneself of the super-sensible world by the appearance to the senses. People had forgotten how to behold the spiritual in purely spiritual way. They had forgotten how to develop the belief in super-sensible forces and how to learn to recognise what is neither sensuous nor analogous to the sensuous, but what can be seized only by spiritual intuition. They had got to be used to get everything on the sensory way, and that is why they also wanted to get these matters on the sensory way. Research moved on this way. Thus we see Swedenborg’s direction going on. What appears offers nothing new to us; spiritism offers nothing new! We take an overview of this later and understand it then also better.

All the phenomena which spiritism knows were explained that way. There we see the South German Oetinger who elaborated the theory that there is a super-sensible substance which can be seen as a physical phenomenon. Only, he says, the super-sensible matter does not have the raw qualities of the physical matter, not the impenetrable resistance and the row mixture. Here we have the substance from which the materialisations are taken.

Another researcher of this field is Johann Heinrich Jung called Stilling who published a detailed report on spirits and apparitions of spirits and described all these matters. He tried there to understand everything in such a way that he did justice to these phenomena as a religious Christian. Because he had tendencies to be a religious Christian, the whole world seemed to him to manifest nothing but the truth of the Christian teaching. Because at the same time natural sciences made claims, we see a mixture of the purely Christian standpoint with the standpoint of natural sciences in his representation. Esotericism explains the phenomena by the intrusion of a spiritual world into our world.

You see all these phenomena registered in the works of those who wrote about spiritism, demonology, magic et cetera in which you can also find something that goes beyond spiritism, like with Ennemoser, for instance. We see even carefully registered how a person can enable himself to perceive the thoughts of others who are in distant rooms. You find such instructions with Ennemoser, also with others. Already in the 19th century you find with a certain Meyer who wrote a book about the Hades from spiritistic standpoint as a manifestation of spiritistic manipulations and stood up for the so-called reincarnation theory. You find a theory there to which theosophy has led us again, and which shows us that the old fairy tales are expressions of the higher truth prepared for the people. Meyer got this view on account of sensuous demonstrations.

We find all the spiritistic phenomena with Justinus Kerner. They are significant because of the moral weight of the author. There we find, for example, that near the seeress of Prevorst things—spoons et cetera—are repelled by her; it is also told that this seeress communicated with beings of other worlds. Justinus Kerner registered all the communications which he got from her. She informed him that she saw beings of other worlds which went through her, indeed, but which she could perceive and that she could even behold such beings which came in along with other people. Some people may say about these matters: Kerner fantasised and was fooled a lot by his seeress. However, I would like to say one thing: you know David Friedrich Strauss who was friendly with Justinus Kerner. He knew how it stood with the seeress of Prevorst. You also know that that which he performed goes in a direction which runs against the spiritistic current. He says that the facts of which the seeress of Prevorst reports are true as facts—about that cannot be discussed with those who know something about it, he considered the matters as being beyond any doubt.

Even if a bigger number of human beings existed who were still interested somewhat in such things, the interest decreased, nevertheless, more and more. This could be led back to the influence of science. It refused to look at such phenomena as true manifestations in the time of the forties when the law of energy conservation was discovered forming the basis of our physics when the cell theory was drawn up when Darwinism prepared. What came up in this time could not be favourable to the pneumatologists. Hence, they were strictly rejected. That is why one forgot everything that these had to say.

Then an event took place which meant a victory for spiritism. The event did not happen in Europe, but in the country where materialism celebrated the biggest triumphs in that time where one had made oneself used to consider only as true what hands can seize. This happened in America, in the country where the materialistic way of thinking intimated by me had strongly developed. It went out from the phenomena which belong in the broadest sense to those which one has to call abnormal but sensual. The well-known knocking sounds, the phenomena of moving tables and the knocking through them, the audibility of certain voices which sounded through the air accompanied by intelligent manifestations for which no sensuous reason existed—they pointed to the super-sensible so clearly in America, in the country where one attaches much value to the outer appearance. Like by storm the view gained recognition that there is a super-sensible world that beings which do not belong to our world manifest themselves in our sensory world. Like a storm this went through the world.

A man, Andrew Jackson Davis, who concerned himself with these phenomena, was called upon for explaining these matters. He was, in similar way as Swedenborg, a seer; he only did not have the deepness of Swedenborg. He was an unlearned American grown up as a farmer boy and Swedenborg was a learnt Swede. He wrote a book in 1848 (?): The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. This work arose from the most modern needs which had originated within the modern battle in which one wanted to accept the sensuous only in which everybody wanted to put his personal egoism forward, in which everybody wanted to grab so much to himself, wanted to become as happy as he only was able to. In this world one was no longer able to have sense for a faith which leads beyond the sensuous world, according to the ways of thinking which were tied to the material only. One wanted to see and one wanted to have such a faith which satisfies the needs and desires of modern humankind. Above all Davis says plainly that modern people cannot believe that a quantity of human beings is blessed, another quantity condemned. It was this what the modern could not stand; there an idea of development had to intervene. Davis was informed of a truth which shows an exact image of the sensuous world. It may be characterised by an example. When his first wife had died, he had the idea to marry a second wife. However, he had doubt, but a super-sensible manifestation caused that he gave himself the permission. In this manifestation his first wife said to him that she had married in the sun-land again; that is why he felt to have the right also to marry a second time. In the beginning of the first part of his book he informs us that he was educated as a farmer boy like a Christian, but he realised soon that the Christian faith can deliver no conviction, because the modern human being must understand the what, the why and the where to of the way.

I was sent out—he tells—to the field by my parents. There came a snake. I attacked it with the hayfork. But the tooth broke off. I took the tooth and prayed. I was convinced that the prayer must help. But ... [gap in the transcript]. How can I believe in a God who allows that I experience such a thing? He said to himself. He became an unbeliever. By the spiritistic séances in which he took part he got the ability of trance and became one of the most fertile spiritistic writers. He emphasises that the appearance of that world is approximately the same as that of the sensory world. It would be an unbelief that a good father does not care for his children, because the father makes long journeys for this purpose et cetera.

You see that the earthly world is transferred to the other world. Therefore, this way of thinking spread like a wildfire all over the world. In short time one could count millions of followers of spiritism. Already in 1850 one could find thousands of media in Boston, and one could also pay 400,000 $ in short time to construct a spiritistic temple. You will not deny that that has a great cultural-historical significance. However, with regard to the modern way of thinking this movement had only prospects of success if science took hold of it, that means if science believed in it.

If I held a lecture about theosophy, I could speak in detail of the fact that still quite different powers stand behind the staging of the spiritistic phenomena. Behind the scenery deep occult powers are at work. But this cannot be my task today. I tell another time who is, actually, the true director of these phenomena. But this is certain: if this occult director wanted to presuppose that these phenomena convinced the materialistically minded humankind of the existence of a super-sensible world thoroughly if it should believe in it in the long run, the scientific circles had to be conquered. These scientific circles were not so hard to conquer. Just among the most reasonable, among those who could think thoroughly and logically were many who turned to the spiritistic movement. These were in America Lincoln, Edison, in England Gladstone, the naturalist Wallace, the mathematician Morgan. Also in Germany was a big number of excellent scholars, they were experts in their fields, and were convinced of the spiritistic phenomena by media, like Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. Friedrich Zöllner also belongs to them about whom only those who understand nothing of the matter can say that he became mad when he did the famous experiments with Slade. Then, however, also a personality who is yet underestimated: this is the Baron Hellenbach, deceased in 1887. He presented his experiences in spiritistic fields in his numerous books in such a brilliant way. For example, in his book about biological magnetism and in the book about the magic of figures, so that these books are true treasure troves to study which way this movement has taken—in particular in more inspired heads—in the second half of the 19th century.

A European impulse came to the American movement and this went out from a man who stood in the European culture, from a disciple of Pestalozzi, and it originated at a time which is already significant because of its other discoveries. This spirit is Allan Kardec who wrote his Spirits’ Book in 1858, in the same year in which many other works appeared epoch-making for the western education in different fields. We only have to call some of the works to indicate the significance of the mental life in this time. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; the other is a basic work about the psycho-physical field by Fechner. The third one is a work of Bunsen which familiarises us with spectral analysis and which gives the possibility to discover something of the material composition of the stars for the first time. The fourth one was the work of Karl Marx: The Capital. The fifth one was a work of Kardec, a spiritistic work, but of quite different kind as the American works. He represented the idea of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the human soul. This French spiritism had as numerous supporters as the American one in short time. It spread over France, Spain and especially also over Austria. It was completely in accord with the ancient teachings of wisdom of theosophy. Also spirits like Hellenbach, an Austrian politician, could accept it. He represented the scientific form of spiritism Kardec had founded. Hellenbach played a prominent role in important political matters of Austria in the sixties and seventies of the last century and proved to be a clear and keen thinker at every step. Spiritism got a scientific form in Germany that way. Also such spirits founded the scientific spiritism in Germany who did not want to speak like Hellenbach or Gladstone, Wallace, Crookes who assumed angelic spirits of the old Christendom but who wanted only to speak about the reincarnation of the human being and the intrusion of beings unknown to us whose forms Hellenbach leaves open. But also those who generally do not want to know anything about a yonder world were no longer able to not accept the facts as such. Even people like Eduard von Hartmann who wanted to know nothing about the theories of the spiritists, however, said that the facts could not be denied. They let themselves not be swayed during the period of the exposures. The most famous one was that of the medium Bastian by the Crown Prince Rudolf and the archduke Johann of Austria. The media, which had convinced our scientific circles, were exposed with the medium Bastian. Everybody who simply has some insight in this field knows that Hellenbach is right when he says: nobody will claim that there are no wigs. Should one also believe that there is no real hair because one has discovered wigs?—To somebody who works in occult fields the sentence applies that one can prove to many a bank that it is a corrupt bank; yes, but did not this bank do also honest banking business once? The assessment of the spiritistic truth hides behind such comparisons.

We have seen that the scientific and materialistic ways of thinking since the 18th century—we can call 1716 the natal year of spiritism—have completely adapted themselves to the modern thinking, also to the materialistic views. A new form was sought for to be able to approach the higher, super-sensible truth, and everybody who faced these facts tried to understand them in his way. The Christian faith found a confirmation of its ancient church faith; also some orthodox have accepted it to find favourable proofs of their case. Others also found confirmation from the standpoints of the material thinking which assesses everything only according to the material relations.

Also those who were thorough scientific researchers like Zöllner, Weber, Fechner and also several famous mathematicians like Simony et cetera tried to get closer to the case, while they moved from the three-dimensional on the four-dimensional. The philosophical individualists who could not believe that in the spiritual world also an individualistic development exists like in the physical one were led by means of thorough investigation to understand that the human way, this sensory way to be—to see with bodily eyes to hear with bodily ears—is only one way of many possible ways. The representatives of a super-sensible spiritism like Hellenbach found their ideas confirmed on account of the spiritistic facts. If you imagine a person who knew to deal with the peculiarities of every single medium who knew how to adapt himself to the most difficult circumstances, so that it was a relief to meet him, Hellenbach was such a man. Also those who spoke only about a psychic force of which one does not and needs not think a lot also these followers of a psychic force, like Eduard von Hartmann or also spirits like du Prel of whom I will speak next time, they all explained the facts in their ways. There were many theories, from the popular interpretations for the people who looked after the manifesting spirits, after writing media, after communications by knocking sounds et cetera, from these religious seekers in old way up to the most enlightened spirits: everybody explained these phenomena in his way. This was in the time when this lack of clarity prevailed in every field, in the time when the phenomena could no longer be denied—but the minds of the human beings proved to be absolutely incapable to do justice to the super-sensible world.

In this time the ground was prepared to a renewal of the mystic way, to a renewal of that way which was taken in former times in the occult science and in the mysteries, but in such way that it is accessible to everybody who wants to go it. The Theosophical Society was founded by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky to open an understanding of the ways. The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. It is based on the old movements, however, also on the newest researches.

Somebody who gets a better understanding of the theosophical movement will find that the way of theosophy or spiritual science which leads to the super-sensible truth is on one side really spiritual, on the other side, that it answers the questions: where does the human being come from, where does he go to, what is his vocation?

We know that one had to speak in certain way to the human beings of antiquity, in more different way to those of the Middle Ages, and again in another way to the modern human beings. The facts of theosophy are ancient. But you convince yourselves if you seek on the way of theosophy or spiritual science that it satisfies any demand of modern scientific nature if it is understood in its very own figure. He would be a bad theosophist who wanted to give up any of the scientific truths for theosophy. Knowledge on the bright, clear way of true scientific nature—yes, but no knowledge which limits itself to sensory things which limits itself to that which takes place in the human being between birth and death, but also knowledge of that which is beyond birth and death. Spiritual science cannot do this without having the authorisation of it—just within a materialistic age. It is aware that all the spiritual movements must converge at a great goal at last which the spiritists will find in spiritual science in the end. However, it searches the spiritual on other, more comprehensive ways; it knows that the spiritual is not found in the sensory world and also not by arrangements of sensory nature only, maybe by means of a beholding which is analogous to the sensory looking. It knows that there is a world of which one receives an insight only if one goes through a kind of spiritual operation which is similar to the operation of a blind-born that is made sighted. It knows that it is not right if the modern human being says: show me the super-sensible like something sensory.—It knows that the answer is: human being, rise up to the higher spheres of the spiritual world, while you yourself become more and more spiritual, so that the connection with the spiritual world is in such a way as the connection is with the sensuous world by means of your sensory eyes and ears.

Theosophy or spiritual science has that viewpoint which a believer of the Middle Ages, a deep mystic, Master Eckhart, expressed, while he characterised that the really spiritual cannot be searched for in the same way as the sensuous. In the 13th, 14th centuries, he expressed meaningfully that one cannot receive the spiritual by sensuous performances, by anything that is analogous to the sensuous. Therefore, he says the great truth leading to the super-sensible: people want to look at God with the eyes, as if they looked at a cow and loved it. They want to look at God as if He stood there and here. It is not that way. God and I are one in recognition.

We do not want to behold a higher world by means of events like knocking sounds or other sensuous arrangements. It is called a super-sensible world, indeed, but it is similar to the sensuous world round us.—Eckhart characterises such apparently super-sensible events saying: such people want to behold God as they look at a cow. However, we want to behold the spiritual developing our spiritual eyes like nature developed our bodily eyes to let us see the physical. Nature has dismissed us with outer senses to make the sensuous perceptible to us. The way, however, to develop further in the sensuous to the spiritual to be able to behold the spiritual with spiritual eyes—we ourselves have to go this spiritual way in free development, also in the sense of modern development.

Notes:

In the title of the talk, the term spiritism is used instead of the more common term spiritualism. Allan Kardec used it for the first time in his book The Spirits’ Book. Since then it is used outside the English speaking world to distinguish spiritism and spiritualism (Spiritualismus). The latter term is applied to the opposite of (philosophical, religious) materialism.

St. Augustine (354–430): Evangelio non crederem, nisi me ecclesia commoveret auctoritas (Contr. Epist. Manich., 5)

Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484), cf. CW 130

Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse: Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries (1853). Davis dictated his first and most significant book in trance in 1845: The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind.

Robert Fludd (1574–1637), English philosopher and physician, Rosicrucian
Apologia Compendaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce … (1616)
Microcosmi Historia (1619)
Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae Fluddanae (1633)

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his Divine Comedy

It was in 1716: M. Martin Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, London 1703
Martin Martin (?–1719), Scottish writer

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and philosopher

Stockholm: the place from which Swedenborg saw the conflagration was Goteborg, 400 km away from Stockholm.

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 -1782), Swabian theologian and theosopher

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), German pietistic-mystic author

Joseph Ennemoser (1787–1854), physician and mesmerist

Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849), Protestant theologian, politician
Hades, a Contribution to the Theory of Spirits (1810) (link to German page as the article in the English wikipedia is insufficient)

Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), German physician, poet, author
History of Two Somnambulists (1824), The Seeress of Prevorst. Revelations of the Human Inner Life and about the Penetrations of the Spirit World into ours (1828), Leaves from Prevorst (1831–1839), The Somnambulistic Tables (1853)

Seeress of Prevorst: Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829), somnambulist, born in a little village, named Prevorst

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian and writer of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846)

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), 16th President of the United States

Thomas Edison (1847–1931), American inventor and businessman

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), British politician, Prime Minister

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), British mathematician and logician

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), German physician, founder of experimental psychology

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), German philosopher and experimental psychologist, the founder of psychophysics

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882),German astrophysicist. He explains that the spiritistic phenomena are caused in a four-dimensional space and appear as shadows in the three-dimensional space: Transcendental Physics (1878)

Henry Slade (1835–1905), fraudulent medium

Baron Lazar von Hellenbach (1827–1887), Austrian politician, philosophical and socio-political writer, famous spiritist. On the Magic of Figures (Vienna, 1882).

Allan Kardec (pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–1869), French spiritist, systematiser of spiritism

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1858–1889)

Archduke Johann Nepomuk Salvator of Austria (1852–1890?) Einblicke in den Spiritismus (Insights into Spiritism) (1885)

Oskar Simony (1852–1915), Austrian mathematician and physicist: On Spiritistic Manifestations from the Scientific Standpoint (1884), cf. R. Steiner mentions him in CW 169 Toward Imagination (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), lecture 6

Master Eckhart (~1260–1327), German Dominican monk and mystic, c f. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism

[ 1 ] A gloriously shining star in the firmament of medieval spiritual life is Nicolas Chrypffs of Cusa (near Treves, 1401–1464) He stands upon the heights of the learning of his time. In mathematics he has produced outstanding work. In natural science he may be described as the precursor of Copernicus, for he held the point of view that the earth is a moving heavenly body like others. He had already broken with the view on which the great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, still relied a hundred years later when he flung the following sentence against the teaching of Copernicus: “The earth is a coarse and heavy mass, unsuited for movement; how can Copernicus make a star of it and lead it around in the atmosphere?” Nicolas of Cusa, who not only encompassed the knowledge of his time but developed it further, also to a high degree had the capacity of awakening this knowledge to an inner life, so that it not only elucidates the external world but also procures for man that spiritual life for which he must long from the most profound depths of his soul. If one compares Nicolas with such spirits as Eckhart or Tauler, one reaches an important conclusion. Nicolas is the scientific thinker who wants to raise himself to a higher view as the result of his research into the things of the world; Eckhart and Tauler are the believing confessors who seek the higher life through the contents of their faith. Nicolas finally reaches the same inner life as Meister Eckhart, but the content of the inner life of the former is a rich learning. The full meaning of the difference becomes clear when one considers that for one who interests himself in the various sciences there is a real danger of misjudging the scope of the way of knowing which elucidates the different fields of learning. Such a person can easily be misled into the belief that there is only one way of knowing. He will then either under—or over—estimate this knowing, which leads to the goal in things pertaining to the different sciences. In the one case he will approach objects of the highest spiritual life in the same way as a problem in physics, and deal with them in terms of concepts that he uses to deal with the force of gravity and with electricity. According to whether he considers himself to be more or less enlightened, to him the world becomes a blindly acting mechanism, an organism, the functional construction of a personal God, or perhaps a structure directed and penetrated by a more or less clearly imagined “world soul.” In the other case he notices that the particular knowledge of which he has experience is useful only for the things of the sensory world; then he becomes a skeptic who says to himself: we cannot know anything about the things which lie beyond the world of the senses. Our knowledge has a boundary. As far as the needs of the higher life are concerned, we can only throw ourselves into the arms of a faith untouched by knowledge. For a learned theologian like Nicolas of Cusa, who was at the same time a natural scientist, the second danger was especially real. In his education he was after all a product of Scholasticism, the dominant philosophy in the scholarly life of the Church of the Middle Ages, which had been brought to its highest flower by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the “Prince of Scholastics.” This philosophy must be used as a background if one wants to depict the personality of Nicolas of Cusa.

[ 2 ] Scholasticism is in the highest degree a product of human ingenuity. In it the logical faculty celebrated its greatest triumphs. One who aims to elaborate concepts in their sharpest and clearest contours should serve an apprenticeship with the Scholastics. It is they who provide the highest schooling for the technique of thinking. They have an incomparable agility in moving in the field of pure thought. It is easy to underestimate what they were capable of accomplishing in this field. For in most areas of learning the latter is accessible to man only with difficulty. Most people attain it clearly only in the realms of counting, of arithmetic, and in thinking about the properties of geometric forms. We can count by adding a unit to a number in our thoughts, without calling sensory images to our help. We also calculate without such images, in the pure element of thought alone. As for geometric forms, we know that they do not completely coincide with any sensory image. In the reality of the senses there exists no (conceptual) circle. And yet our thinking occupies itself with the latter. For objects and processes which are more complicated than numerical and spatial structures, it is more difficult to find conceptual counter-parts. This has led to the claim made in some quarters that there is only as much real knowledge in the various fields of investigation as there is that in them which can be measured and counted. This is as decidedly wrong as is anything one-sided; but it seduces many, as often only something one-sided can. Here the truth is that most people are not capable of grasping purely conceptual when it is no longer a matter of something measurable or countable. But one who cannot do this in connection with higher realms of life and knowledge resembles in this respect a child who has not yet learned to count in any other way than by adding one pea to another. The thinker who said that there is as much true knowledge in any field of learning as there is mathematics in it, did not grasp the full truth of the matter. One must require that everything which cannot be measured and counted, is to be treated in the same conceptual fashion as numerical and spatial structures. And this requirement was respected by the Scholastics in the highest degree. Everywhere they sought the conceptual content of things, just as the mathematician seeks it in the area of the measurable and countable.

[ 3 ] In spite of this accomplished logical skill the Scholastics attained only a one-sided and subordinate concept of cognition. According to this concept, in the process of cognition man produces in himself an image of what he is to grasp. It is quite obvious that with such a concept of cognition, one must place all reality outside of cognition. For in the process of cognition one cannot then grasp a thing itself, but only an image of this thing. Man also cannot grasp himself in his self-knowledge; what he grasps of himself is only an image of his self. It is quite in the spirit of Scholasticism that someone who is closely acquainted with it says (K. Werner in his Franz Suarez und die Scholastik der letzten Jahrhunderte, Francisco Suarez and the Scholasticism of the Last Centuries, p. 122): “In time man has no perception of his self, the hidden foundation of his spiritual nature and life; ... he will never be able to look at himself; for either, forever estranged from God, he will find in himself only a bottomless dark abyss and endless emptiness, or he will, blessed in God, and turning his gaze inward, find only God, Whose sun of grace shines within him, and Whose image reflects itself in the spiritual traits of his nature.” One who thinks about all cognition in this way has only a concept of that cognition which is applicable to external things. What is sensory in a thing always remains external to us. Therefore into our cognition we can only receive images of what is sensory in the world. When we perceive a color or a stone we cannot ourselves become color or stone in order to know the nature of the color or of the stone. And neither can the color or the stone transform itself into a part of our own natura! But it must be asked, Is the concept of such a cognition, focused as it is upon the external in things, an exhaustive one?—It is true that for Scholasticism all human cognition coincides in its essentials with this cognition. Another writer who knows Scholasticism extremely well, (Otto Willmann, in his Geschichte des Idealismus, History of Idealism, V. 2, 2nd ed., p. 396) characterizes the concept of cognition of this philosophy in the following way: “Our spirit, associated with the body as it is in earthly life, is primarily directed toward the surrounding world of matter, but focused upon the spiritual in it; that is, the essences, natures, and forms of things, the elements of existence which are akin to it and provide it with the rungs by which it ascends to the supra-sensory; the field of our cognition is thus the realm of experience, but we should learn to understand what it offers, penetrate to its sense and idea, and thereby open to ourselves the world of ideas.” The Scholastic could not attain a different concept of cognition. He was prevented from doing so by the dogmatic teaching of his theology. If he had fixed his spiritual eye upon what he considered to be a mere image, he would have seen that the spiritual content of things reveals itself in this supposed image; he would then have found that God does not merely reflect Himself within him, but that He lives in him, is present in him in His essence. In looking within himself he would not have beheld a dark abyss, an endless emptiness, nor merely an image of God; rather would he have felt that a life pulses in him which is the divine life itself, and that his own life is the life of God. This the Scholastic could not admit. In his opinion God could not enter into him and speak out of him; He could only exist in him as an image. In reality, the Divinity had to be presupposed outside the self. Thus it had to reveal itself through supernatural communications from the outside, and could not do so within, through the spiritual life. But what is intended by this is exactly what is least achieved. It is the highest possible concept of the Divinity which is to be attained. In reality, the Divinity is degraded to a thing among other things, but these other things reveal themselves to man in a natural manner, through experience, while the Divinity is to reveal Itself to him supernaturally. However, a difference between the cognition of the Divine and of the creation is made in saying that, as concerns the creation, the external thing is given in the experience, that one has knowledge of it. As concerns the Divine, the object is not given in the experience; one can only attain it through faith. Thus for the Scholastic the highest things are not objects of knowledge, but only of faith. It is true that, according to the Scholastic view, the relationship of knowledge to faith is not to be imagined in such a way that in a certain field only knowledge reigns, in another only faith. For “cognition of the existing is possible for us, because it originates in a creative cognition; things are for the spirit because they are from the spirit; they tell us something because they have a meaning which a higher intelligence has put into them.” (O. Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, History of Idealism, V. 2, p. 383.) Since God has created the world according to His ideas, if we grasp the ideas of the world, we can also grasp the traces of the Divine in the world through scientific reflection. But what God is in His essence we can only grasp through the revelation which He has given us in a supernatural manner, and in which we must believe. What we must think concerning the highest things is not decided by any human knowledge, but by faith; and “to faith belongs everything that is contained in the Scriptures of the New and Old Covenant, and in the divine traditions.” (Joseph Kleutgen, Die Theologie der Vorzeit, The Theology of Antiquity, V. 1, p. 39.)—We cannot make it our task here to describe in detail and to explain the relationship of the content of faith to that of knowledge. In reality, the content of all faith originates in an inner experience man has had at some time. It is then preserved, according to its external import, without the consciousness of how it was acquired. It is said of it that it came into the world through supernatural revelation. The content of the Christian faith was simply accepted by the Scholastics as tradition. Science and inner experience were not allowed to claim any rights over it. Scholasticism could no more permit itself to create a concept of God than science can create a tree; it had to accept the revealed concept as given, just as natural science accepts the tree as given. The Scholastic could never admit that the spiritual itself shines and lives within man. He therefore drew a limit to the jurisdiction of science where the field of external experience ends. Human cognition could not be permitted to produce a concept of the higher entities out of itself. It was to accept revealed one. That in doing this it actually only accepted one which had been produced at an earlier stage of human spiritual life, and declared it to be a revealed one, this the Scholastics could not admit.—In the course of the development of Scholasticism therefore, all those ideas had disappeared from it which still indicated the manner in which man has produced the concepts of the Divine in a natural way. In the first centuries of the development of Christianity, at the time of the Fathers of the Church, we see how the content of the teachings of theology came into being little by little through the inclusion of inner experiences. This content is still treated entirely as an inner experience by Johannes Scotus Erigena, who stood at the height of Christian theological learning in the ninth century. Among the Scholastics of the succeeding centuries this quality of an inner experience is completely lost; the old content is reinterpreted as the content of an external, supernatural revelation.—One can therefore interpret the activity of the mystical theologians Eckhart, Tauler, Suso and their companions by saying: They were inspired by the content of the teachings of the Church, which is contained in theology, but had been reinterpreted, to bring forth a similar content out of themselves anew as an inner experience.

[ 4 ] Nicolas of Cusa enters upon the task of ascending by oneself to inner experiences from the knowledge one acquires in the different sciences. There can be no doubt that the excellent logical technique the Scholastics had developed and for which Nicolas had been educated, furnishes an excellent means for attaining inner experiences, although the Scholastics themselves were kept from this road by their positive faith. But one will only understand Nicolas completely when one considers that his vocation as priest, which raised him to the dignity of Cardinal, prevented him from making a complete break with the faith of the Church, which found its contemporary expression in Scholastic theology. We find him so far advanced along a certain path that every further step would of necessity have led him out of the Church. Therefore we understand the Cardinal best if we complete that step which he did not take, and then in retrospect illuminate what had been his intention.

[ 5 ] The most important concept of the spiritual life of Nicolas is that of “learned ignorance.” By this he understands a cognition which represents a higher level, as opposed to ordinary knowledge. Knowledge in the subordinate sense is the grasping of an object by the spirit. The most important characteristic of knowledge is that it gives information about something outside the spirit, that is, that it looks at something which it itself is not. In knowledge, the spirit thus is occupied with things thought of as being outside of it. But what the spirit forms in itself concerning things is the essence of things. Things arc spirit. At first man sees the spirit only through the sensory covering. What remains outside the spirit is only this sensory covering; the essence of things enters into the spirit. When the spirit then looks upon this essence, which is substance of its substance, it can no longer speak of knowledge, for it does not look upon a thing which is outside of it; it looks upon a thing which is a part of itself; it looks upon itself. It no longer knows; it only looks upon itself. It is not concerned with a “knowing,” but with a “not-knowing.” It no longer grasps something through the spirit; it “beholds, without grasping,” its own life. This highest level of cognition, in relation to the lower levels, is a “not-knowing.”—It will be seen that the essence of things can only be communicated through this level of cognition. With his “learned not-knowing” Nicolas of Cusa thus speaks of nothing but the knowledge reborn as inner experience. He himself tells how he came to have this inner experience. “I made many attempts to unite my thoughts about God and the world, about Christ and the Church in one fundamental idea, but of them all none satisfied me until finally, during the return from Greece by sea, the gaze of my spirit lifted itself, as if through an inspiration from on high, to the view in which God appeared to me as the highest unity of all contrasts.” To a greater or lesser extent the influences which derive from a study of his predecessors are involved in this inspiration. In his way of thinking one recognizes a peculiar renewal of the ideas we encounter in the writing of a certain Dionysius. Scotus Erigena, mentioned above, had translated this work into Latin. He calls the author “the great and divine revealer.” These writings were first mentioned in the first half of the sixth century. They were ascribed to that Dionysius the Aeropagite mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by Paul. Here we shall not go into the problem as to when these writings were really composed. Their contents had a strong effect on Nicolas, as they already had on Johannes Scotus Erigena, and as they must also have been stimulating in many respects for the way of thinking of Eckhart and his companions. The “learned not-knowing” is prefigured in a certain way in these writings. Here we shall record only the main feature of the way of thinking of these writings. Man first comes to know the things of the sensory world. He reflects on their existence and activity. The primordial foundation of all things must lie higher than the things themselves. Man therefore cannot expect to grasp this primordial foundation with the same concepts and ideas as he grasps the things themselves. If therefore he attributes to the primordial foundation (God) qualities which he knows from lower things, these qualities can only be auxiliary ideas of the weak spirit, which draws the primordial foundation down to itself in order to be able to imagine it. In reality, therefore, no quality which lower things have can be said to belong to God. It cannot even be said that God is. For “being” too is a concept which man has formed in connection with lower things. But God is exalted above “being” and “not-being.” Thus the God to Whom we ascribe qualities is not the true one. We arrive at the true God if we imagine a “Supergod” above a God with such qualities. Of this “Supergod” we can know nothing in the ordinary sense. In order to reach Him, “knowing” must flow into “not-knowing.”—One can see that such a view is based on the consciousness that out of what his sciences have furnished him man himself—in a purely natural way—can develop a higher cognition, which is no longer mere knowledge. The Scholastic view declared knowledge to be incapable of such a development, and at the point where knowledge is supposed to end, it had faith, based on an external revelation, come to the aid of knowledge.—Nicolas of Cusa thus was on the way toward once again developing that out of knowledge which the Scholastics had declared to be unattainable for cognition.

[ 6 ] From the point of view of Nicolas of Cusa therefore, one cannot say that there is only one kind of cognition. Cognition, on the contrary, is clearly divided into what mediates a knowledge of external things, and what is itself the object of which one acquires knowledge. The former kind of cognition rules in the sciences which we acquire concerning the things and processes of the sensory world; the latter kind is in us when we ourselves live in what has been acquired. The second kind of cognition develops from the first. Yet it is the same world to which both kinds of cognition refer, and it is the same man who shares in both. The question must arise, How does it come about that one and the same man develops two kinds of cognition of one and the same world?—The direction in which the answer to this question is to be sought was already indicated in our discussion of Tauler (cf. above). Here this answer can be formulated even more definitely with regard to Nicolas of Cusa. First of all, man lives as a separate (individual) being among other separate beings. To the influences which the other beings exercise upon one another, in him is added the faculty of (lower) cognition. Through his senses he receives impressions of the other beings, and he works upon these impressions with his spiritual faculties. He directs his spiritual gaze away from external things and looks at himself, at his own activity. Thus self-knowledge arises in him. As long as he remains upon this level of self-knowledge he does not yet look upon himself in the true sense of the word. He can still believe that there is some hidden entity active within him, and that what appears to him as his activity are only the manifestations and actions of this entity. But the point can come at which it becomes clear to man through an incontrovertible inner experience that in what he perceives and experiences within himself he possesses, not the manifestation, the action, of a hidden force or entity, but this entity itself in its primordial form. He can then say to himself: All other things I encounter in a way ready-made, and I, who stand outside them, add to them what the spirit has to say with regard to them. But in what I myself thus creatively add to things in myself, in that I myself live, that is what I am, that is my own essence. But what is it that speaks in the depths of my spirit? It is knowledge that speaks, the knowledge I have acquired about the things of the world. But in this knowledge it is not some action, some manifestation which speaks; something speaks which keeps nothing back of what it has in itself. In this knowledge speaks the world in all its immediacy. But I have acquired this knowledge from things and from myself, as from a thing among things. Out of my own essence it is I myself and the things who speak. In reality I no longer merely express my nature; I express the nature of things. My “I” is the form, the organ through which things declare themselves with regard to themselves. I have gained the experience that I experience my own essence within myself, and for me this experience becomes enlarged into another, that in me and through me the universal essence expresses itself, or, in other words, knows itself. Now I can no longer feel myself to be a thing among things; I can only feel myself to be a form in which the universal essence has its life.—It is therefore only natural that one and the same man should have two kinds of cognition. With regard to the sensory facts he is a thing among things, and, insofar as this is the case, he acquires a knowledge of these things; but at any moment he can have the higher experience that he is the form in which the universal essence looks upon itself. Then he himself is transformed from a thing among things into a form of the universal essence—and with him the knowledge of things is changed into an utterance of the nature of things. This transformation however can in fact be accomplished only by man himself. What is mediated in the higher cognition is not yet present as long as this higher cognition itself is not present. It is only in creating this higher cognition that man develops his nature, and only through the higher cognition of man does the nature of things come into actual existence. If therefore it is required that man should not add anything to the things of the senses through his higher cognition, but should express only what already lies in them in the outside world, then this simply means renouncing all higher cognition.—From the fact that, as regards his sensory life, man is a thing among things, and that he only attains higher cognition when as a sensory being he himself accomplishes his transformation into a higher being, from this it follows that he can never replace the one cognition by the other. Rather, his spiritual life consists of a perpetual moving to and fro between the two poles of cognition, between knowing and seeing. If he shuts himself off from seeing, he foregoes the nature of things; if he were to shut himself off from sensory knowing, he would deprive himself of the things whose nature he wants to understand.—The same things reveal themselves to the lower understanding and to the higher seeing, only they do this at one time with regard to their external appearance, at the other time with regard to their inner essence.—Thus it is not due to things themselves that at a certain stage they appear only as external objects; rather it is due to the fact that man must first transform himself to the point where he can reach the stage at which things cease to be external.

[ 7 ] It is only with these considerations in mind that certain views natural science elaborated in the nineteenth century appear in their proper light. The adherents of these views say to themselves: We hear, see, and touch the things of the material world through the senses. The eye, for instance, communicates to us a phenomenon of light, a color. We say that a body emits red light when, by the mediation of our eye, we have the sensation “red.” But the eye gives us this sensation in other cases too. If it is struck or pressed, if an electric current passes through the head, the eye has a sensation of light. Hence in those instances also in which we have the sensation that a body emits light of a certain color, something may be occurring in that body which does not have any resemblance to color. No matter what is occurring in outside space, as long as this process is suitable for making an impression upon the eye, a sensation of color arises in me. What we perceive arises in us because we have organs that are constituted in a certain way. What goes on in outside space remains outside of us; we know only the effects which external processes bring forth in us. Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894) has given expression to this idea in a clearly defined way. “Our perceptions are effects produced in our organs by external causes, and the way such an effect manifests itself is of course substantially dependent on the kind of apparatus acted upon. Insofar as the quality of our perception gives us information about the characteristics of the external influence by which it is caused, it can be considered as a sign of the latter, but not as a likeness of it. For of an image one requires some kind of similarity to the object represented: of a statue, similarity of form; of a drawing, similarity of the perspective projection in the field of view; of a painting, in addition to this, similarity of colors. But a sign need not have any kind of resemblance to that of which it is a sign. The relationship between the two is limited to this, that the same object, exercising its influence under the same circumstances, calls forth the same sign, and that therefore unlike signs always correspond to unlike influences ... If in ripening berries of a certain variety develop both a red pigment and sugar, then red color and sweet taste will always be found together in our perception of berries of this kind.” (cf. Helmholtz: Die Tatsachen der Wahrnehmung, The Facts of Perception, p. 12 f.) I have characterized this way of thinking in detail in my Philosophie der Freiheit, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and in my Rätsel der Philosophie, Riddles of Philosophy, 1918.—Let us now follow step by step the train of thought which is adopted in this view. A process is assumed in outside space. It produces an effect upon my sensory organ; my nervous system transmits to my brain the impression produced. Another process is effected there. I now perceive “red.” Now it is said: The perception of “red” is thus not outside; it is in me. All our perceptions are only signs of external processes, the real character of which we know nothing. We live and act among our perceptions, and know nothing about their origin. In line with this way of thinking one can also say: If we had no eye there would be no color; nothing would then transform the external process, which is unknown to us, into the perception “red.” For many this train of thought is something seductive. Nevertheless it rests upon a complete misinterpretation of the facts under consideration. (If many contemporary natural scientists and philosophers were not deluded to a truly monstrous degree by this train of thought, one would not have to talk about it so much. But this delusion has in fact vitiated contemporary thinking in many respects.) Since man is a thing among things, it is of course necessary that things should make an impression upon him if he is to find out anything about them. A process outside of man must give rise to a process in man if the phenomenon “red” is to appear in the field of vision. One must only ask, What is outside, what inside? Outside is a process which takes place in space and time. But inside doubtless is a similar process. Such a process exists in the eye and communicates itself to the brain when I perceive “red.” I cannot directly perceive the process which is “inside,” any more than I can immediately perceive the wave motion “outside,” which physicists consider corresponds to the color “red.” But it is only in this sense that I can speak of an “outside” and an “inside.” Only on the level of sensory perception does the contrast between “outside” and “inside” have any validity. This perception leads me to assume a spatial-temporal process “outside,” although I cannot perceive it directly. And, further, the same perception leads me to assume such a process within me, although I cannot perceive it directly either. But, after all, I also assume spatial-temporal processes in ordinary life which I cannot directly perceive. For example, I hear a piano being played in the next room. Therefore I assume that a human being with spatial dimensions sits at the piano and plays. And my way of representing things to myself is no different when I speak of processes within me and outside of me. I assume that these processes have characteristics analogous to those of the processes which fall within the domain of my senses, only that, for certain reasons, they are not accessible to my direct observation. If I were to deny to these processes all those qualities my senses show me in the realm of the spatial and the temporal, I would in truth be imagining something like the famous knife without a handle of which the blade is missing. Thus I can only say that “outside” occur spatial-temporal processes, and that they cause spatial-temporal processes “inside.” Both are necessary if “red” is to appear in my field of vision. Insofar as it is not spatial-temporal I shall look for this red in vain, no matter whether I look for it “outside” or “inside.” The natural scientists and philosophers who cannot find it “outside” should not attempt to look for it “inside” either. It is not “inside” in the same sense in which it is not “outside.” To declare that the entire content of what the world of the senses presents to us is an inner world of perceptions, and to look for something “external” corresponding to it, is an impossible idea. Therefore we cannot say that “red,” “sweet,” “hot,” etc. are signs which as such, are only caused to arise in us and to which something quite different on the “outside” corresponds. For what is really caused in us as the effect of an external process is something quite different from what appears in the field of our perceptions. If one wants to call what is in us signs, then one can say: These signs appear within our organism in order to communicate perceptions to us which, as such, in their immediacy are neither inside nor outside us, but rather belong to that common world of which my “external world” and my “interior world” are only parts. It is true that in order to be able to grasp this common world I must raise myself to that higher level of cognition for which an “inside” and an “outside” no longer exist. (I am well aware that people who rely on the gospel that “our entire world of experience” is made up of sensations of unknown origin will look down haughtily upon this exposition, in somewhat the same way as Dr. Erich Adikes in his work, Kant contra Haeckel says condescendingly: “For the time being, people like Haeckel and thousands of his kind philosophize merrily on, without worrying about any theory of cognition or about critical introspection.” Such gentlemen of course have no suspicion of how paltry their theories of cognition are. They suspect a lack of critical introspection only in others. We shall not begrudge them their “wisdom.”)

[ 8 ] It is just on the point under consideration here that Nicolas of Cusa has excellent ideas. His keeping the lower and the higher cognition clearly separated from each other permits him on the one hand to gain a full insight into the fact that as a sensory being man can have within himself only processes which must, as effects, be unlike the corresponding external processes; on the other hand, it preserves him from confusing the inner processes with the facts which appear in our field of perception and which, in their immediacy, are neither outside nor inside, but are elevated above this contrast.—Nicolas was “prevented by his priestly cloth” from following without reservations the path which this insight indicated to him. We see him making a good beginning with the advance from “knowing” to “not-knowing.” But at the same time we must observe that in the field of “not-knowing” he has nothing to show except the theological teachings which are offered to us by the Scholastics also. It is true that he knows how to develop this theological content in an ingenious manner: on providence, Christ, the creation of the world, man's redemption, the moral life, he presents teachings which are altogether in line with dogmatic Christianity. It would have been in keeping with his spiritual direction to say: I have confidence that human nature, having immersed itself in the sciences of things on all sides, is able from within itself to transform this “knowing” into a “not-knowing,” hence that the highest cognition brings satisfaction. Then he would not have accepted, as he has, the traditional ideas of soul, immortality, redemption, God, creation, the Trinity, etc., but would have upheld those which he himself had found.—But Nicolas, personally was so penetrated with the concepts of Christianity that he could well believe he was awakening his own proper “not-knowing” within himself, while he was only putting forth the traditional views in which he had been educated—However it must be considered that he was standing before a fateful abyss in human spiritual life. He was a scientific man. And science at first removes man from the innocent concord in which he exists with the world as long as the conduct of his life is a purely naïve one. In such a conduct of life man dimly feels his connection with the totality of the universe. He is a being like others, integrated into the chain of natural effects. With knowledge he separates himself from this whole. He creates a spiritual world within himself. With it he confronts nature in solitude. He has become richer, but this wealth is a burden which he bears with difficulty. For at first it weighs upon him alone. He must find the way back to nature through his own resources. He must understand that now he himself must integrate his wealth into the chain of universal effects, as nature herself had integrated his poverty before. It is here that all the evil demons lie in wait for man. His strength can easily fail. Instead of accomplishing the integration himself, when this occurs, he will take refuge in a revelation from the outside, which again delivers him from his solitude, and leads the knowledge he feels to be a burden back into the primordial origin of existence, the Divinity. He will think, as did Nicolas of Cusa, that he is walking his own road, while in reality he will only find the one his spiritual development has shown him. Now there are three roads—in the main—upon which one can walk when one arrives where Nicolas had arrived: one is positive faith, which comes to us from outside; the second is despair: one stands alone with one's burden and feels all existence tottering with oneself; the third road is the development of man's own deepest faculties. Confidence in the world must be one leader along this third road. Courage to follow this confidence, no matter where it leads, must be the other.³

• 3. Addendum III to the 1923 Edition:
  In a few words I hint here at the road to the cognition of the spirit which I have described in my later writings, especially in Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten, How does one Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Umriss einer Geheimwissenschaft, Outline of a Secret Science, Von Seelenrätseln, Riddles of the Soul.—Addendum III to the 1923 Edition

This is presumably a transcription by Rudolf Steiner, but there is no original for it. The text is based on a handwritten template with the note “F.M.”

Man is born of the Godhead. Sublime spiritual entities were active in his construction, cosmic forces were at work, and so he was built out of the cosmos, he emerged from the cosmos.

The first state of evolution, in which the influence of those cosmic forces can be indicated, was that which is called the ancient Saturn state. Then these forces began to work in space and in time, so that ancient Saturn came into being in space and the evolution of ancient Saturn took place in time. At that time there was no solar system with planets, there was only a body of warmth, surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac, which poured their forces into this body of warmth, as if from the circumference into a common center. From this center other forces counteracted them, but the forces acting into it were stronger, and thus the tendency towards the centripetal arose in this development. When the present-day minerals on our earth are observed from the spiritual point of view, the same effect can be found in them, only that here one has to do with solid earthly matter. Coming from different sides, far away from the world, spiritual forces have an effect on a common point in space, and the stone or mineral arises in this center. From this point, forces come to meet this effect, but the incoming forces are strongest. Thus, through the influence of the twelve constellations from the surrounding area on a point in space, the first embodiment of the present earth as a ball of heat, as the old Saturn, arose at that time. Because these forces were superior to those acting towards the center, further condensation and a kind of fragmentation occurred. During the further development, several points formed in the one center, and so finally the whole planet consisted of nothing but such points of force, which were formed by the action of cosmic forces or spiritual beings in the cosmos. In these centers themselves spiritual beings were again active, they animated them and formed them so that they could become the basis for what later became man. Then man was already endowed with the powers which, continuing to work in the future, could give him the physical body that he now inhabits as a self-aware earthly human being. Then he also received the disposition for what he, as a spiritual being, will later develop through his own efforts. The germ for life in the physical and in the spiritual was laid on old Saturn; a physical and a spiritual center was predisposed for the human being. When this development had progressed to a certain point, the spiritual forces withdrew their effect, a kind of planetary night, a state of rest, occurred, and when the next day arrived, the earth emerged in its new embodiment as the old sun.

The process of evolution continued. Taking up the preceding Saturn condition, everything repeated itself under different conditions, and then something new was added. The centers that had arisen on the old Saturn emerged again in the old sun condition. Due to the still-operating centripetal forces, the old sun was more compressed as a heavenly body than the old Saturn. It had become more condensed and was also less extended in space. As a physical center it did not need to pour out its forces into space; it could gather itself more and keep something for itself as its own inner strength of its nature. This it could reveal in such a way that it could send something towards the influence of the zodiac that came out of itself in the light that it radiated into its surroundings. It was precisely through the condensation in relation to the physical that the possibility arose to give something of oneself that worked spiritually. It was the same with the individual centers on the old sun. Through their own power they could radiate something of themselves, it became possible to spread their being into the surroundings, which can be described as growth in the light. In our present-day development on earth, a similar force is at work in the plant kingdom, only that it takes place in dense earthly matter. Just as today's plants grow out of their seeds towards the sunlight, so on the old sun there arose a growth, a spreading out and a coming forth into the light from the centers into the environment. Not only did the forces of the twelve constellations act on the old sun from the surrounding area, but it itself sent something in return to these forces in the radiating light. And out of it, in the form of a germ, grew those planets that we know today under different conditions in our physical solar system. Just as the seven colors can reveal themselves out of the white light through a refraction of rays, so too, in those days, these planets were forming in the sun itself as radiant points of light.

In turn, spiritual beings were active at the centers and formed them in such a way that they became the basis for what man today knows as his life body or etheric body. Man was also given the basis for what he will later acquire as the spirit of life. The principle of growth and expansion was developed in both the physical and spiritual centers of the human being during the ancient solar evolution, because just as the etheric body provides the possibility of growth for the physical body, so the life spirit is what can be called the environment, the surroundings of the spiritual center of the spiritual man, in which he reveals himself.

The centripetal force that was active in the Saturn development continued to operate in the old solar state. This resulted in condensation, so that the ball of heat had become a ball of gas. Through this force, the living beings also divided and became different from each other. Through the centrifugal force, however, the sun radiated and the living beings were also able to step out of their particular form and grow.

After this development had been going on for some time, there was another period of rest, during which the cosmic forces withdrew their activity. Then the earth emerged from the cosmic night in its new embodiment as the old moon, and what had existed in the two previous stages of development was repeated under different conditions. The solidification, the contraction of the world body and of the individual centers or bodies of the living beings continued, and thus a stronger manifestation of inner forces became possible. The centripetal and the centrifugal forces both worked and sought to come to a settlement. This created powerful vibrations. On the one hand, the effect of the centripetal force was evident in the compaction of the old moon and in the individual centers, which became more and more separated from their environment. On the other hand, the centrifugal force found expression in the possibility of revealing more and more spiritual forces from the centers into the environment. These two forces worked together in such a way that they led to a crisis during the evolution of the old moon. A kind of split occurred in the world body. One part of the old moon, in which the centrifugal forces exerted their influence in particular, separated from the other part, in which the centripetal forces remained active in particular. This resulted in one cosmic body sending its forces outwards in particular and revealing itself in its environment, radiating its spiritual power as light, as the sun, and another cosmic body that was subjected to further condensation and on which the further development of those living beings took place that later became earth humans, as the old moon.

Through this contraction, the bodies of the living beings became more and more dense and more dependent on themselves, and the possibility arose for stronger inner forces to reveal themselves. This enabled the living beings to resonate with what was acting on them from the outside, so that they could respond in a certain way. A sound then arose that emerged from the beings' inner selves and was a repetition of the sound that came to them from their environment. The old moon had become a watery ball due to further compression and the bodies of the living beings had also compressed. From the sun, light radiated continuously to the moon, and those forces that strove for spiritualization and refinement of matter were contained in it. In the finer part of the old moon, which had separated out as the sun, spiritual [forces] had gone along with it, leaving the coarser part behind. From the outside, this spiritual essence acted on the part striving for condensation, radiating light and life into it. The coarser part revolved around this source of light as the old moon. It was the same with the individual centers on the old moon. During the separation, the part that was to become more spiritual and in particular developed the centrifugal force within itself went with the sun, and the part that was to become more dense and developed the centripetal force within itself remained with the old moon and condensed into a watery state. The bodies of the living creatures were on the old moon, while the spiritual that animated them was outside these bodies on the sun, radiating its light from there into these bodies. In the animal kingdom, as it is revealed today in the evolution of the earth, something can be found that corresponds to this effect, only it is adapted to the earth conditions. In the animal, the actual spiritual that animates the animal's physical body cannot be found in the animal itself. There is a spiritual center outside of the animal forms, from which life is radiated into the animals. On today's Earth it is the case that a whole animal species is animated by a common spiritual essence, in such a way that one can think of this spiritual essence as a center and the animal species as a periphery that surrounds this point and receives life from it. Thus the old moon orbited its sun and was animated from this spiritual center. Through the fact that these spiritual powers had separated from the moon and worked in from the outside, as the moon revolved around the sun, movement arose during the development of the moon and this also asserted itself for the individual centers. Spiritual beings in turn formed these in such a way that they became capable of being, in potential, that which man today knows as his astral body. In the human astral body, the sensations and feelings that are stimulated in him by the environment are in constant motion. With these feelings and perceptions, he answers the sound that comes to him from the outside world. During the development of the moon, the spiritual link was also established in him that makes spiritual understanding possible, resonating in spirit with world wisdom, so that the human being feels connected to it. Just as man lets the current of surging sensations flow through his astral body, holds it within himself and sends something in return, so that he can consciously react to it, so the light of world wisdom flows into his spiritual self, and it is possible for him to absorb this light within himself and consciously reflect it back. Through the fact that the old moon had split as a world body, so that there were two world bodies influencing each other, movement came into being and with it conscious feeling. The influences went from one world body to the other. The effects of the sun on the moon were felt as forces coming from outside, and so it was with the moon's effects, which followed the sun. Where the sun's forces met the moon's forces, a conscious experience was evoked. A kind of congestion occurred, and a boundary arose where the incoming force met the force coming to meet it. For every living being on the moon there was a limit to the field in which it could consciously experience something; there the possibility ceased to reveal its powers further outwards, and it met the incoming forces with its own power. The living beings that later became human beings on earth had consciousness during the early development of the moon; they did not yet have self-consciousness, because they were still completely absorbed in their environment. They had no experiences of their own and could only let what was revealed to them from the outside world resonate within them.

When the development of the moon had reached a certain degree of maturity, the spiritual powers that had brought it about withdrew. The powers of the sun and the moon neutralized each other, and the sun and the moon gradually reunited and entered into a state of rest. Then the earth emerged from this planetary night as a new world body. At first the earlier developmental stages were repeated under new conditions. The earth went through a period when, in physical terms, it was a body of heat like the old Saturn was back then. The individual centers gradually formed again under the effect of the centripetal force. Then came a time when the Earth became a ball of gas and the centrifugal force exerted influence, as it did at that time on the old Sun. The centers began to radiate again; that was the solar condition on Earth. After that, there was a repetition of the moon condition on earth. Then the sun separated from the other part of the world body, leaving behind the earth, in which the moon forces had remained. Those forces that strove for spiritualization had gone with the sun. From there they radiated light and life into the world body, which now condensed further. The planets also went with the sun, and only the lunar forces remained connected to the earth. In the individual centers, it was also the case that a part striving for spiritualization had gone with the sun and from there radiated its power, while the coarser part remained on earth. A state then occurred in which what had taken place on the old moon was repeated. The earth and the bodies of the living beings became more and more dense. The centripetal forces were predominant. But then a new phase occurred, which arose from the fact that in this earth development not only the old moon had remained, as it was during the old moon development, but that a new force, the actual earth force, had been added. This earth power worked in such a way that it revealed itself as a connecting power between the sun and moon forces, which it could bring into harmony and balance. When the condensation continued, because only the lunar forces were still connected to the earth, this earth force brought about a kind of balance by separating from the lunar forces. With these forces, the earth left the moon behind and remained so for itself between the two forces of the sun and the moon, the impulses striving for spiritualization and those for condensation. It is influenced by both, carries both within itself, and maintains its own equilibrium through its own power. A similar power can be demonstrated in the I of the present-day human being, for just as the earth is the mediator between the forces of the sun and the moon, so the I in man is the connecting link between the spiritual and the material, through which both can unite in him. The earth is also placed in space in such a way that the moon, with its freezing influence, and the sun, from which the spiritual light flows to it, move around it. As if enclosed in a shell, the earth is surrounded by the moon's forces; the sun's forces come to it from a more distant center, far above this shell. In the same way, the human ego is embedded in its sheaths, but from outside the spiritual light radiates to it from the realms of the cosmos.

In the two forces that interacted during the development of the moon, a third force had become active, which revealed itself by interacting with the other two in a perpendicular direction. This caused a new movement in general, which can be called proper motion. In the evolution of the earth, the physical expression of this can be found in the rotation of the earth around its own axis. On the old moon, the two forces, where they met, created a kind of consciousness through the accumulation. Now, through their meeting with this third force, a double congestion arose and thus the general consciousness was limited and closed off, so that it became dependent on itself. This allows it to deepen into self-awareness, in that it can grasp itself, so that the germ of ego consciousness is laid. The same forces were at work on the bodies of living beings, and each of these bodies then became more dependent on itself. They acquired a movement of their own, like the earth had, and it was precisely through this movement that further solidification occurred. The bodies became more self-contained, so that an inner life of their own became possible within these bodies. The further condensation of the bodies was no longer caused merely by the forces of the moon, as it had been before, but by their own motion, by the forces of the earth itself. These earthly forces were the sum total of all that had gone before in the three earlier stages of development and had transformed itself into the fourth, the actual state of the earth.

Again, it was spiritual entities that made this self-awareness possible for man by working during the evolution of the earth in such a way that they could give him the disposition for self-awareness, so that man could learn to say “I” to himself. Man himself inhabited the physical center (or body) on earth, and under the guidance of the higher beings, it was gradually developed into the physical human body as it appears today. The inner power, which was the predisposition for self-awareness, could only come to fruition in a physical body that was independent and separate from the environment. The physical human body gradually developed in this way; but the predisposition for the ego was already imprinted on the human being earlier. Just as the sphere of heat of the old Saturn condensed to become a ball of gas as the old sun, but then was able to radiate its own spiritual power as light into the universe, and how then in the old moon development further condensation occurred to the watery, on the other hand also the revelation of the more inner forces became possible in the sounding and in the movement, so in the earth development occurred a further condensation up to the earthy state and thereby was possible a further revelation of inner forces, which showed themselves as life, inner own life in the earthy. On ancient Saturn everything was contained in the dark ocean of heat; on the ancient Sun everything radiated in the light; on the ancient Moon everything vibrated with sound; and on the Earth everything lives its own inner life.

When the repetition of the earlier planetary developmental states occurred, the earth was initially in a fiery state; man lived in the element of fire and his physical body also consisted of this element. At that time, man mainly developed his will and through this he was able to influence that element. Even then, the disposition for self-awareness was imprinted on him. Later he walked the earth in the element of air, and his body was also in a gaseous state. And there came a time when he lived in watery vapor, and his body was also suited to this element of water. At that time he mainly developed feelings and was thus able to influence the elements. During this time, the human ego did not yet live in the physical body. It was outside of this body, although it was connected to it. It was only in the period called the post-Atlantean period that the physical body was further condensed into the actual earthly element and it became possible for the human ego to dwell in the physical body. Only then did man actually live on earth. Then he was able to develop thinking and thereby influence the earthly itself.

Thus man has developed into what he is today. He is born of the Godhead, he is woven into the great web of the world, and all the powers work together so that he may be built out of the great cosmos. For his sake the whole solar system was formed, it was transformed into the four phases that we call embodiments of the earth: as old Saturn, old sun, old moon and as the earth itself. Numerous beings had to sacrifice themselves so that he could become. Man sees some of these beings around him embodied in the lower natural kingdoms on earth, others he feels as forces working within him. There had to be beings that, through the three previous embodiments of the earth and on the earth itself, still repeated the Saturn level; there had to be other beings that, during the development of the earth, repeated the sun level, and others that repeated the moon level, so that they could live and work in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on earth. Thus there are beings that work within the human being as they did on the old moon, the old sun and the old Saturn. Just as little as man could live and be physically on earth without the three lower natural realms, he can develop as a self-aware being without these retarded forces or beings within him. Man perceives the effect of those beings that remained on the lunar level as inhibiting forces in his astral body, which express themselves in desires and affects that are of a lower nature and that also operate in the animal kingdom. The beings that remained on the solar level operate in his etheric body as inhibiting forces that bind him to habits and acquired ways of thinking. This effect contains something of the plant-like nature. For just as the plant, in its growth, always puts forth new leaves, always repeating the same process until, through the astral body, a change is brought about in the flower, so the habits and adopted ways of thinking, in a continuous repetition, continue to have an effect in man, and something new must also be brought about there through the forces of the astral body, through feelings and sensations. The beings that remained at the Saturn level and work within the human being pour their forces into the physical body as inhibiting forces, causing separation from the environment and a feeling of standing for and on one's own. This causes the person to feel like a personal center and to be stimulated to want, think and feel only for himself, using his environment as an end to this. There is a similarity here with the power that works in the mineral kingdom towards the centre, where the physical mineral is then formed through solidification, for this power also creates a solidification and enclosure in man, by hurling him back on himself. Just as these forces once worked on the old Saturn, the old sun and the old moon, they now work within man and he carries them within him as inhibiting and at the same time promoting forces, as the earth also carries them within itself.

When man in the post-Atlantean era begins to live on earth in his physical body with his sense of self, then from that point on until our time he goes through different cultural periods and in each of these cultural periods he undergoes a certain development. Thus, in the first culture, the ancient Indian culture, the etheric body is particularly worked on, in the second, the ancient Persian culture, the sentient or astral body, in the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the sentient soul, and in the fourth, the Greek-Latin culture, the intellectual soul of man. During this fourth cultural period, when man had sunk deepest into matter, so that his view of the spiritual world was completely closed, something very special occurred that must be described as the greatest, most important event in the evolution of the earth.

When the sun separated from the earth and the moon, the forces striving for spiritualization went with it and radiated light and life into the earth from there. But something was taken from the earth that was initially connected to it. The evolution of the earth could proceed to a certain point without these forces and precisely because these radiated light and life into it from outside. It was the same with the beings that lived on earth as human beings. They were able to develop their own inner life to a certain degree, but they too had lost a spiritual element when the sun separated. When man had developed to become what he could become as an earthly human being, when he had built up his physical body with the help of the higher beings so that he could become a temple for a divine spiritual being, then God also descended and inhabited this temple. The spiritual powers of the Sun united with the Earth again and through this, mankind was also given the opportunity for further development in the spirit. Numerous divine spiritual beings had sacrificed themselves so that man could come into being and develop; many cosmic powers had been built up in him. Now the time had come when the greatest sacrifice was to be made for humanity, when the highest spiritual being, God Himself, who reflected His spiritual life in the powers of the sun, descended to Earth to live in a human body and let His powers flow into the Earth. Then the powers of the sun were given to Earth and a spiritual imprint was made on everything that lived on Earth. From being a self-conscious earthly human being, the human being could now rise to become a self-aware spiritual being. His mortal ego became an immortal core that lives in the spiritual sunlight.

Something similar happens in the development of the individual and of all humanity as a whole as in the development of the earth. After the physical birth, the human being goes through a birth of his ether body and his astral body, only then is he independent of his environment and can he further develop the I within himself. He then develops his sentient soul, his mind soul, in which the I is particularly expressed, and his consciousness soul, in which the I rises above itself to develop the spirit self. Just at the time when humanity was developing the mind soul, in the Greco-Latin cultural period, that link in which the I can particularly express itself, the I of humanity receives a new spiritual impulse as God descends to earth and lives in the midst of humanity. Only then could humanity rise to the higher spiritual life. Mankind on earth was able to rise above itself, and the human ego was given the opportunity to develop into a divine ego.

Just as the individual human being is first born in relation to his physical body, later in relation to its etheric body and astral body, and only then does the I come into its own in him, so the earth was first born out of the cosmos in relation to the physical as old Saturn, then ethereally as old Sun, then astral as old Moon, and only in the state of the earth could the development of the I take place. Thus it can be thought of: ancient Saturn as an expression of the birth of the cosmic human being, the macrocosm on the physical plane; the evolution of the sun as the period during which the etheric body is formed in the macrocosm; the evolution of the moon as the formation of the astral body; and the earth as the developmental period of the mighty, powerful world-I. In the midst of this development, the cosmic higher I descends from spiritual spheres and connects with the further development of the earth. The spirit of the macrocosm descends into the world I.

In this way, cosmic development is mirrored in man and finds its expression in him. It is only on earth that he is born out of the cosmos as a self-aware being, and it is part of his further development that he learn to understand the spiritual impulse given to him, so that he may relive within himself what the world spirit has exemplified to humanity on earth.

Like a blossom opening on the plant of the human race, a human individuality opened itself to the spiritual sunlight, long before these solar forces had united with the earth again. Thus it knew what a great event in the evolution of the earth was about to take place and how it was to be brought about through a mediator who, having grown out of humanity, would surrender his whole being to the sunlight so that it could take complete hold of him. He was to sacrifice his own nature so that the exalted being of the sun might reveal itself in him on earth. As a seed, that individuality held this knowledge within itself. And when the time had come, a human being grew out of humanity, towards the spirit of the sun, like a living flower. It was able to absorb the spiritual powers of the sun by sacrificing its three bodily veils to the great spirit, so that it could descend and live in a human body on earth. Just as a plant begins to die after fertilization, so this body was dedicated to death when this event took place. And when the blood flowed from the wounds of this body on Golgotha, the seed of that flower sank into the earth as a new impulse for spiritual life, which was to develop further in humanity. Thus this impulse was placed in every human being like a spiritual germ, which continues to unfold within him when the human soul is stimulated to allow a flower to grow out of itself through new sensations and feelings, which can be fertilized by the spiritual sunlight. The same process takes place spiritually in the soul as occurs in the physical plant form when, in a kind of sense of shame, the plant withdraws into itself and begins to wither. In the same way, the human soul, when the light of the spirit has descended upon it, feels a deep sense of shame at its own imperfection, and this feeling causes it to turn inward. Once man has felt this spiritual light in his soul, it shines into his inner being and he learns to see himself as he really is. Then he takes the path he would otherwise have to take when he leaves his physical body at death. He descends into these veils, as a personal human being he begins to die. Man dies as an individual personality and gradually lives into the great cosmic being. Thus he can say: “In Christ I die”. With the new spiritual impulse, the human being first descends into his astral body. There, those beings who work as beings remaining on the lunar level come to meet him. They show themselves in all feelings, impulses and sensations that are of a lower nature. They are one step below the development of the I, in that they belong to the development of the moon. Therefore, they are not imbued with the conscious power of the ego and are of an animalistic nature. Everything that works in the human astral body as subconscious, unbridled feelings and sensations, finds there a world that presents itself to him as an external world. By consciously confronting his own inner world, he acquires the power to overcome these beings, to release them from his inner being and gradually transform them. Deeper still, man descends into his inner being, into the etheric body. There he finds a world that he has formed through his way of thinking in relation to what he has acquired from his environment in terms of traditions and habits. Beings that remained on the stage of the sun are active in the etheric body; they hinder his development in terms of conscious, free and independent thinking. These too will gradually be released and transformed by the spiritual impulse that he has received, to become beings of light and wisdom. If the human being then descends further into his physical body, he finds a whole world of forces at work in his will, as if he were a being left behind on the level of Saturn. They solidify his will in relation to the personal and direct it towards the personal center. He can also redeem these beings through the light of the spirit, which flows into his inner being from a center that lies outside his personality and with which he nevertheless feels intimately connected. Thus, the human being in his bodily sheaths initially experiences himself as the being to which he has developed so far. A new center has emerged for him, from which he can observe himself. He knows that the evolution of the three bodily sheaths into which he has had to descend belongs to earlier evolutionary states of the earth, and that he must therefore find in his soul the power that is to be developed in particular during the evolution of the earth and has been deposited in the soul. It is this power that makes him a self-conscious ego-being, so that he can consciously descend into himself. The plant seed gradually develops into the plant form and matures into an independent being within this form. The human being passes through the gate of death with his body still alive, by making himself independent of his bodily coverings. Then he finds within himself the spiritual germ that was placed in his soul through the Christ impulse. The Christ light shines out from his own being, and just as the ripe seed sinks into the earth after the plant has died, so this spiritual germ falls out of the narrow personality and sinks into the great light of the world. Then the light that has united itself with the earth since the event at Golgotha will shine out of the earth towards man. Then he can say to himself: In Christ I die, but reborn I will come to a fuller existence. And he feels and experiences within himself the meaning of the words: He who will lose his life for my sake shall keep it.

Just as man is born out of the macrocosm as a microcosm, as a self-aware I-being, he in turn goes back the way by gradually living himself back into the macrocosm with his I-consciousness. The spiritual powers have gradually withdrawn from man, after they had brought him all their offerings, so that he may now find his own way to spiritual ascent, so that he may consciously and voluntarily re-enter the spiritual realm.

Man first experiences these spiritual beings by feeling a close connection with the great Earth Mother, from whom he was born as an individual human being, but to whom he belongs and with whom he was much more intimately connected during his earlier stages of development. He experiences these states as the evolution of the old Saturn, the old sun and the old moon. Man descends into his own inner being and experiences the beings there that work in his three sheaths: in his astral body, etheric body and physical body. Then he finds the actual center of his own being, and the light of Christ radiates towards him. Then it also enters those stages of the evolution of the earth in which the three covers, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body of the earth, were formed and experiences the spiritual beings that are connected with this evolution and pour their powers into it. Then the human soul progresses further and experiences the spiritual power that has sunk into the earth during its evolution as the light of Christ.

The entire cosmic evolution, in which man is interwoven, presents itself as a mighty tableau. It all takes place around him, this entire evolution lives and moves within him. He feels like a focal point where the beings and forces that are active in that evolution meet. The forces flow in and out of him; he himself is the product of those forces. In these effects he finds a firm center, like an inner center around which everything is grouped, and this center is the Christ-being, the center of macrocosmic and microcosmic development. Like a new center, from which everything flows out, to which everything flows, the source of all life, of all development, radiates towards him as the divine spirit, which stands behind all things, which worked before the things were. And just as he feels embedded in earthly evolution as an earthly man, so he recognizes himself as a spiritual being in this divine source of all life. In the soul lives the power of Christ, in the self-conscious spiritual core lives the power of the I. Beyond the veils of the body lives the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of all things, as a higher power of the I, which is the true, imperishable center of all being.

When man recognizes himself as a spiritual being in this All-Spirit, he can feel the meaning of the words from the Rosicrucian saying: “In the Holy Spirit I shall be reborn,” for as a new being he stands face to face with his earlier self, a being that must first acquire the qualities and abilities it needs in this spiritual life, just as a child must learn to use its bodily organs in the physical world. And again, this spiritual being must experience within itself the three spiritual powers that reveal themselves in the cosmic evolution as feeling, thinking, and willing, as love, wisdom, and power. Just as the child first learns to stand and then to walk, so must man learn to find direction and path in the spiritual world. This can only be acquired through feeling, by lovingly confronting everything. Then he must learn to recognize the truth by learning to understand the world wisdom that resounds in him, by allowing the sounds from the spiritual world to resound within him and intuiting their meaning, just as a child learns to understand language. Then he gradually learns to recognize true life in the spirit by experiencing within himself a center from which his own impulses of will and life emanate, so that he can reveal himself in speech and in his being. Therefore, Christ Jesus speaks the words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” No one can penetrate to the true spiritual source of all being, to the Father, if he has not developed these three powers in his spirit and combines them in the right way.

The development of man is represented in the symbol that belongs to the deeply significant Rosicrucian motto, in the black cross with the red roses. Man feels this symbol as something living, in which live and weave the spiritual forces that have built it up just as he is born out of the Godhead. But then he knows that further development of his soul is possible through the exertion of his own powers. He knows that not only must his blood become pure like the red sap of the roses, but that the black cross must also be transformed by purifying his nature of the veil and growing beyond the merely personal when he surrenders himself to something infinitely greater. Then he dies in Christ, and before his soul the dark, black cross is transformed into a luminous, radiant cross. The red roses expand into an infinite circle as the soul becomes more and more at home in the macrocosm until it perceives itself as this circle. In the all-embracing macrocosm, the human being then experiences himself in a new existence.

Then, in a mysterious way, the colors of the symbolum change, the roses turn green, the cross turns white. The soul can only sense the full significance by feeling the power that streams towards it. As if from higher spiritual spheres, the soul beholds and recognizes this holy symbol. It appears strict and powerful, as an invitation to constant work, so that the great ideal may one day be attained, which every single person can realize when they are reborn in the Holy Spirit.

In our time together here I would like to put before you, at least in outline, certain matters relating to the art of recitation and declamation. We will begin by adopting the standpoint of recitation and declamation itself: so that we have, on the one hand the practice, and on the other, considerations of this practice. Our starting-point today will provide us with a foundation for the considerations to occupy us later. We will begin with the Seventh Scene from my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. This scene takes place, we might say, in the spiritual world. Basically, it presents to us that view on the interconnection of the spiritual, the psychic and the physical world which is revealed by anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. In a certain sense, the Seventh Scene takes place in the spiritual world, but the persons represented there belong as such to the physical world, and are not meant to be symbolic or allegorical figures. They are intended to stand before us in living reality. The four characters – Maria, Philia, Astrid, Luna – represent personalities belonging to the physical world. Yet, as will manifest itself from several points of view in my coming lectures, the consciousness of personalities in the physical world may take such a form that the human being as he is through his ordinary sense-consciousness of objects (the sort of consciousness with which he stands in the physical world) may also stand, with a more highly-awakened consciousness, in the spiritual world.

Human life in its depths is able to bring forth from itself not only the forces of instinct or common intelligence, but also those forces that are inwardly impelled from the soul- and spirit-worlds. And when you aim at a drama that does not just present man one-sidedly as a sense-being, but depicts his full nature, where he demonstrates himself a being who is animated by impulses springing from the world of soul and spirit, you are constrained to add things to the course of the action as played out in the physical world – things which lift the whole action from the physical into the spiritual world. What is portrayed inthe Seventh Scene of my Mystery Play must thus be looked upon absolutely as a representation of spiritual impulses working through the physical human beings. If you present such things, not out of any kind of fantastic or nebulous mysticism, or symbolically, or allegorically, or some similar way, but from genuine experiences of the spiritual world, you have to resort to representations quite different to those you would otherwise have applied in the physical world. In physical life those representations that have to do with the ethical and religious life, possessing a more formless character, an abstract, unrepresentational character, stand apart from those which relate to nature. These other representations have a visual character which gives them clearly-defined contours, etc. If, when you listen, you feel how the contoured word stands out against the more formless, more musically-felt word, you will everywhere notice the transition from the inwardly plastic to the inwardly musical word.

If, however, you need to lead the action up into the spiritual world, you must achieve some degree of synthesis. You must find a way of dissolving the plasticity of the word – yet not so as to lose its plastic qualities; you must bring it so far that at the same time there arises a musical quality. A “plastically-musical” mode of speech must arise. For here the ethical and religious are not divorced from the natural and physical: rather, you have to do with a series of constituents which coincide in a synthesis. And you will hear in this scene, now to be recited, that the presentation derives from a life of inner representation completely different from the one of everyday life or conventional drama. It will be spoken and presented from a life of representation which holds in one both the elemental powers of nature and that which (through the elemental nature-forces) simultaneously possesses a moral, ethical significance. The physical becomes at the same time ethical; and the ethical is brought down into physical pictoriality. In this sphere we cannot differentiate between what takes place physically and what takes place ethically. The ethical takes place in the sphere of physical form, and the physical event takes place in the moral domain. And this requires a very special treatment of speech. In any artistic representation such as this the handling of speech must not derive in the least – and this cannot he otherwise – from thought.

Perhaps I may refer to my own experience in fashioning my Mystery Play. I can say that no thought lives in it; everything you will now hear recited and declaimed was heard, albeit spiritually, exactly as it sounds here. It is not a matter of grasping a thought and then putting it into words, but of beholding what will now be presented to you – and of beholding it in the way it is presented, as inwardly sounding and taking form. In the delineation of such a scene one has nothing to do but write down externally what one has experienced inwardly as a perception.

Thereby results a very special approach to characterising the shaping of the various roles, and you will observe how the four figures, Maria, Philia, Astrid and Luna, differ from one another. The names of the respective characters should not be appended only to show that the contents are to be recited by them. Something quite unique can be heard in what found expression, for example, in Maria, who felt herself in higher perception and an exalted consciousness to be in the midst of ethically-acting forces of nature: and through her feeling of these ethically-acting forces of nature, she was inspired to express this in the way she speaks. It is something which represents an all-awareness of nature, so to speak, insofar as it is ethical – and of ethics insofar as it is already nature.

In Philia we have a personality which, in a certain sense, is irradiated by the powers of love – and yet as a completely human figure. She shows herself a human character, quite simply in that if one is alive to it, one feels pulsating within her all that a personality pervaded by love would say and do when confronted with the feelings, representations, phenomena and images that are realized through Maria. And again: Astrid represents a personality filled with what we might call inner human wisdom – in such a way that inner human wisdom unites itself through inwardness of vision with cosmic activity. And Luna represents what is manifested in a steadfast consciousness as efficacy of will.

These three personalities are not presented as symbols or allegories, any more than Nero is a symbolic representation of cruelty. These three personalities are human beings of flesh and blood, and differ from one another just as human beings in real life differ, for instance, according to their temperaments. They differ so that one personality is wholly vibrant with love, another wholly with wisdom, and another wholly with firmness. And through what reveals itself in the collaboration of the plastic and musical, where a feeling of the ethical-natural and the natural-ethical harmonizes with the human personality, borne by love, illuminated by wisdom and warmed by steadfast strength, there comes into being what can here be presented as a true picture of the spiritual world. Perhaps we may begin with this scene, because in that way it can be shown how, when one creates out of the element of recitation and declamation rather than out of thought, an art of declamation results in a quite direct and elemental kind of way.¹ In this way poetry becomes at once declamation and recitation. And an art of recitation and declamation comes into being through inner perception which one can equally believe to be poetry. This is what we shall consider further when we enter into declamation and recitation.

Frau Dr. Steiner will now recite the Seventh Scene from The Portal of Initiation:

MARIA:
Ihr, meine Schwestern, die ihr
So oft mir Helferinnen wart,
Seid mir es auch in dieser Stunde,
Dass ich den Weltenäther
In sich erbeben lasse.
Er soll harmonisch klingen
Und klingend eine Seele
Durchdringen mit Erkenntnis.
Ich kann die Zeichen schauen,
Die uns zur Arbeit lenken.
Es soll sich euer Werk
Mit meinem Werke einen.
Johannes, der Strebende,
Er soll durch unser Schaffen
Zum wahren Sein erhoben werden.
Die Brüder in dem Tempel,
Sie hielten Rat,
Wie sie ihn aus den Tiefen
In lichte Höhen führen sollen.
Von uns erwarten sie,
Dass wir in seiner Seele heben
Die Kraft zum Höhenfluge.
Du, meine Philia, so sauge
Des Lichtes klares Wesen
Aus Raumesweiten,
Erfülle dich mit Klangesreiz
Aus schaffender Seelenmacht,
Dass du mir reichen kannst
Die Gaben, die du sammelst
Aus Geistesgründen.
Ich kann sie weben dann
In den erregenden Sphärenreigen.
Und du auch, Astrid, meines Geistes
Geliebtes Spiegelbild,
Erzeuge Dunkelkraft
Im fliessenden Licht,
Dass es in Farben scheine,
Und gliedre Klangeswesenheit,
Dass webender Weltenstoff
Ertönend lebe.
So kann ich Geistesfühlen
Vertrauen suchendem Menschensinn.
Und du, o starke Luna,
Die du gefestigt im Innern bist,
Dem Lebensmarke gleich,
Das in des Baumes Mitte wächst,
Vereine mit der Schwestern Gaben
Das Abbild deiner Eigenheit,
Dass Wissens Sicherheit
Dem Seelensucher werde.

PHILIA:
Ich will erfüllen mich
Mit klarstem Lichtessein
Aus Weltenweiten,
Ich will eratmen mir
Belebenden Klangesstoff
Aus Ätherfernen,
Dass dir, geliebte Schwester,
Das Werk gelingen kann.

ASTRID:
Ich will verweben
Erstrahlend Licht
Mit dämpfender Finsternis,
Ich will verdichten
Das Klangesleben.
Es soll erglitzernd klingen,
Es soll erklingend glitzern,
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
Die Seelenstrahlen lenken kannst.

LUNA:
Ich will erwärmen Seelenstoff
Und will erhärten Lebensäther.
Sie sollen sich verdichten,
Sie sollen sich erfühlen,
Und in sich selber seiend
Sich schaffend halten,
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
Der suchenden Menschenseele
Des Wissens Sicherheit erzeugen kannst.

MARIA:
Aus Philias Bereichen
Soll strömen Freudesinn;
Und Nixen Wechselkräfte
Sie mögen öffnen
Der Seele Reizbarkeit,
Dass der Erweckte
Erleben kann
Der Welten Lust,
Der Welten Weh,–
Aus Astrids Weben
Soll werden Liebelust;
Der Sylphen wehend Leben,
Es soll erregen
Der Seele Opfertrieb,
Dass der Geweihte
Erquicken kann
Die Leidbeladenen,
Die Glück Erflehenden.–
Aus Lunas Kraft
Soll strömen Festigkeit.
Der Feuerwesen Macht,
Sie kann erschaffen
Der Seele Sicherheit;
Auf dass der Wissende
Sich finden kann
Im Seelenweben,
Im Weltenleben.

PHILIA:
Ich will erbitten von Weltengeistern,
Dass ihres Wesens Licht
Entzücke Seelensinn,
Und ihrer Worte Klang
Beglücke Geistgehör;
Auf dass sich hebe
Der zu Erweckende
Auf Seelenwegen
In Himmelshöhen.

ASTRID:
Ich will die Liebesströme,
Die Welt erwarmenden,
Zu Herzen leiten
Dem Geweihten;
Auf dass er bringen kann
Des Himmels Güte
Dem Erdenwirken
Und Weihestimmung
Den Menschenkindern.

LUNA:
Ich will von Urgewalten
Erflehen Mut und Kraft
Und sie dem Suchenden
In Herzenstiefen legen;
Auf dass Vertrauen
Zum eignen Selbst
Ihn durch das Leben
Geleiten kann.
Er soll sich sicher
In sich dann selber fühlen.
Er soll von Augenblicken
Die reifen Früchte pflücken
Und Saaten ihnen entlocken
Für Ewigkeiten.

MARIA:
Mit euch, ihr Schwestern,
Vereint zu edlem Werk,
Wird mir gelingen,
Was ich ersehne.
Es dringt der Ruf
Des schwer Geprüften
In unsre Lichteswelt.

From The Portal of Initiation, Scene 7:

MARIA:
Now, my sisters, at this hour

come once more to me

So have you often done. –

Then I may bid the cosmic ether stir

and ring within itself,

harmoniously resounding,

and sounding, all his soul

pervade and pierce with knowing.

I can discern the signs:

they urge us to our task.

Then let your work

make one with mine:

Johannes – as he strives

shall our creating lift him up

to Being’s truth.

bThe Brethren of the Temple

have conferred

how they might raise him up

from his abyss to light-filled eminence:

and they demand of us

to rouse his laboring soul

to strength and soaring flight.

Ah then, my Philia, come inhale

translucent essences of light from sprawling space:

Be filled with all-alluring sound

from shaping-powers of soul:

Reach to me

the gifts you cull

from the deep spirit’s ground!

And I shall weave them in

amid the stirring dancing of the spheres.

You, Astrid, too –

loved image of my spirit!

you must beget dark’s power

within light’s hurrying flux

till it blaze bright with colour;

articulate sound’s essences

till all the weaving substance of the World

lives to resound.

Then can I trust to groping human sense

the spirit’s felt perception.

You, ah steadfast Luna: you

who rooted far within stand firm

as does the vital tract

hid deep and growing in the tree

conjoin now with your sisters’ gifts

your imprint, your incomparable mark, –

let knowing’s certitude

spring up within this questing soul!

PHILIA: I will be filled with light’s

clear-bright essentiality

from wide world-space;

I will inhale

Sound-substances’ vitality,

ethereally remote:

that you, beloved sister,

may realize the task.

ASTRID: I will be weaving

the rays of light

with dampening, muting dark;

I will thicken

the living sound,

till glistering, how shall it ring,

and ringing, how shall it glister!

that you, beloved sister,

the rays of soul may direct.

LUNA: I will warm the stuff of souls,

the vital-ether densify.

Themselves they shall coagulate,

themselves they shall experience,

and in themselves abiding

guard their shaping-power:

that you, beloved sister,

within man’s questing soul

may foster knowing’s certitude.

MARIA: Philia’s broad horizons

shall brim with joyfulness;

and nymphs’ shape-shifting powers

shall stir the soul

to fluid sensitivity –

so may the sleeper

wake to feel

the world’s rapture,

the world’s recoil.

From Astrid’s weft

shall issue joys of love;

the sighing life of sylphs

shall rouse the soul

to make self-sacrifice –

so may the hallowed

bring to life

all those whom sorrows burden,

all those who joy implore.

Luna’s strength

shall pour out steadfastness;

and fiery nature’s might

shall forge the soul’s

hard certainty –

so may the knower

find himself

in weavings intricate of soul,

in world-depths of the living Whole.

PHILIA: I will beseech the gods of the worlds

to shine their natures’ light

on his enchanted soul,

and with resounding voice

enthrall his spirit’s ear –

so may he scale

(the awakening one)

the steep soul-road

to heaven-heights.

ASTRID: I will channel streams of love

that wash the world in warmth

and them impart

to his hallowed heart

so may he bring

of heaven’s good

to earthly works,

and hallowed mood

to mortal men.

LUNA: I will beg from Primal Powers

fortitude and strength,

and in the seeker’s boundless heart

I shall inlay them deep –

so may a trust

in his own self

throughout his life

attend him.

He within himself shall feel

his true self held secure,

and pluck each swelling moment, ripe

with seeds for all

futurity.

MARIA: Sisters, thus united

to achieve a noble work,

it shall be done

as I desire –

there! comes the cry

from his ordeals,

piercing our world of light.

Trans. A.J.W. [Note 2]

As a second example, we will present the first monologue from Goethe’s Iphigeneia in two forms. For there are two versions of Goethe’s Iphigeneia. During his first period of residence in Weimar, Goethe gave – out of his initial enthusiasm and first understanding – a dramatic form to the myth of Iphigeneia. This form he gave to his Iphigeneia was born out of the artistic disposition and perception that were his in Weimar, before he started out on his Roman journey; we may call it, therefore, the Weimar Iphigeneia. And then, during his stay in Rome, he saturated himself in all that came to him from Greek art, insofar as he was able to observe it in the Italian works and in the scanty remnants of Greek art that were still available. Then, in Rome, inspired by these impulses (which had now transformed his whole attitude to art, his entire aesthetic perception and understanding) he rewrote his Iphigeneia; so it is that we have this second version of Goethe’s Iphigeneia, which we may call the Roman Iphigeneia from the point of view of their artistic – their inner artistic – formation, and to see how these two forms flow into the declamatory and into the recitative.

Looking at the German, the Weimar Iphigeneia, it is borne one might say, out of the same period in Goethe’s artistic creativity as the wonderful prose hymn “To Nature”: that powerful nature-poem which begins “Nature, we are surrounded by her ...”, and contains such powerful lines as “She carries along with her, until we tire and fall from her arm ...” etc. This mighty picture of nature which, with its unusual rhythm, moves along so powerfully, is especially characteristic of that period in which Goethe’s poetic works of art were created under the tremendous artistic influence exerted on him by Strasbourg Cathedral, and the whole of Gothic culture. Thus the German, Weimar Iphigeneia arises from an artistic perception that is pervasively a Gothic-German one. Goethe handles the language in such a way that one feels: everything in the speech-formation tends to create something (if I may so express myself) that is both curved yet at the same time pointed – like the pointed arches of the Gothic Cathedral. We follow the interweaving of the rhythms with our inner being: they curve like arches, and weld themselves together, just as the pointed arches of the Gothic Cathedral weld themselves into a whole. This element of plasticity which infiltrates Goethe’s poetry – and Goethe’s poetry is always plastic – is, of course, in no way a conscious imitation of the Gothic style, but rather a poetic interpretation of what he felt when he stood, for instance, before the mighty Strasbourg Cathedral – and in particular whenever he encountered something essentially German. And in order to bring these free rhythms to expression, in a way made possible by the unrestricted Gothic style, he conceived his Weimar Iphigeneia. We see here something gnarled, rugged, something which in its plastic contours stands there like some of the figures on the Cathedral of Strasbourg, and elsewhere. [Note 3]

And then, Goethe goes to Italy, and his Iphigeneia, amongst other things, stands once more before his soul. She looks different to him now, for he is living under the Italian sky, which arches over him in southern loveliness rather than the coldness of the north. Here, through the influence of external nature itself, Goethe experiences the necessity of transforming his feelings. What he had brought with him to Rome as the Weimar Iphigeneia, he now feels to be something Nordic, rugged, gnarled, something almost barbaric. He feels it especially when he compares the line, the poetically felt line of his Germanic Weimar Iphigeneia, with the poetic line he experiences when something of the nature of Raphael’s work affects him. The sight of Raphael’s work smoothed and rounded that gnarled ruggedness which was still present in Goethe’s Iphigeneia from the Weimar period. And so Goethe feels the necessity of completely rewriting the Iphigeneia; in place of the free Gothic rhythms there arises a strict, calm verse-measure. Hence one can see that such a man as Goethe, an artist through and through, can live in this rounded, calm verse-measure only when he has above him the blue sky of Italy, and where in the museums he visits Raphael’s Madonnas and Saint Cecelia confront him. This symbiotic relation to all that he experienced in Greek art, as he reconstructed it from Italian works, this transformation of his perception is indeed tremendously characteristic of Goethe. It was this inner transformation which brought him to feel the necessity of recasting his entire Iphigeneiain another form. We can, then, clearly differentiate between Goethe’s conception and experience of art as expressed and revealed in the Iphigeneia of Weimar, and what is revealed in the Roman Iphigeneia.

Now something of this must naturally find its way into recitation and declamation. In the Weimar Iphigeneia we are dealing with an art that is more in the nature of declamation, an art that must especially elicit the inner tone-element, the fullness of tone, and pour it out into words and sentences. In the Roman Iphigeneia, we have to do with an art which is more recitative, which must bring out the metre and its even-measured flow.

In order to see empirically, as one might say, how declamation on the one hand, and recitation on the other, reveal themselves, we will now present the first monologue from the German Iphigeneia: this discloses in particular the element of declamation which corresponds to a certain period of Goethe’s poetic practice. And we shall then present the first monologue from the Roman Iphigeneia, which discloses especially the element of recitation characteristic of a southern, or even oriental-sounding, poetry. Fundamentally, the same motif is presented in both versions, and to a coarse sensibility, perhaps, the distinction between them may not be apparent. But for a sensitive perception they differ quite radically. Hence, employing just this example, will demonstrate to you how recitation and declamation are to be compared with one another in the art of speech as we understand it here – as declamation in the broader sense.

Frau Dr. Steiner will now read the monologue from the German Iphigeneia, and from the Roman Iphigeneia.

Iphigeneia (Weimar version), Act I, Scene 1:

Heraus in eure Schatten, ewig rege Wipfel des heiligen Hains, wie in das Heiligtum der Göttin, der ich diene, tret’ ich mit immer neuem Schauer, und meine Seele gewöhnt sich nicht hierher: So manche Jahre wohn’ ich hier unter euch verborgen, und immer bin ich wie im ersten fremd. Denn mein Verlangen steht hinüber nach dem schönen Lande der Griechen, und immer möcht’ ich übers Meer hinüber, das Schicksal meiner Vielgeliebten teilen. Weh dem, der fern von Eltern und Geschwistern ein einsam Leben führt ihn lässt der Gram des schönsten Glückes nicht geniessen; ihm schwärmen abwärts immer die Gedanken nach seines Vaters Wohnung, an jene Stellen, wo die goldne Sonne zum erstenmal den Himmel vor ihm aufschloss, wo die Spiele der Mitgebornen die sanften, liebsten Erdenbande knüpften. – Der Frauen Zustand ist der schlimmste vor allen Menschen. Will dem Mann das Glück, so herrscht er und erficht im Felde Ruhm; und haben ihm die Götter Unglück zubereitet, fällt er, der Erstling von den Seinen, in den schönen Tod. Allein des Weibes Glück ist eng gebunden: sie dankt ihr Wohl stets andern, öfters Fremden, und wenn Zerstörung ihr Haus ergreift, führt sie aus rauchenden Trümmern, durchs Blut erschlagener Liebsten, ein Überwinder fort. – Auch hier an dieser heiligen Stätte hält Thoas mich in ehrenvoller Sklavereis. Wie schwer wird mir’s, dir wider Willen dienen, ewig reine Göttin! Retterin: Dir sollte mein Leben zu ewigem Dienste geweiht sein. Auch hab’ich stets auf dich gehofft und hoffe noch, Diana, die du mich verstossne Tochter des grössten Königs in deinen heiligen, sanften Arm genommen! Ja, Tochter Jovis, hast du den Mann, dessen Tochter du fordertest, hast du den göttergleichen Agamemnon, der dir sein Liebstes zum Altare brachte, hast du vom Felde der umgewandten Troja ihn glücklich und mit Ruhm nach seinem Vaterlande zurückbegleite hast du meine Geschwister, Elektren und Oresten, den Knaben, und unsere Mutter, ihm zu Hause, den schönen Schatz, bewahrt, so rette mich, die du vom Tod gerettet, auch von dem Leben hier, dem zweiten Tod.

Iphigeneia (Roman version), Act I, Scene 1:

Heraus in eure Schatten, rege Wipfel

Des alten, heil’gen, dichtbelaubten Haines,

Wie in der Göttin stilles Heiligtum,

Tret’ ich noch jetzt mit schauderndem Gefühl,

Als wenn ich sie zum ersten Mal beträte,

Und es gewöhnt sich nicht mein Geist hierher.

So manches Jahr bewahrt mich hier verborgen

Ein hoher Wille, dem ich mich ergebe;

Doch immer bin ich, wie im ersten, fremd.

Denn ach! mich trennt das Meer von den Geliebten,

Und an dem Ufer steh’ ich lange Tage,

Das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend;

Und gegen meine Seufzer bringt die Welle

Nur dumpfe Töne brausend mir herüber.

Weh dem, der fern von Eltern und Geschwistern

Ein einsam Leben führt! Ihm zehrt der Gram

Das nächste Glück vor seinen Lippen weg.

Ihm schwärmen abwärts immer die Gedanken

Nach seines Vaters Hallen, wo die Sonne

Zuerst den Himmel vor ihm aufschloss, wo

Sich Mitgeborne spielend fest und fester

Mit sanften Banden an einander knüpften.

Ich rechte mit den Göttern nicht; allein

Der Frauen Zustand is beklagenswert.

Zu Haus und in dem Kriege herrscht der Mann,

Und in der Fremde weiss er sich zu helfen.

Ihn freuet der Besitz; ihn krönt der Sieg;

Ein ehrenvoller Tod ist ihm bereitet.

Wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück!

Schon einem rauhen Gatten zu gehorchen,

Ist Pflicht und Trost; wie elend, wenn sie gar

Ein feindlich Schicksal in die Ferne treibt!

So hält mich Thoas hier, ein edler Mann,

In ernsten, heil’gen Sklavenbanden fest.

O, wie beschämt gesteh’ ich, dass ich dir

Mit stillem Widerwillen diene, Göttin,

Dir meiner Retterin! Mein Leben sollte

Zu freiem Dienste dir gewidmet sein.

Auch hab’ ich stets auf dich gehofft und hoffe

Noch jetzt auf dich, Diana, die du mich,

Des grössten Königes verstossne Tochter,

In deinen heil’gen, sanften Arm genommen.

Ja, Tochter Zeus’, wenn du den hohen Mann,

Den du, die Tochter fordernd, ängstigtest,

Wenn du den göttergleichen Agamemnon,

Der dir sein Liebstes zum Altare brachte,

Von Troja’s umgewandten Mauern rühmlich

Nach seinem Vaterland zurückbegleitet,

Die Gattin ihm, Elektren und den Sohn,

Die schönen Schätze, wohl erhalten hast:

So gib auch mich den Meinen endlich wieder,

Und rette mich, die du vom Tod errettet,

Auch von dem Leben hier, dem zweiten Tode!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

Iphigeneia (Weimar version), Act I, Scene 1:

Beneath your leafy gloom, ye ever-waving boughs, even as in the goddess’ holy temple where I serve, in this deep, consecrated grove do I step forth, and ever I shudder still anew – nor doth my restless soul ever feel here at home. Long hath a mighty power detained me here, beneath your shade, concealed, yet ever I feel myself a stranger as at first. For still my yearning is turned toward the beautiful land of Greece, and ever would I cross the seas to share the fate of those I love. Alas for the man who, friendless, far from his parents, far from his brethren, dwells in his loneliness; him grief doth cheat of the fairest joys; his thoughts, with longing, forever flock to his father’s distant halls, where first he beheld the golden sun unclose the gates of heaven, where day by day, leagued in sweet pastimes, brothers and sisters would twine each other about in the tenderest bonds of love. But woman’s lot is worse than all. A man, as fortune bids, at home and in the field alike doth rule and glory; or, if by the gods’ decree dark fate awaits him, still he falls in the foremost ranks of his countrymen, and dies a glorious death. But woman’s fortune is so circumscribed: she must ever be thankful to others, and often to strangers, for her welfare; and if ruin seizes on her house, she is led forth, out of the smoking wreckage and the blood of her slaughtered loved ones, by her vanquisher. – Thus Thoas holds me in this holy place, in honourable slavery! How hard it goes with me, eternal virgin goddess, to serve thee with a rebellious will! Thou, my protectress! To thee should I dedicate my life: for in thee I have ever put my hopes, Diana, and still do I hope in thee, who didst fold the outcast daughter of the mighty king in your gentle, holy arms! O, daughter of Jove, hast thou led home the man from whom thou didst demand his daughter’s life;

Trans. A.J.W.

Iphigeneia (Roman version), Act I, Scene 1:

Beneath your leafy gloom, ye waving boughs

Of this old, shady, consecrated grove,

As in the goddess’ silent sanctuary,

With the same shudd’ring feeling forth I step,

As when I trod it first, nor ever here

Doth my unquiet spirit feel at home.

Long as the mighty will, to which I bow,

Hath kept me here conceal’d, still, as at first,

I feel myself a stranger. For the sea

Doth sever me, alas! from those I love,

And day by day upon the shore I stand,

My soul still seeking for the land of Greece.

But to my sighs, the hollow-sounding waves

Bring, save their own hoarse murmurs, no reply.

Alas for him! who friendless and alone,

Remote from parents and from brethren dwells;

From him grief snatches every coming joy

Ere it doth reach his lip. His restless thoughts

Revert for ever to his father’s halls,

Where first to him the radiant sun unclos’d

The gates of heav’n; where closer, day by day,

Brothers and sisters, leagu’d in pastime sweet,

Around each other twin’d the bonds of love.

1 will not judge the counsel of the gods;

Yet truly, woman’s lot doth merit pity.

Man rules alike at home and in the field,

Nor is in foreign climes without resource;

Possession gladdens him, him conquest crowns

And him an honourable death awaits.

How circumscrib’d is woman’s destiny!

Obedience to a harsh, imperious lord,

Her duty, and her comfort; sad her fate,

Whom hostile fortune drives to lands remote:

Thus I by noble Thoas am detain’d,

Bound with a heavy, though a sacred chain.

O with what shame, Diana, I confess

That with repugnance I perform these rites

For thee, divine protectress! unto whom

I would in freedom dedicate my life.

In thee, Diana, I have always hop’d,

And still I hope in thee, who didst infold

Within the holy shelter of thine arm

The outcast daughter of the mighty king.

Daughter of Jove! hast thou from ruin’d Troy

Led back in triumph to his native land

The mighty man, whom thou didst sore afflict,

His daughter’s life in sacrifice demanding, –

Hast thou for him, the godlike Agamemnon,

Who to thine altar led his darling child,

Preserv’d his wife, Electra, and his son,

His dearest treasures? – then at length restore

Thy suppliant also to her friends and home,

And save her, as thou once from death didst save,

So now, from living here, a second death.

Trans. A. Swanwick.

You have heard the Weimar and the Roman Iphigeneia, and will perhaps have been able to see that here an entirely artistic personality has rewritten a poem, not out of any necessity of ideal, but solely from an artistic feeling for style. Goethe’s feeling for style was so strong that the whole perception, the whole conception of art expressed in the Roman Iphigeneia is entirely different to that which comes to expression in the German-Gothic Iphigeneia. From these two works which are, in fact, one and the same – you will be able to see that they differ only in regard to their purely aesthetic impulses. For to an inartistic perception the distinctions between them are simply non-existent. For artistic perception, however, the Roman Iphigeneia is quite another work to the Weimar Iphigeneia. One can see, too, how small a part is played in the true art of poetry by the mere content of the poem: fundamentally, the content is only a ladder by which true poetry – living poetry – is able to ascend. This must be taken as a basis if recitation and declamation is to be regarded as a real art-form. For everything which is here looked on as the actual life, so to speak, of recitation and declamation, rests upon such intimacies as the difference between the Roman and the Germanic Iphigeneia. It is with such artistic intimacies that we shall have to deal when, after further practical work, we resume our study of declamation and recitation.

---

• 1. For some details with regard to the speech-formation of this scene, see Creative Speech (London 1978), pp. 118f.

[ 1 ] Is man free in action and thought, or is he bound by an iron necessity? There are few questions on which so much ingenuity has been expended. The idea of freedom has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervour, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thought. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion. Infinite subtlety has been employed to explain how human freedom can be consistent with determinism in nature of which man, after all, is a part. Others have been at no less pains to explain how such a delusion as this could have arisen. That we are dealing here with one of the most important questions for life, religion, conduct, science, must be clear to every one whose most prominent trait of character is not the reverse of thoroughness. It is one of the sad signs of the superficiality of present-day thought, that a book which attempts to develop a new faith out of the results of recent scientific research (David Friedrich Strauss: Der alte und neue Glaube), has nothing more to say on this question than these words: “With the question of the freedom of the human will we are not concerned. The alleged freedom of indifferent choice has been recognized as an empty illusion by every philosophy worthy of the name. The determination of the moral value of human conduct and character remains untouched by this problem.” It is not because I consider that the book in which it occurs has any special importance that I quote this passage, but because it seems to me to express the only view to which the thought of the majority of our contemporaries is able to rise in this matter. Every one who has gone beyond the kindergarten-stage of science appears to know nowadays that freedom cannot consist in choosing, at one's pleasure, one or other of two possible courses of action. There is always, so we are told, a perfectly definite reason why, out of several possible actions, we carry out just one and no other.

[ 2 ] This seems quite obvious. Nevertheless, down to the present days the main attacks of the opponents of freedom are directed only against freedom of choice. Even Herbert Spencer, in fact, whose doctrines are gaining ground daily, says “That every one is at liberty to desire or not to desire, which is the real proposition involved in the dogma of free will, is negatived as much by the analysis of consciousness, as by the contents of the preceding chapters” (The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, chap. ix, par. 219). Others, too, start from the same point of view in combating the concept of free will. The germs of all the relevant arguments are to be found as early as Spinoza. All that he brought forward in clear and simple language against the idea of freedom has since been repeated times without number, but as a rule enveloped in the most sophisticated arguments, so that it is difficult to recognize the straightforward train of thought which is alone in question. Spinoza writes in a letter of October or November 1674, “I call a thing free which exists and acts from the pure necessity of its nature, and I call that unfree, of which the being and action are precisely and fixedly determined by something else. Thus, e.g., God, though necessary, is free because he exists only through the necessity of his own nature. Similarly, God knows himself and all else as free, because it follows solely from the necessity of his nature that he knows all. You see, therefore, that for me freedom consists not in free decision, but in free necessity.

[ 3 ] But let us come down to created things which are all determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and definite manner. To perceive this more clearly, let us imagine a perfectly simple case. A stone, for example, receives from an external cause acting upon it a certain quantity of motion, by reason of which it necessarily continues to move, after the impact of the external cause has ceased. The continued motion of the stone is due to compulsion, not to the necessity of its own nature, because it requires to be defined by the impact of an external cause. What is true here for the stone is true also for every other particular thing, however complicated and many-sided it may be, namely, that everything is necessarily determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and definite manner.

[ 4 ] Now, pray, assume that this stone during its motion thinks and knows that it is striving to the best of its power to continue in motion. This stone which is conscious only of its striving and is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to continue. Now this is that human freedom which everybody claims to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Thus the child believes that he desires milk of his own free will, the angry boy regards his desire for vengeance as free, and the coward his desire for flight. Again, the drunken man believes that he says of his own free will what, sober again, he would fain have left unsaid, and as this prejudice is innate all men, it is difficult to free oneself from it. For, although experience teaches us often enough that man least of all can temper his desires, and that, moved by conflicting passions, he perceives the better and pursues the worse, yet he considers himself free because there are some things which he desires less strongly, and some desires which he can easily inhibit through the recollection of something else which it is often possible to recall.”

[ 5 ] It is easy to detect the fundamental error of this view, because it is so clearly and definitely expressed. The same necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any cause. It is only because man is conscious of his action, that he thinks himself to be its originator. In doing so, he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he must obey unconditionally. The error in this train of thought is easily brought to light. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the cause which guides him. Anyone can see that a child is not free when he desires milk, nor the drunken man when he says things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working deep within their organisms, which exercise irresistible control over them. But is it justifiable to lump together actions of this kind with those in which a man is conscious not only of his actions but also of their causes? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic negotiations, be placed on the same level with that of the child when he desires milk? It is, no doubt, true that it is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions are simplest. But lack of ability to see distinctions has before now caused endless confusion. There is after all a profound difference between knowing the motive of my action and not knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize and understand, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.

[ 6 ] Edouard van Hartmann, in his Phanomenologie des Sittlichen Bewusstseins (p. 451) asserts that the human will depends on two chief factors, the motives and the character. If one regards men as all alike, or at any rate the differences between them as negligible, then their will appears as determined from without, viz., by the circumstances with which they come in contact. But if one bears in mind that men adopt an idea as the motive of their conduct, only if their character is such that this idea arouses a desire in them, then men appear as determined from within and not from without. Now, because an idea, given to us from without, must first in accordance with our characters be adopted as a motive, men believe that they are free, i.e., independent of external influences. The truth, however, according to Edouard von Hartmann, is that “even though we must first adopt an idea as a motive, we do so not arbitrarily, but according to the disposition of our characters, that is, we are anything but free.” Here again the difference between motives, which I allow to influence me only after I have consciously made them my own, and those which I follow, without any clear knowledge of them, is absolutely ignored.

[ 7 ] This leads us straight to the standpoint from which the subject will be treated here. Have we any right to consider the question of the freedom of the will by itself at all? And if not, with what other question must it necessarily be connected?

[ 8 ] If there is a difference between conscious and unconscious motives of action, then the action in which the former issue should be judged differently from the action which springs from blind impulse. Hence our first question will concern this difference, and on the result of this inquiry will depend what attitude we ought to take up towards the question of freedom proper.

[ 9 ] What does it mean to have knowledge of the motives of one's actions? Too little attention has been paid to this question, because, unfortunately, man who is an indivisible whole has always been torn asunder by us. The agent has been divorced from the knower, whilst he who matters more than everything else, viz., the man who acts because he knows, has been utterly overlooked.

[ 10 ] It is said that man is free when he is controlled only by his reason, and not by his animal passions. Or, again, that to be free means to be able to determine one's life and action by purposes and deliberate decisions.

[ 11 ] Nothing is gained by assertions of this sort. For the question is just whether reason, purposes, and decisions exercise the same kind of compulsion over a man as his animal passions. If, without my doing, a rational decision occurs in me with the same necessity with which hunger and thirst happen to me, then I must needs obey it, and my freedom is an illusion.

[ 12 ] Another form of expression runs: to be free means, not that we can will what we will, but that we can do what we will. This thought has been expressed with great clearness by the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling in his Atomistik des Willens. “Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives! He cannot will what he wills? Let us consider these phrases more closely. Have they any intelligible meaning? Does freedom of the will, then, mean being able to will without ground, without motive? What does willing mean if not to have grounds for doing, or striving to do, this rather than that? To will anything without ground or motive would mean to will something without willing it. The concept of motive is indissolubly bound up with that of will. Without the determining motive the will is an empty faculty; it is the motive which makes it active and real. It is, therefore, quite true that the human will is not ‘free,' inasmuch as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive. But, on the other hand, it must be admitted that it is absurd to speak, in contrast with this ‘unfreedom,' of a conceivable ‘freedom' of the will, which would consist in being able to will what one does not will” (Atomistik des Willens, p. 213 ff.).

[ 13 ] Here again only motives in general are mentioned, without taking into account the difference between unconscious and conscious motives. If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the “strongest” of its kind, then the idea of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it? The primary question is, not whether I can do a thing or not when impelled by a motive, but whether the only motives are such as impel me with absolute necessity. If I must will something, then I may well be absolutely indifferent as to whether I can also do it. And if, through my character, or through circumstances prevailing in my environment, a motive is forced on me which to my thinking is unreasonable, then I should even have to be glad if I could not do what I will.

[ 14 ] The question is, not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how I come to make the decision.

[ 15 ] What distinguishes man from all other organic beings is his rational thought. Activity is common to him with other organisms. Nothing is gained by seeking analogies in the animal world to clear up the concept of freedom as applied to the actions of human beings. Modern science loves these analogies. When scientists have succeeded in finding among animals something similar to human behaviour, they believe they have touched on the most important question of the science of man. To what misunderstandings this view leads is seen, for example, in the book Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, by P. Ree, 1885, where, on page 5, the following remark on freedom appears. “It is easy to explain why the movement of a stone seems to us necessary, while the volition of a donkey does not. The causes which set the stone in motion are external and visible, while the causes which determine the donkey's volition are internal and invisible. Between us and the place of their activity, there is the skull cap of the ass ... The causal nexus is not visible, and is therefore thought to be non-existent. The volition, it is explained, is, indeed, the cause of the donkey's turning round, but is itself unconditioned; it is an absolute beginning.” Here again human actions in which there is a consciousness of the motives are simply ignored, for Ree declares, “that between us and the sphere of their activity there is the skull cap of the ass.” As these words show, it has not so much as dawned on Ree that there are actions, not indeed of the ass, but of human beings, in which the motive, become conscious, lies between us and the action. Ree demonstrates his blindness once again a few pages further on, when he says, “we do not perceive the causes by which our will is determined, hence we think it is not causally determined at all.”

[ 16 ] But enough of examples which prove that many argue against freedom without knowing in the least what freedom is.

[ 17 ] That an action of which the agent does not know why he performs it, cannot be free goes without saying. But what of the freedom of an action about the motives of which we reflect? This leads us to the question of the origin and meaning of thought. When we know what thought in general means, it will be easier to see clearly the role which thought plays in human action. As Hegel rightly says, “It is thought which turns the soul, common to us and animals, into spirit.” Hence it is thought which we may expect to give to human action its characteristic stamp.

[ 18 ] I do not mean to imply that all our actions spring only from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am very far from calling only those actions “human” in the highest sense, which proceed from abstract judgments. But as soon as our conduct rises above the sphere of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, our motives are always shaped by thoughts. Love, pity, and patriotism are motives of action which cannot be analysed away into cold concepts of the understanding. It is said that here the heart, the soul, hold sway. This is no doubt true. But the heart and the soul create no motives. They presuppose them. Pity enters my heart when the thought of a person who arouses pity has appeared in my consciousness. The way to the heart is through the head. Love is no exception. Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare sexual instinct, it depends on the thoughts we form of the loved one. And the more we idealize the loved one in our thoughts, the more blessed is our love. Here, too, thought is the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But the opposite view can be taken, namely that it is precisely for the good points that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good points without notice. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done except perceive what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the perception.

[ 19 ] From whatever point we regard the subject, it becomes more and more clear that the question of the nature of human action presupposes that of the origin of thought. I shall therefore, turn next to this question.

[ 1 ] Is man in his thinking and acting a spiritually free being, or is he compelled by the iron necessity of natural laws? There are few questions on which so much ingenuity has been expended. The idea of the freedom of the human will has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervour, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thought. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion. Infinite subtlety has been employed to explain how human freedom can be consistent with the laws working in nature, of which man, after all, is a part. Others have been at no less pains to explain how such a delusion as this could have arisen. That we are dealing here with one of the most important questions for life, religion, conduct, science, must be felt by anyone whose most prominent trait is not the reverse of thoroughness. It is one of the sad signs of the superficiality of present-day thought, that a book which attempts to develop a new faith out of the results of recent scientific research (David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube), has nothing more to say on this question than these words: “With the question of the freedom of the human will we are not concerned. The alleged freedom of indifferent choice has been recognized as an empty illusion by every philosophy worthy of the name. The moral valuation of human action and character remains untouched by this problem.” It is not because I consider that the book in which it occurs has any special importance that I quote this passage, but because it seems to me to express the view to which the thinking of the majority of our contemporaries is able to rise in this matter. Everyone who has grown beyond the kindergarten-stage of science appears to know nowadays that freedom cannot consist in choosing, at one's pleasure, one or other of two possible courses of action. There is always, so we are told, a perfectly definite reason why, out of several possible actions, we carry out just one and no other.

[ 2 ] This seems obvious. Nevertheless, down to the present day, the main attacks of the opponents of freedom are directed only against freedom of choice. Even Herbert Spencer, in fact, whose doctrines are gaining ground daily, says, “That everyone is at liberty to desire or not to desire, which is the real proposition involved in the dogma of free will, is negatived as much by the analysis of consciousness, as by the contents of the preceding chapter.” (The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, Chap. ix., par. 219.) Others, too, start from the same point of view in combating the concept of free will. The germs of all the relevant arguments are to be found as early as Spinoza. All that he brought forward in clear and simple language against the idea of freedom has since been repeated times without number, but as a rule enveloped in the most sophisticated doctrines, so that it is difficult to recognize the straightforward train of thought which is alone in question. Spinoza writes in a letter of October or November, 1674, “I call a thing free which exists and acts from the pure necessity of its nature, and I call that unfree, of which the being and action are precisely and fixedly determined by something else. Thus, e.g., God, though necessary, is free because he exists only through the necessity of his own nature. Similarly, God cognizes himself and all else freely, because it follows solely from the necessity of his nature that he cognizes all. You see, therefore, that for me freedom consists not in free decision, but in free necessity.

[ 3 ] “But let us come down to created things which are all determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and definite manner. To perceive this more clearly, let us imagine a perfectly simple case. A stone, for example, receives from an external cause acting upon it a certain quantity of motion, by reason of which it necessarily continues to move, after the impact of the external cause has ceased. The continued motion of the stone is due to compulsion, not to the necessity of its own nature, because it requires to be defined by the thrust of an external cause. What is true here for the stone is true also for every other particular thing, however complicated and many-sided it may be, namely, that everything is necessarily determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and definite manner.

[ 4 ] Now, pray, assume that this stone during its motion thinks and knows that it is striving to the best of its power to continue in motion. This stone which is conscious only of its striving and is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to continue. Now this is that human freedom which everybody claims to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Thus the child believes that he desires milk of his own free will, the angry boy regards his desire for vengeance as free, and the coward his desire for flight. Again, the drunken man believes that he says of his own free will what, sober again, he would fain have left unsaid, and as this prejudice is innate in all men, it is difficult to free oneself from it. For, although experience teaches us often enough that man least of all can temper his desires, and that, moved by conflicting passions, he sees the better and pursues the worse, yet he considers himself free because there are some things which he desires less strongly, and some desires which he can easily inhibit through the recollection of something else which it is often possible to recall.”

[ 5 ] It is easy to detect the fundamental error of this view, because it is so clearly and definitely expressed. The same necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any reason. It is only because man is conscious of his action, that he thinks himself to be its originator. In doing so, he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he must obey unconditionally. The error in this train of thought is easily brought to light. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the causes which guide him. Anyone can see that a child is not free when he desires milk, nor the drunken man when he says things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working deep within their organisms, which exercise irresistible control over them. But is it justifiable to lump together actions of this kind with those in which a man is conscious not only of his actions but also of the reasons which cause him to. act? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic negotiations, be placed scientifically on the same level with that of the child when he desires milk? It is, no doubt, true that it is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions are simplest. But lack of ability to see distinctions has before now caused endless confusion. There is, after all, a profound difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize and see through, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.

[ 6 ] Eduard von Hartmann, in his Phaenomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (p. 451), asserts that the human will depends on two chief factors, the motives and the character. If one regards men as all alike, or at any rate the differences between them as negligible, then their will appears as determined from without, viz., by the circumstances which come to meet them. But if one bears in mind that men adopt a “representation”¹ as the motive of their action, only if their character is such that this representation arouses a desire in them, then men appear as determined from within and not from without. Now, because a representation given to us from without, must first in accordance with our characters be adopted as a motive, men believe that they are free, i.e., independent of external impulses. The truth, however, according to Eduard von Hartmann, is that “even though we (must) first adopt a representation as a motive, we do so not arbitrarily, but according to the characterological disposition, that is, we are anything but free.” Here again the difference between motives which I allow to influence me only after I have permeated them with my consciousness, and those which I follow without any clear knowledge of them, is absolutely ignored.

[ 7 ] This leads us straight to the standpoint from which the subject will be treated here. Have we any right to consider the question of the freedom of the will by itself at all? And if not, with what other question must it necessarily be connected?

[ 8 ] If there is a difference between a conscious motive and an unconscious impulse of action, then those actions which result from the former should be judged otherwise than one springing from blind impulse. Hence our first question will concern this difference, and on the result of this inquiry will depend what attitude we ought to take up towards the question of freedom proper.

[ 9 ] What does it mean to have knowledge of the motives of one's action? Too little attention has been paid to this question, because, unfortunately, we have torn asunder into two parts that which is an inseparable whole: Man. The agent has been divorced from the knower, whilst he who matters more than everything else, viz., the man who acts because he knows, has been utterly overlooked.

[ 10 ] It is said that man is free when he is controlled only by his reason, and not by his animal passions. Or, again, that to be free means to be able to determine one's life and action by purposes and deliberate decisions.

[ 11 ] Nothing is gained by assertions of this sort. For the question is just whether reason, purposes, and decisions exercise the same kind of compulsion over a man as his animal passions. If without my doing, a rational decision emerges in me with the same necessity with which hunger and thirst happen to me, then I must needs obey it, and my freedom is an illusion.

[ 12 ] Another form of expression runs: to be free means, not that we can will what we will, but that we can do what we will. This thought has been expressed with great clearness by the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling in his Atomistik des Willens. “Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives! He cannot will what he wills? Let us consider these phrases more closely. Have they any intelligible meaning? Does freedom of will, then, mean being able to will without ground, without motive? What does willing mean if not to have grounds for doing, or striving to do, this rather than that? To will anything without ground or motive would mean to will something without willing it. The concept of motive is indissolubly bound up with that of will. Without the determining motive the will is an empty faculty; it is the motive which makes it active and real. It is, therefore, quite true that the human will is not ‘free,’ inasmuch as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive. But, on the other hand, it must be admitted that it is absurd to speak, in contrast with this ‘unfreedom,’ of a conceivable ‘freedom’ of the will, which would consist in being able to will what one does not will.” (Atomistik des Willens, p. 213 ff.)

[ 13 ] Here, again, only motives in general are mentioned, without taking into account the difference between unconscious and conscious motives. If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the “strongest” of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it? The primary question is, not whether I can do a thing or not when impelled by a motive, but whether there are any motives except such as impel me with absolute necessity. If I am compelled to will something, then I may well be absolutely indifferent as to whether I can also do it. And if, through my character, or through circumstances prevailing in my environment, a motive is forced on me which to my thinking is unreasonable, then I should even have to be glad if I could not do what I will.

[ 14 ] The question is, not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision is brought about within me.

[ 15 ] What distinguishes man from all other organic beings is his rational thinking. Activity is common to him with other organisms. Nothing is gained by seeking analogies in the animal world to clear up the concept of freedom as applied to the actions of human beings. Modern science loves these analogies. When scientists have succeeded in finding among animals something similar to human behaviour, they believe they have touched on the most important question of the science of man. To what misunderstandings this view leads is seen, for example, in the book Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, by P. Rée, 1885, where, on page 5, the following remark on freedom appears: “It is easy to explain why the movement of a stone seems to us necessary, while the volition of a donkey does not. The causes which set the stone in motion are external and visible, while the causes which determine the donkey's volition are internal and invisible. Between us and the place of their activity there is the skull cap of the ass ... The causal nexus is not visible and, therefore, thought to be non-existent. The volition, it is explained, is, indeed, the cause of the donkey's turning round, but is itself unconditioned; it is an absolute beginning.” Here again human actions in which there is a consciousness of the motives are simply ignored, for Rée declares, “that between us and the sphere of their activity there is the skull cap of the ass.” As these words show, it has not so much as dawned on Rée that there are actions, not indeed of the ass, but of human beings, in which the motive that has become conscious, lies between us and the action. Rée demonstrates his blindness once again, a few pages further on, when he says, “We do not perceive the causes by which our will is determined, hence we think it is not causally determined at all.”

[ 16 ] But enough of examples which prove that many argue against freedom without knowing in the least what freedom is.

[ 17 ] That an action cannot be free, of which the agent does not know why he performs it, goes without saying. But what of the freedom of an action about the motives of which we know? This leads us to the question of the origin and meaning of thinking. For without the recognition of the thinking activity of the soul, it is impossible to understand what is meant by knowledge of something or what is meant by action. When we know what thinking in general means, it will be easier to see clearly the role which thinking plays in human action. As Hegel rightly says, “It is thinking which turns the soul, common to us and animals, into spirit.” Hence it is thinking which we may expect to give to human action its characteristic stamp.

[ 18 ] I do not mean to imply that all our active doing springs only from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am very far from calling only those actions “human” in the highest sense, which proceed from abstract judgments. But as soon as our conduct rises above the sphere of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, our motives are always permeated by thoughts. Love, pity, and patriotism are springs of action which cannot be analysed away into cold concepts of the understanding. It is said that here the heart, the mood of the soul, hold sway. This is no doubt true. But the heart and the mood of the soul do not create the motives. They presuppose them and let them enter. Pity enters my heart when the representation of a person who arouses pity comes forward in my consciousness. The way to the heart is through the head. Love is no exception. Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare sexual instinct, it depends on the representation we form of the loved one. And the more idealistic these representations are, just so much the more blessed is our love. Here, too, thought is the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But the opposite view can be taken, namely, that it is precisely for the good points that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good points without notice. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done except to have achieved a representation of what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the representation.

[ 19 ] From whatever point we regard the subject, it becomes more and more clear that the question of the nature of human action presupposes that of the origin of thinking. I shall, therefore, turn next to this question.

• 1. Vorstellung, cf. Translator's Preface

Yesterday we tried to gain a conception of the importance in human life of what may be termed the super-sensible revelation of our age. We indicated that this was to be reckoned the third revelation in the most recent cycle of mankind, and should, in a certain sense, be regarded as in sequence to the Sinai revelation and the revelation at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ought not to look upon this feature of our age as something affecting us merely theoretically or scientifically; as Anthroposophists we must rise to an ever fuller realisation that men, in their evolution, are neglecting something essential if they hold aloof from all that is being announced to us now and will be announced in the future. It is quite appropriate that at first the external world should pass this by, or even treat it as sheer fantasy; and quite natural also that, to begin with, many people should not pay attention to the harmful consequences of disregarding what is here in question. But Anthroposophists should be clear that the souls in human bodies to-day, irrespective of what they absorb at present, are approaching an ineluctable future. What I shall have to say concerns every soul, for it is part of the whole trend of change in our time.

The souls incorporated to-day have only recently advanced to the stage of that genuine ego-consciousness which has been in preparation during the course of evolution ever since the old Atlantean period. But for the people of those ancient days, up to the time when the great change was intimated by the Mystery of Golgotha, this ego-consciousness was gradually freeing itself from a consciousness of which present-day people no longer have any real knowledge. To-day modern men generally distinguish only between our ordinary condition of being awake and the state of sleep, when consciousness is in complete abeyance. Between these states they recognise also the intermediate one of dreaming, but from the present-day standpoint they can regard it only as a kind of aberration, a departure from the normal. Through dream-pictures certain events from the depths of the soul-life rise into consciousness; but in ordinary dreaming they emerge in such an obscure form that the dreamer is scarcely ever able to interpret rightly their very real bearing on deep super-sensible processes in his life of soul.

In order to grasp one characteristic feature of this intermediate state—a state well understood in earlier times—let us take an ordinary dream of which a scientific modern investigator of dreams, able to interpret it only superficially and in a materialistic way, has made a regular conundrum. A highly significant dream! You see, I am taking my example from the science of dreams, which—as I have mentioned before—has to-day been given a place, little understood though it is, among sciences such as chemistry and physics. The following dream, a characteristic one, has been recorded. I might easily have taken my example from similar, unpublished, dreams; but I would like to deal with one which raises certain problems for present-day commentators, who have no key to such matters.

Now the case is this. A married couple had a much beloved son, who was growing up to the joy of his parents. One day he fell ill, and his condition worsened in a few hours to such a degree that, at the end of this one day, he passed through the gate of death. Thus for the ordinary experience of this couple, their son was abruptly snatched from them, and the son himself torn from a life full of promise. The parents, naturally, mourned their son. During the months following there was a great deal in the dreams of both husband and wife to remind them of him. But, quite a long time—many, many months—after his death, there came a night when his father and mother had exactly the same dream. They dreamed that their son appeared to them saying he had been buried alive, having only been in a trance, and that they merely had to look into the matter to be convinced that this was true.

The parents told each other what they had thus dreamed on the same night, and such was their attitude to life that they immediately asked the authorities for permission to have their son's body disinterred. In such matters, however—conditions being as they are—authorities are not easily persuaded; the request was refused. The parents had this further cause for grieving.

Now the investigator who gave his account of the dream, and could think of it only in a materialistic way, was faced with great difficulties. To begin with it is very easy to say: Yes, this is quite intelligible. The parents were thinking so much about their son that it is obvious they would both have dreamt of him. But the puzzling thing was that they should have had the same dream on the same night. The investigator finally explained it in a remarkable way which is bound to seem very forced to anyone reading it. He said: We can only assume that one parent had the dream, and the other, hearing it when awake, got the idea that he (or she) had dreamt it also. To present-day consciousness this interpretation at first seems fairly obvious, but it doesn't go very deep. I have expressly mentioned that for anyone well-versed in dream-experiences there is nothing unusual in several people having the same dream at the same time.

Let us try now to look into this dream-experience from the point of view of Spiritual Science. The results of spiritual investigation show how a man who has gone through the gate of death lives on as an individuality in the spiritual world. We know, too, that there are definite connections between every thing and every being in the world, and that this is evident in the link that unites those who have departed with people still on earth, when the latter lovingly concentrate thoughts on their dead. There is no question of there not being a connection between those on the physical plane and those who have left it for the super-sensible world. There is always a connection when thoughts are turned at all to the dead by those left on the physical plane—a connection that may continue even when their thoughts are directed elsewhere. But the point is that human beings, organised as they are now for life on the physical plane, are unable when awake to become conscious of these bonds. Having no knowledge of a thing, however, does not justify denying its existence; that would be a very superficial conclusion. On that basis, those now sitting in this room and not seeing Nuremberg could easily prove there is no such place. So we must be clear that it is only because of their present-day organisation that men know nothing of their connection with the dead; it exists all the same.

However, knowledge of what is going on in the depths of the soul can occasionally be conjured up into consciousness, and this happens in dreams. It is one thing we have to reckon with when considering dream-experiences. Another thing is the knowledge that passing through death is not the sudden leap imagined by those knowing nothing about it; it is a gradual transition. What occupies a soul here on earth does not then vanish in a moment. What a man loves, he continues to love after his death. But there is no possibility of satisfying a feeling which depends for its satisfaction on a physical body. The wishes and desires of the soul, its joys, sorrows, the particular tendencies it has during incorporation in a physical body—these naturally continue even when the gate of death has been passed. We can therefore understand how strong was the feeling in this young man, meeting with death when quite unprepared, that he would like to be still on earth, and how keen was his longing to be in a physical body. This desire, working as a force in the soul, lasted on for a long, long time during his Kamaloka.

Now picture to yourselves vividly the parents, with their thoughts engrossed by this beloved dead son. Even in sleep the connecting links were there. Just at the moment when both father and mother began to dream, the son, in accordance with the state of his soul, had a particularly keen desire that we may perhaps clothe in these words: “Oh! If only I were still on earth in a physical body.” This thought on the part of the dead son sank deep into his parents' soul, but they had no special faculty for understanding what lay behind the dream. Thus the imprint of the thought on their life of soul was transformed into familiar images. Whereas, if they could have clearly perceived what the son was pouring into their souls, their interpretation would have been: “Our son is longing just now for a physical body.” In fact, the dream-image clothed itself in words they understood—“He has been buried alive!”—which hid the truth from them.

Thus, in dream-pictures of this kind we should not look for an exact replica of what is real in the spiritual worlds; we must expect the actual objective occurrence to be veiled in accordance with the dreamer's degree of understanding. To-day it is the peculiar feature of the dream-world that—if we are unable to go into these matters more deeply—we can no longer regard its pictures as faithful copies of what underlies them. We are obliged to say: Something is always living in our soul behind the dream-picture, and this picture can be looked upon only as a still greater illusion than the external world confronting us when we are awake.

It is only in our time that dreams are appearing to people in this guise; strictly speaking only since the events in Palestine, when ego-consciousness took on the form it has now. Before then, the pictures appeared while men were in a state different from either waking or sleeping—a third state, more like the one prevailing in the super-sensible world. Human beings lived with the dead in spirit far more than is feasible nowadays. There is no need to look back many centuries before the Christian era to realise what a countless number of people were then able to say: “The dead are certainly not dead; they are living in the super-sensible world. I can perceive what they are feeling and seeing, what they now actually are. This holds good also for the other Beings in the super-sensible world; those, for instance, whom we know as the Hierarchies.”

Thus, for human beings in certain states between waking and sleeping, these were experiences of which the last degenerate echoes linger on in dreams. Hence it was very important that men should then feel this disappearance of something they once possessed. In that traditional epoch of human evolution, when the great events were taking place in Palestine, there was indeed cause for saying: “Change your mood of soul; quite different times are coming for mankind.” And among the changes was this—that the old possibility of seeing into the spiritual world, of personally experiencing how matters stood with the dead and with all other spiritual beings, was going to pass away.

The history of those olden days offers ample evidence of this living with the dead—notably in the religious veneration arising everywhere in the form of ancestor-worship. This was founded on belief in the reality and activity of those who had died. And whereas it continued almost everywhere during the transitional period, men's experience was this, though perhaps not put clearly into words: “Formerly our souls could rise to the world we call that of the spirit, and we were able to dwell among the higher Beings and with the dead. But now our dead leave us in quite another sense; they disappear from our consciousness and the old vivid contact is no more.”

We come here to something exceptionally difficult to grasp, but the intelligent mind, the intelligent soul, can learn to do so. It was the early Christians who felt most vividly the loss of direct psychical contact with the dead, and it was this that made their worship of God so full of meaning, so infinitely deep and holy. They compensated for what was lost by the reverent feeling they brought to their religious ceremonies; when, for instance, they sacrificed at the graves of their dead or celebrated the Mass, or observed any other religious rite. In fact, it was during this period of transition, when consciousness of the dead was seen to be wanting, that altars took the shape of coffins. Thus it was with a feeling for mortal remains of this kind—unlike that of the ancient Egyptians—that the service of God, the service of the spirit, was reverently performed. As I have said, this is something not easy to understand. We need, however, only observe the form of an altar, and allow our hearts to respond to this gradual change in men's whole outlook, and feeling and understanding will then arise for the change and its consequences.

We see, therefore, that slowly, gradually, the present state of the human soul was brought about. From indications given yesterday it can be gathered that what has thus come into being will again be succeeded by a different state, for which people are already developing faculties. The example I gave you yesterday of how a man will see, in a kind of dream picture, his future karmic compensation for some deed, means the re-awakening of faculties that will lead the soul once more to the spiritual worlds. In relation to earthly evolution as a whole, the intermediate state when the soul has been cut off from the super-sensible world, will prove to be comparatively short. It had to come about for men to be able to acquire the strongest possible forces for their freedom. But something else of which I have spoken was bound up with the whole progress of human evolution—that only in this way was a man able to acquire a feeling of the ego within him; to have, that is, the right ego-consciousness. The farther men advance into the future, the more firmly will this ego-consciousness establish itself within them, always increasing in significance. In other words, the force and self-sufficiency of men's individuality will be increasingly accentuated, so that it becomes necessary for them to find in themselves their own effective support.

Thus we see that the ego-consciousness men have to-day does not go back as far as is usually imagined. Only a few incarnations ago, men had no ego-feeling such as is characteristic of them to-day. And as the ego-feeling is intimately connected with memory, we need not be surprised that many people should not have begun, as yet, to look back on their previous incarnations. Because of the undeveloped state of this feeling for his ego during early childhood, a man does not even remember what happened to him then; so it seems quite comprehensible that, for the same reason, he is unable yet to remember his earlier incarnations. But now we have come to the point when man has developed a feeling for his ego, and the forces are unfolding which will make it necessary in our coming incarnations to remember those that have gone before. The days are drawing near when people will feel bound to admit: “We have strange glimpses into the past, when we were already on the earth but living in another bodily form. We look back and have to say that we were already then on earth.” And among the faculties appearing more and more in human beings will be one which arouses the feeling: It can only be that I am looking back on earlier incarnations of my own.

Just think how in the human souls now on earth the inner force is already arising which will enable them, in their next incarnations, to look back and to recognise themselves. But for those who have not become familiar with the idea of reincarnation this looking back will be a veritable torment. Ignorance of the mysteries of repeated earthly lives will be actually painful for these human beings; forces in them are striving to rise and bear witness to earlier times, but this cannot happen because all knowledge of these forces is refused. Not to learn of the truths now being proclaimed through Spiritual Science does not mean neglecting—let us say—mere theories; it is on the way to making a torment of life in future incarnations. In these times of transition, accordingly, something is happening; the slow preparation for it can be gathered from our second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation,” where we are shown earlier incarnations of the characters portrayed—incarnations of only a few centuries before. The event was then already in preparation; and now, thanks to the wisdom of cosmic guidance, human beings will be given positive opportunities of making themselves familiar with the truths of the Mysteries.

At present comparatively few find their way to Spiritual Science; their number is modest compared with that of the rest of mankind. It may be said that interest in Anthroposophy is not yet very wide-spread. But, in our age, the law of reincarnation is such that those now going through the world apathetically, ignoring what experience can tell about the need for exploring the riddles of life, will incarnate again in a relatively short time, and thus have ample opportunity for absorbing the truths of Spiritual Science. That is how it stands. So that when perhaps we see around us people we esteem, people we love, who will have nothing to do with Anthroposophy, are even hostile towards it, we ought not to take it too much to heart. It is perfectly true, and should be realised by Anthroposophists, that refusing to look into Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, means preparing a life of torment for future incarnations on earth. That is true, and should not be treated lightly. On the other hand, those who see friends and acquaintances they care for showing no inclination towards Anthroposophy can say: “If I become a good Anthroposophist myself, I shall find an early opportunity, with the forces remaining to me after death, to prove helpful to these souls”—provided the living link we have spoken of is there. And because the interval between death and rebirth is becoming shorter, these souls, too, will have the opportunity of absorbing the Mystery-truths that must be absorbed if torment is to be avoided in men's coming incarnations. All is not yet lost.

We have, therefore, to look upon Anthroposophy as a real power; while on the other hand we must not be unduly grieved or pessimistic about the matter. It would be mistaken optimism to say: “If that is how things are, I need not accept the truths of Spiritual Science till my next incarnation” If everyone were to say that, when gradually the next incarnations come, there would be too few opportunities for effective aid to be given. Even if those wishing for Anthroposophy can now receive its truths from only quite a few people, the situation will be different for the countless hosts of those who, in a comparatively short time, will be eagerly turning to Anthroposophy. A countless number of Anthroposophists will then be needed to make these truths known, either here on the physical plane, or—if they are not incarnated—from higher planes.

That is one thing we must learn from the whole character of the great change now taking place. The other is that all this has to be experienced by the ego so that it should rely increasingly upon itself, becoming more and more independent. The self-reliance of the ego must come for all souls; but it will mean disaster for those who make no effort to learn about the great spiritual truths, for the increasing individualism will be felt by them as isolation. On the other hand, those who have made themselves familiar with the deep mysteries of the spiritual world will thereby find a way to forge ever stronger spiritual bands between souls. Old bonds will be loosened, new ones formed. All this is imminent, but it will be gradual.

We are living at present in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which will be followed by a sixth and then by a seventh, when a catastrophe will come upon us, just as one came between the Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. When the lectures on the Apocalypse were given here in Nuremberg, you heard a description of this coming catastrophe, of how it will resemble and how it will differ from the one in old Atlantis.

If we observe life around us, we might express the particular feature of our age in this way: The most active element in human beings to-day is their intellectualism, their intellectual conception of the world. We are living altogether in an age of intellectualism. It has been brought about through quite special circumstances, and we shall come to understand these if we look back to the time before our present fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the Graeco-Latin, as it is called. That was the remarkable period when human beings had not reached their present state of detachment from the outer manifestations of nature and knowledge of the world. But at the same time it was the epoch in which the ego descended among men. The Christ-event had also to happen in that epoch, because, with Him, the ego made its descent in a special way.

What then is our present experience? It is not just of the entering-in of the ego; we now experience how one of our sheaths casts a kind of reflection upon the soul. The sheath to which yesterday we gave the name of “faith-body” throws its reflection on to the human soul, in this fifth epoch. Thus it is a feature of present-day man that he has something in his soul which is, as it were, a reflection of the nature of faith of the astral body. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch there will be a reflection within man of the love-nature of the etheric body, and in the seventh, before the great catastrophe, the reflection of the nature of hope of the physical body.

For those who have heard lectures I am giving in various places just now, I would note that these gradual happenings have been described from a different point of view both in Munich and in Stuttgart; the theme, however, is always the same. What is now being portrayed in connection with the three great human forces, Faith, Love, Hope, was there represented in direct relation to the elements in a man's life of soul; but it is all the same thing. I have done this intentionally, so that Anthroposophists may grew accustomed to get the gist of a matter without strict adherence to special words. When we realise that things can be described from many different sides, we shall no longer pin so much faith on words but focus our efforts on the matter itself, knowing that any description amounts only to an approximation of the whole truth. This adherence to the original words is the last thing that can help us to get to the heart of a matter. The one helpful means is to harmonise what has been said in successive epochs, just as we learn about a tree by studying it not from one direction only but from many different aspects.

Thus at present it is essentially the force of faith of the astral body which, shining into the soul, is characteristic of our time. Someone might say: “That is rather strange. You are telling us now that the ruling force of the age is faith. We might admit this in the case of those who hold to old beliefs, but to-day so many people are too mature for that, and they look down on such old beliefs as belonging to the childish stage of human evolution.” It may well be that people who say they are monists believe they do not believe, but actually they are more ready to do so than those calling themselves believers. For, though monists are not conscious of it, all that we see in the various forms of monism is belief of the blindest kind, believed by the monists to be knowledge. We cannot describe their doings at all without mentioning belief. And, apart from the belief of those who believe they do not believe, we find that, strictly speaking, an endless amount of what is most important to-day is connected with the reflection the astral body throws into the soul, giving it thereby the character of ardent faith. We have only to call to mind lives of the great men of our age, Richard Wagner's for example, and how even as an artist he was rising all his life to a definite faith; it is fascinating to watch this in the development of his personality. Everywhere we look to-day, the lights and shadows can be interpreted as the reflection of faith in what we may call the ego-soul of man.

Our age will be followed by one in which the need for love will cast its light. Love in the sixth culture-epoch will show itself in a very different form—different even from that which can be called Christian love. Slowly we draw nearer to that epoch; and by making those in the Anthroposophical Movement familiar with the mysteries of the cosmos, with the nature of the various individualities both on the physical plane and on the higher planes, we try to kindle love for everything in existence. This is not done so much by talking of love, as by feeling that what is able to kindle love in the soul is prepared for the sixth epoch by Anthroposophy. Through Anthroposophy the forces of love are specially aroused in the whole human soul, and that is prepared which a man needs for gradually acquiring a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is indeed true that the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass; and the Gospels have evoked something which yesterday was likened to how children learn to speak. But the deepest lesson—the mission of earthly love in its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha—has not yet been grasped. Full understanding of this will be possible only in the sixth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, when people grow to realise more and more that the foundations for it are actually within them, and out of their innermost being—in other words, out of love—do what should be done. Then the guidance of the Commandments will have been outlived and the stage reached that is described in Goethe's words: “Duty—when one loves the commands one gives to oneself.” When forces wake in our souls which impel us to do what we should through love alone, we then discover in us something that must gradually become widespread in the sixth culture-epoch. Then in a man's nature quite special forces of the etheric body will make themselves known.

To understand what it is that must come about increasingly in this way, we have to consider it from two sides. One side has certainly not come yet and is only dreamt of by the most advanced in spirit; it is a well-defined relation between custom, morals, ethics and the understanding, intellectuality. To-day a man may be to a certain extent a rascal, yet at the same time intelligent and clever. He may even use his very cleverness to further his knavery. At present it is not required of people to combine their intelligence with an equal degree of morality. To all that we have been anticipating for the future this must be added—that as we advance, it will no longer be possible for these two qualities of the human soul to be kept apart, or to exist in unequal measure. A man who, according to the reckoning-up of his previous incarnation, has become particularly intelligent without being moral, will in his new incarnation possess only a stunted intelligence. Thus, to have equal amounts of intelligence and morality in future incarnations he will be obliged, as a consequence of universal cosmic law, to enter his new incarnation with an intelligence that is crippled, so that immorality and stupidity coincide. For immorality has a crippling effect upon intelligence. In other words, we are approaching the age when morality and what has now been described for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch as the shining into the ego-soul of the love-forces of the etheric body, point essentially to forces having to do with harmonising those of intelligence and morality. That is the one side to be considered.

The other side is this—that it is solely through harmony of this kind, between morality, custom, and intelligence, that the whole depth of the Mystery of Golgotha is to be grasped. This will come about only through the individuality who before Christ-Jesus came to earth prepared men for that Mystery, developing in his successive inearnations ever greater powers as teacher of the greatest of all earthly events This individuality, whom in his rank as Bodhisatva we call the successor of Gautama Buddha, was incarnated in the personality living about a hundred years before Christ under the name of Jeshu ben Pandira. Among his many students was one who had at that time already, in a certain sense, written down a prophetic version of the Matthew Gospel, and this, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been enacted, needed only to be given a new form.

There have been, and will continue to be, frequent incorporations of the individuality who appeared as Jeshu ben Pandira, until he rises from the rank of Bodhisatva to that of Buddha. According to our reckoning of time this will be in about 3,000 years, when a sufficient number of people will possess the above-mentioned faculties, and when, in the course of a remarkable incarnation of the individual who was once Jeshu ben Pandira, this great teacher of mankind will have become able to act as interpreter of the Mystery of Golgotha in a very different way from what is possible to-day. It is true that even to-day a seer into the super-sensible worlds can gain some idea of what is to happen then; but the ordinary earthly organisation of man cannot yet provide a physical body capable of doing what that teacher will be able to do approximately 3,000 years hence. There is, as yet, no human language through which verbal teaching could exert the magical effects that will spring from the words of that great teacher of humanity. His words will flow directly to men's hearts, into their souls, like a healing medicine; nothing in those words will be merely theoretical. At the same time the teaching will contain—to an extent far greater than it is possible to conceive to-day—a magical moral force carrying to hearts and souls a full conviction of the eternal, deeply significant brotherhood of intellect and morality.

This great teacher, who will be able to give to men ripe for it the profoundest instruction concerning the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, will fulfil what Oriental prophets have always said—that the true successor of Buddha would be, for all mankind, the greatest teacher of the good. For that reason he has been called in oriental tradition the Maitreya Buddha. His task will be to enlighten human beings concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and for this he will draw ideas and words of the deepest significance from the very language he will use. No human language to-day can evoke any conception of it. His words will imprint into men's souls directly, magically, the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence in this connection also we are approaching what we may call the future moral age of man; in a certain sense we could designate it as a coming Golden Age.

Even to-day, however, speaking from the ground of Anthroposophy, we point in full consciousness to what is destined to come about—how the Christ will gradually reveal Himself to ever-higher powers in human beings, and how the teachers, who up to now have taught only individual peoples and individual men, will become the interpreters of the great Christ-event for all who are willing to listen. And we can point out how, through the dawning of the age of love, conditions for the age of morality are prepared.

Then will come the last epoch, during which human souls will receive the reflection of what we call hope; when, strengthened through the force flowing from the Mystery of Golgotha and from the age of morality, men will take into themselves forces of hope. This is the most important gift they need in order to face the next catastrophe and to begin a new life, just as was done in this present post-Atlantean age.

When in the final post-Atlantean epoch our external culture, with its tendency to calculation, will have come to a climax, bringing no feeling of satisfaction but leaving those who have not developed the spiritual within them to confront their culture in utter desolation—then out of spirituality the seed of hope will be sown, and in the next period of human evolution this will grow to maturity. If the spirit is denied all possibility of imparting to men's souls what it can give, and what the Anthroposophical Movement has the will to convey, this external culture might for a short while be able to hold its own. Ultimately, however, people would ask themselves what they had gained and say: “We have wireless installations—undreamt of by our ancestors—to transmit our thoughts all over the earth, and what good does it do us? The most trivial, unproductive thoughts are sent hither and thither, and human ingenuity has to be strained to the utmost to enable us to transport from some far distant region, by means of all kinds of perfected appliances, something for us to eat; or to travel at high speeds round the globe. But in our heads there is nothing worth sending from place to place, for our thoughts are cheerless; more-over, since we have had our present means of communication, they have become even more cheerless than when they were conveyed in the old snail-like fashion.”

In short, despair and desolation are all that our civilisation can spread over the earth. But, in the last culture-epoch, souls who have accepted the spiritual in life will have become enriched, as if on the ruins of the external life of culture. Their surety that this acceptance of the spiritual has not been in vain will be the strong force of hope within them—hope that after a great catastrophe a new age will come for human beings, when there will appear in external life, in a new culture, what has already been prepared spiritually within the soul.

Thus, if we permeate our whole being with Spiritual Science, we advance step by step, in full consciousness, from our age of faith, through the age of love and that of hope, to what we can see approaching us as the highest, truest, most beautiful, of all human souls.

Yesterday I attempted to portray the general character of speech as such and the character of this visible speech of eurhythmy in particular. To-day I should like to describe the characteristics of the individual sounds, for only when the character and inner nature of these sounds reveal themselves to us shall we be able to understand the elements of eurhythmy. To begin with I should like to draw attention to the fact that in the life of humanity, in the course of human evolution, there has always been a more or less definite consciousness of these things. It is only in our time that, as I said yesterday, we have become so shrivelled up with regard to our attitude towards speech. There has always existed a certain consciousness of all that lies in the progression of sounds as they occur in language, an understanding of the fact that in the consonants there lies an imitation of outer forms and that an inward experience is contained in the vowel sounds.

This consciousness has been carried over more or less into the forms of the letters, so that in the formation of the letters in ancient languages,—in the Hebrew language, for example, particularly in the case of the consonants,—we may still see a sort of imitation of what takes place in the air, of what forms itself in the air when we speak. To a great extent this has been lost in all the more modern languages. (Among these I naturally include all those which, let us say, begin with the Latin language; the Greek language still retains something of what I mean.) Many things, however, still recall the time when an attempt was made to imitate in the forming of the letters that which actually lies in the formation, in the structure of the word; when a word was fashioned out of the consonantal element,—that is to say, the imitation of the external,—and out of the inner experience which had its source in the life of the soul. To-day it is only in certain interjections that we can still see dearly an instance of such imitation. Let us take an example which may serve to lead us more deeply into the real nature of eurhythmy.

When we pronounce the sound h,—clearly, not merely as a breath,—we have a sound which really lies midway between the consonants and the vowels. This is always the case with sounds which have a special relation to breathing. Breathing was always felt to be something in which the human being lives partly in an inner experience and partly in an out-going experience. Now the h-sound, this simple breath sound, may be felt,—and was indeed felt by primitive man,—as the imitation, the forming in the air of a wafting process, as the imitation of the way in which the breath is wafted into the surrounding atmosphere. Everything which is experienced as a wafting process is expressed through some word in which the h-sound is present, because the h itself is felt as the wafting process.

The vowel sound u can be felt as something which inwardly chills the soul, so that it takes on a certain rigidity and numbness. That is the inward experience lying behind u. U is the expression of something which chills, stiffens, benumbs; it is the sound which gives one the feeling of coldness. U, then, is the chilling, stiffening process.

And the sch,—that is the blowing away of something. It is the sound in which one feels that something is blowing past.

Now it is a fact that in certain districts, when an icy wind is blowing and one is numbed and stiff with the cold, people make use of the expression: husch-husch, husch-husch. In this interjection we still have an absolute experience of the h-u-sch: husch-husch. In primeval language all words were really interjections, ejaculations.

Let us take another combination of sounds. You all know the sound r. If one experiences the r-sound in the right way, one feels it as a turning wheel: r-r-r-r. Thus the r expresses a rolling, a revolving; it is the imitation of anything which gives the impression of turning, rolling, revolving. We must think of it, picture it, like this:

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Yesterday I spoke already of the sound a. I told you that a expresses wonder. The sch-sound has already been described; it is the blowing past of something. And now we are able to feel the word ‘rasch’ (swift). It is easy to picture it. When anything rushes past it creates a certain wonder and disappears, is blown away: rasch.

So you see there is good reason for regarding the consonants as being an imitation. Here we have in the r the revolving, rolling, turning of something; in the vowel sound a the inner feeling of wonder: in the sch-sound something which goes away, which passes by.

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From these examples you can already see that there is a certain justification for speaking of a primeval language, for you can feel that if human beings really experienced the sounds absolutely truly they would all speak in the same way; they would quite naturally, out of their own organization, describe things exactly in the same way.

It is a fact, as Spiritual Science teaches us, that there was once upon the earth a primeval language. You all know myths and legends dealing with this, - but it is much more than a myth or a legend. There is really something which lies at the back of all languages, and which is, in the way I have described, the primeval language from which all other languages have been built up.

When one turns one’s attention to certain facts of life and sees how, out of an infinite wisdom, they have been given similar names, then one is quite overwhelmed with the wisdom which reigns in the whole evolution of man, indeed in the whole evolution of the world. Consider the following, my dear friends,—and what I am now going to bring forward is no mere triviality, but it proceeds from out of a true and fundamental perception of the nature of man.

For people who think deeply over the problems which present themselves to the understanding, certain things that bear somewhat intimate relationship to life itself become riddles,—riddles which are simply passed over by the more blunted sensibilities of the average man. The fact that there is a similarity between the words ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’ may well be looked upon as a riddle of this kind. It is clear that one would not say ‘father-milk’, but the reason for not saying ‘father-tongue’ is less apparent. Where are we to seek for this parallel between ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’?

There are always inner reasons for such things. It is true that the external reason may frequently prove deceptive, but for these intimate facts of human evolution inner reasons are always to be discovered. When the child comes into the world the mother’s milk is the best nourishment for the physical body. Such things do not properly belong to lectures on eurhythmy, but if we had the necessary time, and if we were to analyse the mother’s milk in the right way,—not with the dead methods of chemistry but with a living chemistry,—we should find out why it is that the mother’s milk is the best nourishment for the physical body of man during the first stages of life.—Indeed, speaking from the medical-scientific point of view, one may go so far as to say that the milk of the mother is the best means of building up, of actually giving form to the physical body. This is the first thing we have to realize. It is the mother’s milk which gives form to the physical body. And it is the ‘mother-tongue’,—we said yesterday that the mother-tongue corresponds to the etheric body,—it is the mother-tongue which develops and gives form to the etheric body. For this reason we have a similarity between the words. First there appears the physical body with its need for the mother’s milk and then the etheric body with its need for the mother-tongue.

A deep wisdom lies hidden in such things. We find the deepest wisdom, not only in these word formations which can be traced back to ancient times, but also in many proverbial sayings and ideas. We should not look upon the wisdom concealed in old sayings and proverbs merely as superstition, but should recognize that very often wonderful and significant traditions are contained within them.

Having said this, having made my meaning clear to you, let us now proceed to a description of the nature of the sounds. When we understand what the sounds represent, how the vowels are the expression of inward experiences and the consonants the imitation of the external world,—when we understand how this is the case in every, single instance,—then we are led to a threefold study of eurhythmy,—artistic, educational and curative. I shall make use of everything which could possibly serve to give you a vivid picture of the individual sounds as they really are, so that tomorrow you will be able fully to understand the plastic gestures which we make use of in eurhythmy.

In a there lies a feeling of wonder, astonishment. In b, as I told you yesterday, we have the imitation of something which protects and shelters us from what is outside ourselves. In b we feel that we are enveloped in something. This can even be seen in the way that the letter is formed, only in modern writing the sheath is, as it were, doubled: B. B is always an enveloping, a kind of shelter. To put it somewhat crudely b might be said to be the house in which one lives. B is a house.

In my characterization of the various sounds in speech-eurhythmy I shall take the German language as my starting point. I could just as easily take the sounds of more ancient languages, but we will make a beginning with the German sounds and see how these reveal themselves to us in their true nature.[1]

Coming now to the sound c (ts),—I shall naturally not go into the formation of the written letters as these have mostly become degenerate and in any case, eurhythmists do not need to interest themselves so much in language from this point of view,—coming now to the sound c you will feel it to be some-thing which is in movement. It would be impossible to feel that with the sound c one would try to imitate anything which is in a state of rest. There is a certain force in the sound c; nevertheless, when you really experience what lies behind it, you will realize how impossible it would be to picture anything heavy in connection with it. It would never occur to you that with c you would wish to imitate something which would make you get into a great heat if you tried to lift it. On the contrary, the feeling that one has is that here is the imitation of something which is the reverse of heavy, which is really very light. It is the quality of lightness that is really imitated in the sound c. Thus one can say quite simply: In c we have the imitation of lightness.

If you enter into the intimate nature of the different sounds, you will, in the case of c, have much the same feeling as if in a circus you saw weights,—apparently made of iron and marked so and so many hundredweight,—lifted up quickly and easily by the clown. Imagine that you were to approach such a weight, in the belief that it were made of iron and immensely heavy, and that you were to lift it up. You would approach it, and in suddenly raising it, you would produce a movement very similar to the sound c. We have the same thing in Nature; for sneezing is not at all unlike a c. Sneezing is a lightening process.

It was said by the old occultists that the sound c in primeval language was the Regent of Health. And in Austria, when a person sneezes, we still have a saying: Zur Gesundheit (Your very good health). These are feelings which must be taken into consideration when studying the sounds, otherwise we shall not be able to come to any understanding of them in their reality.

D,—how should we most naturally express d? d. d. d. If someone were to ask you where a thing was, and you knew, the movement you would make to show him would very nearly approach the eurhythmic movement for the sound d. And if you wished to indicate that you expected your questioner to be astonished at getting such a speedy answer, then you would say: da (there). If you leave out the astonishment, the wonder, then there remains just the d. In such a case you are not so conceited us to wish to call up in your questioner the feeling of wonder; you simply show him where the thing is. In expressing d in eurhythmy one makes what may be called an indicating movement raying out in all directions. It is not difficult to feel this. So that we may say: D is the pointing towards something, the raying out towards something. The imitation of this pointing, of this raying out, of this drawing attention to something, all this lies in the sound d.

E is a sound which has always been of very special interest. As you already know e is the sound which gives expression to the feeling that something has been done to us and that we have to stand up against it. E: me will not allow what has been done to trouble us.

Here it may be well to introduce the sound t, Tao, and to explain its significance. You are perhaps already aware that a deep reverence rises up in those who begin to understand what lies in this sound. This Tao, t, is really the sound which has to be felt as representing something of the greatest importance. We may even go so fir as to say that it contains within it creative forces, forces which also have a radiating, indicating quality, but with t it is more especially a radiance which streams from heaven down on to the earth. There is a weightiness about the sound, and at the same time also a radiance. Thus we can say: T is the streaming of forces from above downwards.

Now it is, of course, possible for something which under certain conditions has to be felt as having great and majestic qualities also to make its appearance in ordinary everyday life. Let us take three sounds. Let us first take e as we have learned to know it. E expresses the feeling: Something has been done to me, but I stand up against it and assert myself. T, Tao: Something has burst in upon me. Let us try to show what is contained in this experience: Something has been done to me but I stand up against it—e. An event has taken place; it has suddenly burst in upon me—t: but it is soon over, it passes over; the blowing away of something—st. In this way we get the following combination of sounds: etsch. When do we make use of this expression? We use it when, for instance, somebody makes an important statement, which is, however, false, and we immediately jump to the conclusion that it is false. Now when we are in a position immediately to get rid of what has affected us, when this statement or whatever it is has burst in upon us like a flash of lightning but we destroy it and blow it away, then we say: etsch. Here you have an explanation of this combination of sounds. One feels the e particularly strongly, the being affected by something. One could not imagine saying itsch or atsch in such a case. But in an experience of this kind, when one has been affected by something but has been able immediately to get rid of it, then one obviously must use the expression: etsch.

Now out of the way in which you form the movement for e, out of your knowledge of eurhythmy, you will be able fully to enter into the gesture that in many districts accompanies this expression. This gesture is really very similar to the eurhythmic movement for e. Etsch, etsch (showing the corresponding movement). Here we actually have the eurhythmic movement for e. Such movements are absolutely natural and instinctive.

Thus behind the sound e there lies the experience of being affected by something and of withstanding it. Naturally when one describes such things the description tends to be awkward and inadequate. Everything depends on being able to feel what is meant.

F is a sound which is somewhat difficult to experience in an age which has such a lifeless, dried-up conception of language. But it may perhaps be of assistance to us, my dear friends, if I remind you of a phrase which you will know and which is in fairly general use. People say, when somebody knows a thing upside down and inside out: Er kennt die Sache aus dern ff. (He knows it out of the ff.) An extraordinarily interesting experience lies behind this phrase. When one finds the man in the street making use of such an expression and compares it: with what was said in the old Mysteries the result is truly remarkable. (You remember I said that I should make use of everything which could help us to gain a true understanding of the sounds, whether my examples were drawn from a cultured or from a more primitive source,—the latter being the more fruitful, naturally.) In the ancient Mysteries there was still a living understanding of the words: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’; there was still a living feeling for the creative power of the Word, of the Logos. (Logos is not to be translated ‘wisdom’; indeed, by doing so many modern scholars have betrayed their lack of understanding for these things. Logos must unquestionably be translated ‘Verbum’, ‘Word’,—only the word ‘Word’ must be understood in the right way, in the way in which I explained it yesterday.)

Now, in the old Mysteries of Western Asia, Southern Asia and Africa it was said, when speaking about the sound f: When man utters the sound f he expels out of himself the whole stream of his breath. It was by means of the breath that the Gods created humanity, and the whole of human wisdom is contained m the air, in the breath. So that all the Indian was able to learn when through Yoga Philosophy he learned to control his breathing and as a result was able to fill himself with inner wisdom,—all this he felt when he uttered the sound f. In the old Indian Yoga practices the pupil had the following experience: he practised Yoga exercises, the technique of which consisted in this, that he became inwardly aware of the organization of man, inwardly aware of the fullness of wisdom. In uttering the sound f he became conscious of the wisdom contained in the Word. F can therefore only be rightly understood when one tries even to-day to understand a certain formula, which is very little known in the world, but which nevertheless did once exist and in the old I? Egyptian Mysteries ran somewhat as follows: If thou wouldst proclaim the nature of Isis, of Isis who contains within herself the knowledge of the past, present and future and from whom the veil can never entirely be lifted, then thou must do this in the sound f.—

The making use of the process of breathing in order to fill oneself with the being of Isis, the experiencing of Isis in the out-going breath-stream,—this it is that lies in the sound f. So that f—not indeed exactly, but at any rate to some extent—can be felt as the expression of: I know.—But more lies in it than this. ‘I know’ is really only a feeble expression of what we should feel in the sound f. For this very reason the feeling for f was soonest lost. F may be felt somewhat as follows: Know thou, to whom I speak, when I say f to thee I would make thee aware that I can teach thee. Thou must know that I myself have knowledge.—

It would therefore seem natural to you, absolutely natural, if, someone desirous of putting another right were suddenly to approach him giving vent to a sound similar to f. There are many interesting words, words which would well repay study, in which the sound f occurs in some connection or other. This study, however, you can carry out for yourselves; and you will continually be reminded of all that I have told you about the inner nature of the sound f.

I have already spoken about the sound h; we know that it is the blowing, the wafting past of something.

And now i. It is easy to feel i as an assertion of oneself, as positive self-assertion. In the German language there is a very happy example of this. It is our word for the expression of the; affirmation or the assertion of something: Ja (yes). Here certainly there is the indication of a consonantal element, but the i is nevertheless present and is followed by wonder, by amazement. Assent, affirmation, cannot be better expressed than by an assertion coloured by wonder. We said yesterday that the quality of wonder really represented man in his true being; and when we add to this the assertion of oneself: Ja, then we could not have a dearer, more definite expression of the affirmative. Thus in i we have the assertion of self. We shall see how important it is for eurhythmists to understand that behind the sound i there is always a vindication of oneself, an assertion of oneself.

L is a very remarkable sound,—as I am pronouncing it now it contains a hint of e,—but I mean the pure sound l. Try to realize what you really do when you pronounce l. Try to, realize especially what you do with your tongue. You use your tongue in a very skilful way when you pronounce the sound l, l, l, l. You become aware of a creative, form-giving element when saying this sound. Indeed, if one were not too, terribly hungry, one might almost satisfy one’s hunger by, simply saying the sound l very distinctly and over and over again. We feel l to be something absolutely real, as real, for, example, as if we were to eat a dumpling—a specially nice, soft dumpling—and were to allow it to melt on the tongue with a feeling of great satisfaction. We can have a like experience, when we pronounce the sound l, l, l, very distinctly. There is: something creative, something form-giving in this sound. And the sculptor is very much tempted when working on the figures which he is creating to make a movement of the tongue similar to the movement which the tongue makes when forming the sound l. Though of course the sculptor does not say l aloud; he only makes a similar movement with his tongue. And anyone able to feel the shape of a nose, for instance, with his tongue,—where the feeling for form, the feeling of l is so strong,—such a one would undoubtedly be very successful in modelling noses! It was said in the old Mysteries that l is the creative, form-giving element in all things and beings,—the force which overcomes matter in the creation of form.

You will easily feel that the diphthong ei (German ri, English i (as in sight)) corresponds to an affectionate caress. When dealing with a child one often makes use of this sound. Ei, ei—an affectionate caress.

I shall next have to describe the sound m, and we shall see that m has the quality of entering right into something, of taking on the form of something outside itself. Let us now suppose, my dear friends,—and here again I am not merely trifling but what I have to say is drawn from out of the history of the ages,—let us suppose that we had some sort of substance and determined that this substance should be the means of transforming matter, of giving form to matter. Let us put the story together. In the first place we demand of this substance that it shall transform matters and give it form and shape. That la to be its main attribute. It is to give form to matter, but in such a way that it clings closely and lovingly to something other than itself, in much the same way as when one caresses a little child: ei, ei,—this is the expression of a caressing quality. The substance must cling to something. And this clinging quality must be retained; the substance must as it were take on a form which is foreign to it, so that it appears exactly the same as this external form; it imitates this form quite exactly. And now let us suppose that we express this transformation of matter into form by means of a combination of sounds. We say l. The clinging quality, ei. The taking on of some external form: m. Thus we have a word: Leim (putty) which is quite specially characteristic of the German language, quite apart from any other consideration. It is upon such combinations of sound behind which there lies hidden the active, evolving genius of language, that the life of this genius of language really depends. It occurs from time to time that when in some language or other a word already exists, although perhaps in a vague, indefinite form, that this word is metamorphosed and introduced again into a language of a later development. The original feeling: underlying the word, however, remains unchanged, and is retained by the people speaking the later language. An understanding of language is a much more complicated matter than is usually supposed. To-day people treat language in a really terrible fashion. In ordinary everyday life which rests upon superficiality and convention such a treatment of language is perhaps not out of place; but its effect upon the human soul is nothing short of devastating, how utterly devastating it is impossible to say. For instance, somebody wishes to translate a book or a poem. So he proceeds to hunt in the dictionary or to search his memory in order to discover the corresponding words. And having more or less transposed it in this way he calls it a translation. But it would really be more correct to call it a mistranslation,—for this is a wrong track altogether. Nothing is more appalling than this method of transferring something from one language into another.

Let us therefore study this question from the following point of view. Assuming that there was once a primeval language (alike of course for all men),—and there is no doubt that this language did exist,—assuming that there was once a primeval language, then the question naturally arises: How is it that the, many different languages came into being? How does it come about that if we take a German word, the word ‘Kopf’ (head) for instance, and translate this into Italian, we have to say ‘testa’? We have the German word ‘Kopf’ and the Italian word ‘testa’. When we begin to enter into the true nature of language we must ask ourselves the question: How is it that the Italian feels the sounds in ‘testa’ which are totally different from those felt by the German when he makes use of the word: ‘Kopf’? According to the rules of translation the two words should have the same significance. If the word ‘Kopf’ were really to be experienced, then the Italian, and even the Chinese would perforce have to say ‘Kopf’ also. How then can the origin of the different languages be explained?

What I am now going to say may make you double up with laughter, but it is nevertheless true. The German makes use of the word ‘Kopf’; the Italian would also make use of this word if he wished to designate the same thing. But he does not wish to do so. The German point of view lies outside his field of vision. What the German expresses in the word ‘Kopf’, that to which he gives the name ‘Kopf’ does not occur in the vocabulary of the Italian language. Were the Italian desirous of expressing the same thing, he, like the German would say: ‘Kopf’. What then does the German mean when he says: ‘Kopf’? He means to describe the form, the rounded form of the head. It is easy to feel this rounded form in the word ‘Kopf’. Later on when we have studied the sound k and all that we need in this connection, we shall be able to realize more dearly that it is the rounded form which is meant here. Now when the word ‘Kopf’ is shown in eurhythmy try to see how this rounding appears in the middle of the word. (Demonstration). The German describes as ‘Kopf’ the round form of the head as it rests on the shoulders.

Were the Italian to have the same experience, he also would say ‘Kopf’ not ‘testa’. What then does he experience? The Italian does not experience the rounded form, but he feels what is implied in a statement, in a testimony; he is more aware of what underlies the word ‘testament’. Thus the act of making a testimony, making a declaration, an affirmation, this it is which is felt by the Italian and for this reason he says: ‘testa’. He means something totally different from the German. The words ‘Kopf’ and ‘testa’ only appear to describe the same thing; in reality they are fundamentally different. In the one case, in the German word, the form of the head is described as it rests upon the shoulders. And in German, if one wishes to lay emphasis upon the roundness of the form one can make use of an expression which has in it at the same time a certain element of contempt and say: ‘Kohlkopf’. (Cabbage-head. Block-head.) You will agree with me that here there can be no shadow of doubt that the rounded form is meant.

But the head as it rests upon the shoulders is not felt as a round form by the Italian; he feels it to be something which makes an assertion, a declaration. For this reason he says: ‘testa’, and feels in this word all that I have described.

This lack of understanding is very general among translators. As a rule we translate without paying any attention to the fact that we should transpose ourselves into the whole atmosphere of the other language in order to catch its exact shades of meaning. Just think how external it is when one translates according to a dictionary. One misses just those things which are most essential and passes them by in sublime unconsciousness.

Let us now return to the sound m,—that sound which makes such a wonderful ending to the sacred Indian word Aum. M contains within it the element of comprehension, of understanding. In the way in which the sound is carried on the stream of the breath we feel that it conforms itself to everything and understands everything. M signifies that which is deeply felt and understood. I remember that my village schoolmaster said mhn when he wanted to show that I had answered a question rightly. At such times he always said mhn,—i.e., he understood; it, he agreed with it; the hn was only the expression of his satisfaction. M, therefore, may be said to be the expression of, agreement. It clings to something and is in agreement with it, as the m at the end of the word Leim.

It is clear from these few examples that in each sound there lies concealed a whole world of experience. And we can easily:, realize that if we were to express ourselves by means of sounds only, instead of using our ordinary words, we should indeed have a simpler and more primitive language, but it would be one which would combine with this simplicity a much deeper intimacy and understanding.

As eurhythmists it is very necessary that you should gradually feel your way into the real nature of the sounds; for eurhythmy does indeed consist of a plastic formation of movement and gesture. Such movements are, however, in no way arbitrary nor transient. On the contrary the movements of eurhythmy are cosmic in their nature, they are full of significance, they, could in no way be other than they are.

In the next lecture I shall describe to you the other sounds which I have not touched upon to-day, and then gradually we shall consider the main characteristics of the actual movements which we use in eurhythmy. We shall see how these movements express in their very essence exactly the same as is expressed by the sounds themselves as they are breathed into the air, as they take shape in the air.

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