The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the course of our branch of life, when we acquire the concepts of the nature of the human being and of human evolution, when we learn, for example, that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I, then we have indeed gained something over and above the knowledge that exists in the world today, but we cannot yet say that with such more or less theoretical knowledge we have acquired what 'theosophy can actually be for a human being in truth. Theosophy only becomes what it should be for the individual and for the human community when it is put into practice, when it becomes a way of life. On such occasions, when I am able to see my dear friends again, I also like to take the opportunity to draw attention to how those ideas, world and human laws that we otherwise acquire in the course of our annual lives play their great role in human life. So today we also want to do such a contemplation of the influence of Theosophy on life.

Sometimes the question arises, especially for those who know little about Theosophy: Yes, there is talk of facts and truths of a supersensible nature, but how can a person who has not yet become clairvoyant talk much about these spiritual worlds, how can he know something about these worlds, except that these things are told to him? This is a very common prejudice, but it is quite unfounded. Without being clairvoyant, one cannot see the astral body of a person, for example, but what happens in this astral body can be experienced in one's own existence, and in this respect 'Theosophy is extremely effective.

I will give an example of a case where a person can experience having an astral body. You know that in everyday life people are accustomed to doing many things without thinking about them, and that they are also accustomed to doing many things that are not at all in their own interest. Consider how much people do from morning till night without thinking, without really thinking about it, without being present with their thoughts; how much people do in such a way that afterwards they say, “I do not entirely agree with what I did.” Can we not say then that we do something that we only partially consider, only partially accompany with thoughts? In particular, our inclinations underlie those habits that we have taken on from the outside and that we would not have if we had educated ourselves.

Thus, life viewed in a materialistic sense appears as if it does not matter whether we do things that we agree with or not, things that we can justify ourselves to others for or not. For the clairvoyant eye it is not so. For the clairvoyant eye it turns out that with every deed, with every action, the part that is not so that we could morally justify ourselves with regard to it makes an impression on our astral body. Such an action has a kind of setback effect on our astral body. And so one can say of such a person: He has so many cracks, so many pits in his astral body, because he does many such things that, if he thought about them, he would not morally justify.

I am not thinking here of professional matters, but of habitual actions. Every such impact affects the astral body and because it no longer disappears as it is, it continues to affect the etheric body, leaving an imprint like a seal and remains there, so that the person walks around with seal imprints in his etheric body. Up to this point, a person who is not clairvoyant can say that he cannot know this; but what happens here is experienced by the person. In a certain way, these things remain present, actually throughout the whole of the following life, and now have an effect on the person again, so that he sometimes says: If only I didn't remember the whole of my life! — Or he shows a sullenness to all those around him, and this grumpy nature has an effect on his health. It is extremely important to be clear about such things, because it often happens, for example in our thirty-seventh year, that something occurs that makes us inwardly grumpy, upset, melancholy, without any external cause, and this then has a damaging effect on our health, destroys our digestive system and so on. In the twentieth year, the reason may have been laid that the impression of the astral on the etheric body has been effected.

So we can say: only a clairvoyant can see what is in the astral body, but a person experiences in life what becomes of it. Many a person would not go around sullen, with a certain helplessness of soul and a shattered physical system, if people would consider that what does not immediately become effective as a result of our actions in the visible world enters into our invisible part and then later becomes visible. A person who says, “I will observe whether what the clairvoyant says is correct,” can see and feel that what the clairvoyants say is true in this way.

Let us assume the opposite case, that man can consider more, think further, than is reflected in his actions. In this case, everyone is an idealist. He knows that not all ideals can be realized, but only some of them. If we have great ideas, we must be content that we can only realize a part of them. If we are capable of thinking far beyond what life allows us, this also has an effect on the astral body, but differently, so that the person is imbued with healthy powers, making him strong, inwardly firm and calm. If, for example, a person was an idealist around the age of twenty and did not listen to the materialists, if he retained faith and trust in ideals, then this is shown by the fact that at a later age he does not get worked up by every little accident, nor by being unwell, that he stands firm and lets things pass him by more than is the case with others.

What gives us strength and peace are the thoughts we have that go beyond what life allows us to realize in terms of ideals. Doctors are already officially aware of this, but they don't know how to really enable people to have positive thoughts about things that go beyond everyday life to a fairly large extent.

Of course there are popular writings that are praised as beneficial for mental health. They tell you that you have to have strength, inner peace, steadiness, not to stray with your thoughts, and the like. For some, such writings on mental health are a very good start. But you won't get very far with them if you want real nourishment for your soul. Such writings by Duboc, Ralph Waldo Trine and so on are quite good for a start. Compared to the real requirements of mental health, they are as if we were asking: How do we have to live in a physical way to be healthy? — and then get the answer: Then you have to eat food that is beneficial to your health, food whose substances can easily be absorbed into your organism. Quite right! But anyone who seriously wants to get to the bottom of the matter will ask: What kind of food is that? Please tell me in more detail what I should be eating!

Such writings, which relate to mental health in the same way as these rules relate to physical health, may be quite good for the beginning, but for the further course of mental searching, not much can be done with them. In contrast, spiritual science gives us thoughts that are formulated in the most precise way, very definite thoughts about how man has developed in every age, how he is developing in the present. This is revealed to us more and more from the theosophical wisdom, so that we can say: spiritual science gives us many opportunities to go far beyond with our thoughts what we can realize. Therefore, it is Theosophy that makes us strong people in our souls, who, when something happens in our environment that threatens to upset us, can draw from within something that gives us balance.

It is not important whether something that happens in our environment reaches our ears so that we are disturbed, but rather whether we take an interest in it and turn our attention to the process. This applies not only to external things, but also to our inner state, in which we sometimes go through the world elated and sometimes saddened to death, thereby undermining our moral and physical health. There are many painful conditions of the soul that can be compared to the clattering of the mill: the miller who works in the mill no longer hears the clattering. So you can surrender to any such pain, even the smallest, to hear the clattering of your own mill, so to speak, or you can turn your attention away. You can't get over it if you have an empty soul. You can only do that if you have something of a spiritual nature that you can draw from.

Let us take an example. There are two people, one of whom lives like this: in the morning he does his usual work in the office, in the afternoon he has a drink and entertains a small conversation, in the evening he has another drink and then goes to bed. If anything occurs to disturb his usual course of life, such a person will immediately be overwhelmed by it: he hears the clattering of his own mill or his own pain. For he has nothing in his soul, nothing that he can bring out to drown out the clattering.

Another person lives just as much in his daily duties, only he has many great thoughts within him, as given to us by spiritual science. These then resound from within him, and he no longer hears the clatter. It is not as if we have to exert ourselves or spend a long time to bring it out, but it comes out all by itself because we have developed strong feelings for it. Thus we will suffer less from the disturbances of life and find more and more comfort in what has accumulated in the soul through years of spiritual striving. This is a possession of a special kind, the only one that no one can take from us. What we otherwise acquire in the world, or what otherwise comes to us in the world, belongs to what can be taken from us. But what we acquire for the spirit is the only possession that can never be taken from us.

People are accustomed to saying: Death makes everything equal. – That is certainly true, but it is equally true that no situation can be imagined to which what has been said here does not apply equally. Nothing in the world can help, not whether one is rich or whether one is the descendant of a rich noble family – if one wants to attain this spiritual possession, one must travel the same path, one and the same path. Not only does death make everything equal, it is the spiritual life before which all are equal. This gives the spiritual life a far-reaching significance, for it gives rise to something that lifts us above the deceptive appearance of sense.

Someone may object: a brick can hit me and I can then become a cripple, or I can injure my brain so that I become an idiot. —But anyone who can make the treasures of Theosophy his own in such a way that he carries them in his soul knows that such an event is only a temporary condition. Even if the brain were broken, it would be no different than if we wanted to do something and the instrument broke; for example, if we wanted to hammer in a nail and the hammer broke. There is nothing we can do but pick up another hammer; and so we do with the brain. Consciousness can lose its tools, but in a new life we can rebuild them, so that we are not disturbed in our sense of eternity by the loss of this spiritual possession. It is not a matter of knowing something, but of how it penetrates our hearts, and it is able to penetrate our hearts in such a way that we keep the fruit of it and that it also leads us beyond the loss of this tool.

All this is a testimony to the fact that we can say in a certain respect: It affects our astral body, which we have just characterized. Only the clairvoyant can know how it works, but everyone experiences the consequences in their everyday life. A person who performs many actions for which he cannot morally answer, and who becomes grumpy as a result, will be particularly vulnerable to pain in difficult life situations. If, on the other hand, a person can say to himself in the face of the same incidents: They are of little consequence compared to my inner experiences, my ideals – then this certainty will have a healing effect. He will then always hold fast to that which lives in him as the eternal. When the spirit of eternity approaches us in this all-encompassing way, as it does in Theosophy, then we are secured for all situations in life.

Now, my dear friends, there are other things by which we can well convince ourselves that the spiritual that we take in, that we allow to permeate us, is intimately connected with our entire happiness in life, with our ability to cope with life. Just as a person can have good moods, so can he also be exposed to bad moods that may go through his whole life and never let him be happy, that dominate the whole inner soul structure. The spiritual researcher says: Such moods have an effect in the supersensible nature of man; in the etheric body such moods have an effect, are reflected in the physical body and affect the blood. The effect of a mood in the human etheric body is felt in the blood, and the result is that such a mood, which does not allow a person to be happy throughout his life, impairs blood circulation and makes his blood heavy. Here we have an example of how the effects of what is going on in the soul can be felt in the physical body. Even someone who is not clairvoyant can notice this and say to themselves: I suffer from my physicality. This comes from my overall mood. If I could change my overall mood, then a healing influence could be exerted on my whole constitution.

One might think that it is important for a person to free themselves from their physical body. But it is not about simply demanding that people recognize that the body is dependent on the spirit. Rather, it is about the reality that we do not have to be dependent on the body through the power of the spirit. We become independent by making it an instrument of our spirit.

Not the materialist who believes in the teachings of materialism is the worst, who believes in the doctrine of “power and matter,” but the worst is he who is dependent on power and matter, for example, when he can only live in this place in winter and only in that place in summer, making himself completely dependent on matter in order to avoid being neurasthenic. Therefore, it is not just a matter of not believing in this teaching of force and matter, but of becoming independent of matter. What kind of life is it when a person can only live in a big city in winter and only in the countryside in summer? For such a person, prayer does not help and faith does not help, because he is a materialist, he is dependent on “force and matter”.

When we allow thoughts that arise from spiritual research to take effect on us, our connection with the spiritual world becomes apparent. But we see something else as well. When we are really unhappy, in a way that would overwhelm anyone, it becomes apparent that a theosophist can cope with it. Let us assume, for example, that a person who has turned eighteen and has been living off his father now experiences the father going bankrupt. He is then forced to work. He can perceive this as misfortune. He will live with this for fifty years and become someone respectable. He can say, “Thank God this misfortune happened, otherwise I would have become a good-for-nothing.” If you are no longer in the midst of adversity, you can see the adversity as a tool for education. We must be able to say to ourselves: It is we ourselves who, through our karma, have brought this misfortune upon us because we need it in this life for our education. At least a person who can think in such terms will not grumble against the governance of the world in unhappy hours, but will recognize its wisdom. But little by little this prepares moods for us that work in a completely different way than those we have when we feel completely dependent on “force and matter”. Now we know that we depend on the spiritual guidance of the world. This is communicated to the mood, and then, through the influences on the etheric body, we withdraw from dependence on “force and matter”. Then we do not need to go to the Riviera to raise our spirits, but our spiritual possessions enable us to shape our tools in such a way that we can be independent of external influences.

In the soul health writings of Ralph Waldo Trine and others, you will not find how to achieve this mood. Pouring into the mood the wisdom of 'Theosophy' makes us independent of matter and force, opening up a source that elevates us above space and time. Then we withdraw from the power of matter and work back on the instrument of our body. In this way, we gradually acquire a practical knowledge of life through spiritual science. My dear friends, not everyone believes this right away, because very few people today, when everyone is so dependent on material and power, are inclined to see things this way. They should be convinced by experience that this is so, because experience will be able to provide them with more and more proof of life. This is the result of spiritual science in general, that it has an effect on the very ordinary external management of life.

I will substantiate what spiritual science teaches by means of examples; I will cite some of the trivialities of life. For example, the fact that we now live on the physical plane with external matter means that in certain cases we must have the ability to perceive the spirit everywhere around us in external matter. After all, matter is only an illusion, maya; everything is condensed spirit. So that we have to sense spirit in our ordinary life among the objects of matter. We must therefore be able to develop an external relationship with it, so that we are able to enter into intimate relationships with things, so to speak. There are people who wash their hands often, and there are those who rarely wash their hands. Now, in a certain respect, there is an enormous difference between the one and the other. Man is permeated by the supersensible in a very different way in the various parts of his body. For example, the chest and thighs are not permeated by the etheric body in the same way as the hands. Powerful rays of the etheric body emanate from the fingers. Because this is the case with the hands, we can develop a wonderfully intimate relationship with the outer world through them. People who wash their hands often have a more delicate relationship with their surroundings, are more delicately receptive to them, because the spirit materialized in the blood has the effect of making the human being more sensitive in his hands. Pachyderms, as they are called, in relation to the outer world, do not often wash their hands. You see how little such robust people are open to the peculiarities of their fellow human beings, while those who wash their hands more often enter into a more intimate relationship with their environment. If a person were to try to achieve the same thing in another place, for example on the shoulders, it would be shown that if he were to wash them as much, he would become neurasthenic. What is healthy for the hands is not healthy for the shoulders. The human being is organized in such a way that he is able to enter into this intimate relationship with the environment through the hands.

It would also be detrimental if a person were inclined to wash their face just as often. Treating the face in this way would not be beneficial to health. With other parts of the human body, the situation is quite different. People who are not properly trained in spiritual science, materialistically thinking doctors, for example, do not notice the difference and recommend cold washes to children; such things are fanatically pursued. It should be known that nothing is more mischievously done! This is the basis for a great deal of neurasthenia, that one's health is impaired in such an abstruse way. The hands can tolerate it, but the rest of the body becomes receptive to material things as a result. There you see the effect of materialism. I am speaking here of the rule. Where it is a matter of a temporary cure, the matter is different.

Not only do even the youngest children try to wash it off in a systematic way – they are tormented every morning – but people do not stop there. They walk around in the sun to take light baths, to let the material of the external world take effect on them. We should be glad that we are able to work from the inner center outwards and should not make ourselves more and more dependent on the material. This exposure of oneself with all parts is the same as when the miller would do anything to hear the clatter of his mill all the time and was not satisfied that he no longer hears it. Of course, the cases where it is a temporary cure are to be excluded. If this is practised in youth, then man is thereby made to allow the slightest influence to take effect in his organism. He hardens himself, that is, he hardens himself in such a way that he is finally quite “hardened” and no longer feels any external influences.*)

Such insights do not simply arise from ordinary life practice – that is not possible. This can only be judged when one knows the whole person. And that man is a complicated being, and that with regard to his individual members the most diverse relationships exist between the physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on, you can see that from very simple things. Today it may have seemed a little funny to you what was said in connection with the fact that man has a very special relationship with his astral and etheric bodies to the physical body. On the other hand, you may have heard that the distance or illness of a particular organ brings a person close to a condition that resembles idiocy. But if you now give such a person the thyroid juice of a sheep, for example, he will again become a thinking person instead of an idiot. This is a well-known fact. These facts are only correctly judged by the

#\ Oioha Aazii HNote on page DAR. 111 Spiritual Science. Why is that so? Yes, you see, that is so because not only in the thyroid gland, but also in the far greater number of glandular organs, there are tools that are built from the etheric body. We need our tools in the physical world to get things done. As we need a hammer to drive in a nail, so we need the tools for what they are given to us. If they are removed, we no longer have the tool. But that is no proof that the ability to replace their effect. But we must know that such an effect is only possible if the etheric body comes into function.

In the case of organs related to the astral body, we cannot possibly change anything in the organs by replacing the secretion. I have seen that people who had a defective brain ate sheep brains or the like without any improvement in their intellect, because the brain is an organ related to the astral body. There we see how spiritual science also sheds light on these things. You cannot understand people if you cannot go into these higher, supersensible aspects of people, and then you basically don't know at all what comes into consideration.

When you read medical books today, it is described as if a person loses their mind through illness or the absence of the thyroid gland. No, he only loses interest, becomes dull and does not apply his mind. You don't become stupid because you can't think. If you have no interest, your mind remains intact. What is lost is the living interest that a person takes in things, the interest to draw attention to things. A person who has no interest pays no attention to anything because he lacks the tool. We don't give him a brain with a thyroid gland, but we do give him a tool for taking a lively interest in the things of the world. People are judged quite wrongly when they know nothing at all about the transcendental world, and a great deal of what is taught in our scientific and popular books is at this level. If you read that a person becomes cleverer through the loss of the thyroid glands and through eating thyroidin, then it is not true. It is true that his attention is awakened. Everywhere it can be seen from the consequences: what is said from clairvoyant research is not fantastic. Even if not everyone can see it, one can prove that what the clairvoyants see is there. It is everywhere. I recommend that you always remember the sentence: If you cannot see for yourself what is being investigated in clairvoyant research, you can experience it in the world. - In this way you can indirectly obtain evidence for what is communicated in spiritual science.

I have now told you a number of things about the way in which the human astral body can show its influence in relation to life. I have told you how the ether body affects life. I would now also like to say a few words about the ego, from which you can build a bridge from theosophical theory to the reality of life. You are all familiar with a widespread phenomenon in life that is described in two words because it manifests itself in two ways: shedding tears and being sad.

What does it mean in human life to feel sadness caused from outside, which manifests physically in tears, or to have an inner soul experience that also manifests in tears? Man has something within him by which he can not only experience what is going on in his own body, but can also, in his ordinary, normal consciousness, experience and empathize with what is going on in his environment. We are then involved in our surroundings when we are sad about this or that loss, sad to the point of crying. What does that prove? That we can take into ourselves what lives in our surroundings and carry it within ourselves in our hearts. It means that we have an I within us that is mysteriously and magically connected to our entire environment. Through this magical connection of people with what does not live in them, a connection with the outside world is experienced. The ego can be in itself in two ways: firstly, in an egotistical way; then it comes down in particular to us gaining relief from pain through tears. Because we do not want to have any [true] part. Secondly, however, sadness can also be fully justified because we pour something that lives in our environment into ourselves. That is why tears mean the most to a person when he can be sad about things that concern him as little as possible. There are people who cry out of mere selfishness because they cannot bear what is happening in their lives or cannot bear their own loss. Of course, there are also people who cry over things that do not concern them, so that the world says: he howls like a dog over a passage in a novel or in a drama. And this possibility can create a certain splendor in him, which may also emanate from his grief to all other tears and other sadness, because the more we are moved by everything else, the greater is our sadness. And in his grief, man is in a sense led to his ego in a non-selfish way. What has no ego cannot cry or be sad. The claim that animals also cry is therefore basically nonsense. It is much more correct that animals do not cry and cannot be sad like humans. A dog only seems sad because it no longer receives everything it got when its master was still around. Psychologists are right when they say that animals can only howl, but humans can weep. For crying and sadness can be the strongest proof that the deepening of the self is within us and that through this we come into contact with what is around us. Therefore, there is a condensation of our self, which then comes out in tears. Because this is so, we can say that, basically, crying and tears are something that is connected with the innermost essence of human nature.

When a person rediscovers their inner stability, the best way for them to express this state is to give way to tears. The words spoken by Faust in 'Faust' after he returns from attempting suicide and removes the poison cup from his mouth are spoken from the depths of his soul: “The tear welled up, the earth has me again!” It is the 'I' that speaks at this moment. This is expressed in this word: “The tear wells up, the earth has me again.

Therefore, what we experience in mourning with our surroundings is connected with the innermost being of the human being. And what is connected with the innermost being demands that we take it with the right seriousness and that we can become sad about the misery in our surroundings, but never through the merely imagined misery. All those dramas that merely stage misery can only produce unnatural emotions. We can only connect all the unreal misery on the stage with our human dignity if the meaning is connected with the fact that the hero, even if he falls, emerges as a victor. We can only bear the dramas that depict misery if we see the victory of good. Then it has a right to our sadness and our tears, because it so rightly sinks into our innermost being the sorrow of reality. |

It is quite different with regard to another experience of our ego, which we can call by many names. What is expressed in laughter, merriment, joy, perhaps even in jokes – in our sense of the comic – is the other way around. To laugh at a fool in reality is inhuman, but to laugh at the imagined foolishness is actually infinitely liberating. You should experience foolishness because it has a healing effect – you can even experience this good mental healing in the circus – because it is, in turn, a discovery of your own self. When we are able to laugh, we rise above the situation. We become aware of our own inner worth, and in this way we rise up. There is something tremendously healing in the burlesque jokes of the Punch and Judy show, to the comedians who commit all sorts of follies, getting entangled in all sorts of contradictions, while laughter at folly, when it is real, betrays the monster.

The ego shows itself strangely in its healthy relationship to the environment. We are inclined to weep when faced with misery, real misery, not the depicted. The opposite is true when we laugh and joke. Here we are monsters when we laugh at the follies that reside in a person as natural characteristics. But they are healthy and contribute to the healthy education of the person when we can take pleasure in the depicted burlesque and comic. For this points to the healthy ego within us.

There you see how the healthy in the environment can also be understood when we realize that we also have an ego. Now we ask: Does this also show in our materialistic humanity in relation to art? Yes, it shows very characteristically and actually. If people were really confronted with what is presented, for example, in Hauptmann's or Sudermann's dramas, how many would faint! In the presentation they can endure what in real life would plunge them into sadness and move them to intervene. This is not possible on stage. Where does such a reversal of facts come from? It comes from the fact that in our materialistic age people live mostly on the periphery, where the I does not reveal itself. Indeed, what can make us most sad is what happened as the most terrible thing in the evolution of the world in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the suffering, in the whole tragedy of Christ Jesus. And we can be most jubilant where the victory, the victory of life over death, which was directly portrayed for the realms of eternity, was won in the resurrection. No other victory exists in which the highest hallelujah is so united with the deepest sadness, all suffering in the death on Golgotha and all the glory of the Easter season in the resurrection - there is no other event in which both the deepest sadness and the highest exultation are so expressed.

Therefore, there is no deeper wisdom than that which Paul proclaimed with regard to this event: Not I, but the Christ in me! — There we see how we find the right focus to make the I in us as firm as possible, by permeating the I with what the Christ-Revelation is. When Theosophy is permeated with Christianity, it also penetrates into our I, thus giving us the greatest possible security in life, the greatest strengthening of life. For it is only through the understanding of Christ, as we attain it through spiritual science, that we get the right center of gravity within us.

If, then, Theosophy is to have such an effect, as you will also find indicated in my “Occult Science in Outline”, then an attempt is made to give something that can pour such firmness into people as is in the saying: Not I, but Christ in me! —, by which more and more the human being can be transformed, so that that consciousness of eternity can well up in us, by which we can say: What can be taken up into us cannot be taken from us.

Then we feel such a word as that uttered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great discoverer of Theosophy, we feel what it means, what he says: When I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - and nothing can convey this connection to us more than Theosophy - when I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - so says Johann Gottlieb Fichte - and if we also grasp this connection, we too stand on the earth and say with him: “I look to you, you rocks, and to you, mountains; come crashing down and bury my body except for the last speck of sunlight and destroy everything that is my physical tools - and I defy you, for you are not eternal; but I am connected to the eternal, I am eternal!

Thus speaks man, who comprehends the value of the wisdom of the Eternal. Thus speaks man, who has absorbed theosophy within himself, to his corporeal, astral, and etheric totality, for the elevation of his existence, for his incorporation into the spiritual worlds, of which he must only know that he is spirit from their Spirit. For man is not only flesh of the flesh, but is spirit of the spirit of eternity.

In the last few days I have spoken about how the human being can advance from the present earth-consciousness to a world-consciousness, just as he has advanced from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages and the end of the Middle Ages, by transforming his land consciousness into an earth consciousness. We do not take these things abstractly, but we try to penetrate into them in such a way that they become concrete links in our consciousness.

In connection with this idea of the expansion of consciousness, I have said that in the first three epochs of his life, man is influenced by forces that we can actually call sub-sensible forces. From birth until the age of seven, the human being is connected with the forces of the earth planet itself. The formative forces at work in the human organism are essentially those that are anchored in the earth planet itself, in the interior of this earth planet. And what then takes effect, organizing the human being, living through the human being from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life, these are the forces of the air circle, which then, namely through the detour of breathing, permeate the human being, and through which he lives through the formations and forms laid down in the first seven years of life. Then the time begins for the human being in which he is exposed, but without this penetrating into his consciousness, to the forces that work on the human being indirectly through the earth from the planetary system.

Man is therefore actually so organized that the organizing forces in him are not merely those that he carries in his body or within the limits of his body, but are forces that take their radiations from the earth planet and later from the entire planetary system. And through such considerations we must gradually come to the realization that man forms a unity with the whole earth.

In the past I have often used a comparison to characterize this awareness from a different point of view. I have said: a human finger is a human finger only as long as it is connected to the human body. The moment we cut it off, it withers away. Just as the finger is related to the body, I have often said, so man is related to the whole Earth, indeed to our entire planetary system. If you were to remove man from the Earth and from the entire planetary system, he would wither away, he would die like the finger when it is removed from the human body. The point is that in human life one gradually advances from the perception of the part to the perception of the greater whole. Man, as he can observe himself, is really a partial being, insofar as he is a physical organism and also insofar as he is an etheric body. He is only considered as an organism when he is in connection with the earth and even with the whole planetary system. But if you really absorb this in your consciousness, you know that you belong more to the world than to the mere earth, because the earth draws its forces from the universe, and while we are at first only dependent on the earth, we gradually move on to dependence on the universe.

But these things can be deepened even further. Among the stars that form planetary systems around the Earth, the most important are, as you know, the Sun and the Moon. And as we gradually grow into a state of dependency on the planetary system from the age of fourteen onwards, that is, in the third epoch of a person's life, we also become dependent on the other members of the planetary system, on Mercury, Mars and so on, but we become predominantly dependent on the sun and moon. But man's dependence on sun and moon can only be judged correctly if one knows not only from external observation what the sun and moon represent. External observation shows man the moon, full and new moon, first, last quarter as a disc, which he assumes to be dark in itself, illuminated by the sun, and therefore turns part of its being towards him in illumination. But that does not exhaust the nature of the moon. We can only really learn to recognize that which is in the universe if we always see it as a sum of forces, a connection of forces. And we must ask ourselves: what kind of forces are actually concentrated in the moon? In the moon, human forces of will are primarily concentrated, or rather, forces that are related to human forces of will, forces that are related to everything that affects people from the subsensible. So the moon radiates those forces that are related to the subsensible in the human being. The physicist tells us very nicely that the moon is a kind of slag, that the sun is something like a glowing, burning cosmic body that has a corona, that sends out radiations of its fire into the world; so that man has the rough idea that if he could wander there slowly or quickly and approach the sun, he would enter a glowing body. I have already told you several times that this is not the case; rather, the truth is that where the sun is, there is a hollow space, a nothingness, and that light radiates only from the surface of the sun. In truth, there is nothing where one suspects that there is something physical; for the nature of the sun is thoroughly supersensible, just as the nature of the moon is subsensible. The supersensible and subsensible aspects of the planetary system, as they are concentrated in the sun and moon, begin to take effect on the human organism from around the age of fourteen. They affect the human organism in the first place insofar as the lunar is more akin to the female element, to everything feminine in the world, and the solar is more akin to the male element in the world. But they also work in such a way that man has a solar element in everything he develops in terms of knowledge, in everything he develops in such a way that he thinks, and has a lunar element in everything he “does”, in all impulses of will. The sun and moon are not only out there in cosmic space; the sun and moon are within us. And in so far as we think, we are sun beings; in so far as we will, we are moon beings. Better said: in so far as we develop organs in us that are the mediators of thinking, the forces of the sun, the supersensible, work in us from the age of fourteen to develop these organs; in so far as we develop organs that mediate willing, the forces of the moon, the subsensible, work in us from the age of fourteen.

Thus, when we transform such knowledge into a living being, we can feel within us: You human being, you are such that not only what is here on earth lives in you, but what constitutes the sun and moon also lives in you. The sun and moon are in you. You are a citizen of the world. You would not be what you are as a human being if the universe did not work in you.

To know such things in the abstract has no great value; but to feel within oneself that one is such a being, in whom the sun and moon are at work, that gives inner life. To feel everything that one can think supersensibly and will subsensibly comes from the sun and moon, and makes one say to oneself: I may be walking on the earth, but with every step I take on the earth not only what springs and sprouts on earth, and what rejoices and suffers on earth, but with every step I take on earth, the sun and moon live in me. I am not just an earth citizen, I am a world citizen. When this surges and strengthens as a living life in man, then a certain power comes over his thinking, which he does not have without this consciousness. Particularly in the present time, people should learn to feel when they are walking on earth that the universe lives in them. This should become feeling, this should become perception. As it were, when man looks up at the sun, he should say to himself: I am also of your essence, O sun! —When he looks up at the moon, he should say: I am also of your essence, O moon!

When man bears this within him as a feeling, as a sentiment, only then does he become ripe for grasping social ideas. Otherwise his thinking bears a certain earthly heaviness. Of course, one can grasp certain ideas in the abstract, but one cannot inwardly animate them in the concrete. The social is something in which man is active as man. Natural science comprehends only that in which man is not present. One can never understand social forces and social activity in terms of natural science concepts. One can only understand social activity through the kind of light thinking that comes from the feeling that we have as world citizens. It is simply the case that such a world-citizen consciousness must arise from our relationship with the sun and the moon. Only when a person no longer feels that he is, as it were, dependent on the earth, only when he feels as if he is a temporary inhabitant of the earth, who brings solar and lunar forces into this earthly existence, only then does his thinking become so powerful and at the same time so light that he can truly grasp social concepts as they live in social existence. For you see, many an economic thinker thinks that he can grasp social concepts with the ordinary way of thinking that is modeled on natural science. Today you can read many concepts and interpretations in economic works about the concept of the commodity, about the concept of labor — I have already made some allusions to this — and about the concept of capital. But all these concepts are actually useless. They do not capture what is truly alive in social life. If you want to try to create a concept of what circulates in economic life as a commodity, and you create this concept in the same way that you create the concept of a crystal or a plant or an animal or even of a physical human being, then nothing comes of it. You cannot grasp the concept of the commodity according to the pattern of natural science. If you want to grasp it in living life, as it is in social life, then you basically need an imagination; because there is something about the commodity that is inseparable from the human being. Every commodity has something of the human being in it, whether the commodity consists of a sewn skirt or a painting – because in terms of political economy, a painting is also just a commodity – or whether it consists of a lesson in teaching. Even a lesson is, from a national economic point of view, only a commodity. But what constitutes the concept of a commodity is related to human performance. And it is not ordinary, fully conscious life that goes into the commodity, but rather, something of the subconscious life goes into the commodity in many ways. That is why you need imagination to grasp the concept of a commodity correctly. And you need inspiration to grasp the concept of labor, and you need intuition to grasp the concept of capital. For the concept of capital is a very spiritual concept, only a reversed spiritual concept. That is why the Bible quite correctly refers to that which is connected with capitalism as mammon, as something that has to do with the spiritual; only it is not exactly the very best spirit that has to do with it. But one penetrates into the highest regions of spiritual knowledge if one wants to grasp what capital actually does in economic life.

Here we are confronted with something quite curious, with a necessity: in order to arrive at correct economic concepts, one must have an idea of supersensible knowledge. That is why all economic concepts that are being advanced today are so amateurish, because people have no supersensible knowledge and therefore grasp these concepts wrongly.

But do not misunderstand me. If you read my “Key Points of the Social Question”, you will say: “But it is not imagination that you give when you talk about goods; it is not inspiration that you give when you talk about labor, and it is not intuition that you give when you talk about capital. Certainly not. One does not need to ascend to the higher worlds to speak of goods, labor and capital, although it is also very interesting to see the reflections of goods, labor and capital in the higher worlds. But one does not need to ascend. But one only needs to be familiar with what imagination, inspiration and intuition are in order to say the right thing about capital. That is what it is all about. Someone who is not familiar with imagination, inspiration and intuition will not say the right thing about goods, labor and capital. Thus, spiritual science and today's social science are inwardly connected, and there is no other way for today's human being than to ascend from earth consciousness to world consciousness, so that he acquires the ease and also the power of thought that enables him to grasp social life. As long as man only crawls on the earth and basically believes that he is nothing more than what he absorbs from plants, animals and minerals, which is only a little differently composed in him, man does not know himself as the right being that he is. Only then, when he says to himself: the sun and moon work in me — then man knows himself as the right being that he is. World consciousness must be attained in a spiritual way; in a spiritual way, man must recognize how he belongs to a greater part of the world than the earth.

Now it is important to really grasp how one must go beyond ordinary everyday concepts in order to arrive at the kind of thinking that is meant here. You know that there are materialistic thinkers in the world. Today the number of materialistic thinkers is very large, and you are probably all convinced in your innermost being that one should not be a materialistic thinker. At least you were convinced to a certain extent and therefore came to a more spiritual way of thinking, felt drawn to the spiritual thinking that is cultivated in this anthroposophical movement. So let us disregard ourselves here. But there are also other people who represent the spirit, and there are many such people in the world who say: Well, there are all those people walking around who think only of material processes and material beings. These materialistically thinking, materialistically feeling people are opposed by the spiritually thinking and spiritually feeling. The latter believe in the spirit and are often despised by the materialistic thinkers as fantasists. But they accept this contempt because they believe that the materialists do not realize how right they, the fantasists, are when they hold on to the spiritual. This distinction is made and observed in the world between materialistic thinking and spiritual thinking, and there is much dispute between the two camps as to which is right, the materialistic thinker or the spiritual thinker. From some of the things that have been discussed here, you should realize that basically the one who has not yet penetrated into the meaning of spiritual science is the one who argues about such things, but only the one who says, 'You are a materialist; that's fine, that's all right,' has properly penetrated into the meaning of spiritual science. You are a spiritualist, that's fine too, that's also very good. Just as you can photograph a tree from one side and photograph it from the other side: it looks different from the different sides, but it is always the same tree. If you grasp the world materially, it is only a photograph from one side. If you grasp the world spiritually, it is a photograph from a different side. Materialism looks quite different from spiritualism. But the secret is that you have neither materialism nor spiritualism in the world, but that these are actually only two photographs from different points of view. Basically, the materialist is just as right as the spiritualist and the spiritualist is just as right as the materialist. Because these concepts, spirituality and materiality, are only valid on the physical plane. As soon as one goes beyond the physical plane, these concepts are overcome. Then one no longer argues whether the world is material or spiritual, because one knows that these are two different aspects. But why does man actually argue about whether man is material or spiritual? Why does man argue about whether one has a mere bodily being or a mere spiritual being? Why do some people see only, I would say, physical corporeality in a person, while others see soul and spirit in addition to physical corporeality? Because a person is both! And the secret of life actually consists in the fact that a person is both. If you say: a thought is only a spiritual entity, it is only something spiritual, then you are right, because the thought is only something spiritual. But the thought is never in you as spiritual-soul without having a physical imprint, so that you can actually always also prove the physical imprint; it is there. So that every thought is also something material. One would like to say: The universe has impartially ensured that one can be both a spiritualist and a materialist. Because you are indeed spiritual; if you see it that way, you can be a spiritualist. But you are also a material imprint of the spiritual; if you see it that way and ignore the other, you can be a materialist, because a person is both, and because one is only an imprint of the other, because one is the same as the other. Therefore, it is really only a matter of whether man puts himself more into his physical being, then he becomes a materialist; or whether he puts himself more into his soul-spiritual being, then he becomes a spiritualist.

You can't really escape what this is about as long as you remain in the ideas of ordinary everyday life or even in the ideas of ordinary science. You can invent all kinds of theories. There is no end to the theories about the soul and body and about the interrelationship or parallelism and so on! But these are all things that have been invented, they are not rooted in reality. For people have forgotten — I have emphasized this many times before — how to think about these things correctly, because in the course of historical development they have been forbidden to do so, as I have said. In the year 869, the eighth general council was held in Constantinople, and that abolished the spirit, that established the dogma that man does not consist, as a Gnostic science had known until then, of body, soul and spirit, but the eighth Ecumenical ecumenical council decreed that man consists only of body and soul, and that the soul has some spiritual properties, hence the medieval scholastics had a terrible fear of speaking of the so-called trichotomy, of body, soul and spirit; because that was forbidden. Today's philosophy professors are not afraid, because they have overcome their fear; but they have not yet overcome the Roman commandment. They also only speak of body and soul, of a duality, and believe that they are impartially imparting unprejudiced science, while they are actually teaching Roman Catholic dogmatics from the eighth general council of Constantinople. They believe that it follows from their unprejudiced research, but they only say that because they are stuck in history.

Today we have the task of returning to the acknowledgment of body, soul and spirit. For when we look at the outer world and our human organization, insofar as it is perceived like the outer world, we perceive a bodily aspect. If we then look into our inner being, whether we consider our thinking, our will, our feeling in an external, superficial self-knowledge, or whether we descend mystically deep, we experience a soul aspect — on the outside bodily, on the inside soul. But the connection, the interpenetration of the two, the constant interpenetration of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily, is brought about by the third aspect. We do not even have a proper word for it; we have to take the word from one side. The spirit brings it about. So we can say: body, soul and spirit are two different aspects, but the spirit forms the connection. We must return to the healthy concept of body, soul and spirit, otherwise body and soul will always fall apart. You cannot find anything physical in the soul, or anything spiritual in the body, as long as you do not have the spirit in them, in their midst.

Many years ago, to make this clear to you, I used a comparison. Suppose there is a seal here, and engraved in the seal, let us say, so that it is a rather “rare” one, is the name Müller. And now I take sealing wax here, for example on a letter, I can press the name Müller into the sealing wax.

Now the Kantians and the physiologists might come and say: There is no relationship between the seal, which may be made of bronze, and that which is made of sealing wax. - Of course, this is all bronze, the other is all sealing wax. Never does something pass from the bronze into the sealing wax and never does something pass from the sealing wax into the bronze. The two are quite different. It is the same with body and soul. One is expressed in the other, but nothing passes from one to the other, each has its own substantiality, and nothing, absolutely nothing, passes from one to the other. And yet, when you have printed, you have “Müller” in the sealing wax and “Müller” on the seal, one and the same. But the mediation did not happen by something very fine coagulating or trickling over from the seal to the sealing wax; that did not happen. Rather, something happened that is neither sealing wax nor bronze, but is the same in both. And that this is precisely 'Müller' is truly connected neither with the bronze nor with all that is in the bronze, but is in the living. That someone has received the name Müller is connected with life; it points to the whole breadth of life. Thus we have the spiritual-soul, and we have the bodily. The spiritual-soul is reflected in the bodily. But that which is the same in both, the spirit, is a whole wide world. But we do not grasp the spirit if we only look at the soul, just as we do not get to know the miller if we only look at the seal. We also do not grasp the spirit if we only look into the material world, just as we cannot recognize the miller if we look at the sealing wax.

So it is a matter of the spirit imparting to us that which is a relationship between the soul and the body. And in our age, we live in a phase of human development in which we must properly understand precisely this fact.

If you look at the newer natural science, you will find that it imparts to you all kinds of physical, actually only physical things. If you take some of the psychological concepts that come from older times, they convey something of the soul. We can only come to terms with both if we rise to the spirit, for only by grasping our being spiritually do we become citizens of the world, in contrast to the citizens of the earth that we were until today. As you can see from this, we must not merely grasp that which is physical about a person, in the way that we can grasp the external corporeality, but we must see the person in broader relationships. I will tell you of such a case, so that this case can serve as an example.

Ordinary natural science sees the human being only until his death. Then it follows the remains, what is left here on earth, the body, how it is cremated or how it is returned to the earth, becoming dust. Now you could examine what components are in this human dust, which is left over from a human organism. Then science will say: the human substance is breaking down and returning to the earth. Yes, that is not even a quarter of the truth, not even an eighth, it is not the truth at all, if you say it out loud. For that which is given back to the earth, whether by burning or burial, had a human form, and also had a human form because, before birth or conception, a spiritual being descended from the spiritual worlds and worked in this physical body until death. Then this physical body is returned to the earth. Whatever is human form continues to work in the earth, regardless of whether it was cremated or buried. The earth continually receives what it would not have if human bodies were not given to it after death. It is good for the earth to receive human bodies after death. Otherwise the earth would only have earthly substances if human bodies were not imparted to it.

But this human body was inhabited by a spiritual being that descended from spiritual worlds before the birth or before the conception and gave the structure to this human body. This structure remains as an essential in every speck of dust, passes into the earth or into the atmosphere when burned, no matter how, and the earth receives with this human body that which has descended from the spiritual worlds. This is not without significance. This is not just an ordinary truth, but it has a very, very great significance. For our Earth is no longer evolving, and it would have been so long ago that no human being, and perhaps no animal either, could inhabit it today if it were not for the continuous supply of spiritual and soul-like refreshing forces through human bodies. The fact that the Earth is still a habitable place for people today is due to the fact that human bodies are continuously being supplied to it. These always refresh the earth's forces. Since the middle of the Atlantean period, the earth has already been withering. It no longer has the rising powers that it had in the old polar, Lemurian and so on periods. But since the middle of the Atlantean period, the earth has only withering forces of its own and is only refreshed for further existence by the fact that the formative forces of human bodies are imparted to it. These continue to work in the earth. These alone make the earth habitable for people.

From this you can see that, on the one hand, as I have told you, the human being has the inner forces of the planet at work in him, the forces of the atmosphere. But in turn, he returns spiritual-soul forces to the earth; he also supplies the earth with spiritual-soul forces. By being born, he brings spiritual-soul forces from the spiritual universe into the earth, uses them for as long as he needs them, until his death, and then hands them over to the earth in the form of forces. If asked what man means for the earth, the external scientific world view would say something like this: if man had never come into existence on earth, everything would have turned out as it is; man would just not be there. Of course, the houses would not be there either. Cities would not be there, and so on, that is, what man brings forth through his culture would not be there; but otherwise everything would be there, only man would not be there. Spiritual science teaches us that man is not merely a spectator here on earth, but that through his existence he is a co-builder, a co-shaper of the earth, and that through the body, which he hands over to the earth, he becomes a mediator for the earth between the spiritual world and this physical world of the earth.

This, too, is part of the process of gradually becoming aware that one is not merely a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The citizen of the earth is born of a mother and father, carries the characteristics of inheritance within himself, acquires some things that he leaves as an inheritance to his physical heirs, has children and so on. The person who sees himself as a citizen of the world says to himself: By entering into existence through birth, I bring something of the soul and spirit into this world. In this way I contribute to the future existence of the earth, even after I have departed from this earth through death. The human being only really becomes aware of how his existence is connected to earthly existence, how he is one being with the earth, but a being that basically gives the earth its spirituality, through being a citizen of the world.

All these concepts that one acquires from spiritual science should not be acquired like ordinary knowledge. I would like to say, although this is perhaps a little paradoxical: knowledge is not particularly valuable at all. Only what we become through knowledge is valuable. This also applies to education. The fact that we teach geography to a child has a certain external significance, but not really a significance for the soul. Outwardly, it has the significance that later, if the child wants to travel from Dornach, say, to Zurich, it will not confuse Zurich with Bern and the like. So, outwardly, there is a certain significance to learning geography. But there is an inner significance to what happens to the soul when it learns geography. One becomes oriented in the world. Certain spiritual forces are released from the depths, from the roots of the soul, and it is the release of these spiritual forces that is important.

If we take the period since the middle of the 15th century, then this is the time when people were least inclined to release spiritual-soul forces within themselves. They were more attached to the imprint, to the sealing wax. People have actually entered the material age since the middle of the 15th century. But now we are at the point in time when we have to become aware of this and when we in turn return to the spiritual and connect the spiritual with the material.

Why did all this happen? Superficial thinkers might say: Yes, the Lord God could have made it easier for himself. He could have simply given people spiritual life in the 15th century, then they would not have had to go through the whole detour of materialistic struggle. — Perhaps he could have. It is an insult to the Protestant conscience to say that he could not do it. But that is not what interests us here. He did not do it, however, but allowed people to struggle through materialism. And so they arrived at the low point of materialism in the 19th century. If they were now to struggle towards spirituality, they needed a strong inner jolt; this strong inner jolt is the redeemer of freedom, it is the redeemer for man to turn to spirituality out of himself, not through divine inculcation. If man had not been absorbed in the material, then he could not have struggled out of his own free will to the spiritual. In order to call people on earth to independence, this struggle, this struggle through the material was so strong that even the religions and theology have become material. You see, even today's theologian finds it difficult to grasp something spiritual, sometimes with the greatest difficulty, really with the greatest difficulty. Recently I had an opportunity to test it when I discussed something with a Catholic theologian. It just so happened that I had this discussion with this Catholic theologian under the well-known Raphael painting, the so-called 'Disputa'. The conversation led me to try to exemplify something from the 'Disputa'. I said: We must come back to this – all those who want to strive for the spiritual life – so that it can be understood why Raphael actually painted this 'Disputa' from his contemporary consciousness. Up there are the heavenly worlds with the Trinity, below the Sanctissimum on the altar and the church fathers and theologians. But all this is not the essential thing in the picture. The essential thing is that a theologian who was not frivolous (there were many like that even in those days), who was still serious about his theology and out of whose soul Raphael painted, had the consciousness: When the host, the Sanctissimum, is consecrated and one looks through it, then one looks at the world that Raphael painted in the upper part of the “Disputa”. — It is really the consecrated host that provides the means to see through and into the spiritual world. That is why Raphael painted the thing. I wanted to exemplify that. I wanted to say: we must find our way back to understanding such a picture, which is painted from a different consciousness, with its true content. I cannot paint for you right now the picture of the face that this theologian made when he was expected to see his Holy of Holies in such a spiritual sense. Theology, too, is thoroughly materialized, perhaps more than most. It no longer has any real spiritual basis, which is why Christology itself has become materialistic. For the fifteenth-century theologian to turn his attention to the “simple man from Nazareth” would have been inconceivable. The indwelling of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth was still alive in him. It has disappeared from consciousness. Only a person somewhat higher than Socrates and Plato or Aristotle is the simple man from Nazareth. But he is defined and seen as the simple man from Nazareth even by theologians. Theology itself has become materialized.

We need to make the leap from the innermost grasp of our humanity to the spiritual in freedom. We cannot do this by twisting spiritual phrases, by talking about the spirit; we can only do it by thinking spiritually. And it is spiritual when we say: knowledge is connected with the forces of the sun, will with the forces of the moon. When human bodies are formed here on earth through the currents of heredity, it is not something earthly that works, but something solar in the male force, something lunar in the female force. The earth is covered and permeated with solar-lunar forces, and these forces are related to the powers of knowledge and will. The spiritual permeates the physical, the physical expresses itself spiritually. Synthesis, the uniting of soul and body, is what must be sought today, must be sought unconditionally. It does not include those shadowy concepts that have been developed in recent times since the mid-15th century – they are only thoughts that have been developed in recent times since the 15th century. But a spiritual life that has been experienced is only one that can also have a practical effect at the same time. We have had a basically impractical spiritual life for long enough. As I have already said, people have talked a great deal over a long period of time about being good, being fraternal, and practicing love for one's neighbor. But these were concepts that remained in a certain sphere and had no impact on practical life. Just think: a real modern merchant, a real modern industrialist or, let us say, a civil servant – so that we have all three types – he can, and this also happens, even be a pious man. But there is a significant difference between what a merchant may experience inwardly in his soul as his religious confession and that activity of life that finds its expression in his account books! That which lives in his religious life has no power to penetrate into the account books. And the civil servant is not prepared to be a human being, but rather to be a civil servant. What he has learned as a civil servant, what does that have to do with what he may inwardly profess religiously? — Religious life is a current, so-called life practice is the second current. Because the concepts and ideas have become weak and cannot penetrate down into the practice of life, we cannot find such vivid, strong concepts that lead into social life today. For this, they need to be refreshed by spiritual science, so that the concepts become strong enough to penetrate not only as far as the concepts of a Sunday afternoon preacher, which evoke warm feelings in the heart, inward soul voluptuousness, but do not penetrate into the activity that finds expression in the account book. The concepts that are derived from the spiritual must penetrate further into practical life. Concepts are not spiritual if they do not penetrate through their inner power to the deepest essence of matter. This is precisely the spirituality of the concepts: that the concepts are strong and penetrate to the deepest essence of matter.

We need this if we are to overcome the gulf that has arisen between present-day humanity, which still has all possible inheritances from earlier times, and future humanity, which must truly carry out the synthesis, the synthesis between the material and the spiritual. It is a complete regression to earlier human ways of feeling when one is a materialist on the one hand and a spiritualist on the other. And when one can be both, so that both live in each other, then one is only up to the present demands of humanity.

The situation of someone who wants to say something about the nature of the soul on a spiritual scientific basis, insofar as it can be described as immortal, is perhaps characterized for a very long time by the fact that I am talking about the publication of a book as an introduction. This book is entitled “Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul”.

I would like to make it clear, so as not to be misunderstood, that today's spiritual research cannot consider this book as written in the spirit of this spiritual research. Spiritual research in the modern sense did not yet exist at that time, as I was able to sufficiently demonstrate in many lectures that I have given here. However, I would like to say that, in view of the fate that has befallen all those long-standing disputes that push towards what today wants to develop into spiritual science, I believe that what happened with the publication of this book is not without significance. So in 1827 a book entitled 'Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul' was published. The person who published this book wrote a remarkable introduction to it, a remarkable preface, as they say. He writes that he was with a dying person and found the manuscript of this book at his bedside, that he then took over this manuscript with the consent of the dying man, that it could no longer be said to him exactly how the dying man came by this book, which apparently had a great, profound significance for his soul in the last days of his life. Then the person who publishes the book waited because the content seemed so significant to him, seemed to contain such important information about the soul's life after the detachment of the physical body that he could not imagine that this book would not be destined to make its content accessible to wider circles. But since he had waited long enough and had not seen the content published anywhere, he decided to publish the book himself.

What can legitimate research into the origin of this book tell us? There is the strange fact that the person who published this book, with this preface in which he recounts the book's remarkable fate, wrote this book himself, from beginning to end and published it without his name; that he only found it necessary, if one may say so – it is meant in the very best sense of the word – to invent a fairy tale about the book, as it has just been mentioned. It becomes somewhat more understandable why the writer of this book resorted to this fairy tale when one knows that he was a well-known personality in the broadest philosophical circles of his time, a philosopher who dealt with the most profound questions of philosophical thought : the Prague philosopher Bernard Bolzano, who had a large number of students, students who worked for many decades at Austrian universities, who always confessed what a profound influence they had drawn from Bolzano's teachings. So, a famous, influential philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, publishes a book in which he discusses the reasons for the immortality of the human soul, and in this book he has to present himself to the public in the manner described. Why did he do this? Well, the reasons are very obvious. In this book it is not merely stated, as it is so often the case in philosophical writings, that the human soul is immortal for these or those reasons that are derived from human logic. Rather, this book speaks of how man finds within himself a being that can perfect itself between birth and death, perfecting itself in terms of its thinking, perfecting itself in terms of its feeling , perfects itself in relation to its volitions; how this being, when it is rightly grasped by man, shows, however, that it not only bears within itself the powers that lead to its perfection up to death, but that it bears within itself powers that further perfect this soul-being, further develop it, that can be further filled with content even after the human being has passed through the gate of death. This book then explains how one must imagine, when one grasps the human soul, that the human soul must live in a certain environment when it has passed through the gate of death. It also indicates how this human soul, after its death, associates with other spiritual entities, which cannot be perceived as long as the human being dwells in the body. It is hinted at what relationship the human soul, after passing through the gate of death, can have with the relatives and friends left behind, with the souls attached to it in love. As already mentioned, all these details of the soul that has passed through the gate of death are not spoken of from the standpoint of today's spiritual science, but with fine, delicate reasons that a philosopher has developed who not only philosophizes with abstract concepts, but who is involved with his whole soul, with his whole human being, when he develops thoughts, especially the thoughts about that weaving and being in the human being himself, which we call the soul. But Bolzano knew only too well that as long as one remains a logician and discusses how one concept is linked to another, what logical reasons there are for the truth or probability of a judgment, as long as one discusses how attention in the human soul, possibly even the reasons for memory and for the will; in short, as long as one expresses everything that the soul performs while it dwells in the body, one can have the reputation of a scientific philosopher. But if one speaks about the human soul as Bolzano did in his Athanasia, then one's reputation as a philosopher is ruined. Then one is an unscientific person. Then you are a person who talks nonsense and can no longer be taken seriously by those who understand how to think scientifically. Even those who have not learned to think scientifically but swear by the authority of those whom they have heard of or of whom it has been publicly stated that they can think scientifically believe that they can thoroughly dispute the scientific value of such a personality. If Bolzano wanted to save his reputation as a philosopher, he had to resort to the maneuver described above, and then leave it to later researchers to recognize that the book was written by him. And no Bolzano expert today doubts, for the very best reasons that can be proven scientifically and historically, that the book in question is by Bolzano himself. This shows something that was true then and is true today: if you want to openly and frankly advocate something that does not belong to the physical-sensory world or cannot be said about the physical-sensory world, you have to expose yourself to being seen as a completely unscientific person. And as a rule, the 'fact' does not apply either, that one could recognize from the way such things are spoken about, that the person speaking is not an unscientific person.

And yet, just as spiritual science has to speak about the question of immortality today, so this speaking, as I have often emphasized here, is in the fullest sense a continuation of that human spiritual work which, especially in the field of natural science, has led to such great results of human life and striving, which are fully recognized by spiritual science.

Therefore, today I would like to begin by hinting at some of the things that can show how the study of immortality is approached from the point of view of spiritual research, so that everything that can be called spiritual research in this sense today is in fact the direct, immediate continuation of what scientific thinking has contributed to a world view in the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” you will find a chapter entitled “The World as Illusion”. This chapter is not intended to show that the world as it presents itself to the outer senses and to human thinking, which is connected to the brain, should be seen as an illusion, but it does show how many thinkers of the nineteenth century have come to the conclusion that everything perceived by the senses, and also what thinking has to say about the perceptions of the senses, does not flow into the human soul from the outside, but is, as it were, first constructed within the human soul. As far as it can be done in a popular way, I would like to touch on these thoughts in my introduction, even though they may be far removed from many of the esteemed listeners.

We see with our eyes, we hear with our ears, we perceive the world with our sense organs in general. Now, someone who is grounded in the latest natural science and physiological research says that what the senses perceive actually arises only through an interaction of the senses with something completely unknown in the external world. The researcher says: When the eye perceives a color, when the eye receives some impression of light, one must consider that what acts on the eye from the outside remains completely unknown to perception. With his soul, the human being experiences only the effect that the external world has on his soul. That is why, when we go through the world in our ordinary lives, we see things in color, as an expression of their light effects. But if, for example, we strike the eye, we may also have an impression of light in the eye, even if it is vague. Or if we can somehow otherwise evoke that which can occur internally in the eye, say, somehow with an electrical device, then we also get a light impression. That is to say, the eye responds to everything that acts on it from the outside with a light impression. So whatever happens out there, if it somehow acts on the eye, a light impression arises in the eye. The eye creates the impression of light from the effect of a completely unknown external world. It is the same with the ear. It is the same with the other senses. Therefore, for example, the philosopher Lotze, an outstanding philosopher of the nineteenth century, is in complete agreement with Schopenhauer when he says: Everything that we perceive as the effect of light, as color, has actually only come into being in our eye through the effect of an unknown world. What we hear as sounds is created by the effect of an unknown world in the ear. If there were no people with eyes and ears, the world would be dark and silent, and one could never say that something similar to what eyes see and ears hear prevails in this dark and silent, unknown world.

In other words: In the nineteenth century, under the influence of Kant's philosophy, it was concluded that in order for man to gain knowledge and perceptions of this environment, he must engage in an inner activity, and that only through this inner activity does that which he calls his environment come into being in his mind. In reality, one can say that for these people, who are genuine thinkers grounded in natural science, the world is like an illusion. For if out there, where we see pillars and all kinds of pictures on the walls, there is something completely unknown that affects the eye and from which the eye creates colors and shapes, then one can only say that what appears to us as our environment is an image created out of man's own being. And what is behind it can only be constructed by hypothesis, as modern physics does, which assumes all kinds of vibrations in the ether and the like behind our perceptions. So that man, as he goes through the world, in interaction with an unknown external world, simply by the nature of his being, builds up what he calls his world.

Taken as it has just been explained, there is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to be said against this line of thought. This train of thought is completely in line with everything that scientific research has delivered in the nineteenth century. One can say: Such a statement as that made by Hermann Helmholtz, the famous physiologist and physicist, is perfectly understandable: by perceiving an external world, man does not perceive what is, what is really happening, but only perceives signs. Not even images, says Helmholtz, are perceived of what really is, but only signs. For what our eyes and ears create of the external world are only signs for the external world. As I said, there is nothing to be said against the seriousness and logic of this line of thought. Taken directly, as they present themselves, that is so.

You have to go much, much deeper into the nature of man if you want to know what is actually behind this train of thought. I have tried to show the philosophical world what is behind this train of thought and how it offers the possibility of finding one's way with it in relation to the human concept of reality. I have attempted to show the way to do this in a lecture I gave at the last philosophers' congress. But these arguments today only lead to general misunderstandings, if not to something much worse. The one who has the task of finding his way in the train of thought just outlined must indeed advance to spiritual science. And then it certainly becomes apparent that one can truly say: The human soul creates by perceiving through the senses that which it must initially call its world. It creates this. It really does create it. But why does it create it, despite the fact that creation prevails in the real? Well, it creates it for the reason that the human soul, that which is the human soul, is not connected to the human being in such a way that one can say: There is the human body, and in this human body the immortal soul dwells within, just as any person dwells in his dwelling and influences the outside world in some way from his dwelling or looks at the outside world through windows. The connection of the human soul with the human body must be imagined quite differently. It must be imagined in such a way that the body itself, as it were, holds the soul in itself through a process of knowledge. In the sense that colors and light, like sounds, are outside of us, in the same sense the human soul itself is outside of the body, and in that the reality carries colors and sounds in through the senses, in the same sense the contents of the soul live, as it were, on the wings of sensory perception. The soul must not be imagined as just a finer physical being that dwells in the coarser outer body, but as a being that is so connected to the body that the body exercises the same activity that we otherwise exercise in cognition when holding on to the soul. Only when we understand how, in a certain sense, that which we call our ego, the bearer of our self-awareness, is outside the body in the same way as sound or color, only then do we understand the relationship between the human soul and the human body. By pronouncing “I”, the human being, as a bodily human being, perceives this “I” from the same side of reality from which it perceives colors and sounds. And the nature of the body consists in being able to perceive precisely this I, that is, the soul's own nature. In order to fully experience the reality of what has just been said, it is necessary for the human being to carry out the exercises that have often been discussed here, that is, to perform inner acts with his soul.

Today, too, I will not repeat what I have said so often, since everyone can read it in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science,” or in the brief sketch at the end of “Theosophy.” Today, too, I shall not describe these inner soul-searchings in detail, but rather I should like to give again certain points of view which can show what man arrives at when he, in the sense often described here and in the books concerned, undertakes inner work with his soul , so that what otherwise takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing develops further through inner impulses given by the soul in the meditative life; that it becomes something other than what is in the ordinary life of the body.

When a person undertakes the mental processes – this too has already been discussed in the last lectures – that lead thinking beyond the kind of thought life that one has to have in ordinary life and also in ordinary science, then one comes to think, that is, to perform the inner activity of thinking, but no longer to have a specific thought. Meditation consists in the fact that, while one otherwise thinks, as it were, under the influence of the external world and reflects on things, one evokes thinking as an inner arbitrary activity of the soul, that one does not direct one's attention to what is being thought, but to the activity of thinking, to that fine activity of the will that is exercised in thinking. I have already described this in the last lecture. In a sense, one thinks with a thought-content that one has moved into one's consciousness, into one's soul, through one's own will. One thinks so intensely, so strongly, so powerfully inwardly that one really achieves what one does not want to achieve at first, but what is achieved under the influence of such inner thought-work: thoughts fall away and one lives only in the inner weaving and working of an - well, let the expression be used - an ethereal world. The word “ethereal” is used here in a different way than modern physics uses the term. One lives in a weaving, in a pulsating, and one knows, if one has pursued this experience long enough: What one has discovered in one's thinking, what one has detached from one's thinking, just as the chemist separates hydrogen from water so that he can show the properties of hydrogen that cannot be shown while the hydrogen is still in the water, - one knows, when one has detached the activity of thinking from thinking, that one is now really in an experience outside the body. By continuing such inner soul work, one must then become clearer and clearer about what the experience actually is that one has evoked in this way in the soul. When we perceive colors and sounds in our ordinary life — as I said, this can already be considered a result of natural science — then we know through natural science: an unconscious activity is carried out in our human being; because the fact that the world of color and sound is evoked through the eye and the ear is an unconscious activity. An unconscious activity is carried out through which something that is outside speaks into the soul and reveals itself to the soul. What one experiences in the inner grasping of thinking when one does the corresponding soul exercises is not experienced in the same way as if it were rising up from our muscles, from our blood, but it is experienced as if it were coming in from the whole surrounding cosmic space , as if it were a spirit-being entering us and having a certain attraction to our body, so that it recognizes our body as the vehicle through which it wants to reveal itself to the sensory world. By meditating as described, one steps into the external world itself. One immerses oneself in this external world, from which colors and sounds come to us. That is to say, one frees one's experience from the body. This freedom of experience from the body must be inwardly experienced, must be lived. Through soul exercises, the human being must come to know that he is living and pulsating in an element that is not bound to his body as an instrument. But will, inner arbitrariness, is now present in everything, which thus leads the human being to freedom from the body – inner activity, but inner activity on a higher level. Let us just consider for a moment what it would mean for the human being: suppose – assuming the truth of what I have presented to you as a result of more recent physiology, of more recent natural science – the human being were aware: there must be something unknown, a silent, dark world. I stand in it, I open my eyes. Through my eyes I create color, through my ears I create sound. I place the sounds and the colors into the world. What would a person have to say? He would say: Well, then the whole world is a dream, of course it is a dream. Then nothing of what I see and hear is real. Only because this inner activity, which is there, remains unconscious, because one does not know that one does it — evoke colors through the eye, evoke sounds through the ear — only because of that, one is at all undisturbed in one's outer experience. For if human beings were always aware that they do what recent natural science ascribes to them, then they would certainly speak about the whole world of the senses in exactly the same way as they now speak about what way, and what human thinking, trained in this way, experiences through a world that is just as real as the sense world, but which must be voluntarily placed before ourselves through the effort of free will born of thinking. One might say that it is good for most people that they are blessed with not knowing how they create colors and sounds for themselves, otherwise they would already be able to speak about this colored and sounding world exactly as they speak about the world that the spiritual researcher presents to them. For that is indeed the characteristic of the world that the spiritual researcher presents to the soul: that one now exercises the activity, which one otherwise performs unconsciously for the sensual world, consciously, fully consciously, on this higher level of the act of will, which is detached from thinking. Otherwise, however, there is no difference at all in relation to the sense world. But people are not strong enough to hold to that, to have confidence in that which they must first call into existence inwardly. One would like to say that it is good that a kind God has withheld from people the knowledge that they create the light of the sun for themselves, otherwise they would deny it, as they deny the essence of the spiritual world. People depend on the outside world, on the authority of the outside world, to dictate what is, what is inherent in being. If they are to do something to allow this being to come to the fore, then they are not strong enough, not trusting enough in this inner activity of theirs to allow what they now have to co-create themselves to be recognized as a reality, as a truth.

When, through the indicated exercises of thinking, one has truly grasped the will in thinking, that reality which does not express itself in thoughts of a sense world, then at first – and this too has often been hinted at from a different point of view – — one does not have a spiritual reality before one, but one has only an experience that consists of a weaving and being and becoming; one has, so to speak, an expanded self before one, a self that now knows itself connected to the whole world, from which sounds and colors otherwise reveal themselves to it. But one weaves and lives in this becoming. One only knows that the way one lives in this becoming is reality, spiritual reality, spiritual reality free from the body.

One cannot be careful enough in describing such things, because it can, of course, be objected lightly by someone who believes they are allowed to think they are very scientific: So the spiritual researcher claims that he is immersed in the world through the result of this one exercise; he must actually know everything when he lives in that weaving element. Now, what works from within instead of approaching the person from the outside does not have to reveal all the secrets it contains. One can say that it can be compared to the fact that a person also eats and drinks and yet truly does not know the processes that take place in his body. One gets to know another world in its nature and essence, but naturally one does not get to know all the secrets of that world, which in turn must first be explored in detail, a research that requires exactly the same care and seriousness as the exploration of the physical-sensual world, yes, more. But this experience of living in a weaving world can be compared to when a physical person in the body has acquired the ability to grasp all kinds of things, but cannot grasp anything when he reaches out. In that case, one would know that one has organs to grasp, to make grasping movements, but one does not grasp anything. One would be in this situation if one only had the practice results that have just been described. One would live and weave inwardly in the spiritual element, but one would feel as if one were stretching out the spiritual organs in all directions, and it would be certain: you have grasped yourself in the spirit — but one would still perceive nothing of a spiritual environment. It would only be a general living and weaving and becoming of one's own self in the spirit. A tremendous loneliness, even a sense of apprehension, could seize a person if he only came to these conclusions. Therefore, the exercises that the soul performs when they are taken from true spiritual research are designed not only to develop the life of the mind, leading to such experiences as have been described, but also to develop the life of the will. And this training of the life of the will is something that arises in the most natural way from the ordinary life of the will in man. You can find more details in the books mentioned. But I will again characterize the effect, the results of the exercises of the will, which are already interwoven into meditation in proper meditation, from a certain point of view. Exercises of the will lead a person to the point where he can observe his own volition. Ordinary self-observation, even that which is called self-observation in trivial mysticism, does not yet lead to the point where one really observes the content of one's own volition as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena. It certainly does not lead to the point where one could, as it were, become one's own spectator. But the real exercises that spiritual research can indicate allow the human being to see what otherwise takes place as will in his life and flows into actions or even just lives in desires as otherwise things and processes around us can be observed; that man can truly put himself outside of himself, that he observes himself by wanting this or that, by setting goals in life. One only acquires this ability – and this, of course, cannot fill the whole life, but only claim very short, snatched moments of meditation on life – by so directing one's volition – and every true meditator already directs the volition by doing the right meditations – by so directing one's volition that one does not merely will as one wills in ordinary life. In ordinary life some desire arises. It is prompted by some inner bodily disposition, or it is prompted by an external impression, or the will performs this or that action, and thereby something is brought about in the external world. This volition that lives there can indeed be observed, but observation is made easier if one tries to will that – and as I said, it is willed in meditation – which advances the soul itself; if one makes oneself, so to speak, the object of one's volition, if one want something so that, through what one does in the soul, one gradually becomes a different person; that the soul is organized more finely, that the soul becomes more receptive when one carries out acts of will in such a way that one develops, that one consciously advances in life. Anyone who does meditation exercises knows how, after years of doing meditation exercises, the whole way he thinks about the world becomes different from what it used to be. He knows how he connects passion with desires, and these in turn with thoughts, and so on. He knows that he has become a different being, albeit in a more subtle way, and that this must be perceived. Otherwise, the I is always the center of will. The rays of will emanate from the I, as it were, and pour into the feelings and into the actions. In this kind of willing, the person effectively places himself outside of his ego and advances the ego itself through willing. Therefore, true meditation is particularly suitable for becoming the spectator of one's own willing, for knowing how to place oneself outside of one's own will and, just as one learns to observe natural processes, to observe one's own willing with composure. Otherwise, one is completely absorbed in one's desires, with all one's passions, all one's wishes, all one's emotions. One overcomes this for certain moments in life, and one learns to become a spectator of one's desires.

Let us just consider: when we want something else, we are present in what we want, we are so immersed in it that we instinctively defend it, at least inwardly, as our own. In any case, we do not look at wanting in the same way as we look at, say, the formation of a rainbow. But this is the path that the soul can follow: to observe the activity of the will, as one observes the formation of a rainbow or the rising of the sun; to become so objective, so calm. At first, one strives out of oneself in thought – for at first it is a mental striving out of oneself – in order to become a spectator.

But then one makes a discovery that one must take into account if one wants to become immersed in the reality of these things. One makes the remarkable discovery that although one must strive for what one strives for, one achieves something completely different. And with that I characterize an essential aspect of the spiritual research path in general. On the path of spiritual research, one must, if I may say so, set out on the path. One sets out on the path with the first exercises that I have described by meditating, by putting thoughts into the soul. But if one were to believe that holding on to these thoughts, drilling oneself into these thoughts, is also the goal, then that would be wrong. For the goal consists precisely in overcoming what one has initially undertaken: that thoughts cease to be thoughts in the strict sense, that the activity of thinking, free of the thought, now takes hold of us in becoming and weaving. That is the characteristic of the spiritual research path: that something must be undertaken and something else comes out. And precisely because something is undertaken, something else comes out.

And so it is with this second one I have to describe. You make an effort in the way described—but as I said, you can find details in the books mentioned—you make an effort to become your own spectator, that is, to step out of yourself in your imagination and watch your own volition as you would watch external natural phenomena. But the result of these exercises is different from what it would be if you were to follow a straight line. One might think that one would now become such a being by making a being out of oneself that looks at its currents of will. This is not the case. Rather, the result is that the more one goes out of oneself in this way, the more that which goes out disappears within oneself. In the development of thinking, one becomes more and more inwardly absorbed. The self expands, becomes more intense, more powerful. In the process I have just described, one does not enter into oneself, but one's own self is, in a sense, laid aside. Instead, however, a will remains in the spiritual field of vision, an act of the will. And as it were, out of the plane of these acts of the will, rising up from below, through the acts of the will, there rises a real being, which is a higher human being in the human being. That which one has always carried within oneself through one's whole life, but has not carried in consciousness, that rises through the will, that breaks through it. Just as the depths of the sea would appear if they were to break over the surface, so now a being appears, a conscious being, a being of higher consciousness, which is an objective spectator of all our acts of will, a real being that always lives in us and that breaks through the will in this way. And this being, which one discovers in the currents of will, this being connects with what one has made out of thinking. These two beings, which one has found in oneself, unite with each other. And through this one is now not only in a working and weaving, but in a real spiritual world with real spiritual entities and facts. In it now stands one's own being, which is also born out of the will - but in the company of other spiritual beings - and which goes through birth and death. The human being who, through birth or conception, has connected himself with what materially descends from father and mother, the human being who sustains himself when he steps through the portal of death, is discovered in such a way that what lives and works in us is brought to life in himself from two sides.

In the thinking that one gradually develops, the main thing is that in this thinking we really develop something different from what lives in our ordinary soul, and that is precisely what is difficult. Man is so attached to the habits that he has acquired in his soul through his dealings with the sensual world. Therefore, all these qualities that he acquires through this spiritual path, as it has been described, actually initially unsettle him. A sense of apprehension, loneliness, and restlessness can come over him. If everything is done correctly, as indicated by true spiritual science, this does not happen. I spoke about this a few weeks ago in the lecture I mentioned, 'A Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But everyone knows that when you enter into the spiritual world in the way I have described, a certain restlessness can arise, a certain inner anxiety, and even distinct feelings of fear towards the spiritual world that want to overwhelm you. And to avoid this, there are already enough clues in true meditation. But if someone expects that what his soul then does in these newly evoked abilities is directly similar to what the soul does in relation to the external physical world, which it must have around it all day, then he is subject to the most severe deceptions and also disappointments. Then he becomes restless because he says to himself: “I am living in something indefinite and unfamiliar. I have always thought in a different way. My thinking was so secure in the other way; it clung to a certain being that was given to me. Now my thinking is supposed to live in a becoming and not, so to speak, forget itself.

But in the true spiritual path this is avoided by the fact that this true spiritual path brings with it — it brings it with it quite naturally when it is followed in the right way — that what we can call interest, inner soul interest, manifests itself for the human being in a completely different way than the soul interest usually manifests itself in the physical world. It is really true: one acquires a new interest, a quite new kind of interest, when one leads a meditative life. It must be emphasized again and again: one does not want success for the inner life alone. Those spiritual exercises are of no value from the start and must be decidedly rejected, which make man unfit for the outer life. A person who practises true spiritual exercises remains as firmly rooted in the outer life as he was before. No, he will become even more firmly rooted in this outer life. If he has to pursue a particular occupation wherever fate has placed him, he will fulfil this occupation no worse than before if he has true spiritual science. And one can be sure – forgive the trivial expression – that the person who gets all kinds of raisins into his head by going through spiritual exercises, and then thinks he is too good for what he was before, is most certainly on the wrong track. But through that in the soul which is the actual spiritual research activity, one acquires new interests, which take the soul in a different direction, in addition to the old interests, which become even more intense for the outer world.

I will give an example of what it is like for someone who is a philosopher. Perhaps it is useful to give this example for the very reason that most philosophers believe from the outset – well, that they can judge everything from spiritual science much better than the spiritual researcher himself. But those who are not philosophers themselves become restless when faced with the many philosophies that exist. Isn't it true that one should just take a look at all the “ians” (Kantian, Hegelian, Schopenhauerian, Hartmannian) just once, all of them, and then one will see, even if one adds others to that, that one should not allow oneself to be unsettled: Well, everyone thought differently, but I want something certain in my thinking! This tendency will then take on a different expression in the philosopher. The philosopher who wants to be a “ianer” himself now develops a certain train of thought; he then swears by it, and the others are of course all fools, whom he can refute, or at least people who are going astray. But the person who has developed his thinking in the way described, who has included the process of thinking in thinking, reads Hartmann with the same interest as Schopenhauer, as Hegel, as Schelling, as Heraclitus. He does not even get around to refuting one and becoming a follower of the other, because he takes a certain interest in the movement of thinking, in being inside thinking itself, because he takes a certain joy, a certain pleasure simply in the act of thinking and because he knows that this thinking does not lead to reality in such a way as is usually believed — that thoughts can simply be reflections of reality — but that one only comes into a life and weaving in the work of thinking. Yes, when one can do this, then one can take the standpoint: Certainly, the one philosopher has viewed the world from one point of view, the other from another! And the philosophical world view that one then gets cannot be seen any differently than a tree that has been photographed from different sides, where one also does not say: I declare the one photograph to be wrong, that is not at all true with the other, that is a completely different tree! Because it is only a different tree because it has been photographed from a different side. If you look at the activity of photographing, and not at the abstract reproduction, then you will see for yourself what is right. And so it is with thinking. You become interested in the mobility of thinking, and you know that you live in spiritual reality when you live and move in thinking itself. And there is something else that is introduced into your development through the exercises of the will, and this goes much deeper. It can disturb many people, and would even appear very disturbing if you were not sufficiently prepared, as is the case in every true schooling of the spirit. I would like to say again: for ordinary life, people are familiar with the fact that what lies within their will actually only appears to them in such a way that when they have done something they call good, they rub their hands together; then they are very satisfied with themselves. If they have done something they call bad in some way, they reproach themselves. But it remains with these inner soul processes. Man oscillates back and forth between rubbing his hands together out of satisfaction with what he has done and blaming himself. But when the volition is trained in such a way that the inner spectator emerges, then a greater seriousness permeates the matter. Then it is no longer just reproaches or inner satisfaction that arise, but you get to know a very real being in what permeates the will as a spectator and shoots up through its surface. You get to know: That which otherwise appears to you as reproach and as inner satisfaction is a real power. This real power is there in the world, it will continue to have an effect. In the further course one learns to recognize how this power develops into a further destiny and influences the next life on earth as a fact, after one has passed through the life between birth and death. What one experiences there as will, would follow the one who is not well prepared like a shadow, like something one always drags along, like one's shadow, like a real being. Everything depends on whether one also learns to understand the full significance of these things; that one learns, for example, to recognize: what follows one around as a shadow need not lead one to hypochondria, but one must look at it calmly. For it is not at all what has significance for the present life, but what passes through the gate of death with us, what is among the forces that will help determine the configuration, the nature, of our next life.

In short, the interests associated with these developed inner soul activities are different from the interests of the outer life, but they do not detract from these interests of the outer life at all. They merely put everything in its proper place, so to speak. When someone comes to an awareness of what goes through birth and death, what is immortal about the soul, as I have described it, then he will not become less interested in the external physical facts that directly surround him, but rather he will come to the conclusion that there is a spiritual world. In this spiritual world there are just as many concrete spiritual processes and entities as there are in the physical world, and he can see them. But that which exists as a physical world can only be seen in the physical world. What surrounds us as a physical world naturally ceases to exist after death. Only because we carry an immortal being within us, which is a reality in itself and belongs to a reality that goes beyond the physical, do we carry something through the gate of death, enter into a spiritual world, into a world that we live through between death and a new birth, and then enter into yet another earthly life.

Especially when one knows, not in the abstract but in a living sense – and it is only through spiritual research that one really gets to know this – that one can only get to know this sensual world in its full inner essence through one's senses and through the mind that is connected to the brain – then, under this life-filled self-development — not through some theory, but through what life absorbs, under the influence of the exercises that awaken our lively interest in everything that is obvious; the interest for the smallest details in the world is increased. Only one particular interest, and this we must take with us, grows ever smaller and smaller: the interest in that which is already able to appear in the sense world as so-called 'spiritual' and to reveal spiritual reality in and out of the phenomenon itself. It is known that spiritual things can be grasped when the organs, the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, are developed first, to use Goethe's expression. It is known that one must rise to the spiritual world, and it is known that in the world of the senses, this world of the senses must be grasped out of itself, that it stands as that which must be grasped through the world of the senses. Therefore one loses interest in all those events that seek the spiritual out of the world of the senses itself. And while interest in everything that takes place in the spiritual world increases, especially in true spiritual research, interest in the sense in which it exists for many in the spiritual world is purely sensational and all kinds of superstitions and belief in miracles disappears completely. Interest, let us say, in spiritualistic events, in mediumistic performances, completely fades away. The spiritual researcher is not interested because he knows that only something abnormal can come to light in these things, which is indeed based in the sense world, but which cannot lead beyond the sense world into the true spiritual world. Of course, he can take an interest in it, as one takes an interest in some theatrical performance, in some experiment that otherwise appears in the world. Nothing should be said against such events, provided, of course, that they are not frauds, in that they allow a variety of otherwise inexpressible natural connections to be expressed. But they are natural phenomena, and we know that we do not live in these things in any other way than we live and move with our ordinary senses, however abnormal it may seem. For everything that belongs to this area, which I have just touched upon, interest wanes, as I said. It becomes a mere witnessing — well, of all sorts of events. And it is the duty of every true spiritual researcher not to allow superstition to grow in him, but to uproot superstition completely.

It would be very easy to believe – and because it is possible, it must be emphasized – that a person who experiences spiritually what I have indicated, and who basically experiences nothing less than what he can call his immortal soul, and that he is actually experiencing life after death; that he is already experiencing what will be experienced after death. In this abstract form it is not the case, and one must think very carefully about these things if one wants to get an idea of them. What the soul experiences after death, or let us say, from death until birth, is experienced in much the same way as a plant would consciously experience everything that is in its germ, which represents all the forces for the new plant. One experiences everything that must necessarily be gone through in the spiritual world after death in order to prepare one's entire life with the new body and the new experiences as a new destiny in the coming earthly existence. It is the germinal being in us that is suited to experience in the spiritual world between death and new birth that which then prepares a new life on earth, so that we then have the body that we need to have the abilities that we have previously prepared within us, so that we put ourselves in the position in which we need to be when our destiny is to be fulfilled according to our previous life on earth. That this potential lies within us, we experience that. But to have this experience before us, to have the spiritual world before our own soul, for that it is necessary, of course, to go through the experiences ourselves between death and a new birth, which one can at most look at and develop in knowledge, but in a living knowledge that is an inner reality, while the knowledge of the external world, of the physical external world, is only mental images.

You see, I would of course need a great deal of time to discuss in more detail what I have only touched upon. This will be possible in the coming lectures. But, as you can see, there is a certain path that can be described as the path of spiritual research, which leads to the development of a life that is inwardly different from the life of the soul in the external, sensual reality. And in this experience, the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it lives and breathes in the inner power that passes through the gate of death.

Fichte only sensed the truth when he said: Immortality is not only there when we have passed through the gate of death, but it is there when we are still living in the body. For the being that passes through death can be attained by human knowledge while it is still alive in the body. How is it attained? In a remarkable way, we have to form ideas ourselves from spiritual science as to how it is attained.

You may well ask how can a person achieve all that has been described as a result of soul exercises? How can soul exercises lead to something like this? You see, people very often complain – especially when they have a keen cognitive drive – that you can't really see through reality, that there are limits to knowledge. How often have I pointed out in these lectures the famous Ignorabimus of Da Bois-Reymond, where it is said that man can indeed come to an observation of the processes of the world and their limits, but cannot penetrate into the interior of matter; that he cannot, as it were, submerge himself in the interior of matter with his thinking. It is said of all knowledge that all these powers of knowledge are actually insufficient to fully penetrate nature.

When one begins to strengthen the soul inwardly as it has been described, one notices something very definite. One notices how tremendously good it is that there are such limits to external knowledge. For if the powers that one has for external knowledge were to make one see through all nature through themselves, these powers would prevent one from attaining spiritual knowledge. Only because one cannot use everything that is in the soul for external knowledge is something left that can be developed in the way I have explained it. Only because the full, immortal soul does not enter into bodily life, but still retains something, whereby not everything is transparent in the outer bodily life, are inner forces preserved, which can then be developed in the way described. By connecting ourselves with the physical material given by our ancestors through birth or, let us say, through conception, we retain so much of the immortal soul that, on the one hand, we are prevented from seeing through the full nature in the bodily life, and have to make hypotheses and all sorts of things about what lives in nature. But as a result we have in the background of our being forces that we can develop within us and that allow us to enter into a spiritual world in a spiritual way. The immortal soul lives in man. In order for it to live, some things must be taken away from man in a sensual way. This, in turn, is such an important connection that one must look at it.

There is therefore a spiritual research that introduces us directly to the immortal being of man. This spiritual research is different from the external research. In the external research, one can remain as one is. That is exactly what suits people. The same abilities that they have acquired once, they retain when they go into the laboratory, when they do experiments, and can learn something about the external nature. And then these people also demand that the spirit should be explored in the same way, by retaining the same abilities. One cannot approach the spirit without first making oneself spiritual, that is, seeking out that which is in every human soul but which must first be raised to consciousness in the manner described. But there is much, much that, I might say, still thwarts people's paths to spiritual science in the present time. That is why the chapter 'immortality question and spiritual research' is still so little recognized today, one that people are so reluctant to get involved in.

You can already see from what I have said that it is necessary for man to learn to think and live in a subtle inner way. That is to say, when he becomes a spiritual researcher, he must not become a lesser thinker than those who believe, let us say, that they have mastered thinking, who claim that they stand on the firm ground of external natural science, which is not to be challenged in the slightest. They do not love that in the present. In the present, one loves to develop, I might say, that very tangible thinking that does not even broach the subject of the finer things that live and move in the world.

I do not like to do this: to make personal references. Those of you who have been to these lectures often will know that I actually avoid going into all the opposition from the outside world and all the misunderstandings regarding what I am presenting here as spiritual science. I would prefer to ignore it and not talk about it at all. But when things keep coming up that do have an effect and are believed, they do harm to the cause. Personally I would prefer not to talk about these things at all, but harm is done to the cause because printed paper still has tremendous authority today, because it still has a tremendous effect. And so, for the sake of the cause, one must sometimes, when occasion is offered by some topic, go into what stands in opposition to spiritual science. If coarse thinking is opposed to it, which, because it cannot engage in the finer weaving in the life of thought, can see nothing but fantasy, nothing but a form of madness in what spiritual science indicates as the right path for spiritual research. Let me give you an example. And, as I said, please excuse me if it is a personal example, but I only mention it in so far as it is opposed to spiritual science, which is expressed in it as a typical phenomenon.

I gave a lecture in a certain city about the relationships that prevail in the nature of the individual European peoples, relationships that, as many listeners know, I had already presented long before this war gave rise to talk about them; insights that were found quite independently of this war, but which, as they are presented, should actually be obvious. For when it is said in the course of the lectures, which are now often combined with the lectures on spiritual science, that the peoples of the West, the peoples of the European center, the peoples of the East differ in this or that, one should believe that no reasonable person could actually be led to say anything other than: Well, yes, he may be mistaken about individual characteristics, but there really are differences. There really are different character traits, different ones in the Germans, different ones in the Russians. To deny this can only arise from the crudest thinking. And yet, as I said, I also gave a lecture on this in a certain city. In a daily paper of the town in question, this was discussed and said in the most derogatory way, that these differences were constructed only out of the war, as it were. But one could ignore that, following the example I gave recently, for what is being achieved in this area. But now think, that was not enough for one man, but the man even turned to a magazine, and in a magazine what appeared in the newspaper at the time was printed, and the following nice comment was attached to it: “The accusation of the speaker” - that is, the critic of the Tagblatt of the city in question - “of having reconstructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers, rightly applies to Steiner. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive, as Steiner does, a difference in essence between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture. In my opinion, European culture is completely the same in essence.” And so it continues. This appeared in a Central European journal. You can see from it what a crude thinking is confronted with spiritual science as such. For what I have read to you here is further developed in a detailed article that extends over several issues. The thought — well, I need only hint at it, then you will see how crude such a person's thinking is: “Intellectual life, too, has developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European cultured man for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all, were individuals not forced into iron state forms.” So this crude thinking does not even notice how these ‘iron state forms’ are initially more involved in what is happening in this war. It is thinking like this that one has to deal with. Such thinking is in contrast to what must be demanded in the light of an understanding of such a question, and so also of the question of the immortality of the soul. And such a thing does not appear in a materialistic magazine, but in a magazine - it even bears the heading “42nd year” - that calls itself “Psychical Studies”. That I am not speaking out of personal resentment, I can prove to you from the magazine itself. You know, or at least many people know, that I have dealt with the main ideas which this gentleman here attacks in such a way in a small pamphlet. This pamphlet is called “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this pamphlet, though perhaps in a popular way, are exactly the same thoughts, written at least from the same spirit, from the same attitude. In the same issue as the article from which I have just read the characteristic passages, there is a review of this work, “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this review, the work is highly praised and it is shown how meritorious it is to express such thoughts. It goes without saying that I am just as indifferent to being praised as I am to being criticized. But I must characterize what already lives in the formation of the times, so that it is not believed again and again when diatribes appear here and there, simply through the suggestive power of what is daubed with printing ink on dirty paper, since that always forms a kind of obstacle for those who might otherwise find their way to spiritual research. One must point out the grotesque nature of the experience that can be had in our time in such a way. And it is only for this reason that spiritual science must be kept free, so to speak, in the context in which it is found, in the light in which it must appear as true, genuine, honest spiritual science. In order to keep it free in this light, I must also touch on other matters.

I have already pointed out in the lecture before last, where I spoke about misunderstandings regarding spiritual science, also in the lecture “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”, that spiritual research is not only opposed by what comes from the more or less materialistically minded side. On this side it is extremely difficult to achieve something for the reason that the things that are put forward from this side are so terribly plausible. When I have to characterize something, such as this magazine, I do it reluctantly. When I seriously oppose something, I turn to those whom I actually hold in high esteem. So I also hold in high esteem the actual father, I might say, of modern materialism, Lamettrie. He is an astute man, and his reasons are plausible. But one can acknowledge the plausibility of these reasons, one can assert them and one should still, when the spiritual research path is asserted alongside them, acknowledge the significance and essence of this spiritual research path alongside the validity of what comes from the materialistic side. Lamettrie is, as I said, an astute man, and in his book 'Man a Machine' he has put together everything that can prove how man is dependent on his physicality. Now it might seem as if spiritual science would have every reason to contradict such things. No, it agrees with everything, as I even proved in my last lecture, in a more forceful sense than materialism itself. For it is indeed easy to understand and irrefutable when Lamettrie points out how man's mental state depends on what he is. Of course it is very easy to prove, because it is so terribly obvious that man depends on whether he likes something or whether something agrees with him. Think of the mood of the soul that results from it. Lamettrie describes all this, and in doing so, he basically anticipated everything that can be said about this matter. Isn't it extremely interesting – especially in this day and age – to read what Lamettrie said in his book 'Man a Machine', because if you read it somewhere else, it would not make a good impression. But here in Central Europe, this passage can perhaps be read with greater composure than in Western Europe. Lamettrie wants to prove what man actually is - really prove how man, in terms of his mental state, indeed in terms of his character, in terms of what lives in him in terms of soul, depends on what he eats, what his food is. And there Lamettrie says – but as I said, it was more than a century ago since it was said – in his book 'Man a Machine', Lamettrie says: 'Raw meat makes animals wild; humans would become wild from the same food. How true this is,” says Lamettrie, the Frenchman, ”can be seen from the fact that the English nation, who eat meat less cooked than we do, eat it entirely raw and bloody, and show a wildness that is partly brought about by these foods, but partly also by other causes, which only education can suppress. This savagery engenders in the soul arrogance, hatred, contempt for other nations, unruliness and other feelings that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind, whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness.” It is perhaps not uninteresting, especially in Central Europe, to hear the judgment of a Frenchman, even if it is more than a hundred years old, about the English, so that one can see how circumstances change and how people have not always felt and thought in the same way from one place to another and from there to there. This same Lamettrie also says other things that are quite natural, for example, he says - and he believes that this is enough to refute everything that can be said from the spirit about the spirit - he says, for example: “A small fiber would have made two fools out of Erasmus and Fontenelle.” One can, of course, admit this and still stand on the ground of spiritual science, as it has been characterized today. For there is much more that can be admitted and that will not shake spiritual research. Let us assume, for example, that if only a small fiber were different in the case of Erasmus, then, from the point of view of pure materialism, this would mean that his life would perhaps have become that of a drip instead of that of a genius. But now, if it had happened that the mother, before he was born, had been murdered by a bandit and Erasmus had been killed before he was born, what would have become of Erasmus' soul? Only a true spiritual researcher is able to see through such things. For it seems even more compelling that man is dependent on matter; for it would only have been necessary for him to have died as a small boy, then he would not have been there.

That spiritual research has anything to deny that comes from this side should not be believed by those who, with their blunt considerations, want to stand in the way of spiritual research. But even today, on this ground, one still sees much that is unclear and imprecise. The characterized coarse thinking is primarily to blame for this; but there is more to it than that: spiritual science has to suffer not only from those who oppose it, but it also has to suffer from those who often want to be seen as adherents of a certain spiritual-scientific direction and who, in turn, are connected with all kinds of strange social elements of the present day. And as a result, spiritual science is lumped together with all kinds of stuff by those who do not know how to distinguish — I have already pointed this out, but I have to go into it in more detail today with reference to something else. Spiritual science does not build — as you can see from a characteristic of my lectures, which is often criticized, namely that they are too difficult — spiritual science does not build on the gullible crowd, does not build on those who, in a comfortable frame of mind, want to gain some kind of conviction, does not build on those people who, as if in a 'dream, go through life and believe everything that is conveyed to them through their certainly subjective power of persuasion. Spiritual science does not build on that which lives in the world of superstition, and because certain things are rightly discussed in public on the materialistic side as nonsense, a sharp line must also be drawn in spiritual science itself between honest, true spiritual research, which follows only the truth, and that which so often likes to its coattails and what comes from a side where one counts on the superstition of mankind, which is present as well as insisting on one's own judgment; where one pretends to people all sorts of things, because even today one finds enough people who believe everything possible, if it is only proclaimed to them from an alleged spiritual world - unknown whence. What can be confused with spiritual science from this side – as I said, it must be pointed out in order to shake it off – true science, and that is spiritual science, has little to do with it.

I will only point out a few things, because these things are now being discussed publicly on the materialistic side and, certainly under the influence of the serious and serious events of the times, there will be more and more discussion. I want to show how wrong those are who associate spiritual science with some form of ordinary or higher superstition, that higher superstition that pursues all kinds of goals in the world and actually only works in such a way that it first puts people into the world who are said to have higher abilities, a clairvoyant gift. True clairvoyance consists in what has often been described and is again described today. But what people call clairvoyance today is actually subconscious, but is often also just a fraud. But we are not reckoning with what is in the subconscious, but with the effect. Therefore, one must reckon with what the fraudulent clairvoyance is able to do with superstition. And there it is possible that all kinds of dishonest endeavors and currents arise, where one wants to achieve something completely different from what lies in the realm of truth. What people need to know, what is achieved by this, is that first of all — allow me to use a harsh expression — people are made stupid, befogged, by showing them all kinds of occultism, which has an effect on their superstition, and then, with the people made stupid, all kinds of things are carried out that do not belong in the realm of sincerity and honesty. Spiritual science has the same duty and necessity to point out these excesses of modern life as materialism does. And if it proves materialism right in its field in such cases, as I have shown with Lamettrie, then it may also prove it right when it turns against all excesses of an apparent spiritual experience, which is nothing more than life in blind superstition.

In 1912, an almanac was published, a yearbook, edited by a personality who is revered in a city in the West as a higher clairvoyant by many who are clouded in the way just described. This yearbook appeared in 1912 for 1913, in advance. In it, the following note appears about Austria: “The one who is destined to govern in Austria will not govern. A young man who has not yet been appointed to the government will govern.”

And with even greater clarity, the almanac for 1914, which was published in 1913, returns to this matter. There may be gullible people who believe nothing more and nothing less than that a great prophecy has been fulfilled, and it is impossible to make clear to them in their blind faith that dishonest currents living in the European world have been at work here, using superstition and all kinds of dark occultism to bring something into the world. How this is connected with all kinds of underground currents can be seen by considering that a Parisian newspaper, “Paris at Noon,” long, long before the current turmoil and at about the same time as the appearance of the aforementioned note in the aforementioned almanac of an alleged clairvoyant in – a Parisian newspaper that makes no claim to be occult in any way, but can be compared to other newspapers that appear at noon – that this newspaper also expressed its wish long months before that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered. One can see certain underground connections. And this same paper wrote at the time of the three-year anniversary of his term of office: “Among the very first to be murdered if mobilization occurs will be Jaurès.

The same personality who publishes this almanac travelled to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people who are open to such influence, in a direction that I will not say is linked to the main causes of Italy's position, but which had already taken effect in this matter.

I only discuss these things because they are discussed by others, from a materialistic point of view. But they must be discussed so that it can be seen that true spiritual science has nothing to do with such things, with superstition in general that relies on the credulity of the masses, and with what is done under the guise of superstition, both in large and small matters. Spiritual science will only appear as a real science that can be placed alongside other sciences when it is kept free from everything that can still be easily confused with it today and that is often confused with it, not only under the influence of limited judgment, which simply cannot distinguish, but also out of ill will. And in the literature that is thrown at spiritual science, a lot of work is done precisely with the fact that what one has to lie about when one wants to characterize spiritual science is so lied about that spiritual science is thereby put on the same ground as those things that spiritual science must of course fight as fiercely as they are fought by materialistic science.

But just as we recognize such things, spiritual science will emerge ever more clearly in its purity in what it can be for the human soul. Does not the latest book by Ernst Haeckel, that is, by a serious researcher, “Thoughts on Eternity”, shows how utterly at a loss mere natural science is in the face of such great events that have such a profound impact on the development of humanity, since it knows of nothing better to say than this:

Not that such a time would provide the reasons for spiritual science, but one must recognize what spiritual science can become for human life in the spiritual realm: that which sustains the human being, which holds the human being, because it makes him acquainted with that with which no natural science makes him acquainted. Natural science can only make man acquainted with that through which his body is connected with the sensual universe. Spiritual science makes man familiar with this through the fact that it shows him, by means of research, that he has an immortal soul, so that one can know: This soul of man is connected with eternal becoming. Man is anchored in eternity through his soul and spirit, as he is anchored in temporality through his body.

If one asks whether man needs something like this, it must be said that there can be no proof for it, any more than there can be for the fact that he needs to eat and drink. But just as man experiences through hunger and thirst that he must eat and drink, so he experiences over and over again in his soul that he must know. And the more one demands knowledge and not mere belief, one will recognize that he must know about the immortality of his soul. One can deny that man demands this knowledge, but the denial is only a theoretical one. The time will come more and more – and we are already at its beginning – when, just as hunger asserts itself in the healthy human body, the thirst for knowledge of the spiritual world, for knowledge of the immortal character of the soul itself, will assert itself in the human being who lives beyond himself into the time that begins with the present. And it will be an unquenched thirst if there is no spiritual science. This will show in the effects. Theoretically it will be possible to deny it – but it will show in the effects. It will show in the fact that people will find themselves desolate in their souls, will not know what to do with their lives, that they will perform their external tasks but will not know what the meaning of life is, and that they will thirst for this unraveling of the meaning of life. Little by little it will extend to the intellect; little by little it will show how man's thinking becomes coarser and coarser. We have already found enough coarseness in one example today. In short, the development of man would experience a descent if it could not be fertilized by spiritual science.

May the times we are living through today, which call upon man to be earnest in so many fields, also be a sign that the time is beginning when people must have knowledge of immortality and that spiritual research is the way to achieve it. The spiritual researcher himself knows that he is in harmony with all those who, even if they have not yet done spiritual research, have nevertheless been living and breathing in the spiritual world through the very nature of their soul activity. The spiritual researcher knows himself to be in harmony with those who simply knew what it means to live in the spiritual world. When Goethe was asked why he wanted to recognize the plant through ideas, since ideas are something abstract, he said: “Then my ideas, which I believe I experience within myself, are direct reality, because I do see my ideas within reality.” Therefore it was Goethe who, even when he had not yet spiritual science, knew what to say in a poetic but accurate way about the character of the spiritual world, where he was spiritually and soulfully transported by the poetic genius.

Today we have to say: the person who, through the development of his thinking, lives into the spiritual world, lives and moves in the emerging soul entities. And when man is freed from the body, he is also a spiritual-soul entity that lives in the becoming. That which has become, that which is solid, exists only in the outer sensual world in which man lives as long as he is in the body and then only when he perceives through the body. As soon as man ascends to the spiritual being, he is seized by the becoming. Goethe knows this. He also knows that just as man, through his own feeling, lives into his inner well-being, he can also live into a feeling that may well be called love. That is the surprising thing and always will be when one comes to spiritual people, that they even know how to say the right thing with the right word from their life in the spiritual world. That is why Goethe also says: one lives in the becoming. And when one develops oneself into this becoming, then the thoughts live in this becoming itself. Not the ordinary thoughts — these must first be overcome, they can only be incorporated into the world of becoming as something lasting, something enduring. Only when that which can be grasped in the process of becoming is held fast in thought, can the thought become fixed and we can carry it with our immortal soul through the portal of death. That is why, towards the end of his prologue in Heaven, written at the height of his life, Goethe speaks the beautiful words with which I want to conclude these reflections today, because in them, in a time that lies before the development of spiritual research as we understand it today , a poet speaks of the spiritual world out of poetic genius in a way that one must speak of it out of realization, by first pointing, or having the Lord point, to that which man needs as long as he lives in the sensual body. So that he does not degenerate into comfort and convenience, the Lord points out to Mephisto those who are spirit beings. And when free of the body, the human being is such a spiritual being. Goethe points out the peculiarity of the spiritual world with words that are sure to hit the mark. For you will recognize in these words what I myself had to recognize in them. After I had developed everything that I have presented today, I was surprised by the wonderful correspondence of these Goethean words, which I had not recognized before, the wonderful correspondence of these few Goethean words with the fundamental character the world to which the immortal human soul belongs: “But you, the true sons of the gods” - spiritual beings are meant, just as man is a spiritual being as an immortal soul -,

“But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
Embrace with love's sweet barriers what is becoming, what lives and works eternally,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Secure with lasting thoughts.”

Attention is drawn to that which lives in the pure spirit as its very own, but which is recognized in the human soul as its immortal part. In these words, which are directly a characteristic of that which can be grasped in the human soul, even when it is still living in the body, as the immortal, and of which one can know that it passes through the gate of death, when it enters the realm of the developing and takes with it to the pure realm of the spirit that which it has experienced here in a fluctuating appearance, in order to transform it into thoughts that can then become permanent and be taken through the gate of death. And what lives in fluctuating appearance affirms the soul, which passes through the gate of death, as an immortal, as an eternal being, in lasting thoughts, which henceforth make up its life in the same way that the body makes up the soul's life in the physical world.

[ 1 ] When I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this observed process before me. The direction and velocity of the motion of, the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator, I cannot tell anything about the motion of the second ball until it has happened. It is quite different when I begin to reflect on the content of my observations. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the occurrence. I connect the concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of mechanics, and consider the special circumstances which obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add to the occurrence which takes place without my assistance a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This latter one is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If, however, this need is present, then I am not content until I have established a certain connection among the concepts, ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., so that they apply to the observed process in a definite way. As surely as the occurrence goes on independently of me, so surely is the conceptual process unable to take place without my activity.

[ 2 ] We shall have to consider whether this activity of mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections determine, which happen to be in our consciousness at any given moment. (Cp. Ziehen, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Jena, 1893, p. 171.) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and connections of concepts, which stand in a certain relation to the objects and processes which are given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we are determined to it by an unalterable necessity, is a question which we need not decide at present. What is unquestionable is that the activity appears, in the first instance, to be ours. We know for certain that together with the objects we are not given their concepts. My being the agent in the conceptual process may be an illusion; but there is no doubt that to immediate observation it appears so. Our present question is, What do we gain by supplementing a process with a conceptual counterpart?

[ 3 ] There is a far-reaching difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of a process are related to one another before, and after, the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can trace the parts of a given process as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I observe the first billiard ball move towards the second in a certain direction and with a certain velocity. What will happen after the impact I cannot tell in advance. I can once more only watch it happen with my eyes. Suppose someone obstructs my view of the field where the process is happening, at the moment when the impact occurs, then, as mere spectator, I remain ignorant of what happens after. The situation is very different, if prior to the obstruction of my view I have discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can say what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. There is nothing in a merely observed process or object to show its connection with other processes or objects. This connection becomes obvious only when observation is combined with thinking.

[ 4 ] Observation and Thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, in so far as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our Spirit. Philosophers have started from various primary antitheses, Idea and Reality, Subject and Object, Appearance and Thing-in-itself, Ego and Non-Ego, Idea and Will, Concept and Matter, Force and Substance, the Conscious and the Unconscious. It is, however, easy to show that the antithesis of Observation and Thinking must precede all other antitheses, the former being for man the most important.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we choose to lay down, we must either prove that somewhere we have observed it, or we must enunciate it in the form of a clear thought which can be re-thought by any other thinker. Every philosopher who sets out to discuss his fundamental principles must express them in conceptual form and thus use thinking. He therefore indirectly admits that his activity presupposes thinking. We leave open here the question whether thinking or something else is the chief factor in the development of the world. But it is at any rate clear that the philosopher can gain no knowledge of this development without thinking. In the occurrence of phenomena thought may play a secondary part, but it is quite certain that it plays a chief part in the forming of a view about them.

[ 6 ] As regards observation, our need of it is due to our organization. Our thought about a horse and the object “horse” are two things which for us emerge separate from each other. The object is accessible to us only by means of observation. As little as we can form a concept of a horse by merely staring at the animal, just as little are we able by mere thinking to produce the corresponding object.

[ 7 ] In sequence of time observation even precedes thinking. For we become familiar with thinking itself in the first instance by observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the beginning of this chapter, we gave an account of how thinking is kindled by an objective event and transcends what is merely given without its activity. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences becomes an object of apprehension to us first through observation. All contents of sensations, all perceptions, feelings, acts of will, dreams and fancies, representations, concepts, Ideas, all illusions and hallucinations, are given to us through observation.

[ 8 ] But thinking as an object of observation differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table, or a tree, occurs in me as soon as those objects appear within the horizon of my field of consciousness. Yet I do not, at the same time, observe my thinking about these things. I observe the table, and I carry out the thinking about the table, but I do not at the same moment observe it. I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity, if I want to observe my thinking about the table, as well as the table. Whereas the observation of things and processes, and the thinking about them, are everyday occurrences making up the continuous current of my life, the observation of the thinking itself is a sort of exceptional state. This fact must be taken into account, when we come to determine the relation of thinking to all other objects. We must be quite clear about the fact that, in observing the thinking, we are applying to it a method which is our normal attitude in the study of all other contents of the world, but which in the ordinary course of that study is not usually applied to thinking itself.

[ 9 ] Someone might object that what I have said about thinking applies equally to feeling and to all other spiritual activities. Thus it is said that when, e.g., I have a feeling of pleasure, the feeling is kindled by the object, but it is this object I observe, not the feeling of pleasure. This objection, however, is based on an error. Pleasure does not stand at all in the same relation to its object as the concept formed by thinking. I am conscious, in the most positive way, that the concept of a thing is formed through my activity; whereas a feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in a way similar to that in which, e.g., a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls on it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as the event which causes it. The same is not true of the concept. I can ask why an event arouses in me a feeling of pleasure. But I certainly cannot ask why an occurrence causes in me a certain number of concepts. The question would be simply meaningless. In thinking about an occurrence, I am not concerned with an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself from knowing the concepts which correspond to the observed change caused in a pane of glass by a stone thrown against it. But I do learn something about my personality when I know the feeling which a certain occurrence arouses in me. When I say of an object which I perceive, “this is a rose,” I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing that “it causes a feeling of pleasure in me,” I characterize not only the rose, but also myself in my relation to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of putting thinking and feeling on a level as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown of other activities of the human spirit. Unlike thinking, they must be classed with any other observed objects or events. The peculiar nature of thinking lies just in this, that it is an activity which is directed solely on the observed object and not on the thinking personality. This is apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a rule say, “I am thinking of a table,” but, “this is a table.” On the other hand, I do say, “I am pleased with the table.” In the former case, I am not at all interested in stating that I have entered into a relation with the table; whereas, in the second case, it is just this relation which matters. In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I enter already the exceptional state characterized above, in which something is made the object of observation which is always present in our spiritual activity, without being itself normally an observed object.

[ 11 ] The peculiar nature of thinking consists just in this, that the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. It is not thinking which occupies his attention, but rather the object of the thinking which he observes.

[ 12 ] The first observation which we make about thinking is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary spiritual life.

[ 13 ] The reason why we do not notice the thinking which goes on in our ordinary life is no other than this, that it is caused by our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce appears in my field of consciousness as an object; I contrast it with myself as something the existence of which is independent of me. It comes to meet me. I must accept it as the presupposition of my thinking. As long as I think about the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is turned on it. To be thus absorbed in the object is just to contemplate it by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to its object. In other words, whilst I am thinking, I pay no heed to my thinking which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking which is not of my making.

[ 14 ] I am, moreover, in exactly the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking, I can only subsequently take my experiences about the process of my thinking as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this is impossible. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The thinking to be observed is never that in which I am actually engaged, but a different one. Whether, for this purpose, I make observations of my own former thinking, or follow the thinking-process of another person, or finally, as in the example of the motions of the billiard balls, assume an imaginary thinking-process, is immaterial.

[ 15 ] There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the contemplation of it. This is recognized even in the First Book of Moses. It represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only after its completion is any contemplation of the world possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason why it is impossible to observe the thinking in its actual occurrence at any given moment, is the same as that which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process, in detail, takes place. What in the other spheres of observation we can discover only indirectly, viz., the relevant objective nexus and the relations of the individual objects, that is known to us immediately in the case of thinking. I do not know off-hand why, for perception, thunder follows lightning, but I know immediately, from the content of the two concepts why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning. It does not matter for my argument whether my concepts of thunder and lightning are correct. The connection between those concepts which I have is clear to me, and that by means of the very concepts themselves.

[ 17 ] This transparent clearness concerning our thinking-processes is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. I am speaking here of thinking as it appears to our observation of our own spiritual activity. For this purpose it is quite irrelevant how one material process in my brain causes or influences another, whilst I am carrying on a process of thinking. What I observe in thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning, but what impels me to bring these two concepts into a definite relation. Observation shows that, in linking thought with thought, I am guided by nothing but their content, not by the material processes in the brain. This remark would be quite superfluous in a less materialistic age than ours. To-day, however, when there are people who believe that, when we know what matter is, we shall know also how it thinks, it is necessary to affirm the possibility of speaking of thinking without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology. Many people to-day find it difficult to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Anyone who challenges the description of thinking which I have given here, by quoting Cabanis' statement that “the brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.,” does not indeed know of what I am talking. He attempts to discover thinking by the same method of mere observation which we apply to the other objects that make up the world. But he cannot find it in this way, because, as I have shown, it eludes just this ordinary observation. Whoever cannot transcend Materialism lacks the ability to lead himself to the exceptional state I have described, in which he becomes conscious of what in all other spiritual activity remains unconscious. It is useless to discuss thinking with one who is not willing to adopt this attitude, just as it would be to discuss colour with a blind man. Let him not imagine, however, that we regard physiological processes as thinking. He fails to explain thinking because he does not see it at all.

[ 18 ] For everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking, and with goodwill every normal man has this ability, this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself produces. He is not confronted by what is, to begin with, a foreign object, but by his own activity. He knows how that which he observes comes to be. He perceives clearly its connections and relations. He has gained a firm point from which he can, with well-founded hopes, seek an explanation of the other phenomena of the world.

[ 19 ] The feeling that he had found such a firm foundation, induced the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, to base the whole of human knowledge, on the principle, “I think, therefore I am.” All other things, all other processes, are there independently of me. Whether they be truth, or illusion, or dream, I know not. There is only one thing of which I am absolutely certain, for I myself am the author of its indubitable existence; and that is my thinking. Whatever other origin it may have in addition, whether it come from God or from elsewhere, of one thing I am sure, that it is there in the sense that I myself produce it. Descartes had, to begin with, no justification for reading any other meaning into his principle. All he had a right to assert was that, in apprehending myself as thinking, I apprehend myself, within the world-system, in that activity which is most uniquely my own. What the added words “therefore I am” are intended to mean has been much debated. They can have a meaning on one condition only. The simplest assertion I can make of a thing is, that it is, that it exists. What kind of existence, in detail, it has, can in no case be determined on the spot, as soon as the thing enters within the horizon of my experience. Each object must be studied in its relations to others, before we can determine the sense in which we can speak of its existence. An experienced process may be a complex of percepts, or it may be a dream, an hallucination, etc. In short, I cannot say in what sense it exists. I can never read off the kind of existence from the process itself, for I can discover it only when I consider the process in its relation to other things. But this, again, yields me no knowledge beyond just its relation to other things. My inquiry touches firm ground only when I find an object, the reason of the existence of which I can gather from itself. Such an object I am myself in so far as I think, for I qualify my existence by the determinate and self-contained content of my thinking activity. From here I can go on to ask whether other things exist in the same or in some other sense.

[ 20 ] When thinking is made an object of observation, something which usually escapes our attention is added to the other observed contents of the world. But the usual kind of behaviour, such as is employed also for other objects, is in no way altered. We add to the number of objects of observation, but not to the number of methods. When we are observing other things, there enters among the world-processes—among which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. There is present something different from every other kind of process, something which is not taken into account. But when I observe my own thinking, there is no such neglected element present. For what hovers now in the background is just thinking itself over again. The object of observation is qualitatively identical with the activity directed upon it. This is another characteristic feature of thinking. When we make it an object of observation, we are not compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the same element.

[ 21 ] When I weave a tissue of thoughts round an independently given object, I transcend my observation, and the question then arises: What right have I to do this? Why do I not passively let the object impress itself on me? How is it possible for my thinking to be related to the object? These are questions which everyone must put to himself who reflects on his own thought-processes. But all these questions lapse when we think about thinking itself. We then add nothing to our thinking that is foreign to it, and, therefore, have no need to justify any such addition.

[ 22 ] Schelling says: “To know Nature means to create Nature.” If we take these words of this daring philosopher of Nature literally, we shall have to renounce for ever all hope of gaining knowledge of Nature. For Nature after all exists, and if we have to create it over again, we must know the principles according to which it has originated in the first instance. We should have to borrow from Nature as it exists the conditions of existence for the Nature which we are about to create. But this borrowing, which would have to precede the creating, would be a knowing of Nature, and would be this even if after the borrowing no creation at all were attempted. Only a kind of Nature which does not yet exist could be created without prior knowledge.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with regard to Nature, namely, creating before knowing, is accomplished with regard to thinking. Were we to refrain from thinking until we had first gained knowledge of it, we should never attain it. We must resolutely think straight ahead, and then afterwards gain knowledge of the thinking we have done by observing it. When we want to observe thinking, we must ourselves first create the object to be observed: the existence of all other objects is provided for us without any activity on our part.

[ 24 ] My contention that we must think before we can examine thinking, might easily be countered by the apparently equally valid contention that we cannot wait with digesting until we have first observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to that brought by Pascal against Descartes, when he asserted we might also say “I walk, therefore I am.” Certainly I must digest resolutely and not wait until I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But I could only compare this with the analysis of thinking if, after digestion, I set myself not to analyse it by thinking, but to eat and digest it. It is not without reason that, while digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thinking can very well become the object of thinking.

[ 25 ] This then is indisputable, that in thinking we have got hold of one bit of the world-process which requires our presence if anything is to happen. And that is the very point that matters. The very reason why things seem so puzzling is just that I play no part in their production. They are simply given to me, whereas in the case of thinking I know how it is done. Hence there can be no more fundamental starting-point than thinking from which to regard all world-happenings.

[ 26 ] I should like to mention a widely current error which prevails with regard to thinking. It is often said that thinking, in its original nature, is never given. The thinking-processes which connect our perceptions with one another, and weave about them a network of concepts, are not at all the same as those which our analysis afterwards extracts from the objects of perception, in order to make them the object of study. What we have unconsciously woven into things is, so we are told, something widely different from what subsequent analysis recovers out of them.

[ 27 ] Those who hold this view do not see that it is impossible in this way to escape from thinking. I cannot get outside thinking when I want to study it. We should never forget that the distinction between thinking which goes on unconsciously and thinking which is consciously analysed is a purely external one and irrelevant to our discussion. I do not in any way alter a thing by making it an object of thinking. I can well imagine that a being with quite different sense-organs, and with a differently constructed intelligence, would have a very different representation of a horse from mine, but I cannot think that my own thinking becomes different because I observe it. I myself observe what I produce. We are not talking here of how my thinking appears to an intelligence different from mine, but how it appears to me. In any case, the representation which another intelligence forms of my thinking cannot be truer than the one which I form myself. Only if I were not myself the thinking being, but the thinking were transmitted to me as the activity of a quite foreign being, might I then so speak that my picture of thinking appeared indeed in a definite manner; but how the thinking of the being may be itself, that I should not be able to know.

[ 28 ] So far, there is not the slightest reason why I should regard my own thinking from any other point of view than my own. I contemplate the rest of the world by means of thinking. How should I make of my thinking an exception?

[ 29 ] I think I have given sufficient reasons for making thinking the starting-point for my study of the world. When Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges, if only he could find a point of support for his instrument. He needed a point which was self-supporting. In thought we have a principle which is self-subsisting. Let us try, therefore, to understand the world starting from this basis. Thinking can be grasped by itself. The question is whether we can also grasp anything else through it.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thinking without taking account of its vehicle, the human consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object that before there can be thinking, there must be consciousness. Hence we ought to start, not from thinking, but from consciousness. There is no thinking, they say, without consciousness. In reply I would urge that, in order to clear up the relation between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. Hence I presuppose thinking. One might, it is true, retort that, though a philosopher who wishes to understand consciousness, naturally makes use of thinking, and so far presupposes it; in the ordinary course of life, however, thinking arises within consciousness and, therefore, presupposes that.

Were this answer given to the world-creator, when he was about to create thought, it would, without doubt, be to the point. Thinking cannot, of course, come into being before consciousness. The philosopher, however, is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Hence he is in search of the starting-point, not for creation, but for the understanding of the world. It seems to me very strange that a philosopher is reproached for troubling himself, above all, about the correctness of his principles, instead of turning straight to the objects which he seeks to understand. The world-creator had above all to know how to find a vehicle for thinking; the philosopher must seek a firm basis for the understanding of what is existent. What does it help us to start with consciousness and make it an object of thinking, if we do not first know how far it is possible at all to gain any insight into things by thinking?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thinking quite impartially without relation to a thinking subject or to an object of thought. For subject and object are both concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying that thinking must be understood before anything else can be understood. Whoever denies this, fails to realize that man is not the first link in the chain of creation but the last. Hence, in order to explain the world by means of concepts, we cannot start from the elements of existence which came first in time, but we must begin with that element which is nearest and most intimately connected with us. We cannot, with a leap, transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our analysis there, but we must start from the present moment and see whether we cannot advance from the later to the earlier. As long as Geology fabled fantastic revolutions to account for the present state of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it began to study the processes at present at work on the earth, and from these to argue back to the past, that it gained a firm foundation. As long as Philosophy assumes all sorts of principles, such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will hang in the air. The philosopher can reach his goal only if he adopts that which is last in time as the first in his theory. This absolutely last thing in the world-process is indeed Thinking.

[ 32 ] There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether our thinking is right or wrong, and that, so far, our starting-point is a doubtful one. It would be just as intelligent to raise doubts as to whether a tree is in itself right or wrong. Thinking is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of truth or falsity of a fact. I can, at most, be in doubt as to whether thinking is rightly employed, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies wood adapted to the making of this or that useful object. It is just the purpose of this book to show how far the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong. I can understand anyone doubting whether, by means of thinking, we can gain any knowledge of the world, but it is unintelligible to me how anyone can doubt that thinking in itself is right.

Addition to the Revised Edition, 1918

[ 33 ] In the preceding discussion I have pointed out the important difference between thinking and all other soul activities. This difference is a fact which is patent to genuinely unprejudiced observation. Anyone who does not try to apply this unprejudiced observation will be tempted to bring against my argumentation such objections as these: When I think about a rose, there is involved nothing more than a relation of my “I” to the rose, just as when I feel the beauty of the rose. There subsists likewise a relation between “I” and object in thinking as there does, e.g., in feeling or perceiving. Those who urge this objection fail to bear in mind that it is only in the activity of thinking that the “I,” or Ego, knows itself to be identical, right into all the ramifications of the activity, with that which is active. Of no other soul activity can we say the same. For example, in a feeling of pleasure it is easy for a more intimate observation to discriminate between the extent to which the Ego knows itself to be identical with what is active in the feeling, and the extent to which there is something passive in the Ego, so that the pleasure is merely something which happens to the Ego. The same applies to the other soul activities. The main thing is not to confuse the “having of thought images” with the elaboration of thought by thinking. Images may appear in the soul dream-wise, like vague intimations. But this is not thinking. True, someone might now urge: If this is what you mean by “thinking,” then your thinking contains willing, and you have to do, not with mere thinking, but with the will to think as well. However, this would justify us only in saying: Genuine thinking must always be willed thinking. But this is quite irrelevant to the characterization of thinking as this has been given in the preceding discussion. Let it be granted that the nature of thinking necessarily implies its being willed, the point which matters is that nothing is willed which, in being carried out, fails to appear to the Ego as an activity completely its own and under its own supervision. Indeed, we must say that thinking appears to the observer as through and through willed, precisely because of its nature as above defined. If we genuinely try to master all the facts which are relevant to a judgment about the nature of thinking, we cannot fail to observe that this soul activity has the unique character which is here in question.

[ 34 ] A personality of whose powers as a thinker the author of this book has a very high opinion, has objected that it is impossible to speak about thinking as we are here doing, because the presumably observed active thinking is nothing but an illusion. In reality, what is observed is only the results of an unconscious activity which lies at the basis of thinking. It is only because, and just because, this unconscious activity escapes observation, that the deceptive appearance of the self-subsistence of the observed thinking arises, just as when an illumination by means of a rapid succession of electric sparks makes us believe that we see a movement. This objection, likewise, rests solely on an inaccurate view of the facts. The objection ignores that it is the Ego itself which, standing inside thinking, observes from within its own activity. The Ego would have to stand outside the thinking in order to suffer the sort of deception which is caused by an illumination with a rapid succession of electric sparks. One might rather say that to indulge in such an analogy is to deceive oneself by force, just as if someone, seeing a moving light, were obstinately to affirm that it is being freshly lit by an unknown hand at every point where it appears. No, whoever is bent on seeing in thinking anything else than an activity produced—and supervised by—the Ego has first to shut his eyes to the plain facts that are there for the looking, in order then to invent a hypothetical activity as the basis of thinking. If he does not blind himself by force, he must recognize that all these “hypothetical additions” to thinking take him away from its real nature. Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing is to be counted as belonging to the nature of thinking except what is found in thinking itself. It is impossible to discover what causes thinking if one leaves the realm of thinking.

In this and the two following talks we want to occupy ourselves with what Goethe called his apocalypse, his secret revelation.

We have seen, among which lofty brotherhood Goethe counted himself. He was convinced that knowledge is not anything that is ascertained once from a human point of view but that the human cognitive faculty can develop and that this soul development is subjected to principles about which the human being needs to know nothing at first, just as little as the plant knows the principles according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings of the developing cognitive faculty comply completely with the Goethean approach to life. In various ways Goethe expressed this view.

He now answered a question that he tried to answer in infinitely deep way that he approached when his friendship with Schiller became closer and closer. This friendship was hard to make because both personalities stood spiritually on quite different ground. Only in the middle of the nineties (of the 18th century) they met forever and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to the Horen (Horae), a magazine in which the most beautiful products of German cultural life should be made accessible to the public. Goethe promised his cooperation, and his first contribution in this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation:” The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95).

It concerns the great connection of body and spirit, of the earthly and the super-sensible he wanted to demonstrate, as well as the way which the human being must take using his developing cognitive faculties if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual.

It is a question that the human being must always put to himself. Schiller had demonstrated this problem spiritedly in his way in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This treatise, little known and studied, is a repository for somebody who approaches this riddle. Goethe was thereby inspired to comment the same question and he did it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily which he annexed later to the Conversations of German Emigrants.

This fairy tale leads deeply into theosophy. Theosophy says also that the contents of knowledge of our soul are dependent any time on our cognitive faculty, and that we can develop this cognitive faculty higher and higher, so that we gradually do not have anything subjective as contents of cognition in our souls, but that we can experience objective world contents. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily shows the development of the human soul to higher and higher insights, because all human soul forces can develop not only the human intellectual capacity. All soul forces, also feeling and willing, can penetrate into the objective world secrets. But you have to eliminate everything personal.

This fairy tale is so profound that it is worthwhile to consider it more intimately. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's world view. Goethe himself said of it to Riemer (1774–1841, Goethe's secretary) that the same applies to it as to St. John's Book of Revelation that only a few find the right thing in it. Goethe put his most profound ideas into it that he knew about the human destiny. He was always very reserved about it: he said if hundred human beings were found who understand it correctly; he would give an explanation of it. They were not found up to his death, and the explanation was not given. After Goethe's death, a big number of attempts to explain were made which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck (1824–1899, German writer). They are partly valuable as building stones, however, cannot fathom the profound sense.

The question could appear: why did Goethe put his real life secret into such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could speak on such a question only pictorially. He did the same with it as all great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words who treated the loftiest questions in pictures, symbolically.

Up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society it was only possible to give this highest truth pictorially. Thereby comes about what Schopenhauer so pleasantly called the “choir of the spirits,” if the spark is enkindled in the souls like by hieroglyphics. Where the world view became completely personal, completely intimate to Goethe, he could express himself only in this form. One finds two important clues in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann.

Later Goethe still expressed himself in two other fairy tales more intimately, in The New Melusine (1807) and then in The New Paris (1810). These three fairy tales are the most profound expression of Goethe's world view. In The New Paris he says in the end: “whether I can tell you what happens further, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I do not know.” This should be a hint to the sources of this fairy tale.

These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate approach to life and world view. The fairy tale The New Paris points clearly to the sources from which it comes. It begins: all clothes drop from the boy's body, everything drops from the human being that he has acquired within the culture in which he lives. A man, young and nice, approaches the boy. This welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: do you know me? The boy answers: you are Mercury. This I am and I was sent by the gods with an important order to you!

Let us look at these three fairy tales as Goethe's most profound revelations. At first the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The fairy tale immediately begins mysteriously. Three fields are brought forward to us, a this-worldly one, a yonder one and in between them is a river. It shows the world of body, soul and spirit, and the path of the human being to the super-sensible world. The near side bank is the physical world, the yonder one, the country of the beautiful lily, is the spiritual world; in between is the river, the astral world, the world of desire.

Theosophy speaks of the soul life in the physical world, of this mortal world, then of the devachan which the soul experiences after death, but also if it got free of anything personal by means of an esoteric development already here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the kingdom of the beautiful lily; then it finds the way to the yonder bank, where the human being constantly strives for, the way to the home of his soul and spirit. The river in between, the astral world, the current of desires and passions separating the human beings from the spiritual world must be overcome.

A bridge is now built across the river and the human being gets to the kingdom of the beautiful lily. This is the goal the human being strives for. Goethe was completely familiar with the significance of the lily in medieval mysticism. He was, so to speak, initiated in the secrets of the mystic world view and knew the alchemical efforts of the Middle Ages. After he had recognised the deepness of mysticism on one side, he also met the trivial reflection of it in the caricatures of literature.

In the first part of Faust, he still shows us humorously that the problem of the connection of the human being with the beautiful lily stood before his eyes. In the Easter walk you read before he makes the acquaintance with Mephistopheles of the efforts of the human being in a distorted alchemy.

My father was a worthy commoner,
who in good faith, but in his own eccentric way,
laboured at fanciful speculations...
...
...
there a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion,
would in a tepid bath be married to the Lily...

This is a technical term of alchemy: lily signifies Mercury. According to the theosophical world view Mercury is the symbol of the wisdom the human being strives for, and lily that condition of consciousness in which the human being exists if he has obtained the highest. The marriage of the male with the female in the human soul is shown here. “In a tepid bath” means in the alchemical sense “being released from the fire of desires.”

We speak of ahamkara in theosophy, the striving of the human self which wants to enclose the highest. This human principle striving at first in selfness is shown in alchemy as a lion which has been freed from selfness, from desires and passions, and is allowed to combine with the lily. Even if one did no longer know a lot of the true alchemy in mediaeval times, one had preserved the names. All higher truth stands in the etheric shine before us if we approach it, released from stormy desires, from the lion of desires which were cooled down in the tepid bath. Then the human mind can find the lily, the eternal-female, which attracts us; he can have the union with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a way which the souls have always gone in the fullest clearness. Mystic is somebody who strives for the clearness, the highness, and the purity of the views.

There must not be sympathy and antipathy of wisdom, but only an unselfish being merged in it. Because one does not feel any passion with the truths of mathematics, no quarrel is possible; if human sensations came into question, it would be also argued whether two times two are four. In the same etheric shine all higher truths stand before us if we express this attitude. It was this serenity in all that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this whole way with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale because our colloquial language is not really suitable to show these matters. Not until we succeed in describing that in coloured pictures which lives in the soul of the mystic, we find the language to describe the highest form of the human consciousness, the lily.

One likes to represent mysticism as something unclear. But unclear is only somebody who does not find the way to the heights. The mystic strives for the most precious clearness of the concepts in pure etheric height, free of harsh immediate reality. We need to acquire the concepts only which lead us to this country of clearness. Goethe looked for this country of clearness, he strove for mathematical knowledge. In Goethe's estate I found a notebook fifteen years ago. This confirmed that Goethe concerned himself with mathematical studies even during later years, even up to the highest problems. Like a real gnostic he made his studies on nature and the human soul. Because of his intuitive spirit he could also behold the archetypal plant, for example.

But as he was hard understood concerning the archetypal plant and animal, he was still less understood concerning the soul-life. I remind of the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said that an approach of the world and its contents could be probably found which does not pick the things to pieces, as science does, but which shows the connecting band of all forms, which points to something higher, something uniform behind all sensuous phenomena. Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a formation which was similar, indeed, to a plant, but not to living ones which you can perceive with outer senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the essentiality of plants, the archetypal plant, this is the connecting band of the plants; but this archetypal plant lives in no single plant, but in all plant beings. It is the objective of all plants.

He answered to Schiller's objection that his archetypal plant were an idea: “If this is an idea, I see my ideas with eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stands to the spirit; there is an intuitively beheld plant for him which lives in every plant being. Only an intuitive beholding can perceive the objective behind all sensory things, only thinking free of sensuousness can attain this. The will-o'-the-wisps of the fairy tale show us how thinking can develop to objectivity. Who cannot rise toward Goethe's view does not understand what he means; at that time even Schiller did not correctly understand what Goethe meant, but he did his best to penetrate into Goethe's world view. Then the letter of the 23rd August, 1794 came. This broke the ice between both spirits.

Goethe hid a lot of his higher spiritual beholding in this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate into the fairy tale.

You read: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake up the old ferryman who sleeps on the other bank in the spiritual world, and want to be ferried over. Fro the kingdom of the lily he ferries them over the river whipped by the storm. They behave discourteously, dance in the small boat, so that the ferryman must say to them that the small boat topples over. Finally, after they had arrived at the bank with effort, they want to pay him with many gold pieces which they shook off from themselves. The ferryman rejects them and says sullenly: It's a good thing that you have not thrown them into the river which can stand no gold and would have wildly foamed and devoured you. Now I have to bury the gold. However, I myself can be paid only with fruits of the earth. He does not let them loose until they promise three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions. Then the ferryman hides the gold in the abysses of the earth where the green snake lives. This consumes the gold and becomes radiant from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything round it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet it and say to it: you are our aunt of the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins who stem from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which were always used in mysticism for certain soul states.

How do we come to the beautiful lily? - The will-o'-the-wisps ask. Oh, it lives on the other bank, the snake answers. Alas! We have nicely made our beds, from there we come! The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank but not back to the other. Are there no other ways? Yes, at midday I myself form a bridge, the green snake says. But this is not convenient to the will-o'-the-wisps, and that is why the snake points to the shade of the giant who himself is powerless, but is capable to do everything with his shade. At sunrise and at sunset the shade lies down as a bridge across the river.

The snake tries, after the will-o'-the-wisps had gone away, to satisfy a curiosity which had tormented it for long. On its wanderings through the rocks it had discovered with its feeling smooth walls and manlike figures which it hopes to recognise now with its new light.
It creeps through the rock and finds a room in which the portraits of four kings are put up. The first of the kings is of gold, he is decorated with a wreath of oak leaves. He asks the snake where from it comes: from the abysses where the gold lives! What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? The conversation, the snake answers. Then it looks at the remaining kings, the second is of silver, decorated with a crown, the third is of ore, he is decorated with a laurel wreath, the fourth king is misshapen and composed of all these metals.

Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault.

Why do you come, although we have light? The golden king asks. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. Does my empire end? The silver king asks. Late or never, the old man answers. The bronze king begins: when will I get up? Soon, the old man answers. With whom should I combine? The silver king asks. With your older brothers, the old man replies. What will become of the youngest? He will sit down.

During this conversation the snake looked around in the temple.

Meanwhile the golden king says to the old man: how many secrets do you know? The old man answers: three. Which is the most important? The silver king asks. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to reveal it to us? The bronze king asks. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man says. What do I care, the composed king murmurs to himself. I know the fourth, the snake says, approaches the old man and hisses something in his ear. The old man shouts with booming voice: the time has come! The temple resounds; the metal statues sound, and at this moment the old man disappears to the west and the snake to the east, and both roam the abysses of the rocks very quickly.

So far for the moment the contents of the fairy tale. Schiller writes to Cotta: “The public will still find out something, one reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” We are in a point where we want to begin with the resolution. Because we do not want to go too far afield, we have to get some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine clear in our mind to understand the pictures: flames signify something certain to the mystic. What did Goethe show in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps symbolically? The flames which are the will-o'-the-wisps represent the fire of passions, of the sensuous desires, of the impulses and instincts. This is the fire which lives only in warm-blooded animals and in the human being.

Once there was a time when the human being did not yet have the same figure as today. This fire was not there before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were any desires and impulses in this race. The human being became a longing, wishing being by the penetration with the warm-bloodedness, kama manas. The fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. That is why mysticism makes an even stronger distinction than the natural sciences between cold-blooded and warm-blooded beings.

At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, a moment happens at which the human being develops from lower to higher stages. This moment is called in the myths, in the Prometheus legend, the bringing down of the fire. About Prometheus it is told that he had brought it down from heaven, and he was forged to the rock the physical, mineral human body.

The sum of the desires, emotions, instincts, and passions is the fire which pushes the human beings to new actions. In theosophy this flame is called the emergence of the human self-consciousness, of the ability to say "I" to oneself. If the human being did not get round to becoming the flame, he could not have developed the self-consciousness and with it he would not be able to ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the desires and the higher one of the consciousness are linked in the human being. The physical human being originated by the penetration of his self with the blood, with the flame. The flames of the will-o'-the-wisps show the emergence of the self-consciousness within the impulses, desires and passions. This is kama manas as we say in theosophy. With it the human being lives in the physical world at first, on this side of the river.

But the home of the human being in which he stays before he is born is beyond the river, in the spiritual world. The ferryman ferries the human being from this spiritual world over the river of the astral world to the physical, this-worldly existence. However, the seeking soul strives incessantly again back to the land beyond the river; but the ferryman nature cannot bring them back. That means: if they found him also on this bank, he would not accept them, because he is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank, but nobody to the yonder bank. The snake says this to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought in the human being by birth to the physical world. If the human being wants to be brought back to the higher worlds during life, he must do this himself. There is a road back. The self can collect knowledge. Gold is the occult symbol of knowledge. Gold and wisdom knowledge correspond to each other.

The lower humanity also has the gold of knowledge represented by the will-o'-the-wisps and becomes a will-o'-the-wisp if it does not find the right way. There is a lower wisdom which the human being acquires within the sensory world, while he observes the things and beings of this sensory world, makes ideas of them and combines them by his thinking. However, this is wisdom of mere reason. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold which they take up easily and cast off easily again. But the ferryman rejects it. Wisdom of reason does not satisfy nature, only that gift can have an effect on nature which is connected with the living forces of nature. Immature wisdom makes the river of the astral foam, it does not accept it. The ferryman demands fruits of the earth as a pay. The will-o'-the-wisps did never enjoy them. They did never strive for penetrating into the depths of nature, but they must still pay tribute to nature. They must promise to fulfil the demand of the ferryman soon. This demand comprises fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three big onions. What are these earth fruits? Goethe takes these fruits which have skins representing the human covers.
The human being has his three covers, his three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Within these covers the core of the human being lives. In these bodies which surround it like sheaths the self has to gather the fruits of an incarnation after the other. Earth fruits must be gathered. These fruits do not consist of the knowledge of reason. The ferryman demands these three bodies as a contribution to nature. Goethe hid this teaching intimately in his fairy tale.

The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of real wisdom. The snake was always the symbol of the self that does not keep to itself, but is able to take up the divine in selflessness, to sacrifice itself, gathers earth wisdom unselfishly, creeping in the “abysses of the earth.” It ascends to the divine not unfolding egoism and vanity, but trying to make itself similar to the divine. The snake in its unselfish striving takes up the gold of wisdom, it penetrates itself completely with the gold and thereby it becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous as the self becomes if it has advanced to the stage of inspiration where the human being has become internally luminous and full of light and where light radiates toward light. The snake notices that it had become transparent and luminous. Before long one had asserted to it that this phenomenon is possible. It was green before, now it is luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around, with the whole nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in bright green hues. Green is the colour in which the aura of the human being appears if mainly unselfish, devoted striving lives in the soul. Now when it itself has become luminous from within, the snake does see, before it felt only in its striving endeavours. All leaves seem to be of emerald, all flowers are glorified most marvellously. It sees all things in a new, glorified light. The things appear in such luminous emerald hues to us if the spirit flows from them toward us, if light radiates toward light.

Now after it has become luminous and has taken up the higher divine nature in itself, it also finds the way to the subterranean temple.

The sites, the mystery temples, in which in former times the truths were announced, were deeply hidden in the caves and abysses of the earth There light faces light.

Indeed, up to now the snake was compelled to creep without light through these abysses; but it could probably distinguish the objects by feeling. It perceived objects by feeling which revealed the forming hand of the human being, above all human figures. Now it is in the possession of light, and light faces it. It finds the temple and four kings therein, and the old man with the lamp approaches it. The man with the lamp signifies the ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity which is only light and does not shadow which contains something that modern natural sciences cannot understand. Goethe says profoundly that the lamp of the human soul only shines if another light which the soul must produce is shown. It is the same view which he expresses in the saying which he placed in front of his theory of colours and about which he says that these are the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

Theory of Colours. Didactic Part

After the snake's eye has become sun-like because the light of the divine is enkindled in the snake, the light of the ancient wisdom of the world shines toward it.

The fire of passion has changed to the light. The fire which has changed in the earth to the light of wisdom is able to shine toward the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.”

The snake looks at the four kings with amazement and reverence. Amazement and reverence are always the soul forces that bring the human beings forward and upwards. It beholds the golden king first, and he starts talking: where do you come from? From the abysses where the gold lives, the snake answers. What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? He asks. The conversation, the snake answers. In the conversation wisdom comes to the fore intimately for the human being, this is more refreshing than the great revelation. Does one not think of the Platonic dialogues in this discussion of the king with the snake? There were world secrets expressed with few words, few sentences. Goethe wants to explain: what is in the temple and happens there concerns the highest secrets of human development.

Which alchemy transforms the things that way? It is the initiation. Even the modern theory of evolution takes the perpetual transformation of the things as basis. The temple has to be subterranean at first, it is closed to the most human beings; but now the moment approaches when it is open to all human beings. It wants to send the gold of wisdom which has become light from human being to human being.

Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver one, the bronze one and the mixed king? The golden king is manas, wisdom itself which could only develop higher in the mystery temple up to now. This is that soul-force which the human being can gain with purified thinking free of sensuousness. The silver king indicates an even higher element than wisdom: it is love, the creative word of the world buddhi, the god, being aglow with love. Its kingdom is called the kingdom of appearance; Christianity calls it glory (gloria in excelsis). It is pointed to a time which becomes later accessible only; then buddhi has the mastery over humanity. The bronze king whom the snake does not see at first and who is apparently little valuable is of huge seize. He looks rather like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the willing-like soul-force which rests in the human being covertly.

He represents atma with which the striving human being is endowed last what he finds last.

Thus Goethe showed in a beautiful picture the endowment of the human being with the three highest virtues which are given to him one day. Without having attained this maturity, nobody was admitted to initiation in former times.

Then there is still the fourth king, of cumbersome figure; he consists of a mixture of gold, silver and bronze, but the metals seemed to have not correctly melted with the casting, nothing correlates with each other. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who does not yet develop higher striving, in who thinking, feeling and willing are chaotically disorganised and which give “the picture a disagreeable appearance.” The fourth king shows the force of thinking which is still clouded with the sensory impressions, the fire of the soul which does not unfold love but lives in desires and impulses, the disordered will of the human being.

Remember the discussion of the kings with the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: how many secrets do you know? Three, the old man replies. Which is the most important one? The silver king asked. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to disclose it also to us? The bronze king asked. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man said. I know the fourth one, the snake said, approached the old man and hissed something in his ear. The time has come! The old man shouted with penetrating voice.

There are three secrets the most important one is the obvious one. If this is disclosed, the fourth one can be known! This is the most important word of the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key of it as Goethe said in a discussion with Schiller. The old man knows three secrets; these are the secrets of the three realms of nature. The realms of nature have become steady in their development. However, the human being develops perpetually. He is able to do this, because the spirit, the self lives in him. The three secrets which the old man knows explain the principles of the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal realm.

With its own forces the soul has to find the principle which must live in the human soul if it wants to obtain the maturity of initiation. The snake has found it. It hisses it in the ear of the old man. What did the snake say to the old man? That it wants to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the principle of the spiritual world. – Somebody can walk the path to the higher knowledge only who does not regard this knowledge as an end in itself, and seeks for it in the service of humanity. All true mystics know this soul path; they all have gone through this experience of sacrificing like the snake. As soon as the words sound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come!

The words of the old man, the time has come, point to the distant future when the whole humanity has attained the maturity. Then the time has come that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses.

To somebody like me who concerned himself with this fairy tale for twenty years deeper and deeper profundities appear, time and again the lines point to an even more profound primary source. Here are treasures to be found; however, we have to find them. We must only take care not to permit ourselves something in view of Goethe that Goethe lets Mephisto characterise in his Faust in such a way:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together!

(Faust's Study, verses 1936–1939)

Let us seek for this spiritual band in Goethe's creations.

Note:

The text of this and the following lectures are based on two incomplete transripts which were complemented with handwritten notes of two other participants.

I should like to-day to add various things to the considerations of Cosmic and human truths, which we have been studying of late, and I shall want to add several things concerning the sort of truths we discussed in the last lecture, truths connected with the development of mankind in our own age.

How, in order to amplify those things from one side, and another, it will be necessary to-day to insert here and there an observation which may strike you as being personal; but you know that I only make personal observations on the rarest occasions, and when I do, it is always, as to-day, to explain something strongly objective.

We are living at present in an epoch which demands something quite definite from human beings. It demands from everyone what must be called a decision arising from the innermost depths of human nature. It must be considered, and clearly seen that we have now really entered for the first time on the age of human freedom, and the upheavals in intellectual, moral or social spheres, are, after all, nothing but the expression of man being brought into the region of freedom through the deeper forces connected with human development. We have merely to consider the life of individual man or the life of Nations, and to look at them in a quite unprejudiced way, to see what occurs; and then we can say to ourselves that there are to-day innumerable factors, through which each single individual, or whole races, communities and Groups of mankind, are deteriorated either from without or within, factors which leave them unfree. This being carried along by the relationships and events around then, is something which fundamentally lay in the real evolution of humanity; but now man has to emerge from this stage. The future of the Earth will consist in man developing more and more what we have just characterised by saying that, to-day, for the first time, man is faced with such significant decisions.

The fact that man is thus placed before such significant decisions, my dear friends, decisions which have to be made from the innermost depths of man's heart and soul, is expressed in the external course of events. As a rule, however, the great changes which have occurred in all the spheres of political, social, Spiritual and scientific life in the course of the second half of the 19th Century, have been too little observed.

One can notice signs of this transition, both in great and in small things everywhere to-day. Let us take one instance which lies very close to us. You know that amongst the many enemies of our Anthroposophical Movement to-day, are also to be found the Clergy of this Country (Switzerland), and they show quite clearly that behind them stands the power of the Jesuits, and that power appears to have a certain validity just in Switzerland. One has merely to keep in mind what reveals itself to-day in various spheres, to see how this Jesuitical power is amalgamated, for many people, with what they call the external religious education and so on. As regards this Country it may be interesting to bring before our souls an extraordinary document which, because it is so interesting, I have had photographed. This document originated in Switzerland and was produced there in 1847. I will read it to you:—

“Dedicated to the contemporary Army and their brave leaders as a permanent monument, in memory of the 24th November 1847, when the Dominion of the Jesuits passed away from Switzerland. The Almighty has given victory to the just cause. Those days, from the 12th to the 30th November 1847 are therefore unforgettable to every Confederate soldier—those days during which in consequence of resolutions passed on the 20th July and 4th November 1847, the seven Catholic separated States—Lucerne, Uri, Schweiz, Zug, Freiburg, and the Valais, were infested with war, but because of our Army under the command of Heinrich Du-four of Geneva, they had one after another to capitulate. To these days belong some of the most note-worthy events which Swiss history offers. With a relatively slight sacrifice of dead and wounded our clever and war-experienced leader, by his strategical arrangements, was successful, after many conflicts, in freeing those people who were slaves to the tyranny and power of a hypocritical Clergy full of fanaticism; and the inhabitants blinded by their Catholicism, who as enemies faced the Confederate army including the Militia over 80,000 strong. After a few days were entirely conquered, which made it possible to dissolve that Sonderbund and to drive the Jesuits out of Switzerland”

The concluding sentence, which is especially interesting in my opinion runs: “May God's Fatherly protection rule over our Army.”

You see under whose protection at that time the expulsion of the Jesuits was undertaken, and how “God's Fatherly protection” was similarly evoked for the future, that it might always continue to rule over the Swiss people as at the time, when General du-four was successful in ridding Switzerland from the Jesuits. That occurred in 1847.

Now, my dear friends, not these things alone, but many others, have undergone radical transformations in the course of the last half Century, transformations of quite a definite character. Their characteristic is that anyone who gives himself over merely to the sequence of external events, such as have transpired during this epoch, must of necessity come into confusion. The very best way to come into confusion, and to be unable to find a way out of certain knots and tangles, is just to let the external events of the last half- or two-thirds of the last Century work upon us. If a person to-day wishes to find his way aright, a certain orientation which comes entirely from within, a certain impulse, is absolutely necessary. In that chaos, which is the basis of all the confusion into which we fall if we rely solely on external things, all the best strivings of recent times have been entangled. It cannot of course be denied, that our newer age has accomplished many things in various spheres of life; especially in the sphere of technique and the science which is connected with technique, great significant progress has been made. Triumphs have been celebrated, and this praise is thoroughly justified. But if you take the best results, the best scientific and technical conquests of our civilisation, although you will find many things of use, many illuminating things, many things which bring man on materially, you will find nothing either in science or in technique or in any other sphere, or even in that sphere which has brought good to man, nothing which can shine from the outer world into man's soul so that he can get a guiding impulse from those things coming from that external world. Therefore, Spiritual Science had to come, just at this very time, because out of Spiritual Science something must come which is drawn from no external world, but simply from the Spiritual world; and which is so taken up that when it flows into the outer world it represents an impulse which has nothing to do with anything drawn from that outer world itself. It is an impulse carried into the outer world from Spiritual worlds,—and that is what is sought to be given through our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In this connection, we are radically misunderstood to-day, and my yesterday's remarks were a kind of explanation of this from a certain aspect. I wanted especially to show that it must not be said of our School-Impulse (which of course is born out of Spiritual Science), or of our practical undertakings, that we carry into them anything of a theoretical view of the world. I tried to show yesterday how far such a statement is from reality. But neither may one say the opposite, and this too is connected with a right understanding of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. One may not say the reverse, that, as people usually imagine to-day, any external activity is the result of a theory, of a programme; one must not imagine that what we accomplish—whether in the sphere of pedagogy or practical life—proceeds from any programme such as is usually imagined to-day.

A few days ago, for instance, someone said:—“Well, this peculiar idea regarding the Threefold State, would not have arisen if this Threefold idea had not sprung from Anthroposophy,” and I had to correct such an utterance radically. And here I must add a few personal things, which are meant quite objectively, and have a good deal to do with these matters. I had to say:—“It is really the case that what meets you and others to-day as the Threefold Division of the Social Organism, in so far as it was conceived by me, sprang from no abstract thought, nor from meditating on how the social life could be so arranged that something could come into it of that Utopian character one finds in many writings to-day. It did not arise in this way.” That came to me as the perception of a Spiritual stream, which flowed together naturally in life with other streams, especially with the economic stream. The economic perception arose from its own soil, on the basis of its own life.

A few years ago, I had to explain how this perception of the economic life of our recent times, of the economic necessities arose I had to object then, when I was told that the Drei-Gliederung (Three- foldness) proceeded out of Anthroposophy, just as one can take something out of a programme to-day and put it forward as an impulse. I said:—My boyhood was spent as the son of a railway official. That was in the 60's and 70's, when railways had only half evolved from their embryonic life. The great traffic only came gradually and later, but I shared in just those measures which were taken under the very first arrangements made for railways. I was thus absolutely under the impression of this life of commerce which was then arising, and it was the perception which I got from that, which of course, was later united with something else, that led to my presenting the social life as I had to do, in the sense of the three-fold Social Order.

We have to consider that in the 70's of the last Century, the essential, basic element of the newer evolution, was the transformation of traffic. International commerce developed in this epoch. I myself, in the last years of this inter-national commercial evolution, was under the daily and hourly influence of the details that developed in connection with that world-traffic, and then, in the last third of the 19th Century, or rather in the last quarter of it, came that great turnover, the great transformation, which led from world-intercourse, to world-trading, and economics.

My dear friends, those are two quite different things. It was world-commerce which first led to world-economics. World-trade is but the latest phase of the development of National economics. That which is, in its essentials, prepared in single Countries, has been spread abroad through the world-trade and been carried into other Countries. But nevertheless, there exists a certain individuality as regards the productions of each Country. All this, under the influence of the developing traffic, became different,—the world passed over from world trade to world economics. World-economics can only exist when the raw product is purchased in one Country and then sent to another where it is worked over industrially; so that not only through the trading, but through the economics itself, one Country or land became dependent on another, and thereby economics were spread over many different Countries. This spreading of trade, of commerce, this—what I must call a welding of the world into a common world- sphere in economics, came about for the most part in the last decades of the 19th Century;—and this arose perhaps in its most permeating, penetrating form, in the arrangements made in the European Textile Industries in connection with the Indian and American cotton. In the cotton industry, one could especially experience the transformation of ordinary trade into world- economics. Just at the time when it could be seen how these things were going on, I was for eight years tutor in a house dealing in cotton brought from India and America to Europe, and in this house Cotton-Agents—which means also the manufacturers of such goods,—congregated together. Those people too traded in cotton, and so at that time I was in the midst of the interests connected with these things.

I lived entirely in that centre, never having been one of those who regarded external things as trivial, considering that one should withdraw from external things into a mystic twilight, I was deeply interested, especially when despatches came, which had to be deciphered with a Code. Once there came a dispatch which included the word “wire-puller,” and one had to look up this word, which meant, “such and such a firm wants so many bales of cotton at this or that price.” With the word “wire-puller” one could draw forth things which might have a very significant business importance.

You see, during this epoch I was greatly interested in those patterns which came, samples of American and Indian cotton, cotton piled high up in the office, each with its own little specification, labels on which were written quite interesting things. While I was studying these carefully, (pardon these personal observations, but they are connected with the objective side), I also studied Goethe's “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” and those two things were carried on absolutely side by side, and fundamentally it was from that which flowed to me then out of my study of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” that twenty one years later, 3x7 years after, there flowed that which led to my first Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation.” I just wanted to bring forward this couple of instances—which I could multiply many times; but you see, I had to explain to that man who came to me saying that my ideas of economic life came from an abstract Anthroposophy, that it was not abstract. Anthroposophy is not abstract, although people say think so. I had to tell that man that I had taken part in the life of commerce. I even wrote hills of lading; even if in addition to the signs which I had to write on the bills of lading, I made many blots, nevertheless I wrote them. I grew up in the middle of that cotton industry and trade, and it was in connection with these things which are in connection with the whole feeling of our present time, out of my perceptions of these, then that my economic ideas arose. They are not mere theories, but are in reality drawn from life itself. I feel that one can only draw such things out of life if one has the good-will really to look at life itself. One must also, of course look at life just where many despise it, if one wishes to get at those things which can be made practical in life and prove themselves as such. Just out of what resulted from the practise of life and from being in the very midst of it, and seeing the confused tangle and knots in it, those things arose later; for among the men I met at that time were some whose destiny still caused them to find the aftereffects of the great crisis in 1873. At this time, one could clearly see their remarkable connections between the World-views and the economic life, which must now be overcome by our mode of thought. The Director of that railway on which my father worked, was at that time a man named Pontout, who was regarded as a small demi-god by the neighbourhood in which I then lived,—Frau Pontout, for what reason I do not know, was always called the Baroness; she was considered an extremely pious woman. They were both really, from a certain point of view, extremely religious people. Pontout then resigned the post of General Director of the Southern Railway and entered a great business undertaking, which stretched its tentacles from France to Serbia; and, because of his piety he was able to carry out a gigantic business in the service, not of course of a World-power, but of those powers in whose service he placed himself, whenever he took the Prayer-book in his hand. Then the whole business smashed, and there arose that famous Pontout-crash, from which at the right moment, a certain clerical community withdrew their fingers, leaving Pontout alone in it. But even at that time one could see a certain philosophy or let us say a certain order of ideas, being carried into financial undertakings; and one could very well learn from that what one ought not to do. Of course, many people could not believe that I thus learned the right way, and that this led to my thinking in a very different way of the connection between Anthroposophy and the “Kommenden Tag” and “Futurum,” than did Pontout of the connection between the Catholic Church and the Serbian bank.

These things are all taken from life, my dear friends, and the fact that one can read them from life, that we do not approach life with theoretical dogmas, is just what should come from Anthroposophy, if it be rightly understood. Anthroposophy is distinguished, or should make itself distinct from other World-views, in that it can be selfless; that means that it does not trumpet its dogmas abroad, but simply provides an introduction, by which one can learn to know life itself in all its fullness and breadth. Only in this way can Anthroposophy satisfy the most weighty and important demands and necessities of man's present evolution.

I told you that anyone able to look with open eyes at what happens could see confusion everywhere, that even in what was good there was confusion, and that a person could not help going astray if he simply swam on in what the external world offered. Into that an impulse had to flow from spirit-lands, an impulse which coming from quite a different source, was called upon to give a direction which could not be got from the external world, even though there may be good in it. It is just that which Anthroposophy should bring to expression; just consider what an impulse lies in this age, where in external events everywhere whether in scientific or any other branch of cultural life, or in outer life, these insoluble-knots were being formed. It was just then, that coming out of Spiritual depths, something had to find its way into the world which could give it the right direction.

You must consider how, on the other hand, something else came to humanity. That is the following:—Whenever a person gives himself up to the stream of those insoluble knots, he is tempted not to care to seek for guidance for his own soul, but to give himself over to the confusion of external life, and is then only carried along by the river of confusing external events. I could see to my great sorrow, that human beings under this influence, become less and less independent. On the one hand, they were driven to form an independent judgment of things, but their independent judgment could only form that which then forced itself out of that sphere of chaotic external events, urging them into paths unknown to them. These people wanted to be free, they wanted to be independent, for the demand for freedom lives in the subconscious nature of man. People imagine they are free, but all the time, because freedom means a strong shaking up in one's inner soul, and because they did not want to be shaken up, they gave themselves over to that stream which runs its course in the way I have described. In this way, they come under Ahrimanic influence, which strives for the Spiritual with all kinds of beautiful and well-chosen words which have their roots simply in personal egotism, and a longing to allow this personal egoism to carry them into the social life around them.

It is one of the most important characteristics of the age, that human beings are full of this egotism, so that when they speak of social demands they really mean; how can their egoism best be carried along by social life? They speak of the demands of social life, but all the time they mean egoistic life; they want a social life of such a kind that Egoism can thrive best in it.

Of course, the Three-fold Social-Order could not speak in this way, it cannot speak of a Paradise! It must leave that to the Lenins and Trotzkis etc. The Three-fold-Order can only speak of what is organically possible in the social body, of that which is capable of life, of that which can fulfill itself. To that we must attain; for if we simply picture and strive for illusion we shall certainly not get very far.

We must accustom ourselves, my dear friends, not to consider life from any abstract principle, but to live our life, regarding the details of life with full consciousness, whether they belong apparently to Spiritual or material things. A great transformation has taken place, in that the economic life of the whole world has become a single body, but humanity is not able to understand it, could not bear it. It has been proclaimed, but not inwardly understood. Many things have appeared concerning “World Economics,” but they are all mere phrases, for this perception of the whole economic life as one body has not been inwardly digested. And so it has come about that humanity has been driven into a World-trade, but it has not understood how to adapt life to it, and so has now come to live in such a World where barriers on barriers have been set up to preserve all sorts of impossible national commerces, hemmed in by all kinds of customs, duties, passports and other limitations, by which they hope to preserve in a most terrible way, something for which the time is long past.

All that we experience today is nothing but this result of the misunderstanding of what has arisen because the last third of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th Century, presented a state of chaos, of the confusing tangles to which one ought not to give oneself up externally, for that is also something which shows itself in the inimical attacks made now on Anthroposophy. These attacks which appear to-day, (both extensively and intensively) are now assuming the most incredible dimensions; and we may say, if we take these things externally, that we can see in the very way these attacks are expressing themselves, the spirit by which they are inspired. For instance, the following has been said of “Steiner's Goetheanum in Dornach”—“We should like anyone who wants to form his own judgment of Dr Steiner's views, to visit that Temple, that image of his spirit, and to see it with their own eyes. For what does this man take himself and others, for whom he chooses to pour the hallucinations, the feverish dream of his brain into concrete, to carve them in wood, and in glass, and to have them painted on the wall?”

Finally, my dear friends, another very extraordinary party has joined the various people, the Chauvinists the extreme Socialists, and especially the leaders of Socialism, and so on. They are not of recent date, one heard of their activities in 1912, 1913, They add quite extraordinary sentences to what I have just read to you:—Somebody writes: “these are only tiny samples of attacks, appearing at present under the Uranus-influence.”

You see that mockery is not lacking, especially shown in the indignation of an opponent filled with hate, from which I will quote. The odd people who now are uniting with those others, are especially Astrologers; and behind these lies a special ruthlessness, (of which many of them are unconscious,) because in this astrology there is something attractive, and one can do much with such things. Some of these are very extraordinary if one brings them into connection. For instance, here is another attack which contains these words:—

“We hold it very necessary to keep an open eye on Rudolf Steiner, that man who supports himself on Judaism, on the most distorted Communistic and idealistic ideas, and who wanted to become the Minister for Culture in Wurttemberg during the revolution.”

Here you see, a man is speaking of my relationship with the Jews and Communists. Let us quote another attack, from the other side. It is good to compare these things, because in the comparison many details come to light. “None of the former religious founders, such as Christ and Buddha, none of the wise men and prophets” (I do not think that I have ever in the remotest degree taken upon myself such a title but the opponents do, as it seems here) “have ever paid such heed to the external; to earthly treasures, palaces, temples. On the contrary, they remained without much property, they instructed human beings without reward, they led them higher Spiritually, and taught them to pray in their own quiet chambers. They perieated and spread their Spiritual ideas and wise teachings without needing the material help of rich financiers.”

Here you see, on the one hand, my relationship with the Catholics and Jesuits; and on the other, with rich financiers. Only one thing is lacking, and that is my relationship with prominent generals. But my dear friends, I know that no one can take it amiss if I emphasise quite especially,—it must be emphasised once, for this must be said—I say it quite expressly, it must be sooner or later investigated whether I have used anybody, whether Communists, financiers or generals, for my own purpose; for I could have dispensed with those people. It must be ascertained whether I came to them or they to me; that is something which must be kept in mind, my dear friends, for a great deal depends on it.

There is another point; when on the one hand we must meet with the statement that “he can only support himself on the basis of the Communists” and so on, and on the other it is asserted that the wise men of old managed to spread their Spiritual teachings without the material help of rich financiers, one can say that rounds very much like the calumnies which appeared in 1909, when it was said that I was an especially dangerous 'Freemason.' That assertion came from the side of the Jesuits; but from the other side the Calumny arose, that I was myself a Jesuit! You see how well these people know me! One ought to reflect whether perhaps, that which it is most necessary of all to keep in mind, whether in the Jew or Communist, or even in the rich financier, “Man” himself has not been overlooked; for to-day it is a question of man and what must be sought in the human in every form; for in the last resort, my dear friends, neither the old party-strata, e.g. Communists “nor the old racial connections such as the Jews, nor even the old ranks of financial advisers signify a great deal to-day, because to-day we must with all our power enter into what is universally human.”

But it would seem, my dear friends, that those who are in Spiritual relation with all kinds of movements except with that which is really able to bring a Spiritual impulse into the present confused state of human evolution, are quite specially filled with Ahrimanic influence, so we may calmly listen to what they say, which runs as follows:

“The starry influence of 1921 will bring on Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as on all other men with similar horoscopes either psychic upheavals, or shatterings! will lead to a deepening of Spiritual effort; or, if the astral influences are not appreciated Spiritually, thy will bring about severe material losses, harm or bodily diseases. And many another person born in February in such critical years may also be even in personal danger, which, of course is clearly visible if one looks into each particular horoscope.”

Now my dear friends, it is not in the least necessary that such things should be said of the Uranus and Saturn-influences;—that it is necessary to master the life of Self, and so on. I have tried to describe to you, for instance, from what depths the Threefold Order of the Social Organism of the “Portal of Initiation” came about, and I myself can remain quite unmoved as regards what comes from the Uranus and Saturn-influences. These are not the things that worry me. The things that worry me are of quite a different nature, and as long as such things as the following play a part, there is good cause for anxiety; although the things connected with it must be seen in quite a different light.

A certain enemy filled with hatred is here quoted as having said the following:—“Spiritual flashes of light, like lightning-flashes are darting towards that wooden mousetrap, such flashes are plentiful; and it will need a certain cleverness and cunning on the part of Steiner, so to work that one day a real flash of light does not strike that Dornach magnificence, and bring it to an untimely end.” Now my dear friends, you see, there is something clearly indicated here, which people want to see occurring on the top of the Dornach Hill, and they could then search for the reason of such threats, in the fact of Uranus being near the Sun. You see, not only are these attacks very numerous, but they are filled with a striking intensity; and above all my dear friends, as far as I am concerned, I must say that where such Uranus influences express themselves, they show that they come from no good side, for in their way of appearing they show whose Spiritual child they really are.

On the other hand, we must be quite clear that if we look beyond the Spiritual flames of fire of which it is said that enough exist already, and turn to the physical flames, then, my dear friends, a waking-anxiety is necessary on the part of those who cling, perhaps with a certain love, to what has come to expression here, and all that is connected with it. It is really necessary to feel anxiety about this, in order to preserve that work which is really carried out here with sacrifice. For, those people who look at this work filled with hate, with a will tending to such a ruthless deed, are to-day sufficiently numerous.

You might say I ought not to read out such things to you; but, my dear friends there can be no question as to that, for these things are well-known amongst other peoples in the world, they take care of that. But that such things should be known to you who feel perhaps differently, at least most of you, the fact that you must be told about such things, I take on myself. For, through that custom which has been widely prevalent in this room, these things might be concealed from you. Unfortunately, many things have thus been concealed. And so a certain wakefulness must flash in on our friends, as to those who are filled with hatred for our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

It was not simply by way of a joke yesterday that I said:—“Our enemies are in many respects very different people”;—they will yet show themselves quite different people unless we make an effort to be awake, and guardians of that which has been accomplished, with so much sacrifice and such hard work; because if, as is the case at present, where evil is, there ever so many are awake, it should also be possible that where what we regard as good exists, there also we should be awake. You see, my dear friends it will be ever more important to be true Watchers of that Spiritual treasure of which we must say again to-day in a certain connection, that it is not brought into the world through any subjective idea, but from the observation of life itself; out of the perception of those demands which are taken from the most important human things of our age, and which will become more and more important as we advance into the near future. I want you to pay attention to those people whose Will it is, to destroy what is necessary for man-kind. That Will for destruction is very, very strong in many to-day. May you yourselves then be strong, for that which lies in this Spiritual Movement, and which has brought this Goetheanum into expression has not arisen out of the chaos around us. It is an impulse which has been brought into the chaos. That Bau, whenever one comes near it, will make us feel that it gives strength, and life. Be you therefore true Watchers of what you have apparently chosen as your very own, when you joined this Anthroposophical Spiritual Movement.

This chapter was written and published in the original German for the first time in the year 1902.

[ 1 ] It is Goethe's conviction that man can never solve the riddle of existence within the limits of a synthetic conception of the world. He shares this idea with those who, as a result of certain proofs of inner life, have acquired insight into the nature and substance of knowledge. Such men, unlike some philosophers, find it impossible to speak of a limitation of human cognition; and while realising that there are no bounds to man's search for wisdom, but that it is capable of infinite expansion, are aware that the depths of the universe are unfathomable, that in every unmasked secret lies the origin of the new; and in every solution of a riddle another lies unrevealed. Yet they also know that each new riddle will be capable of solution when the soul has risen to the requisite stage of evolution. Convinced as they are that no mysteries of the Universe are absolutely beyond the reach of man, they do not always desire to reach the contentment of a complete and finished knowledge. They strive only to reach certain vantage points in the life of the soul whence the perspectives of knowledge open out and lose themselves in the far distance.

[ 2 ] It is the same with knowledge in general as it is with knowledge acquired from great works of the spiritual life. They proceed from unfathomable depths of soul life. We may really say that the only significant spiritual creations are those in whose presence we feel this to an ever increasing degree the more often we return to them. It must be assumed that a man's soul life has itself advanced in development each time he returns to the work. Goethe's Faust must surely produce a similar feeling in all who approach it with this attitude of mind.

[ 3 ] Students who bear in mind that Goethe began Faust as a young man and finished it shortly before his death, will guard against entertaining conclusive opinions about it. In his long, varied life, the poet advanced from one stage of development to another, and he allowed his creation of Faust to participate in the fullest sense in this development. He was once asked whether the conclusion of Faust accorded with the words of the “Prologue in Heaven,” written in 1797:

A good man through obscurest aspiration,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.

He answered that this was “enlightenment” but that Faust was finished in old age and then man becomes a mystic. Goethe, as a young man, could not of course realise that in the course of his life he would rise to the conception which at the end of Faust in the “Chorus Mysticus” he was able to express in the words:

All things transitory
But as Symbols are sent.

At the end of Goethe's life the Eternal element in existence was revealed to him in a sense other than he could have dreamed in 1797, when he allows “the Lord” to speak to the Archangels of this Eternal element, in the words:

And what in wavering apparition gleams

Fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever! [ 4 ] Goethe was fully aware that the truth he possessed had developed within him by degrees, and he would have judged his Faust from this standpoint. On 6th December, 1829, he said to Eckermann: “In old age one's view of things of the world has changed. ... I am like a man who in youth has many small silver and copper coins which in the course of life he changes into more and more valuable coin, so that he finally sees his youthful heritage in gold pieces before him.

[ 5 ] Why was it that old age brought to Goethe a different view of “things of the world?” Because in the course of his life he attained to higher and higher points of view in his soul life, from which new perspectives of truth were perpetually revealed to him. Only those who follow Goethe's inner development can hope to read aright the portions of Faust which were written in the poet's old age. But to such men new depths of this world poem will ever and again be revealed. They advance to a stage where all the events and figures take on an esoteric significance; an inner, spiritual meaning is there beside the external appearance. Those who are incapable of this, will, according to their personal artistic perception, be like the famous aesthetic Vischer, who called the second part of Faust a patched up production of old age, or they will find delight in the rich world of imagery and fable which streams from Goethe's imagination.

[ 6 ] Anyone who speaks of an esoteric meaning in Goethe's Faust will naturally arouse the opposition of those who claim that a “work of art” must be accepted and enjoyed purely “as art,” and that it is inadmissible to turn living figures of artistic imagination into dry allegory. They think that because the spiritual content is barren so far as they are concerned, it must be so for everyone else. But there are some who breathe a higher life that streams from a mighty Spirit, where others hear only words. It is difficult to meet on common ground those who have not the will to follow us into the spiritual world. We have at our disposal only the same words as they; and we cannot force anyone to sense within the words, that totally different element which is perceptible to us. We have no quarrel with such people; we admit what they say, for with us, too, Faust is primarily a work of art, a creation of the imagination. We know how great our loss would be if we were unable to appreciate the artistic value of the work. But it must never be urged that we have no perception of the beauty of the lily because we rise to the spirit which it reveals, nor that we are blind to the picture that in a higher sense is for us like “all things transitory,” which “as symbols are sent.

[ 7 ] We agree with Goethe, who said to Eckermann on 29th January, 1827: “Yet everything (in Faust) is of a sense nature, and on the stage will be quite evident to the eye. I have no other wish. If it should chance that the general audience find pleasure in the representation, that is well; the higher significance will not escape the initiate.” [ 8 ] Those who want truly to understand Goethe must not hold aloof from such initiation. It is possible to indicate the exact point in Goethe's life when he came to the realisation which he has clothed in the words:

All things transitory
But as symbols are sent.

Standing before the ancient works of art his soul was flooded with this thought: This much is certain, that the artists of antiquity possessed equally with Homer a mighty knowledge of Nature, a sure conception of what lends itself to portrayal, and of how it ought to be portrayed. Unfortunately the number of works of art of the first rank is all too small. But when we find them our only desire is to understand them in truth and approach them in peace. Supreme works of art, like the most sublime products of Nature, are created by man in conformity with true and natural Law. All that is arbitrary, all that is invented, collapses: there is Necessity, there is God.” These thoughts are inscribed in Goethe's Diary of his Italian Journey” under the date, 6th September, 1787.

[ 9 ] Man can also penetrate to the spirit of things” by other paths. Goethe's nature was that of the artist; hence for him the revelation of this spirit had to come through art. It can be shown that the scientific knowledge which enabled him to proclaim the scientific views of the nineteenth century in advance, was born from his artistic qualities. One personality will arrive at a similar perspective of knowledge and truth through religion, another through the development of philosophic understanding. (c.f. my book Goethe's World Conception.)

[ 10 ] We must seek in Goethe's Faust for the picture of an inner soul development,—a picture such as an inherently artistic personality is bound to produce. Goethe was by reason of his spiritual gifts able to look into the very depths of Nature in all her reality. We can see how in the boy Goethe there develops, out of his faith, a pro-found reverence for Nature. He describes this in Poetry and Truth: The God who stands in immediate connection with Nature and recognises and loves it as His handiwork, seemed to him the real God, who might enter into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would make him His care, as well as the motion of the stars, times and seasons, plants and animals.” The boy selects the best minerals and stones from his father's collection and arranges them on a music stand. This is the altar upon which he likes to offer his sacrifice to the God of Nature. He lays tapers on the stones and by means of a burning glass lights the tapers with the intercepted rays of the rising morning sun. In this way he kindles a sacred fire through the essence of the Divine Nature forces. We may perceive here the beginning of an inner soul development that—speaking in the terms of Indian Theosophy—seeks for the Light at the centre of the Sun, and for Truth at the centre of the Light. Anyone who follows Goethe's life can trace this Path along which, in inter-mediate stages, he seeks those deeper levels of consciousness where the eternal Necessity, God, was revealed to him. He tells us in Poetry and Truth how he explored every possible region of science, including experimental Alchemy.

Wherefore from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit power and spirit speech.
(Faust's Monologue at the beginning of Part I.)

Later on Goethe sought for the expression of eternal law in the creations of Nature and in his Archetypal Plant” and Archetypal Animal” he discovered what the spirit of Nature proclaims to the human spirit when the soul has attained to a mode of thought and conception that is in conformity with the Idea.” Between these two turning points of Goethe's soul life lies the period of the composition of that part of the Drama in which, after Faust's despair of all external Science, he invokes the Earth Spirit. The eternal truth-bearing Light speaks in the words of this Earth Spirit.

In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at Time's humming loom 'tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity weaves!

[ 11 ] This is an expression of the all-embracing conception of Nature which we also find in the Prose Hymn Nature, written by Goethe somewhere about the 30th year of his age. Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us, unmasked and unwarned, into the gyrations of her dance, and whirls us away until we fall, exhausted, from her arms. She creates new forms eternally. What is, had no previous existence; what was, comes not again; all is new and yet is ever the old. She builds and destroys eternally, and her laboratory is inaccessible ... She lives in the purity of children, and the Mother, where is she? Nature is the only artist. Each of her creations is an individual Being, each of her revelations a separate concept; yet all makes up a unity. ... She transforms herself eternally and has never a moment of inactivity. ... Her step is measured, her exceptions few, her laws are unchangeable. ... All men are within her, she is within all men. ... Life is her fairest device, and Death is her artifice for acquiring greater life. ... Man obeys her laws even when he opposes them. ... She is the All. She rewards and punishes, delights and distresses herself ... She knows not past and future. The present is her Eternity. ... She has placed me within life and she will lead me out of it. I trust myself to her. ... It was not I who spoke of her. It was she who spoke it all, whether it were true or false. Her's is the blame for all things, her's the credit.

[ 12 ] In old age, looking back at this stage of his soul development, Goethe himself said that it represented an inferior conception of life and that he had acquired one more lofty. But this stage revealed to him that eternal, universal law which streams alike through Nature and the human soul. It inspired the grave conception that an eternal, iron Necessity binds all beings into unity, and taught him to consider man in his indissoluble connection with this Necessity. This attitude of mind is expressed in his Ode, The Divine, written in the year 1782.

Let man be noble, resourceful and good! For this alone distinguishes him from all other beings known to us. According to eternal, mighty Laws of iron must we complete the circle of our existence.

[ 13 ] The same conception is expressed in Faust's Monologue written about the year 1787:

Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to enjoy it. Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast I gaze,
as in the bosom of a friend.
The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.
And when the storm in forests roars and grinds,
The giant firs, in falling, neighbour boughs
And neighbour trunks with crushing weight bear down,
And falling, fill the hills with hollow thunders,—
Then to the cave secure thou leadest me,
Then show'st me mine own self, and in my breast
The deep, mysterious miracles unfold.

[ 14 ] The perspective of his soul was revealed to Goethe by the mysteries of his own breast. It is a perspective which can no longer be revealed in the external world alone, but only when a man descends into his own soul in such a way that in ever deeper regions of consciousness, sublimer secrets may come to light. The world of the senses and intellect then takes on a new significance. It becomes a symbol” of the Eternal. Man perceives that he has a more intimate connection between the external world and his own soul. He learns to know that in his inner being there is a voice destined also to solve all riddles of the outer world.

Here the inadequate
Becomes attainment²

The highest facts of life, the division into male and female becomes the key to the riddle of humanity. The process of cognition becomes that of life, of fecundation. The soul, in its depths, becomes woman, that element which, impregnated by the world Spirit, gives birth to the highest life-substance. Woman becomes a symbol” of these soul depths. We ascend to the mysteries of existence by allowing ourselves to be drawn upwards and on” by the eternal feminine,” the woman soul. Higher existence begins when we experience the action of wisdom as a process of spiritual fecundation. [ 15 ] The deeper mystics of all ages have realised this. They allowed the highest knowledge to grow out of the action of spiritual fecundation as in the case of the Egyptian Horus, the soul-man, born of Isis, who was overshadowed by the spiritual eye of Osiris,—He who was awakened from the dead.” The second part of Goethe's Faust is written from such a point of view.

[ 16 ] Faust's love for Gretchen in the first part, is of the senses. Faust's love for Helena, in the second part, is not merely a sense process, but a symbol” of the most profoundly mystical soul experience. In Helena, Faust seeks for the eternal feminine,” the woman soul; he seeks the depths of his own soul. The fact that Goethe should allow the archetypal figure of Greek feminine beauty to represent the woman in man” is connected with the essential nature of his personality. The realisation of Divine Necessity dawned in him as he contemplated the beauty of the Greek masterpieces.

[ 17 ] Faust became a mystic as the result of his union with Helena, and he speaks as a mystic at the beginning of the fourth Act of Part II. He sees the female image, the depths of his own soul, and speaks the words:

... Towering broad and formlessly,
It rests along the East like distant icy hills,
And shapes the grand significance of fleeting days.
And still there clings a light and delicate band of mist
Around my breast and brow, caressing, cheering me.
Now light, delayingly, it soars and higher soars
And folds together.—Cheats me an ecstatic form,
As early youthful, long foregone and highest bliss?
The first glad treasures of my deepest heart break forth;
Aurora's love, so light of pinion, is its type,
The swiftly-felt, the first, scarce-comprehended glance,
Out-shining every treasure, when retained and held.
Like Spiritual Beauty mounts the gracious Form,
Dissolving not, but lifts itself through ether far,
And from my inner being bears the best away.

[ 18 ] In this description of the ecstacy experienced by one who has descended into the depths of his own soul and has there felt the best within him drawn away by the eternal feminine,” it is as though we were listening to the words of the Greek Philosopher: When, free from the body, thou ascendest to the free Aether, thy soul becomes an immortal god, who knows not death.

[ 19 ] For at this stage Death becomes a symbol.” Man dies from the lower life in order to live again in a higher existence. Higher spiritual life is a new stage of the Becoming”; time becomes a symbol” of the Eternal that now lives in man. The union with the eternal feminine” allows the child in man to come into being,—the child, imperishable, immortal, because it is of the Eternal. The higher life is the surrender, the death of the lower, the birth of a higher existence. In his West-East Diva” Goethe expresses this in the words: And as long as thou art without this ‘dying and becoming’ thou art but an uneasy guest on the dark Earth.” [ 20 ] We find the same thought in his prose aphorisms: Man must give up his existence in order to exist.” Goethe is in agreement with the Mystic Herakleitos when he speaks of the Dionysian cult of the Greeks. It would have been an empty, even a dishonourable cult in his eyes if it had made sacrifices merely to the god of nature and of sense pleasure. But that was not the case. The worship was not alone directed to Dionysos, the god of the immediate sense prosperity of Life, but to Hades, the god of death as well. The Greeks prepared tumultuous fire” both for Hades and Dionysos, for in the Greek Mysteries life was honoured in company with death; this is the higher existence that passes through material death of which the Mystics speak when they say that Death is after all the root of all life.” The second part of Faust represents an awakening, the birth of the higher man” from the depths of the soul. From this point of view we can understand the meaning of Goethe's words: If it should chance that the general audience find pleasure in the representation, that is well; the higher significance will not escape the initiate.

[ 21 ] Those who have developed true mystical knowledge find it in high degree in Goethe's Faust. After the scene with the Earth Spirit in Part I., when Faust has conversed with Wagner and is alone, despairing of the insignificance of the Earth Spirit, he speaks the words:

I, God's own image, from this toil of clay
Already freed, with eager joy who hailed
The mirror of eternal Truth unveil'd,
Mid light effulgent and celestial clay:—
I, more than cherub, whose unfettered soul
With penetrative glance aspir'd to flow
Through Nature's veins, and, still creating, know
The life of Gods,—how am I punished now!³

[ 22 ] What is the Mirror of Eternal Truth”? We can read of it in the following words of Jacob Boehme, the Mystic: All that, whereof this world is an earthly mirror, and an earthly parable, is present in the Divine Kingdom in great perfection and in Spiritual Being. Not only the spirit conceived as a will or thought, but Beings, corporate Beings, full of strength and substance, though to the outer world impalpable. For from the self-same spiritual Being in whom is the pure element—and from the Being of Darkness in the Mystery of Wrath—from the origin of the eternal Being of manifestation whence all the qualities come forth, this visible world was born and created, a spoken sound proceeding from the Being of all Beings.

For the sake of those who love truisms let it be observed that it is not in any sense correct to state that Goethe had precisely this passage of Jacob Boehme in his mind when he wrote the words quoted above. What he had in his mind was the mystical knowledge which finds expression in Boehme's sentences. Goethe lived in this mystical knowledge and it grew riper and riper within him. He created from the kind of knowledge possessed by the mystics. And from this source he derived the capacity for seeing Life,—things transitory” as symbols only, as a reflection. A period of inexhaustible inner development lies between the time (Part I.) when Goethe wrote his words of despair at being so remote from the mirror of eternal truth,” and the time when he wrote the Chorus Mysticus” whose words express the fact that things transitory” are to be seen only as symbols” of the Eternal.

[ 23 ] The theme of the mystical dying and becoming” runs through the Introductory Scene of Part II.:

A pleasing landscape. Faust reclining upon flowery turf, restless, seeking sleep.” The elves, under Ariel, bring about Faust's Awakening.

Who round this head in airy circles hover,
Yourselves in guise of noble Elves discover!
The fierce convulsions of his heart compose;
Remove the burning barbs of his remorses,
And cleanse his being from the suffered woes!
Four pauses makes the Night upon her courses,
And now, delay not, let them kindly close!
First on the coolest pillow let him slumber,
Then sprinkle him with Lethe's drowsy spray!
His limbs no more shall cramps and chills encumber,
When sleep has made him strong to meet the day.
Perform, ye Elves, your fairest rite:
Restore him to the holy Light!

[ 24 ] And at sunrise Faust is restored to the holy Light:

Life's pulses now with fresher force awaken
To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me;
This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken,
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me,
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting,
A vigorous resolution to restore me,
To seek that highest life for which I'm panting.

[ 25 ] For what was Faust striving in his study (Part I.), and what had happened at the stage he has reached at the beginning of Part II.? His striving is clothed in the words of the Wise man:

The spirit world no closures fasten;
Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead:
Disciple, up! untiring, hasten
To bathe thy breast in morning-red!

[ 26 ] As yet Faust cannot bathe his earthly breast” in the morning red.” When he has invoked the Earth Spirit he is forced to acknowledge the insignificance of this being. This he is able to do at the beginning of Part II. Ariel proclaims how it comes to be:

Hearken! Hark!—the Hours careering!
Sounding loud to spirit-hearing,
See the new-born day appearing!

[ 27 ] The new-born day” of knowledge and of life born out of the morning red” inspired Jacob Boehme's earliest work entitled Aurora or The Rise of Dawn, which was imbued with mystical knowledge. The passage in Act IV., Part II., of Faust already quoted shows how deeply Goethe lived in such conceptions. The first glad treasures” of his deepest heart” are revealed to him by Aurora's Love.” When Faust has really bathed his earthly breast in the morning red” he is ready to lead a higher life within the course of his earthly existence. He appears in the company of Mephistopheles at the imperial palace during a feast of pleasure and empty amusements and must himself help to increase them. He appears in the Mask of Hades, the God of Wealth, in a masquerade. He is desired to add to the amusements by charming Paris and Helena from the Underworld. This shows us that Faust had attained to that stage in his soul life where he under-stood the dying and becoming.” He participates joyfully in the Feast, but while it is going on he sets out on the path to the Mothers,” where alone he can find the figures of Paris and Helena which the emperor wishes to see. The eternal archetypes of all existence are preserved in the realm of the Mothers. It is a realm which man can only enter when he has given up his existence in order to exist.” There, too, Faust is able to find the part of Helena that has outlived the ages. But Mephistopheles, who has up to now been his guide, is not able to lead him into this realm. This is characteristic of his nature. He says emphatically to Faust:

Thou deem'st the thing is quickly fixed:
Here before steeper ways we're standing;
With strangest spheres would'st thou be mixed.

[ 28 ] Mephistopheles is a stranger to the realm of the Eternal. This may well appear inexplicable when we consider that Mephistopheles belongs to the kingdom of Evil, itself a kingdom of Eternity. But the difficulty is solved when we take Goethe's individuality into account. He had not experienced eternal Necessity” within the realm of Christianity where, to him, Hell and the Devil belong. This idea of the Eternal arose for Goethe in a region alien to the conceptions of Christendom. It is to be admitted of course that the ultimate origin of a figure like Mephistopheles is to be found in the conceptions of Heathen religions too. (Cp. Karl Kiesewetter's Faust in history and tradition.”) So far as Goethe was concerned, however, this figure belonged to the Northern world of Christendom, and the source of his creation was there. He could not in personal experience find his kingdom of the Eternal within the scope of this world of conceptions. To understand this, we need only be reminded of what Schiller said of Goethe in his deeply intuitive letter of 23rd August, 1794: If you had been born a Greek or even an Italian with a special kind of Nature and an idealistic Art around you from the cradle, your path would have been infinitely limited and perhaps made quite superficial. Even in the earliest conception of things you would have absorbed the Form of Necessity and you would have developed a mighty style together with your earliest experience. But being born a German with your Greek spirit thrown into the milieu of this Northern world, you had no choice but to become either an Artist of the North, or to re-establish in your Imagination by the help of the power of thought, what Reality withheld from you, and so, as it were, from within outwards, and on a rationalistic path, give birth to a Greek world.

[ 29 ] It is not our task here to embark upon a consideration of the different conceptions formed by man as to the meaning of the Mephistopheles figure. These conceptions express the endeavour to change figures of Art into barren allegories or symbols, and I have always opposed this. So far as an esoteric interpretation is concerned, Mephistopheles must be accepted, in the sense, naturally, of poetical reality, as an actual being. For an esoteric interpretation does not look for the spiritual value which certain figures in the first instance receive from the poet, but the spiritual value they already have in life. The poet can neither deprive them of this nor can he impart it; he takes it from life, as he would anything visible to the eye. It is, however, part of the nature of Mephistopheles that he lives in the material sense world. Hell, too, is nothing but incarnate materiality, The Eternal in the womb of the Mothers can only be an entirely alien realm to anyone who lives in materiality as intensely as Mephistopheles. Man must penetrate through materiality in order again to enter into the Eternal, the Divine, whence he has sprung. If he finds the way, if he gives up his existence in order to exist,” then he is a Faust being; if he cannot abandon materiality he becomes a character like Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles is only able to give to Faust the key” to the realm of the Mothers. A mystery is connected with this key.” Man must have experienced it before he can fully penetrate it. It will be most easy of attainment to those who are scientists in the true sense.

[ 30 ] It is possible for a man to accumulate much scientific learning and yet for the spirit of things,” the realm of the Mothers, to remain closed to him. Yet in scientific knowledge we have, fundamentally, the key to the spiritual world in our hands. It may become either academic erudition or wisdom. If a man of wisdom makes himself master of that dry erudition” which a man who is merely scientific has accumulated, he is led into a region which to the other is entirely foreign. Faust is able to penetrate to the Mothers with the key given him by Mephistopheles. The natures of Faust and Mephistopheles are reflected in the way in which they speak of the realm of the Mothers.

...Naught shalt thou see in endless Void afar,—
Not hear thy footstep fall, nor meet
A stable spot to rest thy feet.

... I to the Void am sent,
That art and power therein I may augment;
To use me like the cat is thy desire,
To scratch for thee the chestnuts from the fire.
Come on then! We'll explore, whate'er befall;
In this, thy Nothing, may I find my All!

[ 31 ] Goethe told Eckermann how he came to introduce the “Mothers ” scene. “I can only tell you,” he says, “that in Plutarch I found that in Greek Antiquity the Mothers were spoken of as Divinities.” This necessarily made a profound impression upon Goethe, who as the result of his mystical knowledge, realised the significance of the “eternal feminine.

[ 32 ] From the realm of the Mothers, Faust conjures up the figures of Helena and of Paris. When he sees them before him in the imperial palace he is seized by an irresistible desire for Helena. He wants to take possession of her. He sinks unconscious to the ground and is carried off by Mephistopheles. Here we come to a stage of great significance in Faust's evolution. He is ready and ripe to press forward into the spiritual world. He can rise in spirit to the eternal archetypes. He has reached the point where the spiritual world in an infinite perspective becomes visible to man.

[ 33 ] At this point it is possible for a man either to resign himself to the realisation that this perspective cannot be gauged in one bound, but must rather be traversed by numberless life stages; or he may determine to make himself master of the final aim of Divinity at one stroke. The latter was Faust's desire. He undergoes a new test. He must experience the truth that man is bound to matter and that only when he has passed through all stages of materiality is he made pure for attainment of the final aim.

[ 34 ] Only a purely spiritual being, born in a spiritual fashion, can unite himself directly with the spiritual world. The human tspirit is not a being of this kind and it must pass through the whole range of material existence. Without this life-journey the human spirit would be a soulless, lifeless entity. The very existence of the human spirit implies that the journey through materiality has been begun at some point. For man is what he is only because he has passed through a series of previous incarnations. Goethe had also to express this conception in Faust. On 16th December, 1829, he speaks of Homunculus to Eckermann: “A spiritual being like Homunculus, not yet darkened and circumscribed by a fully human evolution, is to be counted a Daemon.

[ 35 ] Homunculus, therefore, is a man but without the element of materiality that is essential to man. He is brought into existence by magical methods in the laboratory. On the date above mentioned Goethe speaks further of him to Eckermann: “Homunculus, as a being to whom actuality is absolutely clear and transparent, beholds the inner being of the sleeping Faust. But because everything is transparent to his spirit, the spirit has no point for him. He does not reason; he wants to act.” In so far as man is a knower, the impulse to will and action is awakened through knowledge. The essential thing is not the knowledge or the spirit as such, but the fact that this spirit must be led to pass through the material, through action. The more knowledge a being possesses, the greater will be the impulse to action. And a being who has been produced by purely spiritual means must be filled with the thirst for action. Homunculus is in this position. His powerful urge towards reality leads Faust with Mephistopheles to Greece, into the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” Homunculus is bound to become corporeal in the realm where Goethe found the highest reality. It then becomes possible for Faust to find the real Helena, not merely her archetype. Homunculus leads him into Greek reality. To understand fully the nature of Homunculus we need only follow his journeys through the Classical Walpurgis Night. He wants to learn from two Greek Philosophers how he can come into being, that is, to action. He says to Mephistopheles:

From place to place I flit and hover.
And in the best sense. I would fain exist.
And most impatient am. my glass to shatter;
But what till now I've witnessed, is't
Then strange if I mistrust the matter?
Yet I'll be confidential. if thou list:
I follow two Philosophers this way.
'Twas ‘Nature! Nature!’—all heard them say;
I'll cling to them and see what they are seeing,
For they must understand this earthly being,
And I shall doubtless learn, in season.
Where to betake me with the soundest reason.

[ 36 ] His wish is to gain knowledge of the natural conditions of the genesis of corporeal existence. Thales leads him to Proteus. the Lord of Change, of the “eternal Becoming.” Thales says of Homunculus:

He asks thy counsel, he desires to be.
He is, as I myself have heard him say.
(The thing's a marvell!) only born half-way.
He has no lack of qualities ideal,
But far too much of palpable and real.
Till now the glass alone has given him weight,
And he would fain be soon incorporeate.

[ 37 ] And Proteus gives utterance to the Law of Becoming:

No need to ponder here his origin;
On the broad ocean's breast must thou begin!
One starts there first within a narrow pale.
And finds, destroying, lower forms, enjoyment:
Little by little, then, one climbs the scale,
And fits himself for loftier employment.

[ 38 ] Thales gives the counsel:

Yield to the wish so wisely stated,
And at the source be thou created!
Be ready for the rapid plan!
There, by eternal canons wending,
Through thousand, myriad forms ascending,
Thou shalt attain, in time, to Man.

[ 39 ] Goethe's whole conception of the relationship of all beings, of their metamorphic evolution from the imperfect to the perfect is here expressed in a picture. At first the spirit can only exist germinally in the world. The spirit must pour itself out, must dip down into matter, and into the elements, before it can take on its sublimer form. Homunculus is shattered by Galatea's shell chariot and is dissolved• into the elements. This is described by the Sirens:

What fiery marvel the billows enlightens,
As one on the other is broken and. brightens?
It flashes and wavers, and hitherward plays!
On the path of the Night are the bodies ablaze,
And all things around are with flames overrun:
The Eros be ruler, who all things began!

[ 40 ] Homunculus as a spirit no longer exists. He is blended in the Elements and can arise from out of them. Eros, desire, will, action, must go forward to the spirit. The spirit must pass through matter, through the Fall into Sin. In Goethe's words, the spiritual essence must be.darkened and circumscribed, for this is necessary to a full human development. The second Act of Part II. presents the mystery of human development. Proteus, the Lord of corporeal metamorphosis, discloses this Mystery to Homunculus:

In spirit seek the watery distance!
Boundless shall there be thine existence,
And where to move, thy will be free.
But struggle not to higher orders!
Once Man, within the human borders,
Then all is at an end for thee.

[ 41 ] This is all that the Lord of corporeal metamorphosis can know about human development. So far as his knowledge goes evolution comes to an end when man, as such, has come into existence. What comes after that is not his province. He is only at home in the corporeal; and as a result of man's development the spiritual element separates itself from the merely corporeal. The further development of man proceeds in the spiritual world. The highest point to which the process is brought by the Eros of Nature is the separation into two sexes, male and female. Here spiritual development sets in; Eros is spiritualised. Faust enters into union with Helena, the archetype of Beauty. Goethe was well aware of all that he owed to his intimate connection with Greek beauty. The mystery of spiritualisation was for him of the nature of Art. Euphorion arises out of Faust's union with Helena. Goethe himself tells us what Euphorion is. (Eckermann quotes Goethe's words of 20th December, 1829): “Euphorion is not a human but an allegorical being. Euphorion personifies poetry that is bound neither to place nor person.” Poetry is born from the marriage experienced by Faust in the depths of his soul. This colouring of the spiritual Mystery must be traced back to Goethe's personal experience and nature. He saw in Art, in Poetry, “a manifestation of secret Laws of Nature,” which without them would never be revealed. (Compare his Prose Aphorisms.) He attained the higher stages of soul life as an artist. It was only natural that he should ascribe to poetry not only quite general qualities but those of the poetical creations of his time. Byronic qualities have passed over to Euphorion. On 5th July, 1827, Goethe said to Eckermann: “I could never choose anyone else but Byron as the representative of the most modern school of poetry, for he has unquestionably the greatest talent of the century. Byron is neither ancient nor modern, but like the present day itself. I had to have one like him. Besides this, he was typical, on account of his unsatisfied nature and that warlike temperament which led him to Missolonghi. It is neither opportune nor advisable to write a treatise on Byron, but in the future I shall not fail to pay him incidental tribute and to point to him in certain matters of detail.

The union of Faust with Helena cannot be permanent. The descent into the depths of the soul, as Goethe also knew, is only possible in “Festival moments” of life. Man descends to those regions where the highest spirituality comes to birth. But with the metamorphosis which he has there experienced he returns again to the life of action. Faust passes through a process of spiritualisation, but as a spiritualised being he has to work on in everyday life. A man who has passed through such “Festival moments” must realise how the deeper soul element in him vanishes again in everyday actuality. Goethe expressed this in a picture. Euphorion disappears again into the realm of darkness. Man cannot bring the spiritual to continuous earthly life, but the spiritual is now inwardly united with his soul. This spiritual element, his child, draws his soul into the realm of the Eternal. He has united himself with the Eternal. As a result of the loftiest spiritual activity man enters into the Eternal in his highest being, in the depths of his soul. The union into which his soul has entered enables him to ascend to the All. The words of Euphorion sound forth as this eternal call in the heart of ever-striving man:

Leave me here, in the gloomy Void,
Mother, not thus alone!

A man who has experienced the Eternal in the Temporal perpetually hears this call from the spiritual in him. His creations draw his soul to the Eternal. So will Faust live on. He will lead a dual life. He will create in life, but his spiritual child binds him on his earthly path to the higher world of the spirit. This will be the life of a mystic, but in the nature of things not a life where the days are passed in idle observation, in inner dream, but a life where deeds bear the impress of that nobility attained by man as the result of spiritual deepening.

[ 42 ] Faust's outer life, too, will now be that of a man who has surrendered his existence in order to exist. He will work absolutely selflessly in the service of humanity. But still another test awaits him. At the stage to which he has attained he cannot bring his activity in material existence into full harmony with the real needs of the spirit. He has taken land from the sea and has built a stately abode upon it. But an old hut still remains standing and in it live an aged couple. This disturbs the work of new creation. The aged couple do not want to exchange their dwelling for any nobler estate. Faust must see how Mephistopheles carries out his wish, turning it to evil. He sets the homestead on fire and the aged couple die of fright. Faust must experience once again that “perfect human evolution darkens and circumscribes,” and that it must lead to guilt. It was his material sense life that laid this blow, this test upon him. As he hears the bell sound from the aged couple's Chapel he breaks forth into the words:

Accurséd chime! As in derision
It wounds me, like a spiteful shot:
My realm is boundless to my vision,
Yet at my back this vexing blot!
The bell proclaims; with envious bluster,
My grand estate lacks full design:
The brown old hut, the linden-cluster,
The crumbling chapel are not mine.
If there I wished for recreation,
Another's shade would give no cheer:
A thorn it is, a sharp vexation,—
Would I were far away from here!

Faust's senses engender in him a fateful desire. There still remains in him some element of that existence which he must “surrender in order to exist.” The homestead is not his. In the “midnight hour” four grey women appear. Want, Blame, Care, Need. These are they who darken and circumscribe man's existence. He passes through life under their escort, and at first he cannot exist without their guidance. Life alone can bring emancipation from them. Faust has reached the point where three of these figures have no power over him. Care is the only one from whom this power has not been taken away. Care says:

Ye sisters, ye neither can enter, nor dare:
But the keyhole is free to the entrance of Care.

And Care exhorts him in a voice that lies deep in the heart of every man. No man can eradicate the last doubt as to whether he can with his life's reckoning stand steadfast in face of the Eternal. At this moment Faust has such an experience. Has he really only pure powers around him? Has he freed his “inner man” from all that is impure? He has taken Magic to his aid along his path, and acknowledges this in the words:

Not yet have I my liberty made good:
If I could banish Magic's fell creations,
And totally unlearn the incantations,
Stood I, O Nature! Man alone in thee,
Then were it worth one's while a man to be!

Faust too is unable to cast the last doubt away from him. Care may say of him also:

Though no ear should choose to hear me,
Yet the shrinking heart must fear me:
Though transformed to mortal eyes,
Grimmest power I exercise.

In the face of Care, Faust would first ask himself whether those remains of doubt as to his life's reckoning have vanished:

The sphere of Earth is known enough to me,
The view beyond is barred immutably:
A fool, who there his blinking eyes directeth,
And o'er his cloud of peers a place expecteth!
Firm let him stand, and look around him well!
This world means something to the Capable,
Why needs he through Eternity to wend?

In these very sentences Faust shows that he is about to fight his way to full freedom. Care would urge him on to the Eternal after her own fashion. She shows him how men on the earth only unite the Temporal to the Temporal. And even if they do this, believing that this world means something to the ‘Capable,’ she, nevertheless, remains with them to the last. And what she has been able to do in the case of others, Care thinks she can also do in the case of Faust. She believes in her power to enhance in him those doubts that beset a man when he asks himself whether all his deeds have indeed any significance or meaning. Care speaks of her power over men:

Shall he go, or come?—how guide him?
Prompt decision is denied him;
Midway on the trodden highway
Halting he attempts a by-way;
Such incessant rolling, spinning,
Painful quitting, hard beginning,—
Now constraint, now liberation,
Semi-sleep, poor recreation,
Firmly in his place ensnare him
And, at last, for Hell prepare him!

Faust's soul has progressed too far for him to fall into the power of Care to this extent. He is able to cry in rejoinder:

And yet, O Care, thy power, thy creeping shape,
Think not that I shall recognize it!

Care is only able to have power over his bodily nature. As she vanishes she breathes on him and he becomes blind. His bodily nature dies in order that he may attain a higher stage:

The Night seems deeper now to press around me,
But in my inmost spirit all is light.

After this it is only the soul element in Faust which comes into consideration. Mephistopheles who lives in the material world has no power here. Since the Helena Scene the better and deeper soul of Faust has lived in the Eternal. This Eternal takes full possession of him after his death. Angels incorporeate Faust's immortal essence into this Eternal:

This noble Spirit now is free,
And saved from evil scheming:
Who'er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.
And if with him celestial love
Hath taken part,—to meet him
Come down the angels from above;
With cordial hail they greet him.

The “Celestial Love” is in strong contrast to “Eros,” to whom Proteus refers when he says at the end of the second Act, Part II.:

All things around are with flames overrun:
Then Eros be ruler who all things began!

This Eros is the Love “from below” that leads Homunculus through the elements and through bodily metamorphosis in order that he may finally appear as man. Then begins the “Love from above” which develops the soul further.

[ 43 ] The soul of Faust is set upon the path to the Eternal, the Infinite. An unending perspective is open before it. We can dimly sense what this perspective is. To make it poetically objective is very difficult. Goethe realised this and he says to Eckermann: “You will admit that the conclusion, where the soul that has found salvation passes heavenward, was very difficult to write and that in reference to such highly supersensible and hardly conceivable matters I could have very easily fallen into vagueness if I had not, by the use of sharply defined Christian-Theological figures and concepts, given a certain form and stability to my poetical intentions.” The inexhaustible content of the soul must be indicated, and the deepest inner being expressed in symbol. Holy Anchorites “dispersed over the hill,” “stationed among the clefts” represent the highest states of the evolution of the soul. Man is led upwards into the regions of consciousness, of the soul,—wherein the world becomes to an ever increasing extent the “symbol” of the Eternal.

[ 44 ] This consciousness, the deepest region of the soul, are mystically seen in the figure of the “eternal feminine,” Mary the Virgin. Dr. Marianus in rapture prays to her:

Highest Mistress of the World!
Let me in the azure
Tent of Heaven, in light unfurled
Here thy Mystery measure!

[ 45 ] With the monumental words of the Chorus Mysticus, Faust draws to its conclusion. They are words of Wisdom eternal. They give utterance to the Mystery that “All things transitory are only a symbol.” This is what lies before man in the farthest distance; to this leads the path which man follows when he has grasped the meaning of this “dying and becoming:

Here the Inadequate
Becomes attainment.

This cannot be described because it can only be discovered in experience; this it is that the Initiates of the “Mysteries” experienced when they were led to the path of the Eternal; it is unutterable because it lies in such deep clefts of the soul that it cannot be clothed in words coined for the temporal world:

The indescribable,
Here it is done.

And to all this man is drawn by the power of his own soul, by the powers that are dimly sensed when he passes through the inner portals of the soul, when he seeks for that divine voice within calling him to the union of the “eternal masculine,”—the universe, with the “eternal feminine,”—consciousness:

The Eternal Feminine draws us
Upwards and on.

• 2. The author of this essay is in agreement with the opinion of Ad. Rudolf expressed in his Archives of Modern Languages LXX., 1883, that the writing of the word Ereignis” (event) is only due to an auditory mistake of Goethe's stenographer, and that the correct word is Erreichnis,” attainment.
• 3. Miss Swanwick's translation.

Ladies and Gentlemen,¹

A few weeks ago, in my lecture on Soul Health and Spiritual Investigation,² I put before you some of the answers that have been given to the question, "Why do people misunderstand Spiritual Investigation?" To-day, I should like to examine other points of view, which will give a more general answer to the question under discussion. There can, of course, be no question of my examining individual attacks which may have been made from one quarter or another on what we call Spiritual Investigation. Such a procedure would be quite out of key with the tone that you, ladies and gentlemen, have learnt to expect from these lectures. If, on occasions,³ frustrated ambition or some such motive has caused opposition to be raised in those very circles which formerly reckoned themselves perfectly good followers of Spiritual Research, this only serves to show how unimportant are these attacks in comparison to the great tasks which Spiritual Investigation has to fulfil. It will, therefore, be necessary to deal with individual points only occasionally, and on external grounds. That, moreover, is not my aim. My aim is this. To show how contemporary education and all that the mind may have assimilated of the habits of thought, the philosophic feeling, and the intellectual systems that characterise our present times—how all this may make it hard for the modern mind to bring the right spirit to the understanding of Spiritual Investigation. What, then, I wish to explain fundamentally are not the illegitimate attacks that have been made on Spiritual Investigation, but those that are, up to a point—one had almost said completely—legitimate; at any rate understandable to the modern Soul.

For Spiritual Science has to deal not only with the attacks that are made upon other spiritual tendencies of our time; it has, in the special sense mentioned just now, every intellectual movement of the time against it. If the mechanistic, materialistic—or to use the more scholarly expression now in vogue—the monistic view of the universe is put forward, it will be found to have opponents who base themselves upon a certain spiritual idealism. The reasons which such spiritually-minded idealists adduce in defence of their views against materialism are, as a rule, extremely weighty and important. They are objections which can in every respect be shared by the Spiritual Investigator, reasons which he can grasp and understand in the same way as anyone who merely takes his stand upon a certain spiritual idealism. But the Spiritual Investigation speaks of the spiritual world, not merely as do, for example, idealists of the stamp of Ulrici, Wirth, Immanuel Hermann Fichte,⁴ though the last, as we saw yesterday,⁵ went more deeply into things than the others. The Spiritual Investigator does not merely speak in abstract concepts which point to a spiritual world beyond the world of the senses. On the contrary, he cannot leave this spiritual world undefined, cannot grasp it in mere concepts; he must go on to a real description of it. He is not content, as are the idealists, to accept a purely intellectual indication of a spiritual world, which, though it must exist, still remains unknown. No—the spiritual world which he has to show forth must be concrete and manifested in various individual types of being which have, not a physical, but a purely spiritual existence. In a word, he has to speak of a spiritual world which shall be as varied and as full of meaning as the physical, far fuller indeed, if it were but truly described. If, then, the Spiritual Investigator speaks of the spiritual world, not as of something which exists in general and can be proved intellectually, but quite definitely as of something to be believed in, as of something which can be perceived as the world of sense is perceived, he will find among his opponents not only the materialists, but also those who speak of the spiritual world only in abstract concepts from the standpoint of a certain spiritual and intellectual idealism. Finally, he will have as opponents those who believe that religious feeling of any kind will be threatened by Spiritual Investigation, that religion—their religion—will be endangered by the existence of a science of the spiritual world. And one could name many other movements which the Spiritual Investigator would find working against him—all fundamentally in the same way as has been described, and to-day more powerfully than ever. Weighty objections, objections which from a certain point of view and to a certain extent are justified. It is of these, therefore, that I wish to speak.

And again and again it is the scientific view of the world which presents, especially in our day, the most considerable opposition to the aspiration of Spiritual Science, the view, namely, which seeks to erect a picture in the world on the foundations of those recent advances in science which may rightly be regarded as the greatest triumph of humanity. And again and again we must repeat that it is no easy task to realise that the true Spiritual Investigator does not really dispute anything in the world picture that can be legitimately deduced from the data of modern science, that on the contrary he does in the fullest sense of the word take his stand upon the ground of modern science, in so far as the latter supplies an adequate foundation for a cosmic or world-conception. Let us examine this recent scientific tendency from a particular contemporary point of view. For we can but pick out individual points of view for examination. Here, then, we stand before those men who quite legitimately raise difficulties against Spiritual Science by saying, "Does not modern science show us through the wonderful structure of the human nervous system and the human brain how dependent is that which man experiences mentally upon this structure and upon the action of this nervous system? "And one might easily expect the Spiritual Investigator to deny what the ordinary scientist is bound to maintain from his point of view. But this is just where so much mischief is done by the dilettante Spiritual Investigator, and by those who want to be Spiritual Investigators without being worthy to lay claim to so much as the name of dilettante. For ever and again true Spiritual Science is confused with charlatanism and dilettantism. It is no easy task to believe that just on this very subject of the meaning of the physical structure of the brain and nervous system, the Spiritual Investigator actually stands more firmly on scientific ground than the scientist himself.

Let us take an example. I purposely choose one that is not very recent, although with the rapid advance of modern science things alter very quickly and the older discoveries are easily superseded by new ones. I purposely did not choose a very recent example, though it would have been easy enough to do so. I have selected the famous brain specialist and psychiatrist, Meynert,⁶ because I wish to take as my starting-point what, as a result of his researches on the brain, he had to say about the relation between the brain and the life of the soul. Meynert had a profound knowledge of the brain and of the nervous system, both in their normal and in their pathological conditions. His writings, which towards the end of the nineteenth century, were standard works on the subject, will inspire anyone who reads them with the feeling that it is supremely important to consider not only the pronouncements of purely positive research on the question under discussion, but also those of a man of this quality. The following point, however, must be borne in mind. When people who, for one reason or another, have lightly taken upon themselves a would-be Spiritual Scientific attitude, people who have never looked through a microscope or a telescope, ignoramuses who have never done anything that could give them the remotest conception of—say—the wonderful structure of the human brain—when such people talk about the baseness of materialism, then it is easy enough to understand that the conscientious thoroughness which informs the methods of modern scientific research should prevent its votaries from accepting the objections that have been put to them by those who parade as the champions of Spiritual Science.

But when a man like Meynert, however, embarks upon the study of the brain, the first thing he finds is that the brain in its outer frame is a complicated agglomeration of cells (according to him about a milliard in number),⁷ which combine among themselves in the most intricate ways, which multiply and are distributed to the most various parts of the body, into the organs of sense where they become the nerves of the special senses, into the organs of movement, etc., etc. And to a scientist like Meynert it is revealed how connecting fibres lead from one set of nervous paths to another and he is thus led to the view that the brain takes in that which man experiences as the world of presentations, that which is broken up and bound together again in concepts and images when the external world impinges upon his senses. The brain takes all this in, works upon and transforms it, and according to the nature of the transformation, produces what we call the phenomena of the soul.

Yes, say the philosophers, but these phenomena, these visions of the soul, these mental processes are something quite different from the movements of the brain, different from anything that goes on inside the brain. The answer to them is this. That the brain should produce what we call mental processes is for a scientist like Meynert no more wonderful than that, say, a watch should, in accordance with the nature of its internal mechanism, produce signs which tell us the time of day; no more wonderful than that a magnet should, in virtue of its purely physical properties, attract a body outside itself, should, as it were, work with invisible threads. The magnetic field reveals itself as active around the physical object. Why should not the life of the soul be something produced similarly, but in an infinitely more complicated manner, by the brain? The view, in short, is one that cannot be easily dismissed, nor can its claims be rejected without very careful examination. You may laugh at the idea that the brain should, by the mere unrolling of its processes, bring into being some highly complex psychic life. Yet there are plenty of examples in nature of processes where we would not at first glance be disposed to speak of the presence of soul life. Not by taking our stand upon preconceived opinions, but by realising how justified are many of the difficulties which many people feel to be standing in the path of Spiritual Investigation—thus, and thus alone, can we bring order and harmony into the bewildered conceptions of the world.

Thus, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing to disprove the possibility of that which in the ordinary sense of the word we call soul life having been produced by a purely mechanical process, in so far as it takes place in the brain and in the nervous system. The brain and the nervous system may be ordered in so complicated a manner that through the unrolling of their processes, the life of the soul can arise in man. No one, therefore, will reject the materialistic picture of the world given by Natural Science on the ground of considerations such as these, which merely rest upon the observations of nature. Indeed, Spiritual Science is hard put to it to-day to oppose Natural Science, just because the latter has been brought to such a pitch of perfection, and has achieved so legitimate an ideal in its own sphere. For the Spiritual Investigator must be able and willing to recognise to the full where the other side is in the right. That is why, once again, we can never hope to build up a spiritual view of the world by merely stressing those things which run counter to the claims of external observation, even when the latter extends to the sphere of our own human lives. If we want to reach the life of the soul, then we must experience it in ourselves, and our soul life must not flow from outer events. Then we shall not say that the brain cannot produce the processes of the soul, but we must experience these psychic processes ourselves.

Now there is one sphere in which everyone has experience of his own soul, independently of brain processes, and that is the sphere of ethics, the sphere of the moral life. It is at once obvious that what shines before a man as a moral impulse cannot occur as the result of the unrolling of any mere brain processes. It must be clearly understood that I am speaking of the moral impulse in so far as the will and the feelings enter into it, in so far as the experience is really ethical. Thus, in the sphere where the soul becomes immediately aware of itself, everyone can assert that the soul has a life of its own, independently of the body and of anything corporeal. But not everyone is able to add to this inner realisation and growth in the moral life the idea that Goethe added to it in the essay which I mentioned yesterday⁸ on "Anschauende Urteilskraft," and in many other passages. Not everyone can say, like Goethe, from the depth of his own experience: If even in the world of sense man can rise to impulses which act independently of the corporeal, why should not this soul of his be able, in relation to other spiritual activities, to embark boldly upon the "adventure of reason."⁹ (This was the name given by Kant to anything that went beyond the moral standpoint.) This is where Goethe speaks in opposition to Kant. And it means that we must rise, not only to a spiritual soul life which springs, as do the moral impulses, from the depth of the soul, so that it cannot be ascribed to the life of the brain—no, we must also have other spiritual experiences, which will go to show that the soul perceives spiritually with spiritual organs just as we perceive physically with physical organs. But for this to happen there must be added to the ordinary everyday life, which we go through passively, a life of inner activity and doing. And this it is which escapes so many people to-day, who have become accustomed to the idea that if anything is true, then it must be dictated to them from some quarter or another. For men would rather take their stand upon any external manifestation than upon the firm ground of inner experience. What is experienced within the soul strikes them as something arbitrary, something unsure. Truth, so it seems to them, should be firmly rooted in external reality, in something to whose existence we have not ourselves contributed.

Now this way of thinking is easy enough, at any rate in the sphere of scientific research. To add all manner of fantastic material to the testimony of the outer senses and to what experiment and method can make of this testimony, is to burden Natural Science unnecessarily. But we shall see in a moment that the same does not hold of Spiritual Investigation. And even if we admit that the standpoint of Natural Science is justified, we can see how it loses in strength for lack of the habit of inner energising, how enfeebled it shows itself when that activity is demanded of it which is simply indispensable for anyone wishing to make the smallest progress in Spiritual Science. In order to make progress in spiritual knowledge it is not necessary to go in for all sorts of hazy activities, nor to train oneself so as to have what are usually called clairvoyant experiences by means of hallucination, visions, etc. This comes neither at the beginning nor, as I pointed out in the lecture on Soul Health and Spiritual Science,¹⁰ does it come at the end of our quest. What is needful, however, in order to reach a deeper understanding of Spiritual Research (mind, I do not say in order to become a legitimate follower of its teaching), what is needful for a legitimate understanding is hard thinking. And hard thinking has suffered considerably from the fact that people have grown accustomed to do no more than observe how phenomena occur as to their form. They place implicit faith in the pronouncements of nature, whether in the outer world of sense, in external observation, or in experiment. They take their stand upon what the experiment says. They do not venture—and they are right so far as this particular field is concerned—they do not venture to establish as a comprehensive general law anything that has not been dictated from outside. But this attitude hinders the inner activity of the soul. Man gets into the way of being passive, of trusting only what is shown to him from outside. And his soul completely loses the faculty for seeking truth by an inner energising, an inner activity. Now, in approaching Spiritual Science, it is above all necessary that one's thinking should be thorough, so thorough that nothing will escape it, and that certain lightly-veiled objections which could be raised should spring up in one's mind. It is necessary, too, that one should anticipate such objections and face up to them oneself, so as to reach a higher standpoint from which, on looking back on these former objections, one shall find the truth. And at this point I would like to direct your attention to an example—one of many hundreds and thousands which could be found in Meynert. I do this, ladies and gentlemen, because I regard Meynert as a first-class scientist. When it comes to refuting criticisms I do not choose protagonists I despise, but critics for whom I have the highest regard.

Thus one of the points of interest in Meynert is his account of how the conceptions of time and space arise in man. His view is as follows. Let us suppose (the example is particularly apposite at the moment) that I am listening to a public speaker. I shall get the impression that his words are spoken one after the other, i.e., that they are spoken in Time. And, Meynert asks, how do we get this impression that the words are spoken successively in Time? (Thus, ladies and gentlemen, you can all imagine that Meynert is speaking of you as you are taking in my words in such a way that they appear to you one after the other in Time.) And he answers: Time comes into being through the conception of the brain; it is as the brain receives it that one word can be thought of as coming after another. The words come to us through the sense organs and from these sense organs a further process sends them on to the brain. The brain has certain inner organs with which it works upon the sense impressions, and thus the conception of Time arises within through the activity of certain organs. And it is in this way that all conceptions are created out of the brain. That Meynert does not mean a subordinate activity by this can be seen from a certain remark which he makes in his lecture on the "Mechanics of the Brain Structure,"¹¹ in which he gives his opinion of how the external world is related to man. The ordinary man in the street, says Meynert, assumes that the external world is there exactly as he creates it in his brain. The hypothesis, he continues, which Realism dares to make is that the world which appears to the brain is there before and after any brains existed. But the world as constructed in this way by a brain capable of consciousness gives the lie to the realistic hypothesis. That is to say, the brain builds up the world as man pictures it, as it is presented to him by his senses, as he has created it outwards from within through the processes of his brain. And in this way man creates, not only images, but also Time, Space, and Infinity. Certain mechanisms exist in the brain, says Meynert, which enable him to do this. Unfortunately in lectures of this sort, which must of necessity be short, one cannot enter into every detail of these ideas, which may, therefore, in many respects seem obscure. But we shall see in a moment that it is possible, nevertheless, to pick out the main line of thought in this matter. What seems clear is that as soon as one has taken a step along the path which leads to the view that the brain is the creator of the life of the Soul as it occurs in man, then what Meynert says will seem completely justifiable. It is what that path leads to; we are bound to end there. And the only way of avoiding such a conclusion is to have thought things out so thoroughly that the very simple objections to this view will immediately occur to one. For imagine what would be the consequences if Meynert's exposition were correct. You are all sitting there. You are listening to what I say. Through the structure of your brains what I am saying becomes ordered in Time. It is not merely that your auditory nerve transforms it into an auditory image, but it arranges for you in Time the words that I am speaking. Thus you all have, as it were, a dream picture of what is being said and also, naturally, of him who is standing before you. Behind this dream picture, says Meynert, Naive Realism assumes that there is a human being like yourselves, who is saying all this. But this is not necessarily so, for you have produced this man and his words in your brain, and there may be something quite different behind him. And yet I, too, am ordering my images in Time, so that Time is present not only in you but also in the fact that I am placing one word after another. Now this perfectly simple idea will not occur to anyone who digs himself into a certain line of thought. And yet it is easy to see in the case I have just described that Time has an objective existence, that it lives outside ourselves. But the man who has embarked upon a certain definite line of thought will see neither to right nor to left of him, but will go on and on in this same direction and reach the most extraordinarily subtle and highly remarkable results. But this is not the point. All the most subtle results which this line of thought will yield admit of vigorous proof. Each proof is linked to the other. You will never detect an error if you follow the stream of Meynert's thought. The point, however, is this, that you must have thought things out sufficiently to hit upon the instances that will not fit; the thinking finds out of itself that which will force the stream out of its bed. And it is just this act of making thought mobile and active which, among those in the other camp, interferes with that perfectly legitimate concentration upon the external world which is demanded of them by Natural Science. Thus the problem of Time gives rise here not to a subjective, but to a genuinely objective difficulty. And the same will be found to be the case in all kinds of departments of thought.

For more than a hundred years philosophers have been chewing the old saying of Kant's with which he tried to rescue the conception of God from the dilemma in which he found it. If we merely think of a hundred coins,¹² they are not a coin less than a hundred real coins. A hundred imagined, possible coins are supposed to be exactly the same as a hundred real coins! Upon this idea that conceptually a hundred possible coins contain everything that a hundred coins contain, upon this idea Kant bases the whole of his refutation of the so-called Ontological proof of the existence of God. Now, if our thinking is mobile, we shall immediately hit upon the objection: a hundred imaginary coins are for one with a mobile mind exactly a hundred coins less than a hundred real ones. Exactly a hundred coins less. The point is not merely to ask for a logical proof of what we are thinking, but to pay attention to how we are thinking. The web of Kant's ideas is, of course, so closely woven that it needs the utmost acumen to point to any logical error it may contain. The point is not only to bear in mind what arises within certain accustomed streams of thought, but to be so well drilled in thought that one remains firmly planted in the objective world. We must stand, not only with our thinking within ourselves, not only inside our own world of thought, but in the objective world outside us, so as to capture on the wing the instances that will refute the idea before us. The mind must be thoroughly trained, must have thought things out thoroughly before the instances will stream towards it. And only in this way will man attain to a certain kinship with the great Thought that animates the objective world.

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that we must think of the soul in its activity. If we want to grasp what the soul is, it is not enough to draw conclusions from the premise that it is impossible to develop the life of the soul from the brain and its processes. No, we must have immediate experience of the life of the soul independently of the life of the brain; then only can we speak of the life of the soul. This inner activity is what people nowadays regard as merely the work of fantasy. But the genuine Seeker knows exactly where fantasy ends and where in the development of his soul something else begins which he does not spin from fantasy but which binds him with the spiritual world, so that he can draw from this spiritual world that which he then coins into words or concepts, ideas or images. Only in this way will the soul attain to some knowledge of itself.

I now propose to develop what may seem to be a very paradoxical view. But it is a view which must be expressed, because it can throw so much light upon the essential nature of Spiritual Investigation. You will have noticed that the Spiritual Investigator is and can be in no way inimical to the assumption that the brain can of itself produce certain images, so that what arises as soul life devoid of any inner co-operation can be regarded as merely a product of the brain. And a certain mental habit, due mainly to modern methods of education, causes men and women to behave in the following manner. They are unwilling—for the reasons given above—to seek for anything that they hold to be true by means of inner activity. This they condemn as fantasy or dreaming. And they not only apply this opinion theoretically, but also give it practical effect in that they seek to eliminate what the soul has formed within itself, in that they do their utmost to suppress this element in the attempt they are making to give a picture of the world. Once the soul life has been thus cut off the materialistic world view becomes the ideal sought for. For what happens exactly when man rejects his inner life? Why, much the same as if one were to cut off one's own bodily life from the life of the soul. Just as the watch into which the watchmaker has worked his ideas, once it is finished and left to itself, will produce the same manifestations that were at first introduced into it by the watchmaker's ideas—so the life of the soul can continue in the brain, without the soul being there at all. And the education of to-day forms this habit in people. They grew accustomed not only to deny the soul, but to eliminate it altogether, that is to say, instead of seeking after it with inner activity, they sink back, as on to a pillow, into the purely cerebral life. And the paradox I want to utter is that the materialistic view of the world is literally a brain product, it has actually been automatically produced by the self-moving brain. The external world mirrors itself in the brain, sets it in passive motion, and this gives rise to the world picture of the materialist. The curious thing is, that if and when he has eliminated the life of the soul, the materialist is, on his own ground, perfectly right. Having gone to sleep on the pillow of purely cerebral life, all he can see is this purely cerebral life which has produced the life of the soul; then, in Karl Vogt's¹³ coarse simile, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.¹⁴ These ideas, which arise in the field of materialism, do not, however, admit of being thought out. The simile is coarse, but they have literally come out of the brain as bile comes out of the liver. Hence the errors to which they give rise. For errors do not come about simply through people saying something false, but when they say something that is true, that holds good within a limited field, namely in the one and only field they will allow, the field of materialism.

From this tendency to make no mental effort, this inability to intensify our thinking as was shown in the last lecture,¹⁵ this failure to achieve any liveliness in the soul—from this general inclination merely to trust to what the body can do comes the materialistic view of the world. The materialistic conception does not arise from a logical error, it comes from the mental tendency to shun all inner activity and to give oneself up to the dictates of the corporeal. And herein lies the secret of the difficulty of refuting materialism. For a man who refuses to bestir his soul cannot answer the objections that are raised against him except by undertaking this very inner activity; and if he shuts it out from the first and prefers the far more convenient alternative of producing simply what his brain produces, well, it is hardly to be wondered at if he remains firmly stuck in the closed circle of materialism. One thing he will never see, and that is that this brain of his (he may thank Heaven that he has one; he could not for all his materialistic philosophy have provided himself with one!)—that this brain of his has itself been created by the Wisdom of the World and that it can, therefore, go on working like a watch, that it is entirely material and can go on reproducing itself. This Wisdom is a sort of phosphorescence; a phosphorescence that is present in the brain itself brings out what is already placed there spiritually. But the materialist need have nothing to do with all this; he simply gives himself up to that which, from being spiritual, has, as it were, condensed into matter, and which now, like the watch, simply grinds out spiritual products. As you see, ladies and gentlemen, the Spiritual Investigator stands so firmly on the foundations of legitimate Natural Science that he is obliged to assert what to many will seem as paradoxical as what I have just been saying. But this will show you that if we want to pass judgment on Spiritual Science, we must reach down to the central nerve of the matter. And since what can be repeated is so well established, it is easy to see why so very many objections and misunderstandings have arisen. Genuine Spiritual Investigation, that takes itself seriously, is all too easily identified with all the dilettante activities that bear a superficial resemblance to the real thing. I have often been reproached with the fact that the books I have written and the lectures I have delivered on Spiritual Science were not sufficiently on popular lines—as the common phrase goes. Now, I do not write my books nor do I deliver my lectures in order to please people and give them the heart-to-heart talks that they enjoy. I write my books and deliver my lectures in the manner best fitted to present Spiritual Science to the world at large. Spiritual Science existed in the past, as I have often had occasion to point out,¹⁶ although it arose from sources that differ from those of the Spiritual Science of to-day, which has inevitably been altered by human progress. In the olden days only those were admitted to the places where Spiritual Science was taught who were considered sufficiently ripe. Such a procedure would be quite meaningless to-day. Nowadays our life is public and it goes without saying that all subjects of investigation must be brought out into the open and that it would be folly to practise any sort of secrecy. The only secrecy which can be admitted is that which is already customary in public life. Namely, that to those who have already begun to study the opportunity be given of hearing more in lectures addressed to smaller audiences. But this is done in Universities; it is what is practised in ordinary life. And it is as unwarrantable to speak of secrecy in this respect as it would be in connection with University lectures. But the books are written and the lectures are delivered in such a way that a certain effort is needed on the part of those to whom they are addressed, and a certain amount of thought is required of them in their approach to Spiritual Science. Otherwise, anyone who shirked the trouble of going into the matter seriously could understand, or rather imagine he understood it, from reading those popular works that are so palatable to him. I am well aware that much of what I say must seem bristling with scientific terms to those who do not want that sort of thing. But this has to be in order that Spiritual Science may take its place in the mental and spiritual culture of the day. And if here and there Spiritual Science is being cultivated by large or small groups of men and women who, having no conception of the advances of modern science, yet claim to speak with a certain authority, it is little wonder if Spiritual Science incurs the contempt and misunderstanding and calumny of men of science. Something special, something significant must, therefore, be felt even in the manner in which the subject is imparted. And it must be felt in the fact that inner activity and doing of the soul is necessary in order to grasp how the essential part of the soul really lives as something which can use the body as an instrument but is not one and the same as the body.

If, then, we see things aright, how are we to account for the misunderstandings that have arisen? Well, when the soul begins to grow, when its dormant powers begin to awake, then the first of these powers which has to be developed is Thought, and it must be developed in the way we have often indicated and to-day again repeated. And for this a certain inner force, a certain inner strength is required. The soul must strive within itself. And this inner effort is just what, under the influence of the times, people do not want. Unless it be the artists. But in the realm of art, things have reached the point that people prefer simply to copy nature and have no inkling of the fact that, in order to add anything exceptional and new to nature pure and simple, the soul must be strengthened from within, must work upon itself a little. The power of Thought is, therefore, the first thing that has to be fortified. And then Feeling and Will, as was shown in the lectures of the last week.¹⁷ And this process of fortifying is only described by people saying that in Spiritual Science everything happens inwardly. People shrink from this, and from the idea of anything being strengthened inwardly, and they fail to grasp the obvious distinction which is required here between the conception of external nature and that of the spiritual world.

Let us try to grasp this distinction more vividly. What exactly is it? With regard to external nature, our organs are already given. Our eyes have been given us. Goethe has said very beautifully, "Were not the eye sunlike, how could we behold the light?"¹⁸ Just as it is a fact that you would not hear me when I speak unless you met me half-way by listening in order to understand me so, in Goethe's view, it is a fact that the eye has been created out of the light of the sun by a devious path of hereditary and other complicated processes. And by this is meant, not merely that the eye creates light in Schopenhauer's sense, but that it is itself created by light. This must be firmly borne in mind. And those who are inclined to be materialists may, we suggest, thank God! They no longer need to create their eyes, for these eyes are created from the Spiritual. They already have them, and in taking in the world around them they are using these ready made eyes. They direct these eyes towards the outer impressions and the outer impressions mirror themselves, completely mirror themselves in the sense organs. Let us imagine that man could, with his present degree of consciousness, experience the coming into being of his eyes. Let us imagine him entering nature as a child with only a predisposition for eyes. His eyes would first reveal themselves to him through the action of the sunlight. What would happen in man's growth? What would happen would be that by means of the sun-rays, invisible as yet, the eyes would be called forth out of the organism. And when a man feels "I have eyes," he feels the light inside his eye; when he knows his eyes to be his own, he feels them as part of his own organisation, he feels his eyes living inside the light. And, fundamentally, sense-perception is as follows: Man experiences himself by experiencing light, by experiencing with his eyes what has been developed in sense-perception, where we already have eyes for which possession we, as was said above, may thank God!

And so it must also be with Spiritual Science. There, too, the organic must be called forth from the as yet unformed soul. Spiritual hearing, spiritual vision must be called forth, to use Goethe's expressions¹⁹ once again: the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear must be called into being from within. Through the development of the soul we actually feel our way into the spiritual world, and as we do this, the new organs will come into being. And with these organs we shall experience the spiritual world in exactly the same way as we experience the physical world of sense with the organs of the physical body. Thus we must first create something analogous to that which man already possesses, for the purpose of sense perception. We must have the strength to begin by creating new organs of perception in order to experience the spiritual world with them.

The obstacle to this—and there is no other—is what may be called the inner weakness of man, resulting from modern education. It is weakness that prevents man from so taking hold of his inner life (the expression is clumsy, but it will serve) that it becomes as active as it would if man had to create his own hands in order to touch the table before him. He creates his inner powers in order to touch that which is spiritual; with spirit he touches spirit. Thus it is weakness that holds man back from pressing forward in the pursuit of true Spiritual Investigation. And it is weakness that calls forth the misunderstanding which Spiritual Investigation is faced with, fundamental weakness of soul, the inability to see that we are still caught in the Faustian doom, powerlessness to transform the reality within into organs which will lay hold upon the spiritual world. That is the first point.²⁰

And there is a second point, which will also be understood by those who wish to understand it. Man, in the face of the unknown, always experiences a peculiar feeling, primarily a feeling of fear. People are afraid of the unknown. But their fear is of a peculiar sort: it is a fear that does not become conscious. For what is the source of the materialistic, mechanistic world-view, or, as the more scholarly would have us say, what is the source of the monistic world conception? (Though even under this name it is still materialistic.) It arises from the fact that the soul is afraid of breaking through sense-perception, afraid that if it breaks through the sensuous into the spiritual, it will come into the unknown, into "Nothing," as Mephistopheles says to Faust. But, "In the Nothing," answers Faust, "I hope to find the All."²¹ It is fear of that which can only be guessed at as Nothing. But it is a masked fear. For we must become familiar with the fact that there is a luxuriant growth of hidden or unconscious processes in the depths of the soul. It is remarkable how people deceive themselves over this. A frequent example of such self-deception is that of people who, while animated by the grossest selfishness, refuse to admit it and invent all sorts of subterfuges to show how selfless, how loving they are in what they do. Thus do they put on a mask to cover their selfishness. This is very frequently the case with societies that are formed with the object of exercising love in the right way. One often has occasion to make a study of this masking of selfishness. I knew a man who was always explaining that what he did, he did against his own aims and inclination; he did it only because he deemed it necessary for the welfare of humanity. Again and again I had to say, "Don't deceive yourself! Pursue your activities from selfish motives and because you like doing it." It is far better to face the truth. One stands on a foundation of truth if one simply owns to oneself that one likes the things one wishes to undertake and if one ceases to hold a mask before one's face. It is fear which leads nowadays to the rejection of Spiritual Knowledge. But people will not own to this fear. It is in their souls, but they will not let it come into their consciousness, and they invent proofs and arguments against Spiritual Knowledge. They try to prove, for instance, that to leave the firm ground of sense-perception is inevitably to indulge in fantasy, etc. They invent the most complicated proofs. They invent whole philosophical systems which may be logically incontestable but which for anyone who has any insight in such matters go to show no more than that every one of these inventions misses the mark when it comes to Reality—and this, whether it calls itself Transcendental Realism, Empirical Realism, more or less Speculative Realism, Metaphysical Realism, or any other kind of "ism." People invent these "isms," and a lot of hard thinking goes to their making. But at bottom they are nothing but the soul's fear of embarking upon that which I have often characterised as "Feeling the Unknown in its Concreteness." These, then, are the two chief reasons for the misunderstandings which arise in relation to Spiritual Knowledge—weakness of soul and fear of what is presumed to be the unknown. And whoever possesses some knowledge of the human soul can analyse the modern world conceptions in the following way: on the one hand, they arise from men's inability so to strengthen their thought that all the relevant examples will at once occur to them; on the other hand, there is the fear of the unknown. And it often happens that because people are afraid of venturing into the so-called Unknown, they prefer to leave it as such. We grant, they will say, that behind the world of sense there is another, spiritual world. But man cannot enter into it. We can prove this, prove it up to the hilt. And most of them, when they wish to adduce these proofs, begin by saying, "Kant said," on the assumption, of course, that the person whom they are addressing understands nothing about Kant. Thus people invent proofs to show that the human spirit cannot enter into the world that lies beyond what is given in sensation. But these are simply subterfuges—clever though they be, they are attempts to escape from fear. It is assumed that something exists behind the world of sensation. But they call it the Unknown and prefer to lay down a form of Agnosticism of the Spencerian,²² or any other type, rather than find the courage really to lead the soul into the spiritual world.

A curious philosophy has arisen of late—the so-called "World-Conception of the As-If." It has found root in Germany. Hans Vaihinger²³ has written a large volume on the subject. According to the "World-Conception of the As-If," we cannot speak as though conceptions like "the unity of consciousness" actually corresponded to anything real, but must regard the appearances of the world "as if" there existed something which could be thought of as one undivided soul. Or again, the As-If philosophers cannot deny the fact that none of them has ever seen an atom or that an atom must be conceived precisely as something which cannot be seen. For even light itself is supposed to arise from the vibrations of atoms, and atoms would, therefore, have to be seen without light, since light first happens through the vibration of atoms! Thus the As-If philosophers do at least go the length of accepting atoms as real only in an intellectual sense (not to speak of the fantastic nonsense about atoms that dances about in some quarters). What they say, however, is this: It makes the world of sense easier to understand if we think of it "as if" there were atoms in it.²⁴ Now whoever, ladies and gentlemen, has an active inner life, will notice that it is one thing actively to live and move as an individual soul within a realm of spiritual reality, and another quite different thing to apply outwardly and realistically the idea that human activities can be made to appear "as if" they belonged to an individual soul. At any rate, if we take our stand on the firm ground of practical experience, we shall not find it easy to apply the Philosophy as As-If. To take an example. Fritz Mauthner²⁵ is to-day a highly esteemed philosopher, regarded by many as a great authority because he has out-Kantianised Kant. Whereas Kant still regards concepts as something with which we grasp reality, Mauthner sees in language alone that wherein our conception of the world actually resides. And thus he has been fortunate enough to complete his "Kritik der Sprache," (Critique of Language) to write a fat Philosophisches Wörterbuch²⁶ (Dictionary of Philosophy) from this point of view, and, above all, to collect a following who look upon him as the great man. Now, I do not wish to deal with Fritz Mauthner to-day. All I want to say is that it would be a hard task to apply the As-If philosophy to this gentleman. One might say: Let us leave it an open matter whether the gentleman has or has not intelligence and genius. But let us examine his claim to be intelligent "as if" he had intelligence. And if we set about the task honestly we shall find, ladies and gentlemen, that it cannot be done. The "As-If" cannot be applied where the facts are not there.

In a word, we must, as I have said before, reach the mainspring of Spiritual knowledge, and we must know what this teaching can regard as legitimate in the field in which misunderstandings can arise. For, while these misunderstandings really are misunderstandings, it is equally true that they are justified if the Spiritual Investigator is not fully capable of sharing the thought of the man of science. The Spiritual Investigator must be in a position to think along the same lines as the man of science, he must even be able to test him from time to time, especially if the man of science is one of those who are always insisting upon the necessity of standing firmly rooted in the data of empirical fact. At any rate, if one submits to a purely external test a philosophy that seems to be entirely positivistic and that rejects everything spiritual, the results are very remarkable. As you know, I in no wise underrate Ernst Haeckel.²⁷ I fully recognise his merits. But when he begins to talk about World-Conception, he shows precisely that weakness of soul which renders it impossible for him to follow any current of thought except that upon which he has already embarked. We are here up against that extremely significant fact which is so baffling when one meets it in serious contemporary works. I mean the widespread superficiality of men's thought and the downright lie in their life. We find, for example, that one of the great men to whom Ernst Haeckel refers as one of his authorities is Carl Ernst von Baer.²⁸ The name is always introduced as decisive in support of the purely materialistic World-Conception which Haeckel drew from his own researches. Now, how many people will take the trouble to acquire a real insight into what actually goes on in scientific thought and activity? How many people will pause and reflect when they read in Haeckel that Carl Ernst von Baer is one from whom Haeckel has deduced his own views? So, naturally, people think that Carl Ernst von Baer must have said something which led to Haeckel's views. And now, let me read you a passage from one of von Baer's works. "The terrestrial body is simply the breeding ground on which the spiritual part of man vegetates and grows, and the history of nature is nothing but the history of the continued victory of spirit over matter. This is the basic idea of creation, in virtue of which or rather for the attainment of which, individuals and species are allowed to vanish and the present (future) is built up upon the scaffolding of an immeasurable past."²⁹ The man whom Haeckel is always quoting in support of his theories has a wonderfully spiritual conception of the world! The development of scientific thought should be carefully watched. If those whose business it is to trace this development only kept their eyes open, we should not have such a struggle to wage against that superficiality of thought that produces the innumerable prejudices and errors which as misunderstandings constitute an obstacle to such aspirations as those embodied in Spiritual Knowledge.

Or again, ladies and gentlemen, let us take an honoured figure in the arguments about World-Conception in the nineteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss.³⁰ An honourable man—so are they all, all honourable men! Having started from slightly different views he finally takes his stand quite firmly on the opinion that the soul is merely a product of matter. Man has arisen completely out of what modern materialism calls nature. When we speak of the will, there is no real willing present. All that happens is that the brain molecules spin round in some way or other and will arises as a sort of vapour. "In man," says Strauss, "nature has not only willed upwards, she has willed beyond herself."³¹ Thus, nature wills. We seem to have reached the point where the materialist, in order to be one, no longer takes his own words seriously. Man is denied will because he must be like nature, and then it is said that "Nature has willed." One can, of course, dismiss such things as unimportant, but any earnest seeker after a true World-Conception will see that herein lies the source of innumerable mistakes and errors with which public opinion becomes, as it were, inoculated. And from this inoculation arise the many ways in which true Spiritual Science and Spiritual Investigation are misunderstood.

From another quarter we have those objections which are raised by the followers of this or that religious denomination, from those who think that their religion will be imperilled by the advent of a Spiritual Science. I must point out here once again, that it was people of exactly the same mentality who opposed Galileo and Copernicus on the ground that religion would be in danger if one had to believe that the Earth went round the Sun. And to such people there is always the retort: How timorous you are within the limits of your religion! How little you have grasped your own religion if you are so quickly convinced that it must be endangered by any fresh discovery! And, in this connection, I wish once again to mention the name of Laurenz Müllner,³² a good theologian, and one who, as he pointed out on his death-bed, remained to the end a faithful member of his church. When, in the 'nineties of last century, this theologian, whom I knew as a friend, was appointed Rector of the Vienna University, he said, in the inaugural address on Galileo³³ which he held on this occasion: There were once men and women (within a certain religious body they continued to exist until the year 1822, when permission was granted to believe in the Copernican Cosmology)³⁴—there were once men and women who believed that the religions could be imperilled by such views as those of Galileo or Copernicus. But nowadays—thus spoke this theologian, and priest, who remained within his church till the day of his death—nowadays, we must have reached the point where we find that religion is strengthened and intensified by the fact that men have looked into the glory of the divine handiwork, and learnt to know it better and better.³⁵ These were deeply religious, these were Christian words indeed.

And yet men will always rise up and say: This Spiritual Science says this or that about Christ, and it ought not to say it. We have our own conception of what Christ was like. Now, we would like to say to these people: We grant you everything that you hold about Christ, exactly as you put it; only we see in Him something more. We accept Him not only as a Being, as you do, but also as a cosmic Being, giving sense and meaning to the place of the Earth in the universe. But we must not say this. We must not go a step beyond what certain people regard as true. Spiritual Science gives knowledge. And knowledge of truth will never serve as the foundation for the creation of religion, although there will always be fools who say that Spiritual Science has come to found a new religion. Religions are founded in quite a different manner. Christianity was founded by its Founder, by the fact that Christ Jesus lived on earth. And Spiritual Science can no more found anything which is already there, than it can found the Thirty Years War through knowing facts about it. For religions are founded on facts, on events which have taken place. All that Spiritual Science can claim to do is to understand these facts differently—or rather not so much in a different, as in a higher sense—than can be done without its help. And just as in the case of the Thirty Years War, however lofty the standpoint from which we understand it, we do not found something by tracing it back to the Thirty Years War which was first merely known to us as a fact—so, in the same way, no religion is ever founded through that which is at first known to Spiritual Science as a fact. Here again it is a question of that superficiality which limits itself to sentiment and prevents the mind from really going into the matter in hand. If one really goes into the question of Spiritual Science, one will see that while the materialistic philosophy may very easily lead people away from religious feeling, Spiritual Science establishes in them the foundations of a deeper religious experience, because it lays bare the deeper roots of the soul, and thus leads men in a deeper way to the experience of that which outwardly and historically has manifested itself as religion. But Spiritual Science will not found a new religion. It knows too well that Christianity once gave meaning to the world. It seeks only to give to this Christianity a deeper meaning than can be given it by those who do not stand on the ground of Spiritual Science. Materialism, of course, has led to such discoveries as those, for example, of David Friedrich Strauss, who looked upon the belief in the Resurrection as insane. This belief in the Resurrection, he says, had to be assumed. For Christ Jesus had said many true and noble things. But the speaking of truths makes no particular impression on people. It needs the trimming of a great miracle such as the miracle of the Resurrection.³⁶ There you have what materialism has to bring forward. But this will not be brought forward by Spiritual Science! Spiritual Science will endeavour to unearth and bring to light what is living in the mystery of the Resurrection so as to understand it, and place it in the right way before humanity, which has advanced with the years, and can no longer accept it in the old way.

But this is not the place for religious propaganda. All I want to do is to bring to your notice the meaning of Spiritual Science and the misunderstandings which it has to meet—misunderstandings which come from those who presumably lead a religious life. At present (1916) men have not yet reached the stage when materialism can have an evil social result on a large scale. But this could very soon happen if men and women do not once again, through the help of Spiritual Science, find their way back to the fundamental spontaneity of the soul's inner life. And also the social life of humanity may find through Spiritual Science something which will, on a higher scale, bring about its own rebirth.

We can only speak of these things in a general way. Time does not allow us to describe them in more detail. I have done my best to characterise some of the misunderstandings which are found again and again, whenever Spiritual Science is being judged. I do not really wish to discuss the results of the perfectly natural superficiality of our time—at any rate not in the sense of refuting anything. In many cases it is worth considering, as supplying material for amusement—even for laughter.³⁷ ...As I have said, one cannot discuss this type of superficiality, widespread and, in a sense, influential though it be, for printer's ink on white paper still has so potent a form of magic. But what must be discussed are the cases where the objections raised, even if they are unimportant in themselves, insinuate themselves nevertheless into the public mind. And the misunderstandings which arise from this mental inoculation are what must be combated step by step by those who take anything like Spiritual Science at all seriously. We are always meeting with objections that do not arise from any sort of activity of the soul, but which have been, as it were, injected into the minds of those who make them by the prevailing superficiality of the times. But he who is right inside Spiritual Science knows full well that, as I have so often explained, the same thing must and will happen to this teaching as has happened to any new element that is incorporated into the development of humanity. This reception was up to a point accorded to the philosophy of modern Natural Science, until the latter grew powerful, and could exercise its influence by means of external power-factors, and no longer needed to work through its own strength. And then the time comes when people, without any activity on the part of their own souls, can build philosophies upon these power-factors. Is there, ladies and gentlemen, much difference between these two views? Those who nowadays found elaborate Monistic systems regard themselves as very lofty thinkers, infinitely superior to those whose philosophy, coloured perhaps by theological and religious considerations, they consider to be narrowly dogmatic and hidebound by authority. But in the eyes of one who knows something of how misunderstandings arise, it matters little in the soul's achievement whether men swear by a Church Father such as Gregory, Tertullian, Irenus or Augustine and accept him as authority, or whether they look upon Darwin, Haeckel and Helmholtz as authorities, and in so far as these are really their Church Fathers, give them their allegiance. The point is not whether we have given our allegiance to one or the other of these two, but how far we have got in working out a philosophy of our own. And what was true of a mere abstract idealism is true in a higher, a far higher sense, of Spiritual Science. To begin with, it is misunderstood and mistaken on all sides, and then, later, the very thing that at first appeared to be moonshine and fantasy is taken for granted. This is what happened to Copernicus, it is what happened to Kepler, it is what happens to everything that has to be incorporated into the spiritual development of humanity. First it is regarded as nonsense, then it is taken for granted. And this, too, is what is happening to Spiritual Science.

But this Spiritual Science, as has been shown in previous addresses and re-stated in the present lecture, has a very important message. It points to that living reality which brings man to the fullness of his powers, not by offering itself to his passive contemplation, not by revealing itself to him from outside, but by requiring of him that he should seize hold of it alive so that through co-operation alone he may come to a knowledge of his own existence. He must overcome that weakness which makes him regard as fantasy everything whose existence cannot be felt by a mere passive surrender, but demands an inwardly active co-operation with the World-All. Only when man's knowledge is active will it tell him what he is and where he is going, what he is and what is his destiny. The spirit has strength enough of its own to fight its way through all the misunderstandings of the day, justifiable as they are in a certain sense, and it will fight its way through, especially in so far as these misunderstandings arise from the superficiality of the times. Very beautiful, in this connection, is Goethe's saying, uttered, on his own admission, in unison with the ancient sage:³⁸

Were the eye not sun-like
How could we look upon the light?
Were we not animate with God's own power
How could we be ravished with the divine?

The Spiritual-divine that lives, moves and has its being throughout the world is that from which we originate, that from which we have sprung. Even the material element in us is born of the spiritual. And it is because it is already born and no longer needs to be proved or brought forth that man, if he is a materialist, believes in it alone. The spiritual must be grasped in living activity. The Spiritual divine must first weave itself into man, the spiritual sun must first create its own organs in him. Thus, altering Goethe's words, we may say: If the inner eye does not become spiritually sun-like, it will never look upon the light which is the very essence of man.

To conclude these reflections. If the human soul cannot unite itself with that from which it has sprung from all eternity, with the Spiritual-divine whose being is one with its own, then it will never be able to rise as a gleam into the Spiritual; its spiritual eye will never come into being. The soul will then never be enraptured by the Divine, in the spiritual sense of the word, and human knowledge will find the world empty and desolate. For we can only find in the world that for which we have created organs of reception in ourselves.

Were the outer physical eye not sun-like, how could we look upon the light? And if the inner eye does not become spiritually sun-like, we shall never look upon the spiritual light of quintessential humanity. If man's own inner activity does not itself become really spiritual-divine, then never can there pulsate through the soul of man that which alone brings him for the first time to true manhood, to the fullness of his human stature, to be a true man and to that which fills and animates the world, working and weaving through the All until in him it reaches human—if not divine—consciousness, the future Spirit of the World.

• 1. The lecture is reprinted by kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner. By contrasting outstanding individual examples of one-sided thought with their opposites, the lecture gives an answer to the thesis with reference to the following names: Theodor Meynert, Kant, Hans Vaihinger, Fritz Mauthner, Ernst Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauss on the one hand, and Goethe, Carl Ernst von Baer, Laurenz Müllner on the other.
• 2. Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research (Gesundes Seelenleben und Geistesforschung). Lecture given in Berlin on 4th February, 1916.
• 3. As examples of such opponents see, amongst others, Karl Heyer, Dr. Phil. and Jur. Wie man gegen Rudolf Steiner kämpft, Stuttgart, 1932; and also Camille Schneider Eduard Schuré's Begegnungen mit Rudolf Steiner, Basel, 1933.
• 4. Herman Ulrici (1806-1884), German philosopher; John Ulrich Wirth (1810-1859), Protestant theologian and philosopher; Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879), German philosopher.
• 5. Ein vergessenes Streben nach Geisteswissenschaft innerhalb der deutschen Gedankenentwicklung. Lecture delivered in Berlin, 25th February, 1916. {RSA title: A Forgotten Support for Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought}
• 6. Theodor Meynert (1833-1892), born in Dresden, was active in Vienna from 1866 as psychiatrist and cerebral anatomist. Rudolf Steiner's early friend, Alfred Stross, was one of his patients. (See Fritz Lemmermeyer's Erinnerungen, Stuttgart, 1929) A collection of his writings is to be found in August Hirsch's Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragendsten Ärzte, Berlin, 1929. Vol. IV.
• 7. Theodor Meynert, Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues, a lecture delivered before the Vienna Anthropological Society, 1872. (See Theodor Meynert, Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen Vorträgen über den Bau und die Leistungen des Gehirns, Vienna and Leipzig, 1892.)
• 8. See footnote 5
• 9. Literally: "Unconsciously and impelled from within I had pressed on untiringly to the discovery of archetypes, I had succeeded in building up an exposition of things that accorded with nature. There was, therefore, nothing to hinder me from embarking boldly upon the 'adventure of reason,' as the Sage of Königsberg has called it." (Goethe, Anschauende Urteilskraft, 1820) Kant, in the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, describes the attempt to explain the relationship in the structure of different animals through actual blood relationship as "daring to make an adventure in reason." "A priori, in the judgment of mere reason, this cannot be disputed. It is simply that experience gives no instance of it." (Ibid.)
• 10. See footnote 2
• 11. See footnote 7
• 12. "Thus the real contains no more than the possible. A hundred real coins contain no more than a hundred possible coins." "By whatever ... predicates I may cogitate a thing I do not in the least augment the object of my conception by the addition of the statement, this thing exists. Now, if I cogitate a being as the highest reality, without defect or imperfection, the question still remains—whether this being exists or not." Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• 13. Karl Vogt (1817-1895), was a German scientist, philosopher and politician, an eager champion of Materialism and Darwinism, the well-known author of Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft, Giessen, 1855.
• 14. Literally, "Every scientist will, if he thinks with a certain amount of consistency, reach the view that all the faculties which we grasp under the name of activities of the soul are only functions of the brain matter; or to put it rather coarsely, that thoughts stand in the same relation to the cerebral substance as does bile to the liver, or urine to the kidneys. To assume a soul that uses the brain like an instrument with which it can work as it pleases, is sheer nonsense." (See Karl Vogt's Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände, Stuttgart, 1847) The remark is made in refutation of Gall and C. G. Carns, and is repeated with especial emphasis in the fourth edition.
• 15. See footnote 5
• 16. See Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as a Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity
• 17. Lectures between 19 and 26 February 1916.
• 18. Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 1808-1810
• 19. "And with the eyes, not of the body, but of the spirit, I saw myself riding on horseback towards myself." (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part III, Book XI) "The eye may indeed be called the clearest sense, but the inner sense is still clearer." (Shakespeare und kein Ende, 1813-1816) "We learn to see with the eyes of the spirit, without which we should in the realm of Natural Science, as everywhere else, be groping blindly about." (Zur Zoologie, 1795) "And the new-born day sounds already in our spirit's ear." (Faust II, V)
• 20. See Faust I, V. Cp. Hegel, History of Philosophy, Vol. II. "This is one of the foibles of our time, that we cannot endure the greatness, yea, the immensity of the claims of the human spirit, that we feel oppressed by it and flee from it like weaklings."
• 21. Faust, II, V
• 22. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
• 23. Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933), German philosopher, author of The Philosophy of As-If, a system of the theoretical, practical and religious fictions of humanity, based on idealistic Positivism, with an appendix on Kant and Nietzsche. (English translation published by Kegan Paul.) The philosophy of "As-If" treads the same paths as the so-called Pragmatism whose most influential representatives are William James (1842-1910), born in America, and F. C. S. Schiller (born in England, 1864). Cp. Rudolf Steiner, Die Rätzel der Philosophie, Stuttgart, Dornach, 1924-26, Vol. II.
• 24. "The soul, too, is only a summary fiction without any reality of its own... We speak as if there were a soul. We insert this auxiliary conception (the atom) because it is convenient to us. It is literally a hypostatised non-existent.
• 25. Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923), was an Austrian philosopher and author of novels, satires, reviews and journalistic works. He was an exponent of philosophical scepticism derived from a critique of human knowledge and of philosophy of language.
• 26. Fritz Mauthner, Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Stuttgart, 1901-1902. Second edition, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1906-1913. Wörterbuche der Philosophie Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Munich, 1910-1911.
• 27. Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), was a German zoologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species and mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms.
• 28. Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), was a Baltic German scientist and explorer.
• 29. Carl Ernst von Baer, Reden und Kleinere Aufsätze vermischten Inhalts. St. Petersburg, 1864-1875. Vol. I and Vol. II. For Haeckel's reference to Baer, see Haeckel's Anthropogeny.
• 30. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), was a German liberal Protestant theologian and writer, who influenced Christian Europe with his portrayal of the "historical Jesus", whose divine nature he denied.
• 31. David Friedrich Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, Section IV. 'What is our rule of life?' English translation by Matthew Blind, 1873
• 32. Laurenz Müllner (1848-1911), professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Vienna.
• 33. Laurenz Müllner, Die Bedeutung Galilei's für die Philosophie. Inaugurationsrede, 1894, in Die feierliche Inauguration des Rektor's der Wiener Universität für das Studienjahr, 1894-5. Vienna, 1894.
• 34. Not till the year 1822 did the Holy Office at Rome declare that books dealing with the movement of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun were no longer forbidden.
• 35. Literally: "Of the days when men regarded their most holy possessions as threatened through the heliocentric view of the world, we say with the Psalmist, Illic trepidaverunt timore, ubi non erat timor. 'They were afraid where no fear was.' There was no contradiction involved in the right understanding of the Christian view, which should see in the newly discovered stellar worlds fresh wonders of divine wisdom and power, through which the wonders of divine love accomplished on earth would only receive a higher meaning." Laurenz Müllner, (see note 33).
• 36. "Thus (through belief in the Resurrection) men were assured of the continuance of all that was new and profound in the religious life as lived by Jesus and imparted to his followers through precept and example. But from now on, the fantastic form of this recovery (the recovery of belief in Jesus which had been shaken by violent death) . . . became the accepted one . . . his whole life was shrouded in a shining cloud which raised it ever higher and higher above the human." Life of Jesus, by David Friedrich Strauss. Part I.
• 37. At this point the lecturer made brief mention of an article by Max Hachdorf which appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt, Feb. 9, 1916, on "Dreyfus, the Prophet Steiner and the deserters," and of two of its variants in other newspapers, all of which were distinguished by the wildest, almost ridiculous misrepresentations and errors.
• 38. "I am at the moment dictating something about the marked passage in the old mystic" (meaning Plotinus, Enneades, I, 6, 8). Goethe used the text of the Latin translation, Neque vero oculus unquam vederet solem, nisi factus solaris esset. Neque rursus animus, nisi factus sit puicher, si modo deurn sit et pulchritudinem inspecturus. Plotini Opera Salingiacum M.O. See Goethe's letter to Zalter, Sep. 1, 1805, and Goethe Jahrbuch, Vol. III, 1882, Zur Farbenlehre, 1808-1810.

In connection with the public lectures and public gatherings, it always affords me a satisfaction also to be able to address this Group here in The Hague, and I shall try this evening to say some things that may be to you a more intimate continuation, a supplement, of what I was able to express in the public lectures. (Lectures given in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Delft, Holland, from October 31 to November 6, 1922)

In order to have knowledge of the spiritual world and for the acquirement of an inner life with the spiritual world, it is necessary most of all to see in the right light that which one might call the concealed aspects of human existence. Indeed, the concealed aspects of human existence are the more important aspects for the comprehensive judging and evaluation of human life. This may not be admitted willingly by people who merely think superficially and materially, but it is none the less true. No one can become acquainted with human existence, unless he is able to enter into its concealed aspects.

One could, perhaps, if I may thus express myself, demur against the Gods and say that they have put the most precious thing for man into the concealed aspects of his life; that they have not afforded him what is most precious in the visible aspect of life. If this had been done, man would in a higher sense remain impotent. We acquire spirit-soul strength, which then can permeate our whole being, through the very fact that we must first achieve our genuine human dignity and our human nature, that we must first do something in the realm of our soul and spirit in order to become man at all in the right sense of the word. And in this victory, in this necessity of having first to accomplish something to become man, in this lies that which can fill us with strength, which can permeate with forces the innermost depth of our being.

In order, therefore, to explain more definitely this leading theme which I have introduced today, I will speak to you again from a certain viewpoint about that concealed aspect of human existence which is enveloped in the unconsciousness of sleep. And then I will bring to your attention something of that which lies enveloped in states of existence that remain unconscious during earth life: those states of existence in pre-earthly life and the life after death.

The sleep life takes place in such a way for man that, after the transition through dreams—which have, however, but a very dubious existence and a very dubious significance for human life, if one simply accepts them as they present themselves—he falls into the unconsciousness of sleep, out of which he emerges only on awakening, when he immerses himself with his ego and his astral body in the ether body and physical body; that is, when he makes use of both these principles as a tool in order to perceive his physical environment and then to work within this physical environment through his will. But that which lies beyond birth and death is enveloped in that very part of man's being which becomes unconscious when he falls asleep... And the conditions which the human being experiences there I will describe to you as though they were conscious. They can become conscious only to the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness. But the difference between this and what every man experiences in the night is only a difference in knowledge. The individual who, as a modern initiate, looks into the sleep life knows how it is, but this does not make the life of sleep into something different for him from what it is for every man, even for the one who passes through it quite unconsciously. Thus our description can be in conformity with reality when we describe that which remains unconscious as though the human being experienced it consciously. And this is what I shall now do.

After the transition through dreams—as I intimated before—man passes, as regards the normal consciousness, into unconsciousness. But the reality of this unconscious state, as it manifests itself to the higher, supersensible knowledge, is that, directly after falling asleep, man enters into a sort of contourless existence. If he should realize his condition consciously, he would feel himself poured out into an etheric realm. He would feel himself outside of his body, not limited, however, but widely diffused; he would sense or observe his body as some object outside of himself. If this condition should become conscious, it would be filled, as regards man's soul nature, with a certain inner anxiety or uneasiness. He feels that he has lost the firm support of the body, as though he stood before an abyss.

What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.

As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.

If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.

But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself. In this state of sleep the human being has a different appearance according as we observe him before or after the Mystery of Golgotha. Namely, the human being requires cosmic aid from without in regard to this condition, if I may so express it, of being split into many soul reflections.

In olden times, preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, the initiates, the old initiates, gave to the people indirectly through their pupils, through the teachers whom they sent out into the world for mankind, certain religious instructions which evoked feelings during their waking life. And these instructions, which were expressed by the people in ritual acts, strengthened their souls so that the human being carried, in turn, a sort of after-effect of this religious mood over into his sleep life.

You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.

This truly is the difficulty that irreligious people have: they have no such aid during the night in regard to this being split into many souls and thus they carry these experiences over into the waking life without the strength that religion affords. For every experience we have during the night has its aftereffect in the waking life. It has not yet been a very long time since irreligion and non-religiousness began to play so large a, part among mankind as it did during the last century, the 19th century. People still experienced the aftereffect of the influence of what earlier, more sincere, religious times meant to the human being. But, since the irreligious times continue, the ultimate result will be significant: people will carry the after-effect of this splitting of their souls from their sleep state over into their waking life, and this will principally contribute to the fact that they will not have the forces of coherence in their organism to distribute properly the nourishing effect of the food in their organism. And mankind will be afflicted with significant diseases in the near future as a consequence of this irreligion.

We must, indeed, not think that the spirit-soul part of our being has no bearing upon the physical! Its relation is not such that irreligious development will be immediately punished with disease by some kind of demoniacal gods—life does not run its course in such a superficial manner—but there does exist, nevertheless, an intimate relation between our experience in the realm of soul and spirit and our physical constitution. In order to possess health during the waking hours of the day, it is essential that we carry into our sleep life the feeling of our unity with the divine-spiritual Beings, in whose realm of activity we immerse the eternal kernel of our own being. And it is only by a right existence within a spirit-soul world between falling asleep and awakening that we can produce the right and health-bringing forces of a spirit-soul element, so necessary for our waking life.

During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature. This whole reciprocal action of the planetary movements of our solar system, we do not bear it directly within us, not the planetary movements themselves; but facsimiles, astral facsimiles of them then constitute our inner organism. To be sure, we are not spread out into the entire planetary cosmos, but we are of extraordinary size, compared with our physical size in the daytime. We do not bear within us the real Venus each time that we are in the state of sleep, but a facsimile of its movement. In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.

Before we can experience this circulation of the planetary after-effects we must first experience the splitting of the soul. As I said before, the people of olden times, previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, received instructions from their initiates, in order that they might be able to bear this splitting of the soul and that the soul should find its way within these movements which now constituted its inner life. Since the Mystery of Golgotha something else has taken the place of this old teaching. Namely, something has occurred which the human being can now appropriate inwardly to himself as a feeling, a sentiment, a soul life, and a soul mood, when he really feels himself one with the deed which was accomplished for mankind by the Christ Being through the Mystery of Golgotha here on earth. The individual who truly feels his unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha to the degree that in him are fulfilled the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, he has, through this unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, developed something in his feeling which has its after-effect in sleep, so that he now has the strength to overcome the splitting of his soul and the power to find his way in the labyrinth of the planetary orbits which now constitute his inner self. For we must find our way, even though we are not conscious in our inner being of that which constitutes for the soul the planetary circulation in place of the blood circulation during the day, which now continues in the physical body we have abandoned.

After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.

It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.

Now, my dear friends, for the one who has insight into these different stages of sleep, a significant question arises, I might say, every night. The human soul, the astral organism, and the ego being, leave the physical body, their inner self is filled with facsimiles of the planetary movements and of the constellations of the fixed stars. The question arising now is this: “How is it that every morning, after each sleep, the human being returns to his physical body again?”

And it is here where the science of initiation discovers that the human being would actually not return if, on entering the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars, he did not also live his way into the forces of the moon while expanding outward into the facsimiles of cosmic existence. He lives his way into the spiritual forces of the moon, into those cosmic forces which are reflected in the physical moon and in the moon-phases.

While all other planetary and fixed star forces actually draw the human being out of his physical body, it is the lunar forces which again and again return him, when he wakes, to his physical body. The moon is connected in general with all that brings the human being from his spiritual life into the physical life. It, therefore, makes no difference—the physical constellation is not the thing to be considered, although a certain significance attaches thereto—whether we have to do with new moon, full moon, the first or last quarter of the moon; in the spiritual world the moon is always present. It is the lunar forces which lead the human being back into the physical world, into his physical body.

You can see, my dear friends, that, as I briefly describe to you the experience the human being has between falling asleep and awakening, I am, upon the whole, giving you something of a general description of his sojourn in the spiritual world. And this is the state of the matter. Fundamentally, we experience every night a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. If we look into pre-earthly life with the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness, we see ourselves first of all as spirit-soul human beings in a very early state of pre-earthly existence. We see ourselves possessed of a cosmic consciousness. Our life there is not a reflection of the cosmos, as is our sleep life, but we are actually diffused through the real cosmos. About the middle of our life between death and a new birth we feel ourselves as spirit-soul beings, fully conscious—in fact with a much clearer and more intensive consciousness than we could possibly have anywhere upon the earth—surrounded by divine-spiritual Beings, by the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. And, just as we work with nature's forces here on earth, just as we use external objects of nature as tools, so in the same way does work take place between us and the Beings of the higher spiritual Hierarchies.

And what manner of work is this? This work consists in the fact that the spirit-soul human being, conjointly with an enormous number of sublime spiritual Beings of the cosmos, is weaving the cosmic spirit-germ of his physical human body in the spiritual realm. However peculiar this may seem to you—to weave the physical human body as spiritual germ out of the whole cosmos—it is the greatest, the most significant piece of work conceivable in the cosmos. And not only does the human soul in the state described work at this, but the human soul works at it conjointly with whole hosts of divine-spiritual Beings. For, if you visualize the most complicated thing that can be formed here on earth, you find it primitive and simple in contrast with that mighty fabric of cosmic vastness and grandeur which is woven there and which, compressed and condensed through conception and through birth, becomes permeated with physical earth matter and then becomes the human physical body.

When we refer to a germ here on earth, we think of it as a small germ which afterwards becomes relatively large. But, when we refer to the cosmic spirit-germ in relation to the human body as a product of the spiritual, this germ is of gigantic size. And from that moment on, which I have pointed out to you, when the soul is coming towards its birth, the soul-spiritually magnificent human germ is gradually diminishing. The human being continues to work at it with the aim constantly in view that this will be woven together, pressed together, condensed into the physical human body.

It was really not without reason that the older initiates—through a kind of clairvoyance which, to be sure, is no longer suitable to us, although the more recent science of initiation shows the same fact—that the older initiates called the human body the Temple of the Gods. It is the Temple of the Gods, for it is woven out of the cosmos by the human soul conjointly with divine Beings each time between death and a new birth. Later on—in a manner still to be described—the human being is given his physical form. While the human being is weaving the spirit-germ of his physical body at the stage indicated, he is, as regards his soul being, in a condition, in a mood, that can only be compared with what the modern initiates call intuition. The human being lives with his soul within the activity of Gods. He is wholly diffused in cosmic-divine existence. In this state halfway between death and a new birth he is participating in the life of the Gods.

But then, as the human being proceeds on his way, as he comes closer to conception or birth, a change takes place. In a certain way, his consciousness is then impressed with the fact that the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are withdrawing from him. And there appears to him only something like a revelation, like a reflection, as if the Gods had withdrawn and only their nebulous images were still standing before the human soul, and as if a kind of veil were being woven as a nebulous imitation of that which in reality had been woven before. The intuitive consciousness he formerly possessed now changes to a cosmic inspired consciousness. The human being lives no more with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; he lives with their manifestation. But in place of this an inner ego develops more and more within the soul consciousness. During the climax, I might say, of life between death and a new birth, the human being lives entirely with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the ego has no inner strength; it becomes conscious again of its inner self only when the Gods withdraw and only their manifestation remains. The glory of the Gods, their radiation, enters a kind of inspired consciousness; but, as a recompense, the human being feels himself as a self-existent being. And that which now awakens first in him is, I might say, an eager desire, a kind of craving.

Midway between death and a new birth, the human being works at the spirit-germ of his physical body, so to speak, out of a deep inner satisfaction. Although he realizes that the ultimate goal will be his physical body in his next earthly life, he is not permeated with an eager desire, but only—we might say—with admiration for this physical human body, considered from a universal standpoint. At the moment when the human beings is living no more in divine worlds, but only in the manifestations of divine worlds, the eager desire arises in him to reincarnate upon the earth. Just while the ego consciousness is becoming continually stronger does this eager desire awaken. We withdraw, so to speak, from the divine worlds and come closer to what we shall become as earthly human beings. This eager desire becomes continually stronger, and what we see around us is also undergoing a change. Prior to this, we were living in nothing but Beings, in the divine-spiritual Hierarchies; we knew ourselves to be one with them. When we spoke of our inner self we were really speaking of the cosmos—but the cosmos itself consisted of Beings, Beings in sublime stages of consciousness with whom we were living. Now an outer glory is to be seen, and in this outer glory the first images gradually appear of that which, ultimately, are the physical reflections of the divine-spiritual Beings. This glory emanates from the Being which man knew there beyond as the Sublime Solar Being, and in this glory appears, so to speak, the sun as seen from without, or as seen from the world. Here on earth we look up to the sun. There, while descending to the earth, we at first see the sun from the other side. But the sun emerges, the fixed stars emerge, and behind the fixed stars the planetary movements emerge. And with the emergence of the planetary movements a quite definite kind of forces emerges: the spiritual forces of the moon; they now take control of us. It is these lunar forces which, little by little, carry us back into the earthly life.

Such is actually the aspect of things which the human being beholds on his descent from cosmic worlds to earthly existence: that, after an experience of divine-spiritual Hierarchies, he proceeds to images of them. But these images of Beings gradually become star-images, and the human being enters into something which, I might say, he first sees from behind: he enters that which is manifest from the earth as the cosmos. The details of what the human being there consummates can be discerned, and the modern science of initiation can penetrate quite deeply into what man there experiences.

Just through details in this domain do we begin to become acquainted with life. For no one knows life who is able to see the human being in connection with earthly existence alone. What great value does our connection with the earthly existence have for us then? During the enormously long stretches of time between death and a new birth the earth, at first, really means nothing to us, and that which gleams towards us, as the external, so to speak, is transmuted into entire worlds of Gods, in which we live during these long stretches of time and which appear externally to us again as stars only when we are nearing the earth for another earthly existence.

What the human being at first wove, as the spirit-germ of his physical body, he knows, for the time being, to be one with the whole universe, with the spiritual universe. Later, when he sees only the manifestation of the divine-spiritual worlds, this germ gradually becomes his body, which is now also a facsimile of the cosmos. And out of this—his body—arises the eager desire for an earthly existence, for an ego consciousness in his body.

This body now still contains much which is untouched by the earthly existence, for it is a spirit body. As regards this body, the fact still remains entirely undetermined at a certain stage whether, for instance, the human being will be a male or a female personality in his next earthly existence. For, during this whole time between death and a new birth, up to a very late stage, before we are born upon the earth, there is no meaning in the question of man or woman. The conditions there differ entirely from those that are reflected on earth as man and woman. There are also conditions which occur in the spiritual existence and are reflected on the earth; but that which appears on earth as man and woman acquires significance only relatively late, prior to our descent to earth. When the human being, according to certain former karmic connections, thinks it best to experience his next incarnation on earth as a woman, we can trace in detail how, on his descent to the earth in order to unite with the physical embryo, he chooses that time which is known here on earth as the time of full moon.

We can say, therefore, when we are looking from any region here on earth at the full moon, that we then have the time which the beings choose for their descent to the earth who desire to become women, for then only is this decision made. And the time of new moon is the time which beings choose who wish to become men.

Thus, you see, the human being enters his earthly existence through the portal of the moon. But the force which the male requires in order to enter life on earth is then flowing out into the cosmos; we move toward it as we come in from the cosmos, and this force is radiated by the moon when it is known as new moon for the earth. The force which the female requires is radiated from the moon when it is the full moon; then its illuminated side is turned toward the earth, and its unilluminated side is toward the cosmos—and this force, which the moon can send out into the cosmos from its unilluminated side, the human being requires if he wishes to become a woman.

What I have now been describing to you shows that the ancient concept of astrology, which nowadays has been brought to a complete decadence by the ordinary astrologers, was well grounded. Only, we must be able to achieve an inner view of the connection of things. We must not look merely at the physical constellation in a calculating manner, but must see into the corresponding spiritual element. There it is really possible to enter into details.

As you know, the human being descends from the cosmos in a definite state. From the spiritual cosmos he enters the etheric cosmos. Now I am still speaking of the etheric cosmos alone; the physical aspect of the stars is, in this connections, taken less into consideration, as is, likewise, the physical aspect of the moon. The essential moment when the human being decides to descend to the earth depends, as I have stated, upon the phase of the moon during this descent, and thus it may happen that he exposes himself to a decisive new moon in order to become a man, or to a decisive full moon to become a woman. But then—since the descent is not made so very rapidly, but he remains exposed for some time—if he is descending through the new moon as a man, he may still, for one reason or another, decide to expose himself to the coming full moon. Thus he has made the decision to descend as a male; he has made use to this end of the forces of the new moon; but, during his descent, he still has at his disposal the remainder of the moon's cycle, the phase of the full moon. He then fills himself with lunar forces in such a way that they do not affect his condition as man or woman, but rather the organization of his head, and what is connected with the organization of his head from without, from the cosmos, if that constellation occurs of which I have just spoken. Thus, after the human being has made the decision; “I shall become a man through the time of the new moon”, and continues living in the cosmos, so that he has not passed completely through the lunar influence but is still exposed to the next full moon, then, through the influence of the lunar forces in this condition he will, for instance, have brown eyes and black hair. Thus we may say that the manner in which the human being passes the moon determines not only his sex, but also the color of his eyes and hair. If, for instance, the human being has passed the full moon as a woman and is later exposed to a new moon, the result may be a woman with blue eyes and blond hair.

Grotesque as this may seem, we are absolutely predestined by the manner of our experience through the cosmos, as to the way in which our soul-spirit organism works its way into our physical and our etheric organism. Prior to this time there has been no decision made as to our becoming a blond or a brunette; this is determined only by the lunar forces as we pass them, on our descent from the cosmos into earthly existence.

And just as we pass by the moon, which really guides us into earthly existence, so do we pass by the other planets. It is not immaterial, for example, whether we pass Saturn in one or another way. We may pass by Saturn, for instance, when the constellation is such that the force of Saturn and the force of Leo in the Zodiac co-operate. Because of our passing the region of Saturn just as its force is being increased through Leo in the Zodiac, our soul will—conditioned, of course, by our preceding karma—acquire the strength to meet intelligently the outer contingencies of life so that they do not defeat us over and over again. If, however, Saturn is being dominated more by Capricorn, we shall become weak human beings that do succumb to the outer contingencies of life.

All these experiences we bear within us as we prepare from the cosmos our earthly existence. Of course, we can overcome this through an appropriate training, but not by voicing the opinion of the materialists that all this is nonsense, that we need not pay any attention to it at all. On the contrary, it can be overcome by the fact that we develop these forces, really develop them. And in the future mankind will learn again, not only to insure that a child shall have good milk to drink and good food to eat—although no objection is to be made to this—but mankind will learn again to observe whether this or that person has within him forces of Saturn or Jupiter active under this or that influence.

Let us suppose that we find that a human being has within him, through his karma, forces of Saturn under the most unfavorable influence—of Capricorn or of Aquarius, for instance—so that he is exposed to all life's difficulties. Then, in order to strengthen him we shall search most carefully for other forces within him. For instance, we shall ask ourselves whether he has experienced the passage through the sphere of Jupiter, of Mars, or through any other sphere. And we shall always be able to correct and annul one condition by means of the other.

We shall simply have to learn to think of the human being not only in relation to what he begins to eat and drink in the earthly existence, but we shall have to consider him in relation to what he becomes, because of his having passed through the cosmic worlds between death and a new birth.

When the human being is close to his earthly course of life, then he experiences a sort of loss of his being. You know from my description that he was connected with what he has woven as the spirit-germ of his physical body. Into this spirit-germ he has woven, besides, the experiences during the descent through fixed stars and planets. At a definite stage, actually quite close to conception and birth, this spirit-germ is no longer there. It has, in the meanwhile, descended with its forces as a system of forces to the earth. It has fallen from the human being. It has united itself on the earth independently with the physical substance of heredity which the ancestors, father and mother, afford. What is being woven there in the organism descends to the earth sooner than the human being himself as a spirit-soul being. And then, when the human being realizes that he has actually surrendered to the parents that which he himself had woven in the cosmos, he is able, in the last stage prior to his earthly existence, to take to himself from the etheric world what is essential for his own etheric organism—since there is no longer a necessity to do any more weaving on his physical body, which is essentially complete and has been surrendered to and been made a part of the flow of heredity. Now he draws together his etheric organism; and, together with this latter, he unites with that which he himself has prepared through his parents. He takes possession of his physical body, in which all this cosmic fabric of the spirit-germ is drawn together, and which is interwoven with what the human being himself united with it as he descended through this or that stellar region. It is, indeed, not arbitrarily that he passes through new moon or full moon and causes himself to become man or woman, or to have black or blond hair or blue or brown eyes, but all this is intimately connected with the results of his preceding karma.

This shows you that, whereas the human being in the sleep state experiences as his inner nature merely facsimiles of the planetary world, the world of the fixed stars, he now passes through these worlds in their reality between death and a new birth. He passes through these worlds; they become his inner nature. And it is always the lunar forces which bring us back to the earth. They differ essentially from all other stellar forces in this respect, in that they bring us back to the earth. In the sleep state they bring us back to the earth; they bring us back also after we have experienced all that I have briefly described, in order to enter once more a life course on the earth.

But let us consider once again that which is there outside of the physical body, in the form of astral body and ego organization, between falling asleep and awakening. It is not fabricated from physical bones and physical blood; it is a spirit-soul entity. But our whole moral intrinsic quality is woven into it. Just as we consist, when awake, of bones, blood, and nerves, so does that which leaves us during sleep and returns on awakening consist of the actualized judgments of our moral deeds. If I have accomplished a good deed during the day, its effect is reflected in my sleep body within the spirit-soul substance that leaves me during sleep. My moral quality lives within this. And, when the human being passes through the Portal of Death, he takes with him his whole actualized moral evaluation. It is a fact that, between birth and death in the earthly life, the human being creates within himself a second being. This second human being, who leaves the body every night, is the result of our moral or immoral life, and we take it with us through the Portal of Death. This result, which is merged with our eternal essential being, is not the only element we possess within the spirit-soul substance which passes out of us during the night. Just after death, however, when we are first in the ether body and then in the astral body, we hardly see anything in ourselves but this moral entity of our being. Whether we were good or bad, this is what we behold; we are this. Just as here on earth we are a, human being in whom the skin forces, or the nerve forces, or the blood forces, or the bone forces predominate, so, after death, we are, to our own perception, what we were, morally or immorally.

And now after death we proceed on our way, first through the sphere of the moon, then through the sphere of the fixed stars... until the time arrives when we can begin to work with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies on the spirit-germ of our future physical body. But, if we were to take this moral element up into the highest worlds, where we are to weave our future physical organism in its spirit-germ, this physical organism would turn out to be a monstrosity. For a certain length of time between death and a new birth, the human being must be separated from what constitutes his moral quality. Indeed, he leaves his moral quality behind in the moon sphere.

It is an actual fact that, when leaving the moon sphere, we leave our moral and immoral human being in the moon sphere and enter into the pure sphere of the Gods, where we can weave our physical body.

I must now revert again to the difference between the times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha and those following it, including the present. The older initiates made very clear to their pupils—and through them to all mankind of the civilization of that time—that, in order to be able to find the transition from the world which I called in my book Theosophy the soul-world, and which we really experience in its entirety while still in the moon sphere, into the world which I called the spirit-land, the human being must develop on earth the feelings that enable him to be led upward by the spiritual Sun Being, after having left behind the whole bundle of his moral after-effects in the moon sphere.

All that history relates to us in regard to the first three Christian centuries, and even the fourth century, is fundamentally a falsification; for in those centuries Christianity was quite different from the thing described. It was something quite different for the reason that within it there held sway the conception which came from understanding the ancient science of initiation. From this wisdom of initiation it was known that, in the life after death, the sublime Sun Being led the human being out of the moon sphere, after he had left behind his moral bundle, and, on his return, led him back again into the moon sphere. This gave the human being the strength—which he could not have had through himself—to make this moral being a part of himself, at a certain time before his birth, in order to fulfill his destiny on earth within his soul, and to prevent it from entering his body. For otherwise, the human being would be born a monstrosity and be utterly diseased in his body. This moral bundle had to be taken over again in the moon sphere, during the descent, in order that it should not enter into the body.

Those initiates who were living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even in the three or four centuries following thereafter, said to their pupils: Previously the sublime Sun Being was only above in the spiritual worlds. But, as mankind progressed, the ego consciousness has become so bright upon the earth that it becomes all the more obscured in the spiritual world. In other words, the brighter our ego consciousness is by means of the physical body only, here below on the earth, the darker is it above. The human being would no longer come into contact with the Sun Being, he would not find through his own power the transition after death from the moon sphere to the higher spheres, had the Christ not descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being whom the human being met formerly after death only in the spiritual world has now descended; He has lived here upon earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha; and now the human being can establish a relation to Him according to the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. In this way the human being takes strength from the earth with him, strength given to him by the Christ here on this earth, which enables him to leave behind in the moon sphere his moral being which he creates within himself and to proceed to higher spheres, there to work on the spirit-germ of his physical body. It also gives him the strength on his descent through the moon sphere to take up his karma again of his own free will, take up the after-effects of his good and evil deeds. In the course of historical evolution, we have become free human beings. But the reason we have become such is that the Christ force we have acquired has enabled us through free inner strength to take over our karma on our descent through the moon sphere. No matter whether we like this or do not like it here on earth, we do this at the stage I have described, if we have become true Christians on earth.

I have been endeavoring, my dear friends, to show you a little of the way in which the modern science of initiation can see into worlds which we might call the concealed aspects of human existence, to show you how really everything pertaining to the human being can be elucidated only as we are able to see into these concealed aspects. And at the same time I tried to show you in connection therewith what the Christ Impulse means to mankind of the present time; for we will have constantly to revert to it. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we cannot be a whole human being, unless we find the way to this Christ Impulse. Therefore it is necessary that Anthroposophical spiritual science shed light more and more upon the Christ Impulse in the right way. For the manner in which light was shed on the Christ Impulse in the past, when man's consciousness was obscured, would, if continued, deprive a large part of mankind—just think of the Orientals, think of the inhabitants of other continents—of the possibility of embracing Christianity. But that Christianity which is rooted deeply in Anthroposophical spiritual science will actually—if once the essence of spiritual science, as it is here intended, is understood thoroughly—be eagerly grasped particularly by the Orientals, who are endowed with an ancient spirituality, even though it is in decadence.

In this way only can that peace prevail on earth which must proceed from the soul and spirit of men, and which is so indispensable to the earth, as every impartial person feels today. We shall have to be much more convinced of the fact that all present-day thinking concerning outer institutions is really worthless, and that it is very necessary on the other hand, to appeal directly to human souls. But we can appeal to the souls only if we are able to say something to them about the true home of the soul, about the experiences of the human being that lie beyond his physical existence, in those states of consciousness I have been describing to you today. Even if those states of consciousness do not exist during the earth life, their effects do exist. Oh, my dear friends, the one who has insight into life sees in the countenance of every human being a reflection of cosmic destinies which the individual has experienced between death and a new birth!

I have described to you today how destiny—whether one has become a man or a woman—can be understood by means of the cosmos, even how the color of the eyes and hair can be understood only when we can look into cosmic existence. Nothing in this world is comprehensible unless it can be understood by means of the cosmos. The human being will feel himself to be truly a human being only when we can inform him through true spiritual knowledge of his relation with that which is back of the sensuous-physical existence. Even though the human beings on earth are not yet aware of it, mankind unconsciously thirsts for such a knowledge. What is developing convulsively today in all domains, be it the domain of the spiritual, the externally juridical, or the economic life, all is ultimately a result of the spiritual. Only as the human being learns again to know of his relation with extra-physical existence, can all this be transformed from forces of decadence into upward moving forces. For physical existence is meaningless unless seen in connection with super-physical existence. The physical human body becomes significant only then when we can see it, so to speak, as the confluence of all those sovereign forces that are woven between death and a new birth. This is the tragic character of materialistic knowledge of the world that, in the final analysis, it does not know matter itself. We lay the human body upon the dissecting table; we examine it most carefully as to its tissues and its individual physical component parts. This is done in order to acquire a knowledge of matter. But we do not learn to know it in this way, for it is the product of spirit, and only as we are able to trace it back to those stages where it is woven out of spirit do we know it. Human beings will comprehend precisely this physical-material existence only when their souls are led cosmically into the realm of soul and spirit.

If we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that we should comprehend more and more our connection with the spirit-soul realm of the cosmos, we then become true Anthroposophists. And you, my dear friends, will surely not ridicule me when I say that the world is in need today of true Anthroposophists who will bring about an ascent for humanity through that consciousness which results from experiencing the spiritual, even though at first we should only grasp it as a reflection and not ourselves have attained to clairvoyant knowledge. We need not be clairvoyant in order to work beneficently after we possess spiritual knowledge. Just as little as a person needs to know what constitutes meat when he is eating it and it nourishes him, just as little does a person need to be clairvoyant in order to be efficacious through his work and through his whole association with the life of the higher worlds. If we accept spiritual science before we are clairvoyant, it is as though we were consuming it. Fundamentally, clairvoyance adds nothing to what we can become for the world through spiritual knowledge. It satisfies merely our knowledge. This knowledge must, indeed, exist. Of course, there have to be people who examine the composition of meat, but this knowledge is not required in order to eat. Likewise there must be clairvoyant persons today who can investigate the nature of man's connection with the spiritual world; but, in order to bring about that which is essential to mankind, it is necessary that we be healthy human souls. If they are informed of the science of the spirit, they will sense the digestive power of the soul nature; they will appropriate this spiritual science, digest it, and assimilate it into their work. And this is what we need today throughout the civilized world: external human work which is spiritualized through and through in the right and true sense.

Appendix

In connection with this lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave on November 5, 1922, in The Hague, he addressed the members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following words:

“And now, my dear friends, after these explanations permit me to add some remarks to today's lecture which are, to a certain degree, connected with the lecture itself. Pardon me for speaking of my own anxieties. These anxieties of my own, to be brief, have to do with the possibility of being able to go on with the building of the Goetheanum, in Dornach.

My dear friends, the fact is that since the building of the Goetheanum has been begun, and it is in large part completed, it must be continued to completion. What if this could not be done? This is bound up with the very fact that this Goetheanum is a symbol today for that spiritual movement which is to be born into the world through Anthroposophy. If there had never been a circle of friends through whom the beginning of the building of the Goetheanum could be brought to realization, then Anthroposophy would have had to find some other avenue of expression. Today the building of the Goetheanum cannot simply be discontinued without damage. And it is this, my dear friends, that weighs heavily on my soul; for, if the results of what I have said in this regard remain the same as they have thus far, it will not be months, but only weeks for the moment to arrive when we shall come to a complete stoppage in Dornach.

Naturally, I cannot make such a statement without remembering with heartfelt gratitude that in this very country individual friends have made sacrifices in a most devoted manner for what has been accomplished thus far in building the Goetheanum. My thanks for this are profound and heartfelt, and I know that many of our friends have done their utmost in this matter. This I must, naturally, presuppose. But, on the other hand, I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize the fact—without wishing to criticize anything—that the worry weighs heavily on my soul over the fact that we shall not be able to continue with the building of the Goetheanum unless we receive abundant help on the part of a greater number of our friends, and that this Anthroposophical Movement, which has been active these last years at all possible points of the periphery, will tie without a center.

Therefore, my dear friends, I cannot but tell you what is at stake. Anthroposophy as such has spread very much in the world; and I assure you that, even here in Holland, the dear friends present today are only a very small part of the people who are in touch with Anthroposophy. We can judge this by the sale of our literature and we can see how, in many ways, Anthroposophy has become important to many persons.

On the other hand, something different can be observed—we can voice this without malice, even though we may create an impression of malice—we know that, on the other hand, the enemies of truth have made their appearance. And these, my dear friends, are well organized. Among them exist strong international ties. The enemies of Anthroposophical work are as well organized as our Anthroposophical Movement—pardon me for saying this—is badly organized! This is something we have yet to realize.

How is it that we have to say today that, in a few weeks, the Goetheanum may be without any means for its progress toward completion? You may have everything possible on the periphery—Waldorf Schools, etc.—all this is naturally void of power if there is no center. But for this center the right heart is lacking among the membership!

Let it be understood that I am not saying that this or that person is not giving all he has or, perhaps, does not have; it is not in the least my intention to go into such details. But, if our souls possessed the same enthusiasm for Anthroposophy which our opponents of all shades have today for anti-Anthroposophy, we should be very differently established. Then it would not be so difficult to collect the pennies, trivial in comparison with the wealth of the world—in spite of the impoverished world of today—to finish the Goetheanum. But the right heart for this is really lacking, my dear friends; yet we cannot do otherwise than to save this symbol in Dornach from failure. It can be saved from ruin if we can combine a strong enthusiasm with all our longing for Anthroposophical knowledge.

In these remarks I am not referring to any individuals. But, on the whole, the prevalent spirit within our circles is to start things with great apparent enthusiasm. The building of the Goetheanum was begun with enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has vanished, particularly in those who in the beginning displayed great enthusiasm. And these very persons have left this problem of going on to me alone. It has in many instances become characteristic, my dear friends, that people cannot remain enthusiastic; that something flares up—and those who shared in this sudden blaze leave the fire and do not keep feeding it. The warmth of heart dies out. And then come those worries. And, in view of the seriousness of the matter, my dear friends—why should I not call attention in this intimate circle to such a thing? The seriousness of the cause demands it. On the other hand there really exists the necessity to extend spiritual science as such. Be assured, a heavy responsibility rests on the one who is able to state at all that it depends on the conditions of the cosmos, in one way or another, whether a human being becomes a man or a woman, whether he has blue eyes and blond hair or brown eyes and black hair. I mention this only as an example. A statement like this cannot he made carelessly. It requires years of research before one arrives at the point of making such a statement, for one who does this without being conscious of his responsibility will usher disaster into the world. But it is necessary today, on the one hand, to extend this spiritual science; on the other hand, my dear friends, new cares spring up because of the developments in the periphery, when the enthusiasm does not persist, through the very fact that these things are there. New establishments are founded, and they have to be cared for. The worries have to be borne. These two things do not coincide unless the Society, as bearer of the Anthroposophical Movement, is a reality built on firm inner ground. Societies, that are realities built on firm ground, can surely accomplish great things! But it is imperative to observe that along with the need to deepen spiritual science more and more, there moved along, at the same time, an increasingly badly organized Society, a will displaying less and less enthusiasm for making the Society itself an instrument.

And the first thing for which I repeatedly beg our friends, since we are confronted by urgent necessity, is that they shall make the Society into a living, active being in the world.

This is highly essential, my dear friends. It is greatly to be desired that the center in Dornach shall not crumble, but that friends shall be found who will give us help.

There is, for instance, the wonderful possibility of gradually achieving significant results in the field of medicine, of therapeutics through the discoveries of remedies, based on spiritual science. But all this depends on the existence of the center in Dornach. The moment the Dornach center breaks down everything breaks down, and it is this that I want our friends to be conscious of, for it has in many instances disappeared from their consciousness. And I must say, it has really become an extremely heavy burden for me, a crushing burden.

I am saying this for the reason, my dear friends, that you may find the opportunity to think with me about these things in your good heart; for these things have to be thought out.”

In today's additional consideration of the discussions that I was able to give here in Stuttgart this time, I will deal with adding a few things to what has already been said, in order to round it off, so to speak.

To begin with, it will be best if I pick up from where I left off in yesterday's public lecture. There we saw how the human soul, in its threefold nature, has relationships with the bodily and the spiritual. And we emphasized in particular that the feeling element of the soul has relationships with the body towards the respiratory life, that, so to speak, what is breathing in the body, and in a comprehensive sense, with all its ramifications and ramifications, is the tool for the emotional life. On the other hand, we have been able to show that the life of feeling has a special relationship to everything that is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world. But what is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world is also, at the same time, everything that is contained in the world to which we belong with that part of our being that passes through birth and death, the world that we live through between death and a new birth, the world in which we naturally also live between birth and death. This world is hidden by sense perception and ordinary thinking, that is, by the life of the body. So that what corresponds to breathing and feeling actually points us to the great, all-encompassing world into which we ascend when we pass through the gate of death, the world to which we belong when we no longer use the tool of our bodily life. The tool of our bodily life, so to speak, fetters us to earthly existence. From various lectures given over many years and recorded in the cycles, you know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it is not tied to earthly life, but rises into the cosmos to live in the spiritual worlds of that cosmos, in that which can be called the spiritual world. Is it not to be expected that precisely the emotional life, which corresponds bodily to breathing, spiritually to the inspired world, the emotional life with the breathing life, is in a much, much more comprehensive relationship to the cosmos, to the great world, to the macrocosm than our narrowly limited perception and imagination? What do we perceive in the end? We perceive a very small part of the world; a small part of the world plays into our physical existence between birth and death through our eyes and ears. Even if we are people who enjoy looking around and perceiving everything through our senses and then processing it in our imaginations, it is still a small part of the world that plays into our existence.

But what happens when we turn from the life of the nerves, to which the life of thinking belongs, to the life of breathing, to which the life of feeling belongs? A concept that is capable of elevating our feelings can be given to us by what can approach our soul in the following way: You all know that the sun rises at a certain point in spring. At the beginning of spring, on March 21, the sun rises in the morning at a certain point. But this point is not the same at all times, you know that. In ancient times, the sun rose at the beginning of spring in the constellation of Taurus, then in the constellation of Aries; the vernal point thus moves on and has now entered the constellation of Pisces. If you turn to what I mean now, you are therefore looking at the progression of the vernal point through the zodiac. The vernal point itself moves on in the zodiac. When a point in a circle moves on, it must of course arrive at the same point again after a certain time. Now, ordinary astronomy is familiar with this progression of the vernal point and its return to the same point in the zodiac. That is to say, if in a particular year of the past the vernal point was in Aries, the next year it will be a little further along, and so on, and then it will have moved out into Pisces and so on, and after a certain time it will be back in Aries again. The time it takes the vernal point to move through the entire zodiac is approximately 25,900 years, about 26,000 years. This number of 26,000 years expresses a measure of the outer cosmos: the measure by which the vernal point progresses. In this number, we have, so to speak, the means by which the course of the sun is measured in the cosmos. We could say, approximately. If we hold on to this number, we can add another consideration, which we now want to make.

A person breathes in and out, taking a certain number of breaths in one minute. We do not take the same number of breaths at every age between birth and death, but there is a certain average number of breaths per minute that a man of average strength can take. That is eighteen breaths in one minute. Now let's calculate how many breaths a person takes in the course of a twenty-four-hour day. First, we have to multiply the number of breaths taken in one minute by sixty, which gives us one thousand and eighty. Then we multiply that by twenty-four, which gives us the number of breaths a person takes in one day, including night and day: 25,920 breaths. It is remarkable that if we count the breaths of a person over the course of a twenty-four hour day, we get the same number as when we calculate the number of years that result from the advance of the sun in the great cosmos. The number of years that the equinox advances in fits and starts corresponds to the number of times that a person breathes in one day. The same number! Just think how wonderfully true that biblical saying is: that the wisdom of the world has ordered everything according to measure and number. — A number that is inscribed in the cosmos is reflected in our twenty-four-hour breathing. We can therefore also take this number into consideration, and we will find that human breathing is related to the great world in the way that was revealed yesterday by spiritual science.

But now, in a sense, we are again looking at something that is also a breathing, because breathing is nothing more than a special case of the general world rhythm. The essential thing in what was meant by breathing yesterday is the rhythmic movement, the rhythm. Let us look at something that is quite similar to breathing, another rhythmic movement that we know from our spiritual scientific considerations. When we fall asleep, our ego and our astral body leave our physical body and ether body; when we wake up again, our ego and our astral body enter our physical body and ether body. I have often compared the peculiar behavior of the ego and the astral body, this going out and coming in into the physical and ether bodies, with breathing out and breathing in. Just as we breathe in and out the air in an eighteenth of a minute, so, in the course of twenty-four hours, we breathe in our ego and our astral body, as it were, by waking up, by falling asleep; by waking up again, we breathe them in again, and by falling asleep again, we breathe them out. It is only a more comprehensive breathing out and breathing in of our ego and astral body in the course of the twenty-four hours of an ordinary astronomical day. How very remarkable, something is breathing! Let us first disregard what is breathing. There is a definite rhythm, which represents a kind of slow breathing, with each breath lasting twenty-four hours. Now, you know that the Bible speaks of the patriarchal age, of seventy, seventy-one years. Of course, this does not mean that this is something different from the average age. Some people die very young, some live to be a hundred, even over a hundred years old, but the patriarchal age is meant to be something average. So that when we mean something average in terms of human age, we can speak of seventy to one hundred and one years. Let's work out how many days that is. If we calculate that, we would find out how many such great breaths we take in an earthly life, where we exhale and inhale the ego and the astral body over the course of twenty-four hours. Let's calculate that: we take about three hundred and sixty-five such breaths in a year, as many as there are days in a year. So in seventy years it is seventy times as much: that would be 25,550. But let us assume that we are calculating for seventy-one years, and then we come a little closer: that makes 25,915. So a person only needs to live a little over seventy-one years to reach 25,920 such breaths. This means that if a person lives to be a little over seventy-one years old, he has breathed his I and his astral body in and out 25,920 times; that is, as often as a person breathes in and out during the day. Think about it: the same number again!

So you see that we can regard human life as a day, and the individual day that we live through as a breath: then our seventy-one to seventy-two year life is given by the number that is also the number of the advance of the vernal point, which is the number of breaths in one day. Our life is one great day, and the great Being at whose center we can imagine the Earth breathes out and in the I and astral body as often as we go out and in with our single breath. So our single life on Earth would be one day, one day of something. What is it a day of? If you multiply seventy-one by three hundred and sixty-five, you naturally get the year for the day of seventy-one years. If you count seventy-one years as one day and ask: What is one year of this day, it is three hundred and sixty-five times as much. But that is 25,920 years. That means, if we count our single life on earth with its 25,920 breaths, which are waking and sleeping, as one day, count a human life as one day, and see what year corresponds to this one human life with its 25,920 breaths: it is the orbit of the vernal point, 25,920 years! We get a wonderful numerical rhythm.

That is why I said: we get an idea that must be uplifting for our feelings, because we can feel that we are placed in the macrocosm through measure and number. Numbers reveal to us that which is true for us in the realization that what belongs to breathing, and therefore to the emotional life, is the inspiring world, the great world to which we belong not only between birth and death, but also in the time between death and a new birth and in repeated earthly lives. We are, as it were, in the bosom of the rhythm of our entire solar system, breathing in our individual breathing movements the great macrocosmic rhythm of our entire solar system. This is a thought that places us with certainty in the midst of the great life of our solar universe. In the course of time, people will have to make many more similar observations, and then they will be convinced that in this way they will again come to spirit-filled perceptions about the relationship between man and the universe. We need spirit-filled perceptions for our age and for the following ages in the sense that they are stimuli for our inner life, as was explained here the day before yesterday. In ancient times, it was the case that man's enlightenment came, so to speak, from outside. Today, this has been lost through the nature of the declining ages of humanity. We are now in an age in which, if humanity is not to descend into decadence, a development of the human soul from within must begin in an energetic way. And only he understands what our time needs who, as a necessity of earthly development, understands that spiritual life must take hold of the innermost part of the human soul from the fifth post-Atlantic period in which we live, into the time to which we are to develop further. What spiritual science says about this is not said out of some arbitrary idea or out of an agitative sentiment, but it is said out of the realization of the necessity of human development.

Now today we are once again looking at this human development from a slightly different point of view. Let us go back to the first post-Atlantic age, that is, the age immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe. The day before yesterday, after having done so from a different point of view on several occasions, we emphasized how, in this first post-Atlantean age, man was still related to that series of beings that we call archai or spirits of personality in the hierarchies. Spiritual life was still revealed in these ancient times of humanity because the age of life in those days was such that we can compare it to the present age between the fifty-sixth and forty-eighth year, as I explained the day before yesterday. Man had, so to speak, instruction from spiritual beings. How did these spiritual beings come to man? In those days, man did not look at nature in the same way as he does today. For man today, nature is a kind of mechanical order. Man today regards abstract, almost mathematical laws of nature as his ideal, an abstract order. Take the images that are spread out around you when you go out into nature. Compare what is out there with what is written in botanical and zoological textbooks about plants and animals. Compare these distorted, abstract ideas with life, and you can say: What is written in these books of botany and zoology is what is revealed to the human spirit today. Such botany and zoology, of which today's humanity is so tremendously proud, did not exist in that age. If we compare what modern botany, zoology and biology have to say about nature with the knowledge of nature that arose from the ancient way of knowing, we arrive at a different view. There was no botany or zoology of that kind in those days, but there was something else, something that is still very difficult for modern humanity to understand. It came from nature itself, and I would like to call what came out of nature: the light-filled, formed word. Just as we see nature today through our senses and minds, they did not see it that way, but nature sent them figures of light, and these figures of light also sounded, said something, expressed themselves about what they are. And every person could experience this atavistic clairvoyance in certain states of consciousness, whereby the light-filled, formed word came to meet him from nature; one could also say words, because a wealth of such figures came, speaking out of nature. The human being knew: You too belong to this world from which these words full of light come forth. You too belong there. But now you are here in nature, surrounded by minerals, plants and animals. You are in nature because you have an outer physical body; through this you belong to this nature. But nature lets the light-filled word sprout forth: you belong to it in your soul's nature just as your physical body belongs to the outer mineral, plant, and animal world. You were in this world of the light-filled, light-shaped word before your birth or conception, and you will be in it after your death. You will live in it again.

In the first post-Atlantean period, one could still see and feel an echo of the world in which one lives between death and a new birth by observing nature in certain states of consciousness. In the second post-Atlantean period, things were already somewhat different. The word was lost for these atavistic states. The figures no longer spoke themselves, but they were still there, light-filled figures were still there, only they had become mute. That which lay outwardly before the senses was felt as the darkness in this light-filled formation within, and one's own body was felt as a piece of the darkness. So that one could say: light and darkness! One's own body is ruled by darkness. By coming out of the light and going into darkness, he enters into earthly life through birth or conception; by going through the gate of death, he passes through the dark world back into the light. In the world there is a struggle between light and darkness, between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Thus Zarathustra, who was the teacher of this second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, spoke to his disciples. One does not understand what Zarathustrism means with its Ormuzd and Ahriman teachings if one does not relate it to the way people viewed the world at that time.

The situation had changed again in the third post-Atlantic period. If you look at the outward appearance, the light-filled figures had gradually disappeared in the third post-Atlantic period. But people still had the power to put themselves into an intermediate state between sleeping and waking, just as we put ourselves to sleep today. They only had to make a little effort. When sleeping, one does not need to make an effort, but in this different state, one had to make some effort. But if one made an effort, one could conjure up such a world of light around oneself, which now came from within and was similar to that which used to come from nature, from outside. So what was the actual progression from the second post-Atlantean cultural period to the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian period? What was the transition like? Well, in the second, in the Persian cultural period, people still saw the figures of light when they looked outwards and could say to themselves: Before my soul went through conception, it belonged to this world of light figures. In the third cultural period, this world of light no longer shone from the outside in, but the human being could, as it were, squeeze it out of himself; then he had conjured up out of his soul and in front of his soul what was there in the spiritual world before his birth or conception and what will be there in the spiritual world after his death. So that we can say: the third post-Atlantean period had the world of light as a soul experience. People had the world of light as a soul experience, so to a certain extent man had been pushed back from the external world more to his inner being. It was no longer the natural way for man to look at the outer world and see the world of light, that is, to see the spiritual world around him. Therefore, it had become necessary during this time to initiate a small circle of people in the manner of the Mysteries, so that they would be able to see the outer world of light again and bear witness to the fact that what was brought up from the depths of the soul was truly the same as that which lived in the spiritual realm.

Now came the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin one. In this fourth period, no more light came up when man put himself in a special state, as in the third period. The light no longer came, nor did that come up from the depths of the human being that would have been an echo of the soul's life before conception and after death. But there was still a certainty that the human being's inner being is filled with soul. This certainty came up. One still sensed something of what one had seen earlier when one inwardly brought the soul to see. One no longer saw the light, but one still felt the warmth of the light. That was the case in the Greco-Latin period. There we must say: the world of light was no longer experienced inwardly as a soul experience, but the soul itself was experienced as a soul experience.

But naturally this had to become weaker and weaker in the course of time. And how is the whole relationship expressed at all? It was expressed in the following way. We will have to look particularly at the Greeks if we want to understand the matter: the Greeks had, like the average person today, the consciousness of their body. But through what I have described, they also had the consciousness: the soul pervades the body. They felt the soul as invigorating, the body as it lives through. This feeling, which the Greeks still had, has been lost. The fact that history says nothing about the fact that this feeling has been lost today is only because we live in the age of materialism. No one really understands Homer, no one understands Sophocles or Aeschylus, if they do not read them with the feeling that the Greeks had a different spiritual experience than that of today's people. If one were to read Aeschylus with this feeling, one would provide different translations than those that are provided today and sometimes admired, and which, especially in the most intimate things, truly do not resemble Aeschylus. But the fact that it was so had a very definite consequence for the Greeks, namely that they felt the invigorating soul element in their bodies during the time between birth and death, and thus came to another realization: that body and soul actually belong together very intimately. Never in the development of humanity has this realization been as strong as in the Greek era. For in earlier epochs, which preceded the time of the Greeks, people actually always had the feeling that the soul belongs to the world of light, the world of the word, the world of the Logos, in which the human being lives before birth and after death. Now, in the materialistic age, it is the case that the human being no longer feels the soul at all. In Greek times, and to a lesser extent in Roman times, there was a sense of the intimate connection between body and soul. The Greeks regarded the body as the external form for the soul. Growth and decay of the body appeared to the Greeks as an expression of the growth and decay of the soul. The Greek loved the body as much as he loved the soul. This feeling, as it existed in the Greek, was not present in the same way in the past – as I have just explained – and is not present again today. But the consequence of this was the feeling that is so deeply expressed in the words put into the mouth of Achilles: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows.” The Greeks had to pay for the beautiful harmony they felt between body and soul with the fact that, if they were not members of the mysteries, any notion of how the soul fares in the spiritual world after death had completely disappeared. Now, the remarkable thing is that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a great thinker but not initiated into the mysteries, spoke in a grandiose way about the experience of the soul after death, as one could speak in those days if one was able to envision the intimate harmony between body and soul in the way of the Greek age.

And when in the Middle Ages, in the so-called scholastic philosophy, Aristotle was revived, the scholastics said: In philosophy, one must think about the soul as Aristotle thought. If one wants to know more about it, it can only come from faith. With mere human research, one cannot go further than Aristotle. — How far did Aristotle go, he who is so very much the philosophical expression of the Greek way of looking at body and soul? He really did arrive at what can be so beautifully expressed in the words of the recently deceased masterly Aristotle scholar Franz Brentano, who says: If a person has lost a limb, he can no longer make use of that limb; he is, as it were, no longer a whole person. If he has lost two limbs, he is even less of a whole person. If he has now lost his entire body – so says Aristotle and with him Franz Brentano – and is still a soul after death, which Aristotle does not deny, then he is in a state of incompleteness compared to the state in which he is between birth and death. He is not a complete human being. And that is indeed the true doctrine of immortality of Aristotle, the greatest thinker of the Greek world, that man is only here between birth and death a complete, a perfect human being. If he goes through the gate of death, he is only a piece of man; he is indeed immortal, but at the expense of no longer being a whole human being. This is indeed the price that Hellenism had to pay for its beauty and harmony, that it came to the age of man – you know, compared to the human age – where one could indeed sense the soul from within, but where one could not yet see the life of the soul in the spiritual world, where one had to say of the soul: it is no longer a complete human being after death. Only those who were initiated into the mysteries, that is, those who were endowed with powers of knowledge that went beyond the normal, were revealed what the soul experiences between death and a new birth. That is the great difference between Plato and Aristotle, that Plato was initiated into the mysteries and Aristotle was not. Therefore, Plato must be understood in a completely different sense than Aristotle, who came to the “Chimborasso of thought” but could not penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.

That is why those who had power in this age strove for something different from what one can achieve in normal human life. Who were the men who had the power, who were able to develop this power? Certainly, there was a great, significant world of initiation, spread by the mysteries here and there, filling the then cultural world; but these mysteries gave people that which Plato said lifted people above the mud of transience. Those who had power in this fourth post-Atlantean period were primarily searching for something in the soul that would enable them to participate in the spiritual world. According to the general karma of humanity, one normally had to wait until one was introduced to the mysteries in the sense of the initiation principle of that time. In Greece this was common practice. The Roman Caesars did not need that. The Roman Caesars, who gradually rose to dominate the world at that time, were able to use their power to be initiated into the mysteries.

And so we see that from the time of Augustus onwards, the Roman Caesars sought initiation simply through their power. They forced one priesthood or another to initiate them into the mysteries. So that in this fourth period a peculiar phenomenon can be observed: on the one hand we have the mystery principle, the mystery knowledge that was still there, but which gradually disappeared, gradually declined I have often described why this had to happen: because the Mystery of Golgotha took its place. On the other hand, the priests were forced to reveal their secrets to the Roman Caesars. Augustus was the first emperor to be initiated in the fourth post-Atlantic period; but his successors were also such initiates. They differed in their nature from the other initiates, who were initiated into the mysteries on the basis of moral qualities, namely, of moral development. The Roman Caesars were initiated on the basis of their power, in that they were able to force the priesthood to reveal their secrets to them. And so we see that even a successor of Augustus like Caligula was an initiate. But that is why a person like Caligula was familiar with the secrets of the spiritual universe. He was familiar with the fact that the impulses of this spiritual universe are revived in the soul, that the human ego is divine within the divine. That which was a sacred truth of humility for the initiated priests became a symbol of external world power for the Caesars. For what did a Caligula know? The others stared at the mythological figures of the gods that had come down to them from ancient times; they worshiped them. An initiate like Caligula knew what these gods meant. Above all, he knew that man belongs to the same world as his innermost being. From experience, Caligula knew that he belonged to the same world as those beings who have their images in these gods: Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, Apollo, Zeus. Caligula knew the secret of how he could commune with the gods of the lunar world in a sleep-like state. And it is not mere myth, but absolutely true, when it is said of Caligula that he was said to have associated in his sleep – but it is meant in another state of consciousness – with Luna, the moon goddess, and to have drawn from it nourishment for his sense of power. The world lives in me – he said to himself – for I am in it. By looking up at the gods, he saw himself as a god among gods. And the initiated Roman emperors meant it when they said that. The initiated priest knew how to enter the dwelling of the gods, and so the Roman Caesar forced himself into communion with the gods. “My brother Jupiter,” ‘My brother Zeus’: these were terms that Caligula in particular used again and again. And it was Caligula who once asked a tragedian which of them was greater, Jupiter or he, Caligula. And when the tragedian refused to answer that Caligula was greater than Jupiter, he had him flogged. These are not myths, these are historical facts. Hence the processions in which Caligula appeared before the people as Bacchus with 'thyrsus and ephhebe wreath', because he was aware that he could transform himself into those figures he knew as images of the gods. As Hercules he appeared with the club and lion skin, as Mercury with the Hermes wand, as Apollo with the corona and surrounded by choirs. Thus he appeared in order to instill in his people the awareness that he belonged to the gods and not to men. Such was the situation in those times, in which, one might say, the less favorable image of what was great in the Greek world was reflected in the Roman world. Of course, no one saw this better than a Caligula or other uninitiated emperors such as Commodus and others. Caligula once heard that a court case had taken place in which a judge sentenced a defendant to death. And when the matter was reported to him, since it was a special case, he said: “The judge could just as well have been sentenced to death, because he is worth just as much as the other.” This was how he viewed the moral state of his time. In Romanism, the opposite of Greek culture really appears. We no longer have any conception of the inner constitution of the Romans of the time of Caesar. But we must form a conception of it, for it is one of the roots from which our new, our fifth cultural epoch developed in the course of time.

Nero, too, was such an initiate, an initiated emperor. And precisely because of that, Nero was able to see something very special. Those who were initiated into the mysteries at that time knew that evolution had gone downhill to a certain point. It must go up again, but it must also become more spiritualized. That is really what is meant by the “Parousia,” by the new age, of which Christ Jesus also speaks.

If you compare what is alive in all these ancient cultural epochs up to the Greeks with later times, you will find that in these ancient cultural epochs, the soul-spiritual still reveals itself in a certain way through the physical. Then it ceases; it no longer reveals itself, and must now be sought through other means. If man wants to seek the spiritual and soul through what he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears, he can no longer find it. The Kingdoms of Heaven were once revealed through the bodies, but now they must arise in the spirit. The Kingdoms of Heaven must come near. This is the prophecy of John the Baptist. This is also what Christ Jesus meant by the Parousia. Only, in a certain sense, the theologians still stand to this day on the peculiar point of view that they believe that Christ meant by the Parousia that the earth must physically change. Blavatsky also criticizes the saying of Christ Jesus about the Parousia, the coming of the Kingdoms of Heaven, saying: “It was foretold that the Kingdoms of Heaven would come upon the Earth, but the grain has not improved; the grapes are no richer than before; no Heavens have come upon the Earth. All the people who speak in this way do not understand what is meant. What Christ Jesus meant, what John meant, had already come to pass: the Kingdom of Heaven had already descended upon the earth, in that the Christ had embodied Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. The event is to be understood as a spiritual one.

But an initiate like Nero, who knew this also from the mysteries, rebelled against it. He actually came to the delusion that he said to himself: Well, the world is in decline, so it shall perish! — And that is actually the psychological reason why Nero had Rome set on fire — which he really did — because he at least wanted to have the spectacle of the firebrand coming from there to burn the whole world. For he no longer thought much of this world. He did not want to admit the renewal that came through the mystery of Golgotha. He was a madman, but he was also a genius. Through his power, he had forced his initiation, so all his ideas were great, greater than those of others who did not have this prerequisite. In a sense, therefore, Nero was the first psychoanalyst, but a generous one, not a psychoanalyst like those who are called Freud or otherwise. For Nero idolized the physical, in that he, like the psychoanalyst, wanted to bring up what was spiritual and mental from the subconscious. Today's psychoanalyst says: What is down there in the soul? Disappointments, all kinds of wasted lives and so on, and then he says: the animalistic, basic sludge of the soul is down there, there is not much beauty down there. When you hear a psychoanalyst today, it is as if a person is describing a field that has just been fertilized and then cultivated with the seeds for the near future, but the person only sees the fertilizer, the manure. So the psychoanalyst sees only what is really dung in the soul, comparatively speaking, of course. He does not see the eternal in the soul, that which goes from life to life. This is why psychoanalysis is so dangerous: although it goes down to the subconscious, instead of the soul-spiritual essence of the soul, it sees the animalistic mud, as if one does not see the germinating seed but only the dung. Nero was a great psychoanalyst when he said: There is absolutely nothing in man but the animalistic primeval mud; everything else is mere appearance. It used to be different when people were still close to the divine, but now man consists only of this animalistic primeval mud; there is not even the slightest part that is chaste; everything in man is dissolute – so said Nero. One can see from this, one feels especially with those who had forced their way into initiation in this way, the materialization of the world. In these circles, the old, spiritual principle of initiation was generally translated into the material. When Commodus, who had made himself not only an initiate but also an initiator, wanted to give a symbolic blow to someone whom he himself had to initiate, he killed him on the spot. Instead of delivering him to spiritual death, that is to say, to raising him, he killed him! Thus Commodus, the initiator. This is an historical fact.

What occurred during this fourth period is the Mystery of Golgotha. And since the spiritual can no longer come from the external and material, the spiritual must be conquered again. The ascent within has received an impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. But we live in the fifth period, where this conquest has not yet flourished, where precisely those forces that emerged so grotesquely in Roman times are still strong in people and fight against the impulse of ascent that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha. And so it is understandable that in this fifth post-Atlantic period, the age of materialism in the way of thinking and feeling has mainly emerged.

The Mystery of Golgotha has already brought an impulse so that the great corruption of the Romans has somewhat diminished, but man has not yet brought it about that the spiritual-soul in his soul also naturally shines forth again. For this, further impulses are needed; for this, a more intensive, a more thorough becoming acquainted with the Christ Impulse is needed. This must become more and more familiar. And so, in the fifth cultural period, the normal human being no longer encounters the soul when they experience themselves. The sense of the soul, the inner experience of the soul, has disappeared for the normal human being. The human being experiences themselves in the experience of the body; they experience themselves as a body, as a natural body.

Self-awareness of the body! And that is why the soul has disappeared from science in particular, and is still disappearing more and more. This soul must be conquered again from within. The fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, which began around 1413-1415, is only just beginning. Humanity will have to develop further in it in such a way that the spiritual is truly conquered more and more within. But this is initially making itself felt in the realm of the soul through a peculiar phenomenon: the phenomenon that something in man himself is appearing materially that was not so material before: namely, thinking itself. Such thinking, as we have it in the fifth period, would have been impossible for the Greeks, and even more so for the Egyptians, Chaldeans or the ancient Persians. Behind the Greeks, imaginative ideas still existed to a certain extent, and even more so in older times; and anyone who can really read Aristotle will notice effective imaginations even in the dry Aristotle, because thinking was still more consciously taking place in the etheric body. Now thinking is completely drawn into the physical body, has become completely brain thinking, and then it takes on the abstract character of which our time is so proud. Thinking that becomes completely abstract is thinking that is really bound to matter, to the matter of the brain. And this thinking, it shows itself precisely in the most epoch-making impulses, which in turn must be deepened, otherwise thinking becomes more and more materialistic and materialistic. And as thinking becomes more and more materialistic, life must also become more and more materialistic. Fundamental ideas - that is the characteristic of our present fifth epoch, which should work as impulses, they only work as abstract ideas.

And there was a time when abstraction as a principle of life had reached its zenith. Everything is necessary – understand me correctly – I do not want to criticize, I am not speaking from the point of view of sympathy and antipathy, I am characterizing as one does scientifically. I do not want to criticize – nobody should think that – the fact that there was an epoch in which abstract world ideas celebrated their greatest triumph. That epoch was when three ideas were expressed in the most extreme abstraction: liberty, equality, fraternity. They were expressed in the most extreme abstraction. This is not said from a conservative or reactionary point of view, but to characterize the development of humanity. At the end of the 18th century, everything calls for freedom, equality, fraternity, not from the soul, but from the thinking brain. And this developed in the 19th century in such a way that we still feel it reverberating everywhere like a habit today. In the course of the nineteenth century, people became terribly accustomed to the abstraction of thinking and are content in the abstractness of thinking because it makes them feel so clever. They believe that in thinking they have truth and feel no need to immerse their thinking in reality. This must be learned again, to immerse oneself in reality; otherwise it remains with the declamation of abstract ideas that have no value for life.

This is the great disease of our time, the declaiming of abstract ideas that have no value for life. If someone says today that a time must come when the world offers the path to success to the hardworking, when the hardworking are given the right place, well, what could be better than this idea! Is it not a wonderful ideal: a free path for the brave! — Sometimes, in today's materialistic times, when one expresses such an ideal, one feels as if one were carrying the whole future in one's breast. But what use is such an abstract ideal if it means that one considers one's son-in-law or one's nephew to be the most capable? What matters is not that we recognize, express and proclaim an abstract ideal, but that we are able to immerse our souls in reality, to see through reality in its essence, to recognize, penetrate, experience and work with reality. Expressing beautiful ideas and enjoying expressing beautiful ideas will increasingly prove harmful. What must enter into our soul is love for reality, knowledge, and adaptation to reality. But this can only come about when people learn to recognize the whole of reality, for the reality of the senses is only the outer shell of reality. If someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet says, “That's the best way to shoe a horse's hoof,” does he have the whole of reality? No, only when he recognizes that there is magnetism in the horseshoe does he have the whole reality. But just as the person who knows nothing else to do with a magnet but to shoe a horse acts, so too is the person who wants to found an external natural science or political science, under the assumption that everything is only the visible world and can be grasped with concepts borrowed from the visible world. This is precisely the extreme abstraction, the harmfulness of abstract ideals. And one does not recognize this harmfulness because the ideals are true, because they are also good, but they are ineffective. They only serve human epistemological egoism, which feels lust in living in such ideals. But no world is ruled by that. At best, it governs a world as it has become in the first half of the 20th century.

One must surrender oneself to such feelings if one wants to understand our time more deeply. The soul life must come alive in the human being, which has emerged so gradually, as I have described, from our environment, from our observed environment. The ideas must become concrete and alive again. Brotherhood is a beautiful idea, but as an abstraction it means nothing. If, firstly, we know that the human soul lives in the body, through the body, on the physical plane here, that is, in a bodily-spiritual, spiritual-bodily way, and secondly, if we know that the human being is not only spiritual-bodily, but is truly a soul, and thirdly, if we that the soul is filled with spirits, and so, if one knows the soul as threefold and the human being as threefold, one knows the human being in his composition of body, soul and spirit: then one has begun to give concrete form to the abstract three ideas of brotherhood, freedom and equality. To say of man in general, of this abstract man, that he should live in brotherhood, freedom and equality, is nothing but a torrent of words. What is necessary is to acquire a living realization of the fact that man, inasmuch as he lives in the body in the physical world, needs a social order that is based on the foundation of real brotherhood, but that brotherhood can only be understood if one regards man as a body. That is the beginning of the right idea of brotherhood. Brotherhood has only one meaning if one knows that man is a trinity and that brotherhood is applicable to the bodily. Freedom: To understand this, one must know that man has a soul, because bodies can never become free. There is no institution by which bodies can become free; the development of mankind can only be such that souls become free. Freedom, when expressed as a general human idea, is an abstraction. Free souls in relation to fraternally living bodies is a concrete idea. People are equal in spirit. An old folk saying was even aware of this: after death, everyone is equal. It was based on the spirit. By living as spirits, people are equal here on earth, but speaking of equality only makes sense when speaking of this third part of the human being, the spirit. It must come to life, my dear friends, so that one can say: that which walks around here on earth in any order lives in body, soul and spirit. Evolution must progress in such a way that bodies live in brotherhood, souls in freedom, and spirits in equality. There is not enough time today to develop this further, but you will already notice today the very significant difference between abstract ideas of equality, freedom and fraternity and the concrete ideas permeated by knowledge, which are then applied to the right thing.

But what is the reason for the fact that one has become so abstract? Well, what has been lost to humanity is that which, relatively late, was still a mystery truth: that the human being consists of body, soul and spirit. Among the Greeks, it was still common to regard the human being as body, soul and spirit. With the first Church Fathers it was still a matter of course. That which lay in the decline of human development, which in turn needs an ascent from the Christ principle, was dogmatically established by the Council of Constantinople in the year 869 by abolishing the spirit. Forgive me for expressing it so grotesquely. It is only on the surface that what emerged in human consciousness through the circumstances I have described has been established. Since that time, it was no longer permissible to teach in theology that man consists of body, soul and spirit, but rather that man consists only of body and soul, as philosophy professors still teach today. And if some good Wundt or other professor of philosophy in our own time has no inkling that man is a trinity, but always talks of body and soul, then he does not know that he is only following the decrees of the Council of Constantinople of the year 869. He is completely unaware that his teaching is only a reproduction of this council decision. Yes, this “presupposition-free” science, if one knows its developmental history more precisely, sometimes has very strange presuppositions. The presupposition-free science of our present age in philosophy is in fact inconceivable without the Council of Constantinople, only the gentlemen do not know it.

What has been obscured, namely that man consists of body, soul and spirit, must be regained through spiritual science. Therefore, the first thing I tried to do, with full awareness, was to apply it symptomatically to our Central European, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, namely, to the structure of the human being into body, soul and spirit, as described in the book “Theosophy”. The whole book is built upon this. This had to be presented to humanity radically again and again; humanity had to be made aware of the threefold nature of man through evolution.

You see how, when you are grounded in spiritual science, everything is justified down to the last detail, but also how spiritual science is suited to giving us such ideas, such impulses of feeling and will, that can make us true co-workers in the right progress of the newer development of humanity. And I always wish that I could evoke a feeling that spiritual science must not remain a theory, must not remain a doctrine, that it must not remain something that is cultivated as a science, but that it can become a truly living, inner soul life. This seems to me much more important than the mere enrichment with concepts, which is of course also necessary, because if something is to be enlivened, it must first be grasped. We must have the concepts within us, but the concepts must not remain dead, they must come to life. Then spiritual science works in such a way that when it is grasped in reality, it stimulates the whole person. But then it is also necessary that the whole person tries to understand it perceptively and willfully. But when the whole person understands this spiritual science perceptively and willfully, then he can live accordingly in it. But then he must never run short of love for true knowledge and for humanity as it continues to develop. In our time, this love is still a tender little plant. And it is understandable, even if it is infinitely sad, when in the field of the spiritual-scientific movement, as we understand it, personal interests, sometimes not of a noble kind, still disfigure the tender little plant of love for the knowledge demanded by the times, celebrates its orgies precisely among those who do not approach spiritual science out of a pure longing for knowledge, who approach it in such a way that, if their vanity is not satisfied, their apparent love immediately turns into hatred. For only real love can conquer hatred; apparent love is even a producer of hatred.

If we feel this correctly, then we will also be able to cope with the phenomena to which I have already referred twice, with those phenomena that are looming so sadly over our Anthroposophical Society, in which we see that the strong haters arise precisely from the circles of the Anthroposophical Society. We will not overcome these things as long as we apply a principle of our materialistic time, as we are so fond of doing today: “I want to be left in peace!” — when we close ourselves off to things or do not want to call things by their right name. If numerous defamatory writings are now appearing, nothing is achieved by taking these defamatory writings so seriously that one refutes the individual sentences. For gentlemen such as those who are now writing do not care whether they put this or that as a proposition. To such a gentleman, for example, who had to be rebuffed when he submitted a work that could not be published by us, who felt offended in his ambition as a result, who, while he then became an enemy, to whom one must say: What you write is simply nonsense, you know better yourself; you write all this because your writing has been rejected. That is the truth. If one understands how to serve spiritual science, it is not important to refute all these things in detail as inventions and fabrications, but rather to show in its true light the person who has belonged to the spiritual-scientific movement in appearance and then afterwards does such things as many are now beginning to do, and more will be done.

Or there is someone — as I told you a few days ago — who wanted to become a great painter, but tried it by begging to be allowed to learn; but when every effort was made to help him, he wanted to know everything better. He thought you didn't become a great painter by learning, but by declaring that you were a genius! If you then have the misfortune not to become one, and, despite being given teachers, you can't learn to paint, but only make a mess of things, and if others are not able to recognize the mess as great paintings, then you come and say that it is the fault of the exercises. You cure such a person in the right way by telling the truth. It must not appear as if spiritual science were endangered and things were not being corrected.

Things will fulfill themselves karmically. The right thing should also be done in many other details in our circles, as it has been done on important points of principle. Consider that since 1911 all ties with Mrs. Besant's Theosophical Society have been cut, and that England's war against Germany did not begin until 1914. This is something where it may be said: the Anthroposophical Society has acted prophetically. There is a lot of defamation in general – this is of course not directed against the English people, but against the defamers who today abuse the nationality principle in this way – but defamation against all better judgment, as Mrs. Besant defames our Anthroposophical Society and me, is a rarity. And after we first made the book “The Great Initiates” popular in Germany and staged Schure's plays, we now have to experience being attacked by Schure in the most impossible way. These are things that, to a certain extent, take place in the wide open spaces. But enemies are also gradually emerging in the narrow spaces.

The anthroposophist must acquire a little foresight and a little will to see what is happening and what will come. One acquires this foresight by taking seriously the motto of our Anthroposophical Society, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, even if it is correctly placed as a motto at the beginning. The one who is able to grasp this deeply enough, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, will take the right position.

With this, my dear friends, I must bid you farewell for this time. I hope that our meeting this time can be the starting point for good cooperation in the spirit, even if we cannot be together physically. Let us try to think, feel and will in the spirit of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then we will work together properly.