The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In various and complicated ways, we have already seen that the human being can only be understood within the context of the entire universe, out of the whole cosmos. Today we will consider this relationship of the human being to the cosmos from a rather simpler standpoint in order to bring the subject to a certain culmination in later lectures.

The most immediate part of the cosmos surrounding us is, to begin with, what appears to us as the physical world. But this physical world actually comes to meet us as the mineral kingdom, at least it confronts us only there in its intrinsic, primal form. Considering the mineral kingdom in the wider sense to include water, air, the phenomena of warmth and the warmth ether, we can study within the mineral kingdom the forces and the essential being of the physical world. This physical world manifests its workings, for instance, in gravity and in magnetic and chemical phenomena. In reality we can only study the physical world within the mineral kingdom. As soon as we come to the plant kingdom, the ideas and concepts we have formed for the physical world are no longer adequate. In modern times no one has felt this truth as intensely as Goethe.¹⁵ As a relatively young man he became acquainted with the plant world from a scientific point of view and sensed immediately that the plant world must be understood with a very different kind of thought and observation than is applicable to the physical world. He encountered the science of plants in the form developed by Linnaeus.¹⁶ This great Swedish naturalist developed botany by observing, above all, the external and minute forms to be found in the individual species and genera. Following these forms he evolved a system in which plants with similar structural characteristics are grouped into genera, so that the various genera and species stand next to each other in the same way as the objects of the mineral kingdom are organized. Goethe was repelled by this aspect of the Linnaean system, by this grouping of individual plant forms. This, said Goethe to himself, is how one observes the minerals and everything of a mineral nature. A different kind of perception must be used for plants. In the case of plants, said Goethe, one would have to proceed in the following way: Here, let us say, is a plant which develops roots, then a stem, then leaves on the stem, and so forth (drawing 1). But it does not always have to be that way. For example, Goethe said to himself, it could be like this (drawing 2):

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Here is the root—but the force that in the first plant (drawing 1) began to develop right in the root is held back here (drawing 2), still enclosed in itself, and therefore does not develop a slender stem that immediately unfolds its leaves but a thick bulbous stem instead. In this way the forces of the leaves go into the thick stem structure and very little remains over to start new leaves or, with time, blossoms. Or again, it may be that a plant develops its roots very sparingly; some of the forces of the roots are left. Such a development would look like this (drawing 3):

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Then there would be few stalk and leaf starts developing from the plant. All these examples are, however, inwardly the same. In one case the stem is slender and the leaves strongly developed (drawing 1); in another (drawing 2), the stem becomes bulbous and the leaves grow sparingly. The basic idea is the same in all the plants but the idea must be kept inwardly mobile in order to be able to move from one form to the other. Here I must create this form: weak stem, distinct leaves, concentrated leaf force (drawing 1). With the same idea I get a second form: concentrated root force (drawing 2). And again with the same idea I find another, a third form. And so I must create a flexible, mobile concept, through which the whole system of plants becomes a unity.

Whereas Linnaeus set the different forms side by side and observed them as he would observe mineral forms, Goethe, by means of mobile ideas, wanted to grasp the whole system of plant growth as a unity—so that he slipped out of one plant form, as it were, into another form by metamorphosing the idea itself. This kind of observation with mobile ideas was, in Goethe, doubtless the initial impulse toward an imaginative way of observing. Thus we may say that when Goethe approached the system of Linnaeus, he felt that the usual object-oriented way of knowing, although very useful when applied to the physical world of the mineral kingdom, was not adequate for the study of plant life. Confronted with the Linnaean system he felt the necessity for an imaginative means of observation.

In other words, Goethe said to himself: When I look at a plant it is not the physical that I see or, at any rate, that I should see; in a manner of speaking, the physical has become invisible, and I must grasp what I see with ideas very different from those applicable to the mineral kingdom. It is extraordinarily important for us to appreciate this distinction. If we see it in the right way we can say that in the mineral kingdom nature is outwardly visible all around us, while in the plant kingdom physical nature has become invisible. Of course, gravity and all the other forces of physical nature are still at work in the plant kingdom; but they have become invisible while a higher nature has become visible—a higher nature that is inwardly mobile all the time, inwardly alive. What is really visible in the plant is the etheric nature. And we are wrong if we say that the physical body of the plant is visible. The physical body of the plant has actually become invisible. What we see is the etheric form.

How then does the visible part of the plant really come into being? If you have a physical body, for instance, a quartz crystal, you can see the physical in an unmediated way. But with a plant you do not really see the physical, you see the etheric form. This etheric form is filled out with physical matter; physical substances live within it. When the plant loses its life and becomes carbon in the earth you see how the substance of physical carbon remains. It is contained in the plant. We can say, then, that the plant is filled out with the physical but dissolves the physical through the etheric. The etheric is what is actually visible in the plant form. The physical is invisible.

Thus the physical becomes visible for us in the mineral world. In the world of the plants the physical has already become invisible, for what we see is really the etheric made visible through the agency of the physical. We would not, of course, see the plants with our ordinary eyes if the invisible etheric body did not carry within it little granules (an overly simplified and crude expression, to be sure) of physical matter. Through the physical the etheric form becomes visible to us; but this etheric form is what we are really seeing. The physical is, so to speak, only the means whereby we see the etheric. So that the etheric form of a plant is an example of an Imagination, but of an Imagination that is not directly visible in the spiritual world but only becomes visible through physical substances.

If you were to ask, what is an Imagination?—We could answer that the plants are all Imaginations, but as Imaginations they are visible only to imaginative consciousness. That they are also visible to the physical eye is due to the fact that they are filled with physical particles whereby the etheric is rendered visible in a physical way to the physical eye. But if we want to speak correctly we should never say that in the plant we are seeing something physical. In the plants we are seeing genuine Imaginations. We have Imaginations all around us in the forms of the plant world.

But if we now ascend from the world of plants to that of animals, it is no longer sufficient for us to turn to the etheric. Here we must go a step further. In a sense we can say of the plant that it nullifies the physical and makes manifest the being of the etheric.

Plant: nullifies the physical and manifests the being of the etheric.

But when we ascend to the animal, we are not allowed to hold onto the etheric; we must imagine the animal form with the etheric now also nullified. Thus we can say that the animal nullifies the physical (the plant does this too) and also nullifies the etheric: the animal manifests that which can assert itself when the etheric is nullified. When the physical is nullified by the plant the etheric can assert itself. If then the etheric too, is only a filling, granules (again, a crude expression), then the astral, which is not within the world of ordinary space but works in ordinary space, can make its being manifest. Therefore we must say that in the animal the being of the astral is made manifest.

Animal: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, and manifests the being of the astral.

Goethe strove with all his power to acquire mobile ideas, mobile concepts, in order to behold this fluctuating life in the world of the plants. In the plants the etheric is before us because the plant, as it were, drives the etheric out onto the surface. The etheric lives in the form of the plant. But in animals we must recognize the existence of something that is not driven to the surface. The very fact that a plant must remain at the place where it has grown shows that there is nothing in the plant that does not come to the surface and make itself visible. The animal moves about freely. There is something in the animal that does not come to the surface and become visible. This is the astral in the animal, something which cannot be grasped by merely making our ideas mobile, as I explained previously, by merely showing how we move from form to form in the idea itself. This does not suffice for the astral. If we want to understand the astral we must go further and say that something enters into the etheric and is then able, from within outward, to enlarge the form—for example, to make the form nodular or tuberous. In the plant you must always look outside for the cause of the variation in form, for the reasons why the form changes. You must be flexible with your idea. But the merely mobile is not enough to comprehend the animal. To comprehend the animal you have to bring something else into your concepts. If you want to understand how the conceptual activity appropriate for understanding animals must differ from that for plants, then you need more than a mobile concept capable of assuming different forms; the concept itself must receive something inwardly, must take into itself something that it does not contain of itself. This something could be called Inspiration in the forming of concepts. In the organic activity that takes place below our breathing we remain in the activity, so to speak, within ourselves. But when we breathe in, we receive the air from outside; so too if we would comprehend the animal we not only need to have mobile concepts but we must take into these mobile concepts something from the “outside.”

Let me explain the difference in another way. If we really want to understand the plant, then we can remain standing still, as it were; we can regard ourselves, even in thought, as stationary beings. And even if we were to remain stationary our whole life long we would still be able to make our concepts mobile enough to grasp the most varied forms in the plant world. But we could never form the idea, the concept of an animal, if we ourselves could not move about. We must be able to move around ourselves if we want to form the concept of an animal. And why?

When you transform the concept of a plant (drawing 1) into a second concept (drawing 2) then you yourself have transformed the concept. But if you then begin running, your concept becomes different through the very act of your running; you yourself must bring life into the concept. That infusion of life is what makes a merely imagined concept into an inspired concept. When it is a plant that is concerned, you can picture yourself inwardly at rest and merely changing the concepts. But if you want to think a true concept of an animal (most people do not like to do this at all because the concept must become inwardly alive; it wriggles within) then you must take the Inspiration, the inner liveliness, into yourself, it is not enough to externally weave sense perceptions from form to form. You cannot think an animal in its totality without taking this inner liveliness into the concept.

This conception of the animal was something which Goethe did not achieve. He did reach the point of being able to say that the plant world is a sum total of concepts, of Imaginations. But with the animals something has to be brought into the concept; with the animal we ourselves have to make the concept inwardly alive. In the case of a plant the Imagination is not itself actually living. This can be seen from the fact that as the plant stands in the ground and grows, its form changes only as the result of external stimuli, and not because of any inner activity. But the animal is, in a manner of speaking, the moving, living concept; with the animal we have to bring in Inspiration, and only through Inspiration can we penetrate to the astral.

When, finally, we ascend to the human being we have to say that he nullifies the physical, the etheric, and the astral and makes the being of the I manifest.

Humanity: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, nullifies the astral, and manifests the being of the I.

With an animal we must say that what we see is really not the physical but a physically appearing Inspiration. This is the reason why, when the inspiration or breathing of a person is disturbed in some way it very easily assumes an animal form. Try sometime to remember some of the figures that appear in nightmares. Very many of them appear in animal forms. Animal forms are forms filled with Inspirations.

The human I we can only grasp through Intuition. Truly, in reality, the human I can only be grasped through Intuition. In the animal we see Inspiration; in the human being we actually see the I, the Intuition. We speak falsely when we say that we see the physical body of an animal. We do not see the physical body at all. It has been dissolved away, nullified, it merely makes the Inspiration visible to us; and the etheric body has likewise been dissolved away, nullified. With an animal we are actually seeing the astral body externally by means of the physical and the etheric. And with the human being we perceive the I or ego. What we actually see there before us is not the physical body, for it is invisible—and so too are the etheric body and the astral body. What we see in a human being is the I externally formed, formed in a physical way. And this is why people appear to visual, external perception in their flesh color—a color found nowhere else, just as the I is not found in any other being. Therefore, if we want to express ourselves correctly, we should say that we can only completely comprehend the human being when we think of him as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I. What we see before us is the I, while invisibly within are astral body, etheric body, and physical body.

Now, we really only comprehend the human being if we consider the matter a little more closely. What we see to begin with is merely the “outside” of the I. But the I is perceptible in its true form only inwardly, only through Intuition. But something of this I is also noticed by the human being in his ordinary, conscious life—that is, in his abstract thoughts which the animal does not have because it does not have an I. The animal does not have the ability to abstract thoughts because it does not have an I. Therefore, we can say that in the human form and figure we see externally the earthly incarnation of the I; and when we experience ourselves from within, in our abstract thoughts, there we have the I. But they are merely thoughts; they are pictures, not realities.

If now we consider the astral body, which is present although nullified, we come to the member that cannot be seen externally but that we can see if we look at a person in movement and out of their movements begin to understand their form. Here we need to practice the following kind of observation: Think of a small, dwarflike, thickset person who walks about on short legs. You will understand his movement if you observe his stout legs, which he thrusts forward like little pillars. A tall, lanky man with very long legs will move very differently. Observing in this way you will see unity between movement and form. You can train yourself to observe this unity in other aspects of human movement and form. For example, a man with a forehead sloping backward and a very prominent chin moves his head differently than someone with a receding chin and a strikingly projecting forehead. Everywhere you will see a connection between the form and movement of a human being if you simply observe him as he stands before you and get an impression of his flesh, of its color, and of how he holds himself when in repose. You are observing his I when you watch what passes over from his form into his movements and back again into his form.

Study the human hand sometime. How differently people with long or short fingers handle their tools. Movement passes over into form, form into movement. Here you are visualizing, as it were, a shadow of the astral body expressed through external, physical means. But, you see, as I am describing it to you now, it is a primitive inspiration. Most people do not think of observing people who walk about, as, for example, Fichte walked the streets of Jena.¹⁷ Anyone who saw Fichte walking through the streets of Jena could also have sensed the movement and the formative process which were in his speech organs and which came to expression particularly when he wanted his words to carry conviction although they were in his speech organs all the time. Inspiration, at least in an elementary form, is required in order to see this.

But when we see from within what we have thus seen from without, which I have told you is perceptible by means of a primitive kind of inspiration, what we find is, in essence, the human life of fantasy permeated with feeling. It is the realm where abstract thoughts are inwardly experienced. Memory pictures, too, when they arise, live in this element.

Seen from without the I expresses itself, for example, in the flesh color but also in other forms, for example, in the countenance. Otherwise we would never be able to speak of a physiognomy. If, for example, the corners of one's mouth droop when one's face is in repose, this is definitely connected karmically with the configuration of one's I in this incarnation. Seen from the inside, however, abstract thoughts are present here. The astral body reveals itself externally in the character of the movements, inwardly in fantasy or in the pictures of fantasy that appear to the human being. The astral body itself more or less avoids observation, the etheric body still more so.

The etheric body is really not visible from outside, or at most only becomes visible in physical manifestation in very exceptional cases. It can, however, become externally visible when a person sweats—when a person sweats the etheric body becomes visible outwardly. But you see, Imagination is required in order to relate the process of sweating to the whole human being. Paracelsus¹⁸ was one who made this connection. For him, not only the manner but the substance of the sweat differed in individual human beings. For Paracelsus, the whole human being—the etheric nature of the entire human being—was expressed in this way. Generally speaking, then, there is very little external expression of the etheric. Inwardly, on the other hand, it is experienced all the more, namely in feeling. The whole life of feeling, inwardly experienced, is what is living in the etheric body when this body is active from within, so that one experiences it from within. The life of feeling is always accompanied by inner secretion. To observation of the etheric body in the human being it appears that the liver, for instance, sweats, that the stomach sweats—that every organ sweats and secretes. The etheric life of the human being lives in this process of inner secretion. Around the liver, around the heart, there is a cloud of sweat, all is enveloped in mist and cloud. This needs to be understood imaginatively. When Paracelsus spoke about the sweat of the human being he did not say that it is only on the surface. He said rather that sweat permeates the whole human being, that it is his etheric body that is seen when the physical is allowed to fall away from sight. This inner experience of the etheric body is, as I have said, the life of feeling.

And the external experience of the physical body—this, too, is by no means immediately perceptible. True, we become aware of the physical part of human corporeality when, for example, we take a child into our arms. It is heavy, just as a stone is heavy. That is a physical experience; we perceive something which belongs to the physical world. If someone gives us a box on the ears there is, apart from the moral experience, a physical experience, too—a blow, an impact. But as something physical it is actually only an elastic blow, as when one billiard ball impacts another. The physical element must always be kept separate from the other, the moral element. But if we go on to perceive this physical element inwardly, in the same way we inwardly perceive the external manifestation of the life of feeling, then in the merely physical processes we experience inwardly the human will. The human will is what brings the human being together with the cosmos in a simple, straightforward way.

You see, when we look around us for Inspiration we find it in the forms of the animals. The manifold variety of animal forms is the basis for our perceptions in Inspiration. You will realize from this fact that when Inspirations are seen in their pure, original form, without being filled with physical corporeality, that these Inspirations can then represent something essentially higher than animals. And they can, too. But Inspirations that are present in the spiritual world in their pure state may also appear to us in animal-like forms.

In the times of the old atavistic clairvoyance people sought to portray in animal forms the Inspirations that came to them. The form of the sphinx, for example, was intended to create a picture of something that had been seen in Inspiration. We are dealing, therefore, with superhuman beings when we speak of animal forms in the purely spiritual world. During the days of atavistic clairvoyance—and this continued in the first four Christian centuries, in any case, still at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—it was no mere symbolism in the ordinary sense, but a genuine inner knowledge that caused men to portray, in the forms of animals, spiritual beings who were accessible to Inspiration.

It was in complete accordance with this practice when the Holy Spirit was portrayed in the form of a dove by those who had received Inspiration. How must we think of it today when the Holy Spirit is said to have appeared in the form of a dove? We must say to ourselves: Those people who spoke in this way were inspired, in the old atavistic sense. They saw him in this form as an Inspiration in that realm of pure spirit where the Holy Spirit revealed himself to them.

And how would the contemporaries of the mystery of Golgotha who were endowed with atavistic clairvoyance have characterized the Christ? Perhaps they had seen him outwardly as a man. To see him as a human being in the spiritual world they would have needed Intuition. And people who were able to see his I in the world of Intuition were not present at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. That was not possible for them. But they could still see him in atavistic Inspiration. They would, then, have used animal imagery, even to express Christ. “Behold the Lamb of God!” was true and correct language for that time. It is a language we must learn to understand if we are to grasp what Inspiration is, or to see, by means of Inspiration, what can become manifest in the spiritual world. “Behold the lamb of God!” It is important for us to recognize once again what is imaginative, what is inspired, and what is intuitive, and thereby to find our way into the language that echoes down to us from olden times.

In terms of the ancient powers of vision this way of language presents us with realities. But we must learn to express such realities in the way they were still expressed, for example, at the time of the mystery of Golgotha, and to feel that they are justified and natural. Only in this way will we be able to grasp the meaning of what was represented, for example, over in Asia as the winged cherubim, in Egypt as the sphinx, and what is presented to us as a dove and even as Christ, the Lamb. In ancient times Christ was again and again portrayed through Inspiration, or better said, through inspired Imagination.

• 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 16. Karl von Linne (Linnaeus) (1107–1778), Swedish naturalist, father of modern systematic botany.
• 17. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), German idealist philosopher. Important for the development of anthroposophy. See Rudolf Steiner: Truth and Science and The Riddle of Man.
• 18. Paracelsus (1493–1541), Renaissance alchemist, doctor, and philosopher. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Origins of Modern Science (Lecture Eight).

A wise man of ancient Egypt once spoke to a wise man of Greece words to this effect: You Greeks are a people who live only in the present, without taking history into account. You speak of what is happening immediately around you and give no thought to how the present has been taking shape since primeval times.

What did the Egyptian sage mean by this? He wanted to convey that the thoughts of the Egyptians were concerned with great problems of the cosmos, with the evolution of the earth through different forms, and that the Greeks, at most, had only pictures of these things in myth and saga. But in reality the Egyptian sage wanted to indicate what had resulted from the use made of the mummified human being, as I have been trying to explain in the last two lectures. The Egyptians set out to bring into the rhythm of inbreathing, impulses derived from certain Spiritual Beings for whom dwelling places had been created in the mummies. Let us try to picture as clearly as possible the significance of the mummy in days when Egyptian Initiation-culture was at its prime.

The mummy was the human being after the spirit-and-soul had departed from his physical form. While a man is alive, the forces active in his etheric organism, his astral organism and Ego, work within this form. The form is irradiated and permeated by the human “tincture” proceeding from the blood and the rest of the organism. The mummy was bare form, a form that could exist on earth only because the human being exists on earth. The Egyptian Initiates used this form—in which the soul and the spirit were not actually present—in order to acquire a power which, without the cult of the mummy, they could not have possessed.

We must try to picture times when the life of soul was quite unlike that of today. Before the Egyptian epoch, all the ideas and thoughts of man, all the experiences of his inner life, were imparted to him directly from the spiritual world. Even when immersed in his thoughts, therefore, he was living in revelations of the spiritual world. In the days of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian civilisations, all the thoughts of man were revelations from the spiritual world. No thoughts were stimulated in him by the external world, by plants, animals or other human beings. His life of soul was replete with thoughts proceeding from the Spiritual and they shed abundant light upon the world. Man lived in communion with the plants and animals and he also gave them names. But these names, too, came to him as revelations from the Gods. When, in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia, man gave a name to a flower, it seemed to him that a divine voice said to him distinctly: This is the name by which the flower is to be known. When he gave a name to an animal, he was conscious of hearing inwardly: This is the name by which the animal is to be known. In the civilisations of ancient India and ancient Persia, all such names came to men via their inner life of soul.

In the civilisation of ancient Egypt it was different. Clairvoyant experiences were now fading more and more into twilight and man no longer had clear perception of what was being revealed to him from the spiritual world. As a result he felt it increasingly necessary to live in communion with external nature, with the kingdoms of the animals, the plants and the minerals. But this, too, was out of his reach, for the time was not yet ripe. It was to come in the real sense only after the Mystery of Golgotha. The development of the human being in ancient Egypt had not reached the point where he could have lived in direct communion with the external world. He was obliged, therefore, to mummify the human body. For out of what was present in the mummified form from which the soul and the spirit had departed, he could receive enlightenment about nature around him, about the plants, the animals, the minerals. The first facts of knowledge about these kingdoms of nature came to man from the Spirits who spoke to him from the dwelling places provided for them on earth in the mummies. In the days when the Gods ceased to speak to man from the super-sensible world, he had recourse to helpers who were now able to live on the earth because the human form was preserved by mummification.

But the matter was full of complication. True, it would have been possible for the Initiates to receive from the Moon-Beings indwelling the mummies, enlightenment upon what should be introduced into human life and directives for the guidance and education of men. But because the necessary faculties of soul were still undeveloped, it would not have been possible, even for the Initiates, to obtain, without further measures, enlightenment on nature, on the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals, from the Moon-Beings in the mummies. And yet in this very domain the Egyptians were great. With the help of the culture connected with the mummies, they founded, for example, a wonderful art of medicine.

Of course, when a “clever” man of today interprets these things, he says: By preserving the mummies, the Egyptians obtained knowledge of the various organs and founded a science of anatomy, not merely of medicine. This, however, is an illusory conception. The truth is that purely empirical research and logical deliberation would have been no use to the Egyptians for their intercourse with the external world was not of this character; it was much more delicate, much subtler. But something was achieved by this careful preservation of the mummified form, namely, that the souls of the Dead were fettered for a time to their mummies.

Herein lies the dubious character of Egyptian culture, a perpetual reminder that it was a culture in decline, in degeneration, and cannot be said to represent a golden age in human evolution. It was a culture that encroached upon the super-sensible destinies of men, for human souls after death were fettered, as it were, to the preserved, mummified form. And whereas through the Spiritual Beings indwelling the mummies, directives for human affairs could be received, it was not possible to obtain enlightenment about nature, about the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms directly, but only indirectly, in this sense, that the Moon-Beings were able to communicate secrets of nature to the human souls still fettered to the mummies. And so it was from the human souls lingering with their mummies that the Initiates of Egypt, in their turn, obtained enlightenment about the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals. A strange atmosphere pervaded Egyptian culture. The Initiates said to themselves: Before death our bodies are not suited to receive enlightenment about nature; a science of nature is beyond our reach; this can come only later, after the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place; our bodies now are unsuitable. Nevertheless we need enlightenment. As human bodies now are, men can acquire knowledge about nature only after their death. They live in the midst of nature here, but they cannot use the body in order to form concepts about nature. After death, however, such concepts can arise. Let us therefore detain the Dead for a period in order that they may give us enlightenment about nature.

Thus a dubious element was introduced into the historical development of humanity through Egyptian culture. Chaldean culture held aloof in this respect and was, so to speak, a culture of greater purity.

Now all these things—modern science, of course, will regard them as so much fantasy, but modern science holds the same opinion of a great deal that is true—all these things were known, particularly, to men of Hebrew antiquity. Hence the aversion to Egyptian culture indicated in the Old Testament although, through Moses, many elements of Egyptian culture found their way into the events there recorded. The Old Testament indicates the kind of attitude that prevailed in regard to all those things I have described as typifying Egyptian development. The attitude of the Initiates in ancient Egypt was this. They said: In order to acquire the powers that are essential for the direction and education of men, we must create external means since inner means are no longer available to us. But we must also anticipate something that will arise only in the future, namely, a science of nature. And there is no other way of achieving this than by letting the Dead, whom we fetter to their mummies, impart it to us. Time ran on and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. By the fourth or fifth century A.D., the old constitution of the soul, with its pictorial conception of the world, had completely passed away. Indications were already appearing of an epoch when men were to form their concepts of outer nature from outer nature herself and moreover when they would be capable of doing so. The whole organisation of man was inwardly transformed. He felt more and more that his soul remained empty when he waited for thoughts and ideas to be revealed to him directly out of the spiritual world. And so he turned to the observation of external phenomena; he formed his concepts and ideas from observations and, later on, from experiments. The process was exactly reversed.

And now, once again it was a matter of acquiring by other means something that was no longer within the reach of man's own powers. More and more since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., it has been borne in upon men that a future must come when, despite the gift of intellect and the capacity to form thoughts and ideas about external nature through the intellect, this intellect must be spiritualized, so that thoughts will once again lead directly to Divine-Spiritual reality and the power inherent in such thoughts pass into the out-breathing. But this power has not yet come into existence. For the time being we have recourse only to the intellect that is bound up with the physical body.

Certain traditional conceptions which today have almost entirely died out and of which history knows nothing, were alive all through the early Middle Ages, from the fourth and fifth to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even later, although hidden in obscurity. Men now proceeded to make “mummies” of a certain kind, out of these conceptions—mummies that are analogous to those of Egypt although they take a different form and the analogy is not perceived. Modern humanity could have gained nothing by preserving the human form in the mummy, as was the custom in Egypt. What modern humanity preserved, was something different, namely ancient cults, mainly pre-Christian cults. And particularly since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the birth of a completely intellectualistic culture, ancient ceremonies and rites were preserved in all kinds of occult Orders. Wonderful cults of antiquity, occult rites and ceremonies have been continued in Orders and Lodges of different kinds. They are mummies, like the mummies of human beings in ancient Egypt, as long as they are not irradiated and quickened by the Mystery of Golgotha. There is a very great deal in these cults and ceremonies, but of the wisdom they contained in ancient times only dead elements have been preserved, just as the mummy preserved the dead form of man. And in many respects it is so to this very day. There are innumerable Orders where ceremonials and rituals of all kinds are enacted; but the life has gone out of them, they are mummified. Just as the Egyptian felt a kind of awe when he gazed at a mummy, so in modern man there is not exactly awe, but a feeling of uneasiness perhaps, when he comes across these mummified procedures in his civilisation. He feels them to be something mysterious, as the mummy was felt to be mysterious.

Now just as among the Initiates of Egypt there were some who acted unlawfully, who used the information conveyed to them by the Spirits indwelling the mummies to give false instruction and direction to humanity, so in the mummified ceremonies of many occult Orders an impetus is given to introduce a false twist here or there in the guidance of mankind. I told you that something made possible by mummification of the corpse, passed into the human being by way of the inbreathing. As I said yesterday, the Spiritual Beings needed by the Egyptians had no dwelling-place on earth. And this was provided by the mummies. Those Spiritual Beings and forces which by way of the out-breathing are to bear the inner configuration of man into the ether-world, find no paths in the everyday world, but they are able to move along paths created in these ceremonies—even though they are not understood and are mummified.

In the epoch of Egyptian civilisation, the Moon-Spirits found themselves homeless during the hours of the day. The Spirits who work in the out-breathing of man, these elementary Earth-Spirits who are to be the helpers of mankind today—they have no dwelling-place by night, but they slip down into these ceremonies and ritualistic enactments. There they find paths and are able to live. During the day it is still possible for these Beings to live as it were an honourable existence, for by day the human being thinks, and his intellectualistic thought-forms are passing outwards all the time with the breath as, driven through the cerebral fluid, through the spinal canal, it is then again exhaled. During the hours of night, however, when a man is not thinking, no thought-forms go forth from him; there are no little “ether-ships” upon which the Earth-Spirits can go forth into the world in order to impress man's form into the cosmos of ether. And so ways and directions for the Earth-daemons have been created through these mummified ceremonies. What is contained in all kinds of occult Orders, especially since the birth of modern intellectualism, has a basis similar to that of the cult of the mummy in Egypt, which so suddenly made its appearance. For the human being cannot have knowledge of outer nature without knowledge of himself and of his own form. When the Egyptians set out to acquire a knowledge of nature, they were able to have the mummified human form before them. When it behooved men of the modern age to find something that is not merely passive, ineffective thought elaborated by the intellect but that can really go forth into the world and produce an effect there, then they were obliged to surround themselves with symbolism, symbolism which points to what should really take shape within them in a spiritual sense.

These ceremonial forms and enactments in Lodges and Orders are devoid of soul—the soul has departed from them. As little as the soul of a man indwelt his mummy, as little does there inhere in these ceremonies the power of soul that once was present when they were conducted by the Initiates of olden time. Spiritual life pulsated through the ceremonies when they were being enacted among the ancient Initiates—a spiritual life flowed out from human beings into the ceremonies. In those days, man and the ceremony were one. Think, by way of comparison, of how externalised the ceremonies have become in Orders of the modern age!

The modern man cannot get beyond his intellect. I told you yesterday how even a Benedictine Father, whose vocation it is to be a servant of the Spirit, how even he cannot get away from intellectualism. Modern man cannot find his way out of intellectualism any more than the ancient Egyptian could find his way into it. The ancient Egyptians needed the souls of men already dead in order that a science of nature might be imparted to them. The man of modern times needs something that again imparts to him a spiritual science, a knowledge of the Spirit, because as yet he is unable to unfold this himself.

Now quite apart from the many occult Orders which have become pure mummies, have no deep background, and are carried on more out of a liking to dabble in mysteries, we find that as late as the first half of the nineteenth century there always existed, as well as these others, very earnest and sincere Orders, in which more was imparted than, for example, an average Freemason today receives from his Order. The Orders to which I am referring were able to impart more, because certain needs prevailed in the spiritual world among Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi who are of less interest to us on the earth but very important in our pre-earthly existence. Certain Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, too, have needs of knowledge, and can only satisfy them by letting human beings reach over, probingly as it were, to these genuine occult Orders before they have come down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. It has actually happened that in connection with certain Lodges working with ancient ceremonial forms, men of vision have been able to assert: Here there is present the soul of a human being who will descend to the earth only in the future. Before the man is born, the soul may be present in such a Lodge and, through their feelings, men can acquire a great deal from this source. Just as the human soul hovered around the mummy, was still bound in a sense to the mummy, so in certain occult Lodges the spirits of human beings not yet born hover in a kind of anticipatory existence. What happens in a case like this does not stimulate intellectual thoughts, for modern men have these thoughts naturally and need no such stimulus. But when they are working in their occult Lodges with the right mood of soul, they can receive communications from human beings not yet born, who are still in their pre-earthly existence and who can be present as a result of the ceremonies. Such men feel the reality of the spiritual world and can, moreover, be inspired by the spiritual world.

There is something in the biography of Goethe which strikes anyone who has a feeling for such things as very significant, particularly when it is mentioned by people who, although they do not know the whole truth, none the less indicate it out of a kind of half-conscious knowledge. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often told you, was quite remarkable in this respect when he was speaking of Goethe. Again and again when he was lecturing on the works and biography of Goethe, a striking phrase would fall from his lips. Schröer would say: “Goethe experienced that once again and the experience rejuvenated him.” Schröer spoke of Goethe as a personality who, say at the age of seven, had had a certain experience; then at the age of fourteen, perhaps, he experienced something different, but the second experience really brought him back a little nearer childhood. Goethe became younger, was rejuvenated. At the age, say, of twenty-one, he was again rejuvenated. Schröer depicted Goethe as if, from stage to stage, he was constantly being rejuvenated.

Study Goethe's biography with care and you will find clear indications of this. Even when he had become a corpulent official in Weimar with a double chin, even in the days when in his dealings with certain people he was a surly, morose old man—and there is much to suggest that in his intercourse with others he was anything but pleasant—even then, in advanced age, Goethe underwent a rejuvenation. It would have been impossible for him, at a great age, to write the second part of Faust if he had not been thus rejuvenated. For about the year 1816 or 1817, Goethe was not a personality from whom one could have expected anything like the second part of Faust, which was written from the year 1824 onwards. A rejuvenation had actually taken place. Moreover Goethe himself had an inkling of this, at any rate in his younger years, when he depicts Faust being given a draught of youth. It is really part of his own biography.

When we investigate what was responsible for this, we realise that it was Goethe's membership of a Lodge. Other venerable figures of Weimar, perhaps only with the exception of Wieland, Chancellor von Muller and one or two others, were ordinary members of the Lodge like many bona fide officials in Weimar. It was their habit to go to Church on Sundays and also be members of the Lodge—the contrast did not worry them! It was the custom in such circles. But it was different in Goethe's case, different too, in the cases of Chancellor von Muller, Wieland and one or two others. They actually experienced these rejuvenations because in their souls they had intercourse with men as yet unborn. Just as the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt had intercourse with the souls of men after their death, so persons such as I have named had intercourse with human beings still living in pre-earthly existence. And from this existence before birth, human beings can bring spirituality into the world of the present. They bring, not intellectualism, but spirituality, which a man then receives through his feelings and which can pervade his whole life.

Thus it may be said that the first elements of intellectual thinking unfolded by mankind in the course of evolution, were learnt by the Egyptians from the Dead, And the first elements of spiritual truths, which have been learnt again by men in the modern age, were acquired from unborn human beings by certain outstanding personalities out of the Initiation-teachings given in occult Orders. Study Goethe's works and again and again you will find flashes of spiritual wisdom which he is not able to express in the form of thoughts but which he clothes in pictures often reminiscent of symbols used in occult Orders. The pictures came to Goethe in the way described. And there are many other such cases.

Now these unborn human souls can give enlightenment only about spiritual truths which can be experienced in the non-earthly world—about the things of heaven and what lies out-side the actual arena of earth-evolution. But because the elementary Earth-Spirits find a foothold in the ceremonies, communications can be made by the Unborn to these Earth-Spirits. And if there is anyone present at the ceremonies with a gift for hearing from the Earth-Spirits what has been communicated to them by the Unborn, such men can, in their turn, give voice to what the Unborn say to the Earth-Spirits. Think of the wonderful understanding of nature possessed by Goethe and by other men in those days, for example, the Danish writer Steven, or men like Troxler, or Schubert who wrote so prolifically on the subject of dreams and whose best inspirations came from the Nature-Spirits. And there were many others—more numerous in the first half of the nineteenth century than later on—who are examples of what came to men by this means. Often, too, something else happened. Communications made in this way by the Unborn to the Nature-Spirits did not always result in the voicing of spiritual secrets of nature. In some human beings these communications became part of their very soul. The forces of the Nature-Spirits were received into their individual qualities of soul and this expressed itself in the style in which such men wrote. Anyone who has a feeling for such things today will realise that the very style of historians such as Ranke or Taine or a typically modern English historian, is intellectualistic. Ranke's style in itself is intellectualistic. The sentences are strung together in an intellectualistic way; the subject is cleverly placed, the predicate just where it should be, and so on. It is all so clever that even a schoolmaster could be satisfied with it, but compare this kind of style with that of Johannes Muller in his twenty-four volumes of world-history: that is a style ... well ... as though an angel were speaking. And in other domains too, in the eighteenth century, many things were written in a style which has no trace of this lack of individuality, this irritating objectivity, but on the contrary, has a quality which makes us feel that elementary forces of nature are streaming through the writer, so that his style seems to flow from the cosmos, from the universe. In such cases something resembling what went out from the mummies to the Initiates of ancient Egypt, comes to modern man. These are facts of great significance, taking place behind the veils of outer history, and they must be recognised by anyone who desires really to understand the evolution of humanity. And so, although these things have remained unrecognised for a time because nowadays there are no ears to hear them—we see how preparation was made for the spiritual power that must enter into and live within the intellect in future ages if humanity does not wish to take the path leading towards the decline of the West depicted by Spengler.

The ancient Egyptians mummified the human form. Since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., humanity has mummified ancient cults, making it possible, in this way, for forces from beyond the earth to work in the ceremonial of these old cults. Human beings themselves contributed little to these cults; but superhuman beings often contributed a great deal. It is the same with cults of the Churches, and those who have vision of realities can often dispense with the person who stands in the flesh before the altar, because—apart altogether from the officiating priests—they are able to perceive the presence of these Spiritual Beings in the ceremonies.

When we think about these things, it will be clear to us that if we really desire to approach what is all around us spiritually, quite a different kind of language is necessary from that to which modern man is accustomed. Nor shall we be surprised at the appearance of a work like Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache, which sets out to prove that the ideas men have conceived of Spiritual Beings are words and nothing more. And if words are not to be believed, then, obviously, one cannot believe in Spiritual Beings. Such is the purport of Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache.

Yes, but as far as a large proportion of modern humanity is concerned, Mauthner is quite right. A large proportion of modern humanity has nothing but words with which to speak of the super-sensible. Here, unfortunately, the Kritik der Sprache is right. What is necessary is that real spiritual substance shall again be brought into words. And so it was also necessary in the course of historical evolution that during a period when men themselves were unable to lay hold of this spiritual substance, it should be continued and developed for them by superhuman Beings and by unborn human beings, just as intellectuality was prepared for the Egyptians by those who had already passed through death. The Egyptians received from the Dead the intellectuality in which we are now steeped. We, in the present age, have to learn or at least study by way of the now mummified cult, the spirituality we have not yet acquired—for cult has many things to tell us. Through this different kind of mummy we must supplement our intellectual knowledge with the spirituality of the future. Mummified enactments have taken the place of the mummified human being; mummified ceremonies have superseded the mummified human form.

In this way we must study what proceeds behind the veils of world-history; otherwise every account of the flow of history remains a jumble of external, seemingly fortuitous happenings. But they are not fortuitous when their background is known and understood; they become so only if men refuse to recognise their background. They throw up waves, as it were, of which man believes that each is separate and distinct from the other, whereas the truth is that they all surge upwards together from the depths of an ocean. In reality, processes in history are waves thrown up to the surface, into the sphere of man's life, from the depths of a spiritual sea of world-evolution. In each historical fact we should perceive one such wave, and abandon the belief that one wave arises fortuitously by the side of another. Each wave, that is to say, each historical fact, arises from spiritual depths of that historical evolution which flows onwards eternally, from age to age.

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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.

This single lecture is the 7th of 11 lectures in the lecture series entitled, Spiritual Science as a Treasure for Life, published in German as, Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut. It is also known as, The Evil, and, Evil in the Light of Anthroposophy.

Basically, what we have to deal with today is an ancient issue for mankind: the issue of the origin of wickedness and of evil in the world. And though in our time many people are of the view that, fundamentally, this question cannot be defined any further, yet the human soul feels compelled to bring it up time and again. For this question is indeed not one that rises up to our soul just from theoretical or scientific viewpoints; it is far more of a question that human souls are confronted with step after step in life, because their lives are embedded in goodness, in doing good, but also in evil and wickedness. On the one hand, one might say, the whole history of human thinking and reflection unfolds, in order to fully persuade us that our questions have always been issues for the deeper spirits in human development. On the other hand, we can study significant and prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century and of our time, and we will find that even with these prominent thinkers a halt was called to all philosophy, to all striving towards knowledge, precisely when faced with this issue. So today, we wish to try and consider what arose from the lecture cycle this winter about Spiritual Science, as the basis from which perhaps we can approach some way to finding an answer to the riddle of evil and wickedness. I say advisedly “we can approach,” since I have often expressed that this significant question must be addressed in a wholly particular way: Spiritual Science does not only open that existence to our sight which cannot be reached by external science, but in a certain way it also makes it decisive. And we may perhaps be able to feel about such a question, that it is one that easily throws up the highest questions, as they are usually thrown up, when one is at the start of striving for knowledge in a certain way. That leads to real striving for knowledge, and often it only shows the initial steps on the path, through which one can gradually approach a solution to the major riddles of life.

First of all, permit me to raise one point in advance, that should make clear how deeply this question has occupied the hearts and souls of significant thinkers throughout long ages. We can go far back into human development; but first we would like to refer to thinkers in the last centuries before the foundation of Christianity in Greece: to the Stoics, that group of remarkable thinkers which, following the views of Socrates and Plato, tried to answer this question: how should human beings behave, so that their behaviour corresponds to their deepest being, to their previously prescribed and recognisable purpose? This can be designated as the fundamental question for the Stoics. And as an ideal for humanity, that strove to insert its purpose in the universe accordingly, the ideal of the wise surfaced before the soul vision of the Stoics.—It would take us too far, if we were to exhaustively portray the ideals of the Stoics, and how this all is connected with the general stoical world view. But one point at least must be raised, that in Stoicism an awareness came into play, that human development was going towards an ever clearer and clearer self-aware human being, in order to work upon the human consciousness of the I. This was said in the stoic manner: this I, through which humanity is enabled to insert itself in full clarity in the world, this I, can be darkened, and can at the same time deaden itself; and this deadening happens if a human being allows feeling life to enter too strongly into the surging wave-play of imagination and perception. To the Stoics, if a human being were to allow the clarity of the I to be submerged, to be befogged by the being of pain and emotion, this seemed a kind of spiritual impotence. For this reason, for the Stoics, holding back the pain and emotion within the human soul, and striving for peace and equilibrium, led to freedom from the spiritual impotence of the soul.

We can see what must often be raised here, as the first step on the path to knowledge of the spiritual world, which also consists of this: that the wild waves of the being of pain and emotion, that at the same time create a spiritual impotence, are held back, so that the clarity of soul vision is extracted from the full experiences of the soul. What is here set out as the first steps on the path that leads into spiritual vision, all that swirled around before the Stoics. As regards Stoicism, I have tried to bring to the fore precisely this side of Stoic being in the new edition of my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century,” since it is still only little worked upon in the history of philosophy. In the matter just described, conquering pain, conquering sentiment appeared as an ideal before Stoicism. And that which inserts itself as wisdom in the development of the world, recognises in the meaning of Stoicism, that the development of the world was able to take it up. That world development was also shot through with wisdom, so its wisdom must also reach up into the flowing of cosmic wisdom.

Always, when the question surfaces: how does the human self position itself in the whole structure of the cosmic order?—Another question then arises: how does the cosmic order permit wisdom, (which humanity must assume, if it wants to embed itself into the cosmic order) to unite firstly with that which rules as evil in the widths of world experience, and secondly with what wickedness has set up in opposition to human striving for wisdom in the world?

Now, before the soul vision of the Stoics stood what was later called divine providence. How did a Stoic find himself then, with regard to this assumption of evil and wickedness? Something had already surfaced within Stoics, which even today can be put forward as a kind of justification of evil and wickedness, (if we do not want to penetrate into spiritual science itself, but only go up to the doors to the same). This arose before the Stoics as the need for human freedom. And now they could say to themselves: if a human should strive through his/her freedom towards the ideal of wisdom, the possibility must be offered to him/her also not to strive.

Freedom must reside in striving for the ideal of wisdom. But with this it must be allowed, that one can also remain behind with those features, from which one strives upwards; it must be granted that at the same time one can plunge into the being of sentiment and pain. Then, as the Stoics thought, they plunge down into a kingdom that is not their own human kingdom, but really a kingdom below their true humanity. And to want to reject the wise cosmic order, so that a human can plunge down into such a kingdom that is beneath him/her: doing that is so clever, as if one were to reject the wise cosmic order, since under humanity there is a kingdom of animal, plants and minerals. The Stoics knew that there is a kingdom into which a human being can plunge down, from which his wisdom is far removed: but if he/she can drag himself out of it, but it must be from his/her own free choice, his/her wisdom.

We can see: the concept that many people have who stand before the door to the answers laid out by Spiritual Science about the meaning of evil, already resided in ancient Stoic wisdom; and one cannot say that the grasp of evil as such has shown any real progress in later centuries. At the same time this can emphasise for us, how to go out and encounter a spirit, who was otherwise an exceptionally significant spirit, who lived in the time since the foundation of Christianity and who had a major influence on the forming of Western Christianity: to Augustine. Augustine too had to think over and research the meaning of evil in the world; and he came to a singular expression: that evil and real wickedness hardly exist, but they are simply something negative in that they are the negation of good. So Augustine said to himself: goodness is something positive; but in the end a human being in his/her weakness is not always able to perform it, so that goodness is limited. This limited goodness needs to be explained as something positive, as little as the shadows that are cast forth by the light, need to be explained as something positive. If one were to hear the Church Father Augustine speak about evil, so one might perhaps find such an answer naïve compared with what one might imagine is thinking that has progressed for a few centuries. But how things truly stand with regard to the question of the meaning of evil, can be set out before us, through the answer an erudite man gave precisely the same answer in our time: Campbell, who described the so-called “New Theology” and whose works in certain circles had created a great sensation. He too believes, that one cannot enquire about evil and wickedness, because they show nothing positive, but are simply something negative. We do not wish to get involved in hair-splitting philosophical deductions to refute the viewpoint of Augustine—Campbell. Since, for anyone who can think with an open mind free of prejudice, this response about the simple negativity of evil stands on the same ground as the answer someone might make and says: What then is cold? Cold is only something negative, namely the absence of heat. Therefore, one cannot speak of it as something positive. But if one turns around when it is cold, with no furs or winter clothes on, so one will then feel this negative as something very positive! This image should make it fully clear, how little one straightens things out with this answer that truly does not go beneath the surface, and which indeed even major philosophers of the nineteenth century have given: that with regard to evil and wickedness we have nothing to do with anything positive. It may be that in this regard, we have nothing to do with anything positive; but this “not positive” is precisely as negative as cold is compared with heat.

Now we could put forward a whole group of other thinkers, who through the preparation of their own soul life, one would like to say, came close to what Spiritual Science now has to state. For an example of such, one could put forward Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist, who lived in post-Christian times and still followed the principles of Plato; and with him also put forward at the same time a large number of other thinkers who have thought about evil and wickedness in the world. They tried to make the following clear: that a human being is put together from a spiritual and a material-bodily nature. By plunging down into the bodily, a human being shares in the characteristics of matter, which from the outset creates obstacles and limitations in opposition to the activity of the spirit. In this plunging down of the spirit into matter lies the very origin of evil in human life; but therein also lies the origin of evil in the outer world.

That such a view has not just been considered simply in the heads of individual thinkers as a satisfactory answer to this major question about the significance of evil and wickedness in the world, even though it is greatly widespread, can explain a comment that I will not suppress, because maybe it will make our situation more precisely clear. I will refer to a thinker from an entirely different region: to the significant Japanese thinker, who was a pupil of the Chinese thinker Wang Yang Ming: namely Nakae Toju. For him everything that constitutes experience of the world, consists of two things, of two entities on could say. For him, one entity is this, that he looks up to as to the spiritual, and it permits the human soul to take part in the spiritual: this entity he called Ri. Then he looked at what bodily forms a human being, and which permits the bodily to take part in everything through which is it constructed from matter: and that entity he called Ki. And from the particular juxtaposition of Ri and Ki all beings arose, according to him. For this thinker from the East, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, mankind is partly made of Ri and of Ki. But, because the human soul must plunge down with its Ri into Ki in its experience, from Ki the will streams out against it—and with will comes desire. Thus, the human soul in its life is involved in willing and desiring, and so it stands before the possibility of evil.

This thinker from the East, who lived a reasonably short time before us, as was said, in the first half of the seventeenth century, is not far removed from what in Western lands, at the time of Neo-Platonism, of Plotinus for example, one tried to set forth as the origin of evil: humanity's involvement in matter. We shall see later that it is important to refer to this in this way, in order to answer the question of the origin of evil with the involvement of humanity in matter. Precisely this comes to meet us in the most remote circles of human thinking. A thinker of the nineteenth century, who truly was one of its most significant ones, tried to examine evil and wickedness, and I would like to briefly portray the main points of his thinking. He saw in the world around him, part evil, part human wickedness, and he stood before evil and wickedness as a philosopher, who had trained himself in depth about the characteristics of human nature in particular: Hermann Lotze, one of the most significant thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose very significant Microcosm for example, amongst others, described meaningful philosophical works for the nineteenth century. Let us try to call up others before our souls, from amongst our most significant contemporaries, who like Hermann Lotze stood before the issue of evil. He said to himself: evil does not try to deny its existence. How have we attempted to answer the question of evil? For example, it has been said, that evil and wickedness must be there in life; since only through learning how the human soul struggles out of evil, can we be educated. Now Lotze was no atheist, but one who assumed God as living and weaving throughout the world, so he said: how should one then put the idea of education about evil and wickedness? One must assume that God has used evil and wickedness, in order to develop humanity and to elevate it to the free use of its soul. That could only happen, if humans were to organise this inner working for themselves, that is organise our working the way out of evil, and only through this, then learn to recognise one's own true being and its true worth.

Against this Lotze objected at the same time: whoever gives such an answer, does not take account of the animal kingdom first of all, into which in truth not only evil but also wickedness have entered comprehensively. How does cruelty rise up to meet us in the animal kingdom, how does everything, that is taken up in human life, and which can become the most fearsome burden, come to meet us everywhere in the animal kingdom! But whoever wants to lead us to the animal kingdom in this field as regards education, can they not also run into the same animal kingdom issues? So Lotze turned away from the idea of education. In particular he drew attention to the fact that omnipotence of God would contradict this idea of education; since it was only possible then, Lotze thought, to extract the best in a being from the worst: once the worst had been given. But that would contradict the omnipotence of God: first we must work our way out of the worst, at the same time as preparing to be able to build goodness thereupon. So Lotze turns around to say: maybe one should consider more like someone who says that whatever is evil, what is bad, is wickedness. This arises not through the omnipotence of God, nor through the will of any conscious being; but evil is connected with that which exists in the world, in the way for example that the three angles of a triangle that add up together to 180º, are related to a triangle. So, if God wanted to create a world, he must conform to that which is true without him. So any world that he wanted to create is perforce connected with wickedness and evil. So, he must, if he wanted to create a world, prepare evil and wickedness along with it.—Against this Lotze objected: but then we limit what we can properly assume is the working and weaving of a divine being through the world. Since, when one observes the world, then one must say: according to general laws, according to which the appearances of the world can be thought through, it is very likely that it could be thought of without evil and wickedness. If we observe the world, we must say at once, that wickedness contravenes real freedom; so it must be from arbitrariness that freedom was called into being by the divine being.

We could add still other matters that Lotze and other thinkers have said on the problem and riddle of evil—Lotze is mentioned here only as being typical. I will only draw your attention to that to which Lotze came to in the end, because that will be important for us later. So Lotze turned against the German Philosopher Leibnitz, who had written a “Theodysee,” that was a justification of God against evil, and had come to the view that this world, even if it also contained much evil, was still the best possible of all worlds. Because if it was not the best one possible, Leibnitz thought, then either God did not know the best possible world—and that conflicts with his all- knowingness; or else he must not have wanted to create it, which conflicts with his all-goodness; or he must not have been able to do so—and that conflicts with his omnipotence. Now, Leibniz says, since in thought one cannot conflict with these three principles of God, one must assume that the world is the best one possible.—Now against this Lotze objected: in any case one cannot speak of an omnipotence of God, since in the world, where evil exists and the wicked reigns, this would be held to be outflowing from God. Therefore, one must say, as Lotze thought, Leibnitz has limited the omnipotence of God and by doing so won for himself the teaching of the best of all possible worlds.

Now, Lotze thought, there is still a way out. One must say: in general, when we observe the cosmos one can see overall order and harmony; evil and wickedness can only be seen in the details. So Lotze said: but what can a viewpoint give, which depends solely from the vision of humanity? Since about a world, where in general and as a whole, order and harmony command, so as to be able to astound us, and where in details evil and wickedness show themselves as black spots, one could also use the expression: what does it say, when in general and as a whole, order and harmony command in a world, and in details everywhere evil and wickedness is to be found? Here Lotze thought—and this was the culmination of his experience to which we wanted to refer-, one should rather say this one thing: evil and wickedness are indeed in the world. It must be wise that wickedness is there alongside excellence, and evil alongside good; it is just that we cannot see this wisdom. And so we are obliged to accept evil and wickedness beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. It must indeed be wisdom, which is not human wisdom Lotze thought: wisdom we cannot reach and which justifies evil. So Lotze transposed the wise concepts of evil and wickedness into an unknown world of wisdom.

At least I have expressly made these arguments, which for many will seem more or less pedantic, because they show us with what weapons humanity tried to approach the concept of evil and wickedness in philosophical thought, and how here we have found this confession time and again: these weapons have proven themselves to be completely blunt against such an enigma, which we come up against step by step in life; and even as Lotze says, they are completely unsuitable.

Now there is also another thinker, who tried to explore even further than Plotinus did into this, that is, in fact into the underground of being, which can only be reached after a certain development of the soul aimed at uplifting it to higher faculties of knowledge. Such a thinker was Jakob Böhme. And if one approaches Jakob Böhme, one approaches certainly a spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, into which not many nowadays even wish to penetrate, since today he is seen more as a kind of curiosity. Jakob Böhme tried to penetrate into the depths of the world and its appearance up to the point where he felt something like a kind of Theosophy rising up in himself, as a kind of vision of God in his own inner being; and he now tried to make clear to himself, how wickedness and evil are to be pursued into the deepest underground of the world, and how evil and wickedness are not something simply negative, but are in a certain way rooted in the underground of the world and of human existence. Jakob Böhme saw the divine being as something, that in him, as he said—we must first of all become accustomed to his way of expressing himself—one must enter “amicably.” A being that allows its activity to flow out into the world at the same time, could never manage to grasp its own self. This activity must, one would like to say, hit up against something. Basically, each morning in waking up we perceive this to a small degree, and that is what Jakob Böhme put into his imagination. When we wake up, we are in a position so to speak, to unfold our soul-spiritual being to an unlimited extent from our soul-spiritual activity. There we hit up against our environment with our soul- spiritual activity. Through this, that we hit up against our surroundings, we become aware of ourselves. In general, a human being is only self-aware in the physical world, in that he hits up against things. The divine being cannot be such that it hits up against others. It must set up its adversary, or as Jakob Böhme stated in several expressions, its “no” against its “yes” for itself. It must limit its endlessly out-flowing activity in itself. That is…it must “amicably” distinguish, it must at the same time at a certain point create its own opposite on the surrounding circle of its activity; so for Jakob Böhme it was necessary for the divine being, in order to become self-aware, for it to create its own adversary. Now through taking part in the being of a creature, Jakob Böhme thought, not only that which streams out of the diving being, but from what the divine being had to create necessarily as its adversary, wickedness arises: evil above all arose in the world. The divine being set itself up against its own adversary, in order to become self- aware. Therefore, we cannot speak of evil and wickedness, but only of the necessary conditions of the divinity for becoming self-aware. But since creatures arose, and those creatures are not simply embedded in out-flowing life, but take part in the adversary, evil and wickedness have arisen.

Certainly, such an answer cannot be satisfactory to those who attempt to penetrate through spiritual science into the secrets of existence. This is set out here solely in order to show to what depths a sensible thinker goes, if he researches the source of evil in the world. And accordingly, I could also add much that could show us more than what we have found shining back from the world as an answer, when we try and draw close to enigmas, amongst which are wickedness and evil. If we now try and relate to what at the same time arises before us as a confession of one of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century, as a confession by Lotze, we can say something like the following. Lotze is of the view, that there must be such wisdom somewhere, which justifies evil and wickedness. But mankind is limited in its capacity for knowledge; it cannot penetrate to that wisdom.—Are we not standing before, what we have often been forced to mention: that it is a beloved prejudice of our own time, to take our capacity for knowledge as it once was, and to hardly to reflect upon the fact that something could come out of the objects which are in our daily lives; something that could rise above itself, in order to have insight into other worlds, more than the simple world of the senses and the understanding related to the senses? Maybe it has already arisen before us, so that we are unable to find the answers to significant questions such as the origin of evil, because with regard to knowledge that turns to the senses and to the understanding that is related to the sense world, it spirals upwards above and away from this knowledge towards another knowledge. Along the path a way must be found, of which I have often spoken here, a way along which the human soul triumphs over that which is our everyday and usual scientific viewpoint. We have often spoken of the possibility that the human soul struggles to release itself from its bodily nature, that it really can perform a spiritual chemistry, that even releases the soul-spiritual element in mankind from the bodily, just as in outer chemistry, hydrogen is released from water. We have spoken of this: when a human being so releases his/her soul-spiritual nature from the bodily-corporeal one, so that it can rise up to the spiritual and that its bodily nature stands over against the soul-spiritual, so when the soul-spiritual is outside the body and is able to perceive in a spiritual world, then it can see into the depths of the world through direct experience, not within but outside of its body, as far as this knowledge is accessible to him/her. Maybe we should ask ourselves here: what then comes to meet us, when we truly try to walk along this path of spiritual research, the path that has often been described here, and which is set out extensively in my book “How does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” What are the experiences one arrives at, when one really follows this path, in order to become a participant in super-sensible worlds? Now it will specially interest us, how what we usually call evil in everyday life positions itself on this path. We only need to look somewhat into everyday evil, what people call evil in everyday life. There it emerges, when a spirit researcher begins on his/her path, in order to rise up to soul-spiritual worlds, in order to truly come out of the bodily with his/her soul-spiritual being and to perceive free of the body, that everything that he/she must look back upon as evil, yes even upon imperfection in life, sets the hardest obstacles on his/her path. The most difficult hindrances come from that which one must look back upon as something imperfect. With this I do not want to say that the arrogant teaching follows logically: that anyone who achieves vision in the spiritual world as a spiritual researcher must be called a perfect human being. This should not be understood at all through saying this. But it should be repeated, what was once very forcefully emphasised: that the path to spiritual research is martyrdom in a certain sense, and it is so precisely on the basis that in the moment in which one comes out into the soul-spiritual from the bodily and takes part in the spiritual world, one looks back upon one's life with its imperfections and now knows: you bear these imperfections with you as a comet bears its tail. You bore them in yourself in other lives and must compensate for them in later lives. What you have stepped over until now, without having an awareness of it, now you can see.—This tragic insight into that which we are in everyday life depends on how a human being seeks out the way upwards to the spirit world. If it does not depend upon this, then it is not the true path to the spirit world. Of this act one must say: a certain seriousness of life starts, when one steps up into the spirit world. And if man gains nothing else, at least one conquers this one thing: that one can see one's own evil and one's own imperfections with endless clarity. So, one might say: one conquers an experiential knowledge of evil and imperfection with the very first steps that one takes upwards into the spirit world.

Where does this come from? When we look closer to see where it comes from, we find in this the essential feature of all human evil, so to speak. In my last book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” I tried to refer to precisely this essential feature of evil, as far as it proceeds outwards from mankind. The common essential feature of all evil is none other than selfishness.—If I wanted to prove this in detail, what I will now set out here, I should have to speak for several hours; but I will only set this out and each person may then follow up for themselves with the further run of thoughts that follow as a consequence. They will also be followed up on in the next lectures, where we shall speak of the “Moral Basis of Human Life.” Basically, all human evil comes forth from what we call selfishness. We shall go and follow through from the smallest details, which we regard as human slip-ups, to the strongest crimes, that are human imperfections and human evil, regardless of whether they are portrayed to us as apparently arising more from the soul or apparently more from the bodily: the common essential feature, that comes from selfishness is universally present. We find the true meaning of evil, when we think of it as bound up with human selfishness; and we find all striving outwards and over imperfections and evil, when we see this striving upwards in the struggle against what we call selfishness. A great deal of careful thinking has been done over some ethical principle or another, over some moral basis or another; but the deeper we plunge into ethical principles and moral foundations, precisely this shows us that selfishness is the common root of all human evil. And so we might say: the more a human being works him/herself free of evil here in the physical world, the more he/she overcomes selfishness.

Now this result leads to another one just behind it; and it is so made one might say, that it is almost oppressive in spiritual investigation, truly oppressive. So what should one then develop, when one seeks to find the way up to the spiritual worlds, to those worlds, that one must look at with the soul- spiritual outside of the body?

When you take this all together, with what I have referred to as soul exercises in the run of these lectures, and which must be used in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, you will find that they run on, in order to strengthen certain soul characteristics, which the soul has in the sense-world, that make the soul stronger and more powerful, so it can set itself up more and more independently. Now what comes out in the physical-sense world as selfishness, that must be strengthened, must be made more intensive when a human being steps up and into the spiritual world. Since only in a strengthened soul, which strengthens those powers in itself that are its very own, which are in its Ego, and are rooted in its I, only such a soul can rise up to the spiritual world. Precisely that which a human must set aside, who wants to appropriate moral principles for the physical world, must be strengthened on the way to the spirit world. A significant mystic made the following statement:

When a rose decorates itself,
It also decorates the garden.

This is certainly true up to certain limits. But in human life selfishness also goes forth, if the human soul is only seen as a “rose” that decorates itself. But for the spirit world, that is perfectly valid. In the spirit world what lies in the expression: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden” is present to a higher degree. If the soul rises up to the spirit world, and there it is all the more a useful tool, the more it has been strengthened in itself and has worked outwards on what lies in its inner fullness. Just as one cannot use an instrument that is imperfect, so can the soul itself not use what it has not fully driven out: what lies in it from its I, from its ego.

From this comparison, which takes us away from all facile phrases and leads us into the actual facts that should not be concealed, we now see that this spiritual world stands in relation to the physical sense-world: that the latter must make the former its own task completely. If a human being could only live in the spirit world, then he/she would only be able to develop inner faculties because of the law which must be valid: “When a rose decorates itself, It also decorates the garden”; he/she could not develop those faculties that would bring him/her together with other people, and with the whole world as a benefactor. We must find our abode in the physical world that enables us to overcome selfishness. Otherwise we have no duty to be benefactors in the world, except when we fundamentally educate ourselves away from selfishness, if I may use a trivial expression.

Now the same thing that a spiritual researcher finds to be definitive, namely the strengthening of his/her soul in order to rise up to the spiritual world, that same thing is equally definitive when a human being goes through the gate of death in a natural way, and goes into that world that lies between death and a new birth. There we transpose ourselves into a world, which a spiritual researcher has also reached through his/her soul development. There we must bring the characteristics that the soul has allowed to become strong in itself, which make the sentence true within the soul that runs: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden.” In the instant in which we go through the gate of death, we enter into a world, in which our I comes to its highest elevation and strengthening. What we have to do in that world, we will hear in the lecture: “Between Human Death and Rebirth.” Now reference should only be made to this, that in this spiritual world, in essence only that which the soul has itself sent in arrives into this spiritual world, in accordance with what it has experienced in previous earthly lives, in order to structure the following. It must, to the extent that it corresponds to its destiny, primarily be concerned with itself, in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

When we observe the human soul in this way, then the following appears to us from two different viewpoints. The way how selfishness can be transformed into becoming a benefactor appears in its meaning for the physical-sense world, since this is the large training ground, where the one must come out from the other, so that it may be something of value for the larger circles of existence. And the world between death and rebirth appears to us as that in which the soul must live with more power, and for which the soul would immediately be useless, it were to enter into this world weak and not empowered in this way.

What follows thereupon, that the soul has these two characteristics?

It follows from this, that a human must in fact protect him or herself from that which in one field, in one world is excellent, namely the lifting up of the inner soul into another world so as to somehow use it at the highest level to achieve the spiritual world; but that must be stricken by evil and by the worst, if a human permits him or herself be penetrated by what he/she must live out of as his/her being in the physical-sense world: what is useful to him/her as worthy preparation for the kingdom of the spirit. Thus we must precisely be strong in the spirit between death and new birth, in the strengthening and empowering of our I, with which we can prepare for ourselves such a physical sense being, so that in outer existence, in the acts and thoughts of the physical world we can be as unselfish as possible. We must use our selfishness before our birth in the spiritual world to work upon ourselves; we must look upon ourselves in such a way that we can become unselfish in the physical world, that is to say, moral.

Here, at this point lies everything that one could name as the most valuable for a person who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. In fact, one must be clear, that one sees one's own evil and imperfection not otherwise than as a shadowy outline, when one is in the spiritual world. That is what shows us, that we must remain connected to the sense world, and how our karma, our destiny must bind us to the sense world, until we have broken through into the spiritual worlds so far that we are able to live not only with ourselves alone, but with the whole world. It shows as if on a screen, how things stand with evil, what is essential in spiritual progress, namely self- perfecting: that must be used on the things of outer life. Trying to make spiritual progress is not something we can allow to cease. That is our duty, far more. And that duty is development for humanity, which is the law for all other living beings. But evil is using directly in outer life, that which is fitting for spiritual development. These two, outer physical life with its morality must necessarily place a second adjacent world, next to that towards which the soul strives inwardly, if we wish to approach the spiritual world.

Now there is something present however, that could appear to be a contradiction. But one would like to say, the world lives in such living paradoxes. It must be said: one must strengthen oneself in the soul; precisely the ego, the I must become stronger in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. But if a spiritual step up were only to develop selfishness, then it would not get very far. But what does that mean? It means: one must enter into the spirit world without selfishness; or rather that one cannot enter without selfishness—which each of us who enters into the spiritual world must painfully acknowledge, so one must have all selfishness so objectively before one, that one sees one's own selfishness, to which one is bound in the outer world. One must also consider how to become an unselfish person using the means of the physical life, because one no longer has the opportunity in the spiritual world to become unselfish, because there one arrives at the strengthening of the soul life. That is only an apparent contradiction. Even when we enter the spiritual world, even when we go through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we must live there with what is present as strength in our inner being. But we cannot achieve this, if we cannot achieve this through selfless life in the physical world. Selflessness in the physical worlds is mirrored as the correct selfishness that raises value in the spiritual world. We can see how difficult the concepts become, as we near the spiritual world. But now one sees at the same time, what human life can involve. So now let us assume that a human being comes through birth into physical being. In that case, it means, that if that being that was in the spirit world before birth or conception, between the last death and the present birth, is clothed in the physical body, then the possibility is present that the person with this, which must at the same time be the life force of the spirit world, pulls through to its physical body unjustifiably; that the soul strays into the bodily, in that it brings down into the physical world that which is good in the spirit world. Then, what is good in the spirit world becomes evil, becomes wickedness in the physical world! That is a significant secret of existence, that a human can bring down what it necessarily needs in order to be a spiritual being, what in a certain sense can be portrayed as its highest being for its spiritual being, into the physical world, and that its highest and best spiritual nature can become the deepest error in the physical sense world.

Through what does evil enter life? Through what is so-called crime in the world?

It is present through the fact that a human being permits his/her better nature, not the worse one, to plunge down into the physical-body, which as such cannot be evil, and to develop those features there, which do not belong in the physical and bodily but belong precisely in the spiritual. Why can we humans be evil? Because we should be spiritual beings! Because we must come into the position, as soon as we live our way into the spirit world, to develop those features, which become bad, if we use them in the life of the physical sense world. If you allow those features which are lived out in the physical world as cruelty, malice for its own sake and others, to be taken out of the physical sense world, and let the soul be penetrated by them and live them out in the spirit world instead of the physical sense world, then there they will take us further, towards perfecting characteristics. That a human being uses the spiritual in the opposite way in the sense world, that leads to its evil. And if he/she could not be evil, he/she could not be a spiritual being. Since the characteristics that can make him/her evil, he/she must have; otherwise he/she could never rise up to the spiritual world.

Perfection lies herein, that a human being learns to penetrate himself/herself through and through with the insight: you should not use the features that make you into an evil human being in physical life, not in this physical life; since as much as you use them here, so much you take away from the empowering characteristics of the soul for the spiritual, so much you need to awaken yourself to the spiritual world. There these characteristics are in their correct place. So we see, as spiritual science shows, that evil and wickedness through their own nature indicate that we must assume a soul-spirit world alongside the physical world. Then why do the human faculties of knowledge of someone like Lotze or other thinkers freeze, when they observe the sense world and say: we cannot penetrate into the origin of evil and wickedness? Because of what is present—a capacity for knowledge that cannot penetrate to the spiritual world—, because it cannot enlighten evil starting from the physical world, because it is a misuse of powers that belong in the spirit world! No wonder also, that no philosopher, who has a viewpoint from the spirit world, can find the essence of evil in the physical sense world! And if one has a tendency to penetrate from here into a further world, in order to find the origin of evil, then also does one not come to any knowledge of outer evil, of that which we encounter as badness and imperfect in the outer world, such as for example in the animal world. So, we must be clear, that evil in human behaviour arises from this, that what for a human being is great and perfect in one world, as soon as it is uprooted into another world, it is changed over into its opposite. But when one considers evil independently of humanity in the world, the evil that flows through the animal world, then one has to say: we must then be clear upon this, that not only beings like humans are present, who through their life, bring down what belongs in the spirit world and there is great, and bear them into another world where it is out of place. Other beings must also exist—and a glance onto the animal world shows us also, that apart from humanity other beings must exist, which in the region, where humanity cannot take its evil, now bear their wickedness and so create evil. That means, that we are led by the knowledge of where the source of wickedness lies, at the same time to recognise that not only can humanity insert itself as imperfect in the world, but also that other beings are there, which can bring imperfections into the world. And so we say that it is no longer incomprehensible, when a spiritual researcher says: the world of animals is basically an outer formation of an invisible spirit; but in that spirit world beings are there, which have done before humanity itself, what mankind now does, in that it inserts the spiritual unjustifiably into the physical world. From this all the evil in the animal world has arisen.

It should be stated today, that people are wrong if they believe one can ascribe the impulse for evil to this involvement in matter, based upon material existence, because the soul is involved in a material existence. No, evil arises precisely thought the spiritual characteristics and through the spiritual possibilities of activity of humanity. And we must say to ourselves: where lies the wisdom in the world order, that wished to limit mankind to this, to only unfold goodness in the sense world—and not evil, as we see through it, as we have seen, that it necessarily must take power in order to go forward in the spirit world? Through the fact that we are a being that belongs both to the physical world and to the spiritual world, and that in us not the imperfection, but the perfection of spiritual law lies, we are placed in a position, like a pendulum, that can swing out to one side; and we are placed in the position to swing out to the other side, because we are spirit beings, which can bear the spiritual into the physical world, in order to realize evil there, as others, beings who perhaps higher than mankind are able to realize evil, which they have borne into the sense world, and which should belong solely in the spirit world.

I know very well that in such a portrayal of the origin of wickedness and evil something has been said today, which can only be enlightening to a small number of human beings, but who live ever more and more into the human soul life. For one will find that resolving the problems of the world overall is only possible, when we think of our world as one with a spiritual basis. Humanity may one day finish with the perfection of the sense world—there is also an illusion about such things; but with the imperfections, with wickedness and evil, it will never come to an end, if it does not want to seek, to what extent this wickedness and evil must be in the world. And one has insight, that it must be in this world, if one says to oneself: evil is only displaced into the physical world. If the characteristics which mankind uses unjustifiably in the physical world, and which there establish evil, were used in the spirit world, so mankind would go forward there.

I have no need to say that it would be entire nonsense, if someone were to draw conclusions from what has just been said: that you portray that only villains move forward in the spiritual world. It would be a complete travesty of what has been said. This is because these characteristics only become evil through their being used in the sense world, and they undergo a kind of immediate metamorphosis if they are used in the spirit world. Whoever wishes to raise such an objection, resembles someone who says: so you maintain that it is entirely good, if a human being has the strength to smash a watch? Certainly it is good if he has that strength; but he does not need to use that strength to smash the watch. If it is used to cure humanity, then it is a good power. And in this sense, one must say: the powers that a human being allows to flow into evil, are only evil in that place; used right in the right place, are they good powers.

It must lead us deep into the secrets of human existence, if one can say: through what is mankind evil? Through its using the powers granted to it for its perfection, in the incorrect place! Through what is wickedness, is evil in the world? Through humans using forces that are lent to them in an unsuitable world.

In our present time one could say at once: for the underlying soul there is a distinct tendency present to incline towards the spirit world. A more precise intimate glance onto the nineteenth century and on up to our present time could teach us this. Against this in the nineteenth century amongst the philosophers there also came into play what has been called pessimism, a world view that immediately looks at the wicked and to the evil present in the world, and draws the conclusion some individuals have already drawn it—, that this world cannot be seen as good overall, that something other is required of mankind, than being led to its end. I will only refer to Schopenhauer or to Eduard von Hartmann, who both saw the solution for mankind, in that they said: an individual can only find his/her salvation in the rise of world processes, but not in a personally satisfying conscious purpose. But I would like to refer to something else: that the soul in the age of matter is imprisoned in materialism, and that in this time the strongest hopelessness must arise towards the world's evils, towards the wicked; since materialism rejects a spiritual world, out of which light shines upon us, to give its meaning to evil and to the wicked. If this world is rejected, it is entirely necessary that this world is hopelessly covered in filth by evil and wickedness in their purposelessness.—I will not refer to Nietzsche today, but to another spirit of the nineteenth century. From a certain viewpoint I also wish to refer to a tragic thinker of the nineteenth century: from the viewpoint that a human being must necessarily live with their time, in that he/she is inserted into their own time. That is a property of our being, that our being finds itself together with the being of our time. So it was only natural that in the latest times, that deeply formed spirits, yes, precisely those who had an open heart for what took place in their surroundings, we deeply gripped by that world description, which only wants to see the outermost appearance of the alpha and omega of world existence. But such spirits can often give in to an illusion, that one can go through the world inconsolably, if one must look into that world existence which must be portrayed as evil—and cannot look up to a spiritual world, in which evil is justified, as we have seen.

A spirit who, I would like to say, went through the entire tragedy of materialism, even though he was not a materialist himself, was Philipp Mainländer, born in 1841. One could call him a follower of Schopenhauer, if one observes things outwardly. In a certain sense he was a deep spirit, but a child of his time, so that he could only look upward to what the material world exposes. Now materialism worked indeed, enormously to imprison precisely the very best souls: we should not be deceived about this. Yes, the humans, who are not concerned with what is around them, what the times and their spirit offer, and who live selfishly in a religious confession that they have once found pleasant, the “most religious” people are sometimes in this point the most selfish of all; they reject any rising above the things which they love, and do not concern themselves about anything else, other than what they know. One can find this answer again and again, if one refers to the tragedy of numberless human beings: yes, cannot old Christianity satisfy souls much more than your spiritual science? Such questions are put by spirits who do not go along with the times and intolerantly reject everything that should penetrate into cultural development for the salvation of mankind.

Philipp Mainländer looked around him, at what outer science, what our time was able to tell him from its materialistic viewpoint, and there he could only find a world filled with evil and mankind involved in wickedness. He could not deny it, since the pressure of this new world view was so strong that it hindered the soul from looking up to a spiritual world. So let us not try and conceal from ourselves here: why do so few people come to spiritual science? That is because, since the pressure of the prejudice of materialism, or as it is called more nobly, of monism is so powerful, it darkens the soul and prevents its penetrating into the spirit world. If the soul is left independent and to itself and is not dulled by materialist prejudice, then it will surely come to spiritual science. But the pressure is large, and from our time on, one can say: it is connected to the epoch, in which one can represent spiritual science before humanity with a few perspectives, because the desire of souls has become so strong, that spiritual science must find an echo in souls. In the second and third thirds of the nineteenth century that echo was unable to be present. Then the pressure of materialism was so strong, that even a soul striving towards the spirit such as that of Philipp Mainländer was held back. And so he came to a unique view: to the view that nothing spiritual can be found in the current world. We have in Mainländer in the nineteenth century a spirit before us, who only did not make a major impression on his contemporaries, because the spirit of the nineteenth century, despite its major progress in material areas, was a superficial spirit. But what a soul must feel in the nineteenth century, that Mainländer felt, even when he stood alone, because in a certain way he felt a kind of spiritual impotence regarding the removal of that which must leave one dissatisfied with a materialistic or monistic world view. One does not need to pick up and read the somewhat thick volume of Mainländer's “Philosophy of Salvation,” but only the reasonably small booklet by Max Seiling, in order to make a judgement about what I am saying now.

Philipp Mainländer looked out into the world, and he could only see under the pressure of materialism, what the senses and understanding portray. But he must assume a spirit world. But it is not there, he told himself; the sense world must be illuminated from itself. And now he came to the view that the spirit world of our ancestors was real, that once there was a divine spirit existence, that our soul was within a divine- spiritual existence, and that the divine existence from a former being has gone over into us, and that our world can only be there, because God had died before that spirit world died before us. So Mainländer sees a spirit world, but not in our world; but in our world he only sees a cadaver loaded with evil and wickedness, which can only be there, so that its destruction can be overcome, so that what led to God and his spirit world to die, should not enter into the destruction of the cadaver into nothingness.—Monists or other thinkers may laugh more or less at this; whoever better understands the human soul and knows how a world view can become the inner destiny of a soul, how the entire soul can adopt the nuances of a world view. He/she knows what a human being must experience, who, like Mainländer, was forced to transpose the spirit world into past times and was only able to see the material cadaver of the same left behind in the current world. In order to resolve the evils of this world, Mainländer had taken up this kind of world view. That he was more deeply involved in his world view than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, than Bahnsen or Eduard von Hartmann, we can see from that fact that, at the time of finishing his “Philosophy of Salvation” in his fifty-third year, the thought came to him: your strength has been used lovelessly, since you more quickly offer what appears as your salvation of humanity, than when you still used it after the middle of the life in the body. That Mainländer thought with his world view with the deepest sincerity is shown from the fact that he, when he came to this thought: you now use more strength, when you pour out your power into the world and do not concentrate on the body. He really drew the conclusion, which Schopenhauer and the others did not draw, and died through suicide, and that is, a suicide through conviction.

Philosophers and others may look away from such a human destiny: for our time however, such a human destiny is endlessly significant, because it shows us how the soul must live, which can really pierce down into its depths, to that which as longing can resurrect in our time—how the soul can live and confront the problem of wickedness and evil in the world, and have not any vision into the world where spiritual light spreads out and illuminates the sense of wickedness and of evil. It was necessary that the human soul should develop the materialistic capacities for a period. One can also position in a certain future of spiritual life, I would like to say, under a “psycho-biological viewpoint,” a point of view of the soul life, and make clear to oneself, that only when lifted up to the spiritual, does what appears in a physical image, for example in animal beings, become valid for human beings. Certain animals can go hungry for a long time and also are hungry for a long time. Tadpoles for example, can bring about their rapid transformation into frogs through long hunger. Similar behaviour is also shown in certain fishes with long hunger, because back-bone building processes come into play, that make it possible to perform what they have to perform; they are hungry because they hold back the forces, they otherwise take in through taking in nourishment, in order to force a way into another form. That is an image that is suitable for use for the human soul: through centuries it has lived through people constantly talking about the “boundaries of human knowledge”; and even many who believe that they think spiritually, are nonetheless entirely devoted to materialistic imaginations—which are willingly called monistic today because people are ashamed of them—, and even philosophers are devoted to the maxim: human knowledge can do no more than make a halt, when it stands before the greatest riddles. The capacities that led them to everything, had to be trained for a period: that is to say that humanity must undergo a period of spiritual starvation. This was the time of the arising of materialism. But the powers that were held back in souls through this, they will now lead human souls to seek for the way into the spirit world in accordance with a psycho- biological law. Certainly one will find that human pondering had to take the form that we meet up with in Mainländer, who could no longer find the spirit world in the physical world, because materialism had taken him. He was forced to remain before the physical world: there he only had the power to visualise errors, and not that which underlies our world, that indeed gives us the possibility in find something out in our souls, that refers to the future just as the outer world refers to the past. It cannot be denied, that in a certain sense Mainländer was correct: what our world sets out all around us, are the remains of original development. Even present-day geologists have to admit today, that we, in that we wander across the earth, are walking away a cadaver. But what Mainländer could not show, that is, that we, to the extent that we are walking over a dead body, at the same time are developing something in our inner being, which is precisely a seed for the future, as that which is all around us is a bequest from the past. And to the extent that we look into this, what spiritual science is for individual souls, it can resurrect in us, that which Mainländer was not yet able to see, and therefore was forced to doubt.

So we stand at the watershed between two epochs: the epoch of materialism and that of spiritual science. And maybe nothing can prove it to us in such a popular form, as when we, if we correctly understand our soul, must live up against the spiritual epoch, as considering evil and wickedness, when we are able to lift up our sight to the illuminated heights of the spirit world. I have often said, that with such considerations one feels oneself in harmony with the best spirits of all ages, who have longed, as mankind must live in an ever-clearer manner as against the future. If one such spirit, with whom one feels in full harmony, made a remark about the outer sense world, that is like a call for spiritual knowledge, so we should also put together what today has been able to enter into our souls, and this should spark off a kind of transformation of such a remark.

Goethe let something be said in his Faust, that shows how a human being can lose their way away from the spirit. Mankind's distance from the spirit world is set out paradigmatically in a beautiful sentence with the words:

Whoever wants to know and describe the living,
Tries first of all to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Except, sadly! only their spiritual bond is missing.

So, this is how things lie in a certain way for all knowledge of the world. It was the destiny of mankind, to devote itself to parts for a few centuries. But ever more and more one will perceive the absence of the spiritual bond as not only a theoretical deficiency, but as a tragedy of the soul. Therefore, spiritual researchers must today look into the soul overall, which the majority of souls do not know how to do themselves: and catch sight of the longing for the spirit world. And if we set our eyes upon something, such as illuminating the nature of evil and of wickedness, then perhaps we may extend Goethe's remark, in that we take the following as a summary of what was said.

Goethe thought that whoever wants to strive for a world view, should not stop at parts alone, but must see the spiritual bond above all. But whoever approaches as significant a life question as the riddle of evil and wickedness, he should say based on spiritual-scientific foundations, as a summary of his/her persuasion in accordance with his findings:

Whoever does not solve the soul riddle,
Remains in the simple light of the senses;
Whoever wants to understand life
Must strive towards spirit heights!

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.

[ 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.

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.

Christmas Lecture

Follow me for a few moments into the ancient Egyptian temples for a ceremony that was celebrated at midnight on the day that corresponds to our Christmas Day. On this day – or rather at midnight – one of the images that are only shown four times a year was unveiled in the temple and carried before a small crowd that had been prepared for this temple service. This image was locked in the innermost sanctuary of the temple throughout the year and was kept in strict secrecy. On this day, it was carried out by the oldest of the priests, and a ceremony was performed before him, which I will describe to you very briefly.

After the eldest of the priests had carried out the radiant image of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, four priests in white robes approached the image. The first of the priestly sages spoke the following before the image: “Horus, you who are the sun in the spiritual realm and you who give us the light of your wisdom as the sun gives us the light of the world, lead us so that we may no longer be what we are today.” This temple priest had entered from the east. The second of the temple priests entered from the north and spoke roughly the following words: “Horus, you sun in the spiritual realm, you who are the giver of love, as the sun is the giver of the warming power that coaxes out the forces of plants and fruits throughout the year, lead us to a goal so that we may become what we are not yet today.” And the third of the temple priests came from the south and said: “Horus, thou sun in the spiritual realm, bestow thy power upon us, as the sun of the physical world bestows its power, by which it will part the darkest cloud and spread light everywhere.” After this third priest had spoken, a fourth stepped forward and said something like the following: “The three wisest of us have spoken. They are my brothers, but they are beyond the sphere in which I myself still am. I am the representative of you” - and he meant: the representative of the multitude. And he said: “I will lead your voice. I will speak for you who are still standing there as minors. I will tell my older brothers that they long for the great goal of the world, where human destiny and the eternal law of the world will be reconciled.” This should be understood in this hour by those who were sufficiently prepared for it, as once unchanging cosmic law and human destiny were one.

If we understand the ceremonies that took place on Christmas in Asia, India and even in China, then we understand what Christmas bells actually mean to us. A macrocosm has always been called the world and a microcosm the human being. This was meant to suggest that the human being contains within himself the forces that are present outside in the great. But not only the calculating mind has called the world a microcosm for man, but also the mind, which tells us that we must look up at the stars. Here a word of the philosopher Kant applies: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

How different macrocosm and microcosm are when we look at them from a different point of view. Especially when faced with the macrocosm with its immutable eternal laws, those who are the most knowledgeable are filled with the deepest admiration and reverence. There have been no knowledgeable people who have seen through the wisdom of the world and not at the same time stood in awe of the creative spirit of the world. And one of those people [in modern times] who for the first time had a confidential relationship with this immutable law, Kepler, spoke the words: Who could look into the wonderful structure of the whole world and not admire the Creator who implanted these laws of the world. - Those who know most admire the eternal laws of the starry sky.

It seems to be different when it comes to human destiny. Goethe says that he likes to take refuge from the changeability of man in the fixed rules of eternal nature, and the moral law [of Kant] with its categorical imperative seemed to him to be in error. We perceive the difference between the human heart and the world-spirit, the macrocosm, in yet another way. We perceive this difference when we consider the connection between human destiny and human character. Who would impose responsibility on a volcano? Probably no one. But we must indeed impose responsibility on the man who causes harm. Who would speak of justice and injustice in relation to nature? And how is it that the good suffer while the wicked prosper?

We see harmony within the macrocosm. What position do we have in relation to it? What is clearly and distinctly outlined in the ceremony I have described will be enacted in a few days in the festival that is so little understood today. The starry sky with its immutable laws was not always the cosmos that appears to us now. This cosmos emerged out of chaos. Out of the surging and swaying of forces, what we have today first developed. The Copernican-Keplerian laws, which make us marvel at the wisdom of the world spirit, have not always applied. Today it seems to be poured out, exalted above justice and injustice; we cannot ask about good and evil. But we can ask about good and evil in relation to the human being. Today we ask ourselves the deeper question: Why do we ask about good and evil, about justice and injustice in relation to the human being? Why can we not ask this question in relation to the macrocosm? In the beginning, when the world was still a surging sea, there was, in the midst of what the eyes see, the ears hear, the senses perceive, between what appears to us today in the laws of harmony, still a surging sea of surging feelings, of desires and passions out there in the universe. These world passions, which were in the midst of the laws and chaos, had to be overcome first. Today, anyone who tries to visualize this world of cosmic desires and passions from an ancient past can hardly perceive the body of passions. Shiny and transparent, bright as stars, barely perceptible with the seer's finest tools, it shines in every atom after chaos has been overcome.

What has brought the astral body of the cosmos to rest has not yet reached the same goal in man. In man, the astral body is still surging. What has already taken place in the cosmos over the course of millions of years, what has reached its goal, is still in the process of becoming in man. And if we follow man from return to return, from re-embodiment to re-embodiment, if we see him in his different bodies and then follow him in his astral bodies, then we see that from embodiment to embodiment the astral body becomes brighter and purer. In the beginning we see it permeated by dull passions. These remind us of the passions of that time when the world was still a chaos. But little by little that brightness and clarity developed, as it has now the astral body of the great universe.

Because the sages of ancient times knew about the connection between the development of the human being and the existence of the world, they called the world macrocosm and the human being microcosm. The human being must look at the goal that he can set for himself: to become like the macrocosm, to imbue himself with the same bliss and peace that flows through the cosmos as a universal law today. Just as we cannot ask whether the laws of the cosmos are just or unjust, so neither can man ask whether his destiny coincides with his law. Pure law is the law of the cosmos, and pure human law, pure human spirit, shall one day become man's destiny. This is the path of destiny that the human spirit undergoes in its various embodiments. We become ever more starry and ever more similar to the destiny of the cosmos.

Karma is a law by which we all suffer. What we have accomplished in one embodiment bears its fruits in later embodiments. What befalls us today we have caused in previous embodiments. But karma is a law that not only distributes guilt and atonement, disharmony and harmony in the right way, but is a law that leads us up to the highest summit of the human spirit. The great world book of karma will have found its balance on the left and on the right. We will have transformed everything we owe to life back into the bright glow of the astral body. Everything we have felt as deficiencies will be balanced out. Karma is burnt up. When the guilt points of our existence will no longer be there, when we ourselves go our way like the sun, which is not able to step even a little out of its orbit, then we will also follow the laws implanted in us like the sun in the starry sky. That is our way, that is our goal. That will one day be the harmony between the destiny of man and the laws of the world.

Not everyone's journey through life is the same. Just as in the natural world, the perfect exists alongside the imperfect, and the higher animal already exists alongside the worm, so too in the spiritual world, the imperfect human spirit exists alongside that which has already reached a higher level.

Those who honestly and sincerely believe in evolution must also have faith in spiritual science and its teachings of the first human beings. These are those who have already come further along the path that we all have to travel than we have today. Some have rushed ahead. They have overtaken us from the times of which history tells us; they have reached a higher stage of human development. Thus they have become leaders, guides of humanity. Just as the higher developed animal towers above the worm, so the Rishis, the masters, tower above humanity. They have achieved this in the earlier times because they have taken a different path of knowledge, a steeper, more dangerous path, which is associated with infinite danger. No one may enter it for its own sake. Whoever does so may stumble and fall into deep abysses, or lose his sense of existence for a time, or become a tormentor to people. In short, no one may seek out this path of faster knowledge out of selfishness. Only he who has taken this vow, who has sworn an oath that may never be broken, to powers of which the ordinary person has no inkling, only he who has taken this vow can enter upon the path to becoming a leader of humanity, a forerunner of humanity. Such leaders of men have never used their knowledge for themselves.

What is so highly esteemed in the West, the knowledge for the sake of knowing, is not what the adepts, the great masters of knowledge, strive for. They strive for knowledge in order to help humanity, to draw it up to where human destiny and world harmony are in harmony with each other. These human firstlings are those who live in our midst and have lived in all times, who have acquired an astral body cleansed of desires and passions. Buddha already had it, the starry astral body. When he once went out with his disciple Ananda, Buddha dissolved into a bright cloud, into a cloud of light, into radiant light. That was the astral body that had come to rest.

The corona of rays is nothing other than the symbol of the radiant astral body of the founder of Christianity. The Firstfruits of Men, as walking brothers of humanity, are an immediate reflection of the macrocosm. It should be shown that they have burnt their karma, that there is nothing more to be redeemed, that the eternal wisdom can no longer stray, that they guide humanity as surely as the sun follows its path across the vault of heaven and cannot stray from this path marked out in the firmament. This is the symbol for the firstfruits of mankind. It expresses that they cannot stray from the path that is laid out for people. As surely as the sun walks across the vault of heaven, they walk their path. And just as the sun sends its light and warmth over the earth, so they send the love of their hearts into the hearts of people, awakening love in the hearts of their fellow brothers. These firstfruits are strong in their powers to resist all temptations. You can show them, you can offer them all the riches of this world, they will not accept them, they only want to be one with the original spirit from which they came forth. These people want to be a macrocosm themselves in this life. That was their consciousness. This is also present in all religions. Those who know the sources of the religions are aware that in all these religions one looks up to the founders of the religions as one looks up to the stars of the macrocosm, as one looks up to the eternal cosmic law that rules the starry sky. These firstfathers of mankind were suns for the initiated and those who had progressed further.

If humanity was to be shown how karma works, then they were shown the image of the sun in the temple. This signifies to man his destiny, like the course of the sun in the course of the world. [A-mi-t'o] was the same for the Chinese when they worshipped the Buddha as the “son” among their heavenly gods. And it was the same for the Hindus when they showed Krishna resting in the arms of the Deva-Mother. Christmas permeates all religions. It is the festival that should make man aware that his destiny is once to be an image of the destiny of the macrocosm.

In Christianity, the spirit sun lives just as much as in the old religions. The life of Christ should also directly reflect the sun as it rushes across the firmament. His birth was therefore transferred to Christmas. Let us ask ourselves why. What happens to the sun at the time of the winter solstice, at the time of Christmas? The days become longer again after the shortest day has passed. The light struggles out of the darkness again. The sun, which has been in darkness for most of the day, is reborn, and as such a newly born sun it now sends its light. The birth of the light was celebrated at midnight because the light was born out of darkness. Thus, symbolically, the light of wisdom is to be born, which is represented by the firstlings of man. The sun appears again anew - she who moves across the firmament. With her birth, she is a symbol of the firstling of man who is born, who walks just as surely on his path as the universe carries harmony within itself.

In the beginning, there were various Christian sects, and they celebrated the Savior's feast at different times. In the early Christian times, there were 135 such days. It was only at the beginning of the 5th century that a uniform date was set, namely our present Christmas. It was deliberately set on this day in order to establish the same symbolism, which resounded throughout the ancient world, for this Christian festival as well. A church father himself, who had been canonized by the church, considered it justified and in the spirit of Christianity. He tells us that the Christians were right to celebrate the birth of Christ at a time when the Romans celebrated the birth of Mithras and the Greeks the birth of Dionysus. The same meaning should be attached to the festival as to the festivals of Mithras and Dionysus, because in them too the birth of the firstlings was celebrated. Thus, in the Christmas festival, Christianity has erected a symbol that is intended to remind people again and again that the karma must be burned so that harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm, which is not yet present today, will one day be present, so that man will one day also follow the immutable laws from which he must not stray.

Just as Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, the symbol of human existence and human destiny, was shown to the assembled crowd at midnight, and just as it was pointed out by the priests that he was the sun in the spiritual kingdom, that it is equal to the power of warmth and light of the sun, just as the three wise priests have joyfully bowed down, so the Christian legend also presents us with the three wise men bowing down before the Christ child. They follow the star, the light. There is a deep meaning in the visit of the three wise men from the Orient. They are the same three wise men who were active in the service of Horus and who now say: “A child has been born to us who will follow his path as unchangingly as the star that now guides us. The star is still far from us. But when this law will one day be our own, then we will be like the one who carries the unchanging law within himself. Just as the star is our ideal, so he who was born under it is our example. What the Egyptians celebrated became a world fact, a world event. Therefore, he who founded Christianity was allowed to call his disciples together for the Sermon on the Mount. It says: “He led them away from the people, up the mountain.” “Mountain” means the secret place where the inner circle were taught. The King James Version contains a tremendous error at this point: (“Blessed are they that are poor in spirit”). In truth it says: “Blessed are they that are beggars for spirit, for they find within themselves the Kingdoms of Heaven.” What did Jesus want to do for them? He wanted to make them blessed, the beggars for the spirit. Only those who were initiated into the temple mysteries had become partakers of wisdom. The founder of Christianity wanted to carry this wisdom out into the whole world; not only the rich in spirit were to receive the grace of wisdom – no, all those who stand outside and are also beggars for the spirit should find the Kingdoms of Heaven within themselves. In the past, people found this in the temple mysteries. They should not only find bliss within the temple precincts, but should also find the Kingdoms of Heaven within themselves, which were presented to them as the harmonious model of human destiny. They should ascend to the summit where a balance can be struck between the changeable, erring human heart and the unchanging law of the macrocosm. This is what the Christmas bells are meant to make people aware of, according to the original will of the initiates; they are a pointer to what shows us how karma leads to the goal, how the laws of the world and human destiny are connected.

And to hear this again is what theosophical deepening is meant to bring us. Many festivals that we celebrate today without thinking about it, without knowing their deeper meaning, have their origin in a deeper wisdom. Because the ancient man was connected to the macrocosmic world, the events of the festival were signs for him. The mystery of the heart and the immutable law resound to us from the sounds of Christmas bells. Theosophy will bring deeper wisdom and the core of religious beliefs into the most direct life; it will show the extent to which these truths are contained in them. And when we recognize this truth, then, in the highest sense, what is expressed in the beautiful word “peace be with all beings” will gradually come true in the harmony between the law of the universe and the destiny of man.

[ 1 ] Francesco Redi, the Italian natural scientist, was considered a dangerous heretic by the leading scholars of the seventeenth century because he maintained that even the lowest animals originate through reproduction. He narrowly escaped the martyr-destiny of Giordano Bruno or Galileo. For the orthodox scientist of that time believed that worms, insects, and even fish could originate out of lifeless mud. Redi maintained that which today is generally acknowledged: that all living creatures have descended from living creatures. He committed the sin of recognizing a truth two centuries before science found its “irrefutable” proof. Since Pasteur has carried out his investigations, there can be no longer any doubt about the fact that those cases were merely illusion in which people believed that living creatures could come into existence out of lifeless substances through “spontaneous generation”. The life germs entering such lifeless substances escaped observation. With proper means, Pasteur prevented the entrance of such germs into substances in which, ordinarily, small living creatures come into existence, and not even a trace of the living was formed. Thus it was demonstrated that the living springs only from the life germ. Redi had been completely correct.

[ 2 ] Today, the spiritual scientist, the anthroposophist, finds himself in a situation similar to that of the Italian scientist.

On the basis of his knowledge, he must maintain in regard to the soul what Redi maintained in regard to life. He must maintain that the soul nature can spring only from the soul. And if science advances in the direction it has taken since the seventeenth century, then the time will come when, out of its own nature, science will uphold this view. For—and this must be emphasized again and again—the attitude of thought which underlies the anthroposophical conception of today is no other than the one underlying the scientific dictum that insects, worms and fish originate from life germs and not from mud. The anthroposophical conception maintains the postulate: “Every soul originates out of the soul nature,” in the same sense and with the same significance in which the scientist maintains: “Everything living originates out of the living.”¹

[ 3 ] Today's customs differ from those of the seventeenth century. The attitudes of mind underlying the customs have not changed particularly. To be sure, in the seventeenth century, heretical views were persecuted by means no longer considered human today. Today, spiritual scientists, anthroposophists, will not be threatened with burning at the stake: one is satisfied in rendering them harmless by branding them as visionaries and unclear thinkers. Current science designates them fools. The former execution through the inquisition has been replaced by modern, journalistic execution. The anthroposophists, however, remain steadfast; they console themselves in the consciousness that the time will come when some Virchow will say: “There was a time—fortunately it is now superseded—when people believed that the soul comes into existence by itself if certain complicated chemical and physical processes take place within the skull. Today, for every serious researcher this infantile conception must give way to the statement that everything pertaining to the soul springs from the soul.”

[ 4 ] One must by no means believe that spiritual science intends to prove its truths through natural science. It must be emphasized, however, that spiritual science has an attitude of mind similar to that of true natural science. The anthroposophist accomplishes in the sphere of the soul life what the nature researcher strives to attain in the domains perceptible to the eyes and audible to the ears. There can be no contradiction between genuine natural science and spiritual science. The anthroposophist demonstrates that the laws which he postulates for the soul life are correspondingly valid also for the external phenomena of nature. He does so because he knows that the human sense of knowledge can only feel satisfied if it perceives that harmony, and not discord, rules among the various phenomenal realms of existence. Today most human beings who strive at all for knowledge and truth are acquainted with certain natural-scientific conceptions. Such truths can be acquired, so to speak, with the greatest ease. The science sections of newspapers disclose to the educated and uneducated alike the laws according to which the perfect animals develop out of the imperfect, they disclose the profound relationship between man and the anthropoid ape, and smart magazine writers never tire of inculcating their readers with their conception of “spirit” in the age of the “great Darwin.” They very seldom add that in Darwin's main treatise there is to be found the statement: “I hold that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form into which the creator breathed the breath of life.” (Origin of Species, Vol. II, chapter XV.)—In our age it is most important to show again and again that Anthroposophy does not treat the conceptions of “the breathing in of life” and the soul as lightly as Darwin and many a Darwinian, but that its truths do not contradict the findings of true nature research. Anthroposophy does not wish to penetrate into the mysteries of spirit-life upon the crutches of natural science of the present age, but it merely wishes to say: “Recognize the laws of the spiritual life and you will find these sublime laws verified in corresponding form if you descend to the domain in which you can see with eyes and hear with ears.” Natural science of the present age does not contradict spiritual science; on the contrary, it is itself elemental spiritual science. Only because Haeckel applied to the evolution of animal life the laws which the psychologists since ancient days have applied to the soul, did he achieve such beautiful results in the field of animal life. If he himself is not of this conviction, it does not matter; he simply does not know the laws of the soul, nor is he acquainted with the research which can be carried on in the field of the soul.^e1 The significance of his findings in his field is thereby not diminished. Great men have the faults of their virtues. Our task is to show that Haeckel in the field where he is competent is nothing but an anthroposophist.—By linking up with the natural-scientific knowledge of the present age, still another aid offers itself to the spiritual scientist. The objects of outer nature are, so to speak, to be grasped by our hands. It is, therefore, easy to expound their laws. It is not difficult to realize that plants change when they are transplanted from one region into another. Nor is it hard to visualize that a certain animal species loses its power of eyesight when it lives for a certain length of time in dark caves. By demonstrating the laws which are active in such processes, it is easy to lead over to the less manifest, less comprehensible laws which we encounter in the field of the soul life.—if the anthroposophist employs natural science as an aid, he merely does so in order to illustrate what he is saying. He has to show that anthroposophic truths, with respective modifications, are to be found in the domain of natural science, and that natural science cannot be anything but elemental spiritual science; and he has to employ natural-scientific concepts in order to lead over to his concepts of a higher nature.

[ 5 ] The objection might be raised here that any inclination toward present-day natural-scientific conceptions might put spiritual science into an awkward position for the simple reason that these conceptions themselves rest upon a completely uncertain foundation. It is true: There are scientists who consider certain fundamental principles of Darwinism as irrefutable, and there are others who even today speak of a “crisis in Darwinism.” The former consider the concepts of “the omnipotence of natural selection” and “the struggle for survival” to be a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of living creatures; the latter consider this “struggle for survival” to be one of the infantile complaints of modern science and speak of the “impotence of natural selection.”—If matters depended upon these specific, problematic questions, it were certainly better for the anthroposophist to pay no attention to them and to wait for a more propitious moment when an agreement with natural science might be achieved. But matters do not depend upon these problems. What is important, however, is a certain attitude, a mode of thought within natural-scientific research in our age, certain definite great guiding lines, which are adhered to everywhere, even though the thoughts of various researchers and thinkers concerning specific questions diverge widely. It is true: Ernst Haeckel's and Virchow's conceptions of the “genesis of man” diverge greatly. But the anthroposophical thinker might consider himself fortunate if leading personalities were to think as clearly about certain comprehensive viewpoints concerning the soul life as these opponents think about that which they consider absolutely certain in spite of their disagreement. Neither the adherents of Haeckel nor those of Virchow search today for the origin of worms in lifeless mud; neither the former nor the latter doubt that “all living creatures originate from the living,” in the sense designated above.—In psychology we have not yet advanced so far. Clarity is completely lacking concerning a view point which might be compared with such scientific fundamental convictions. Whoever wishes to explain the shape and mode of life of a worm knows that he has to consider its ovum and ancestors; he knows the direction in which his research must proceed, although the viewpoints may differ concerning other aspects of the question, or even the statement may be made that the time is not yet ripe when definite thoughts may be formed concerning this or that point.—Where, in psychology, is there to be found a similar clarity? The fact that the soul² has spiritual qualities, just as the worm has physical ones, does not cause the researcher to approach—as he should—the one fact with the same attitude of mind as he approaches the other. To be sure, our age is under the influence of thought habits which prevent innumerable people, occupied with these problems, from entering at all properly upon such demands.—True, it will be admitted that the soul qualities of a human being must originate somewhere just as do the physical ones. The reasons are being sought for the fact that the souls of a group of children are so different from one another, although the children all grew up and were educated under identical circumstances; that even twins differ from one another in essential characteristics, although they always lived at the same place and under the care of the same nurse. The case of the Siamese Twins is quoted, whose final years of life were, allegedly, spent in great discomfort in consequence of their opposite sympathies concerning the North-American Civil War. We do not deny that careful thought and observation have been directed upon such phenomena and that remarkable studies have been made and results achieved. But the fact remains that these efforts concerning the soul life are on a par with the efforts of a scientist who maintains that living creatures originate from lifeless mud. In order to explain the lower psychic qualities, we are undoubtedly justified in pointing to the physical forebears and in speaking of heredity, just as we do in the case of bodily traits. But we deliberately close our eyes to the most important aspect of the matter if we proceed in the same direction with respect to the higher soul qualities, the actually spiritual in man. We have become accustomed to regard these higher soul qualities as a mere enhancement, as a higher degree of the lower ones. And we therefore believe that an explanation might satisfy us which follows the same lines as the explanation offered for the soul qualities of the animal.

[ 6 ] It is not to be denied that the observation of certain soul functions of higher animals may easily lead to this mistaken conception. We only need draw attention to the fact that dogs show remarkable proof of a faithful memory; that horses, noticing the loss of a horse shoe, walk of their own accord to the blacksmith who has shod them before; that animals which are shut up in a room, can by themselves open the door; we might quote many more of these astonishing facts. Certainly, the anthroposophist, too, will not refrain from admitting the possibility of continued enhancement of animal faculties. But must we, for that reason, obliterate the difference between the lower soul traits which man shares with the animal, and the higher spiritual qualities which man alone possesses? This can only be done by someone who is completely blinded by the dogmatic prejudice of a “science” which wishes to stick fast to the facts of the coarse, physical senses. Simply consider what is established by indisputable observation, namely, that animals, even the highest-developed ones, cannot count and therefore are unable to learn arithmetic. The fact that the human being is distinguished from the animal by his ability to count was considered a significant insight even in ancient schools of wisdom.—Counting is the simplest, the most insignificant of the higher soul faculties. For that very reason we cite it here, because it indicates the point where the animal-soul element passes over into the spirit-soul element, into the higher human element. Of course, it is very easy to raise objections here also. First, one might say that we have not yet reached the end of the world and that we might one day succeed in what we have not yet been able to do, namely, to teach counting to intelligent animals. And secondly, one might point to the fact that the brain has reached a higher stage of perfection in man than in the animal, and that herein lies the reason for the human brain's higher degrees of soul activity. We may fully concur with the persons who raise these objections. Yet we are in the same position concerning those people who, in regard to the fact that all living creatures spring from the living, maintain over and over again that the worm is governed by the same chemical and physical laws that govern the mud, only in a more complicated manner. Nothing can be done for a person who wishes to disclose the secrets of nature by means of trivialities and what is self-evident. There are people who consider the degree of insight they have attained to be the most penetrating imaginable and to whom, therefore, it never occurs that there might be someone else able to raise the same trivial objections, did he not see their worthlessness.—No objection can be raised against the conception that all higher processes in the world are merely higher degrees of the lower processes to be found in the mud. But just as it is impossible for a person of insight today to maintain that the worm originates from the mud, so is it impossible for a clear thinker to force the spirit-soul nature into the same concept-pattern as that of the animal-soul nature. Just as we remain within the sphere of the living in order to explain the descent of the living, so must we remain in the sphere of the soul-spirit nature in order to understand the soul-spirit nature's origin.

[ 7 ] There are facts which may be observed everywhere and which are bypassed by countless people without their paying any attention to them. Then someone appears who, by becoming aware of one of these facts, discovers a fundamental and far-reaching truth. It is reported that Galileo discovered the important law of the pendulum by observing a swinging chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa. Up to that time, innumerable people had seen swinging church lamps without making this decisive observation. What matters in such cases is that we connect the right thoughts with the things we see. Now, there exists a fact which is quite generally accessible and which, when viewed in an appropriate manner, throws a clear light upon the character of the soul-spirit nature. This is the simple truth that every human being has a biography, but not the animal. To be sure, certain people will say: Is it not possible to write the life story of a cat or a dog? The answer must be: Undoubtedly it is; but there is also a kind of school exercise which requires the children to describe the fate of a pen. The important point here is that the biography has the same fundamental significance in regard to the individual human being as the description of the species has in regard to the animal. Just as I am interested in the description of the lion-species in regard to the lion, so am I interested in the biography in regard to the individual human being. By describing their human species, I have not exhaustively described Schiller, Goethe, and Heine, as would be the case regarding the single lion once I have recognized it as a member of its species. The individual human being is more than a member of his species. Like the animal, he shares the characteristics of his species with his physical forebears. But where these characteristics terminate, there begins for the human being his unique position, his task in the world. And where this begins, all possibility of an explanation according to the pattern of animal-physical heredity ceases. I may trace back Schiller's nose and hair, perhaps even certain characteristics of his temperament, to corresponding traits in his ancestors, but never his genius. And naturally, this does not only hold good for Schiller. This also holds good for Mrs. Miller of Gotham. In her case also, if we are but willing, we shall find soul-spiritual characteristics which cannot be traced back to her parents and grand-parents in the same way we can trace the shape of her nose or the blue color of her eyes. It is true, Goethe has said that he had received from his father his figure and his serious conduct of life, and from his little mother his joyous nature and power of fantasy, and that, as a consequence, nothing original was to be found in the whole man. But in spite of this, nobody will try to trace back Goethe's gifts to father and mother—and be satisfied with it—in the same sense in which we trace back the form and manner of life of the lion to his forebears.—This is the direction in which psychology must proceed if it wishes to parallel the natural-scientific postulate that “all living creatures originate from the living” with the corresponding postulate that “everything of the nature of the soul is to be explained by the soul-nature.” We intend to follow up this direction and show how the laws of reincarnation and karma, seen from this point of view, are a natural-scientific necessity. [ 8 ] It seems most peculiar that so many people pass by the question of the origin of the soul-nature simply because they fear that they might find themselves caught in an uncertain field of knowledge. They will be shown what the great scientist Carl Gegenbaur has said about Darwinism. Even if the direct assertions of Darwin may not be entirely correct, yet they have led to discoveries which without them would not have been made. In a convincing manner Darwin has pointed to the evolution of one form of life out of another one, and this has stimulated the research into the relationships of such forms. Even those who contest the errors of Darwinism ought to realize that this same Darwinism has brought clarity and certainty to the research into animal and plant evolution, thus throwing light into dark reaches of the working of nature. Its errors will be overcome by itself. If it did not exist, we should not have its beneficial consequences. In regard to the spiritual life, the person who fears uncertainty concerning the anthroposophical conception ought to concede to it the same possibility; even though anthroposophical teachings were not completely correct, yet they would, out of their very nature, lead to the light concerning the riddles of the soul. To them, too, we shall owe clarity and certainty. And since they are concerned with our spiritual destiny, our human destination, our highest tasks, the bringing about of this clarity and certainty ought to be the most significant concern of our life. In this sphere, striving for knowledge is at the same time a moral necessity, an absolute moral duty.

[ 9 ] David Friedrich Strauss endeavored to furnish a kind of Bible for the “enlightened” human being in his book, Der alte und neue Glaube (Faith—Ancient and Modern). “Modern faith” is to be based on the revelations of natural science, and not on the revelations of “ancient faith” which, in the opinion of this apostle of enlightenment, have been superceded. This new Bible has been written under the impression of Darwinism by a personality who says to himself: Whoever, like myself, counts himself among the enlightened, has ceased, long before Darwin, to believe in “supernatural revelation” and its miracles. He has made it clear to himself that in nature there hold sway necessary, immutable laws, and whatever miracles are reported in the Bible would be disturbances, interruptions of these laws; and there cannot be such disturbances and interruptions. We know from the laws of nature that the dead cannot be reawakened to life: therefore, Jesus cannot have reawakened Lazarus.—However,—so this enlightened person continues—there was a gap in our explanation of nature. We were able to understand how the phenomena of the lifeless may be explained through immutable laws of nature; but we were unable to form a natural conception about the origin of the manifold species of plants and animals and of the human being himself. To be sure, we believed that in their case also we are concerned merely with necessary laws of nature; but we did not know their nature nor their mode of action. Try as we might, we were unable to raise reasonable objection to the statement of Carl von Linné, the great nature-researcher of the eighteenth century, that there exist as many “species in the animal and plant kingdom as were originally created in principle.” Were we not confronted here with as many miracles of creation as with species of plants and animals? Of what use was our conviction that God was unable to raise Lazarus through a supernatural interference with the natural order, through a miracle, when we had to assume the existence of such supernatural deeds in countless numbers. Then Darwin appeared and showed us that, through immutable laws of nature (natural selection and struggle for life), the plant and animal species come into existence just as do the lifeless phenomena. Our gap in the explanation of nature was filled.

[ 10 ] Out of the mood which this conviction engendered in him, David Friedrich Strauss wrote down the following statement of his “ancient and modern belief”: “We philosophers and critical theologians spoke to no purpose in denying the existence of miracles; our authoritative decree faded away without effect because we were unable to prove their dispensability and give evidence of a nature force which could replace them in the fields where up to now they were deemed most indispensable. Darwin has given proof of this nature force, this nature process, he has opened the door through which a fortunate posterity will cast the miracle into oblivion. Everybody who knows what is connected with the concept ‘miracle’ will praise him as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race.”

[ 11 ] These words express the mood of the victor. And all those who feel like Strauss may disclose the following view of the “modern faith”: Once upon a time, lifeless particles of matter have conglomerated through their inherent forces in such a way as to produce living matter. This living matter developed, according to necessary laws, into the simplest, most imperfect living creatures. These, according to similarly necessary laws, transformed themselves further into the worm, the fish, the snake, the marsupial, and finally into the ape. And since Huxley, the great English nature researcher, has demonstrated that human beings are more similar in their structure to the most highly developed apes than the latter are to the lower apes, what then stands in the way of the assumption that the human being himself has, according to the same natural laws, developed from the higher apes? And further, do we not find what we call higher human spiritual activity, what we call morals, in an imperfect condition already with the animal. May we doubt the fact that the animals—as their structure became more perfect, as it developed into the human form, merely on the basis of physical laws—likewise developed the indications of intellect and morals to be found in them to the human stage?

[ 12 ] All this seems to be perfectly correct. Although everybody must admit that our knowledge of nature will not for a long time to come be in the position to conceive of how what has been described above takes place in detail, yet we shall discover more and more facts and laws; and thus the “modern faith” will gain more and firmer supports.

[ 13 ] Now it is a fact that the research and study of recent years have not furnished such solid supports for this belief; on the contrary, they have contributed greatly to discredit it. Yet it holds sway in ever extending circles and is a great obstacle to every other conviction.

[ 14 ] There is no doubt that if David Friedrich Strauss and those of like mind are right, then all talk of higher spiritual laws of existence is an absurdity; the “modern faith” would have to be based solely on the foundations which these personalities assert are the result of the knowledge of nature.

[ 15 ] Yet, whoever with unprejudiced mind follows up the statements of these adherents of the “modern faith” is confronted by a peculiar fact. And this fact presses upon us most irresistibly if we look at the thoughts of those people who have preserved some degree of impartiality in the face of the self-assured assertions of these orthodox pioneers of progress.

[ 16 ] For there are hidden corners in the creed of these modern believers. And if we uncover what exists in these corners, then the true findings of modern natural science shine forth in full brilliance, but the opinions of the modern believers concerning the human being begin to fade away.³

[ 17 ] Let us throw light into a few of these corners. At the outset, let us keep to that personality who is the most significant and the most venerable of these modern believers. On page 804 of the ninth edition of Haeckel's Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte (Natural Genesis) we read: “The final result of a comparison of animals and man shows that between the most highly developed animal souls and the lowest human souls there exists only a small quantitative, but no qualitative difference; this difference is much smaller than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls, or the difference between the highest and the lowest animal souls.” Now, what is the modern believer's attitude toward such a fact? He announces: we must explain the difference between the lower and the higher animal souls as a consequence of necessary and immutable laws. And we study these laws. We ask ourselves: how did it come about that out of animals with a lower soul have developed those with a higher soul? We look in nature for conditions through which the lower may develop into the higher. We then find, for example, that animals which have migrated to the caves of Kentucky become blind there. It becomes clear to us that through the sojourn in the darkness the eyes have lost their function. In these eyes the physical and chemical processes no longer take place which were carried out during the act of seeing. The stream of nourishment which has formerly been used for this activity is now diverted to other organs. The animals change their shape. In this way, new animal species can arise out of existing ones if only the transformation which nature causes in these species is sufficiently great and manifold.—What actually takes place here? Nature brings about changes in certain beings; and these changes later also appear in their descendants. We say: they are transmitted by heredity. Thus the coming into existence of new animal and plant species is explained.

[ 18 ] The modern believers now continue happily in the direction of their explanation. The difference between the lowest human souls and the highest animal souls is not particularly great. Therefore, certain life conditions in which the higher animal souls have been placed have brought about changes by means of which they became lower human souls. The miracle of the evolution of the human soul has been cast out of the temple of the “modern faith” into oblivion, to use an expression of Strauss', and man has been classified among the animals according to “eternal, necessary” laws. Satisfied, the modern believer retires into peaceful slumber; he does not wish to go further.

[ 19 ] Honest thinking must disturb his slumber. For this honest thinking must keep alive around his couch the spirits which he himself has evoked. Let us consider more closely the above statement of Haeckel: “the difference (between higher animals and men) is much smaller than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls.” If the modern believer admits this, may he then indulge in peaceful slumber as soon as he—according to his opinion—has explained the evolution of the lower men out of the highest animals?

[ 20 ] No, he must not do this, and if he does so nevertheless, then he denies the whole basis upon which he has founded his conviction. What would a modern believer reply to another who were to say: I have demonstrated how fish have originated from lower living creatures. This suffices. I have shown that everything evolves—therefore the species higher than the fish will doubtless have developed like the fish. There is no doubt that the modern believer would reply: Your general thought of evolution is useless; you must be able to show how the mammals originate; for there is a greater difference between mammals and fish than between fish and those animals on a stage directly below them.—And what would have to be the consequence of the modern believer's real faithfulness to his creed? He would have to say: the difference between the higher and lower human souls is greater than the difference between these lower souls and the animal souls on the stage directly below them; therefore I must admit that there are causes in the universe which effect changes in the lower human soul, transforming it in the same way as do the causes, demonstrated by me, which lead the lower animal form into the higher one. If I do not admit this, the species of human souls remain for me a miracle in regard to their origin, just as the various animal species remain a miracle to the one who does not believe in the transformation of living creatures through laws of nature.

[ 21 ] And this is absolutely correct: the modern believers, who deem themselves so greatly enlightened because they believe they have “cast out” the miracle in the domain of the living, are believers in miracles, nay, even worshipers of the miracle in the domain of the soul life. And only the following fact differentiates them from the believers in miracles, so greatly despised by them: these latter honestly avow their belief; the modern believers, however, have not the slightest inkling of the fact that they themselves have fallen prey to the darkest superstition.

[ 22 ] And now let us illumine another corner of the “modern belief.” In his Anthropology, Dr. Paul Topinard has beautifully compiled the findings of the modern theory of the origin of man. At the end of his book he briefly recapitulates the evolution of the higher animal forms in the various epochs of the earth according to Haeckel: “At the beginning of the earth period designated by geologists the Laurentian period, the first nuclei of albumin were formed by a chance meeting of certain elements, i.e. carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, under conditions probably only prevailing at that epoch. From them, through spontaneous generation, monads developed (the smallest, imperfect living creatures). These split and multiplied, rearranged themselves into organs, and finally, after a series of transformations which Haeckel estimates as nine, they bestowed life upon certain vertebrae such as the amphioxus lanceolatus.” We may skip the description of the further animal species in the same direction and add here at once Topinard's concluding sentences: “In the twentieth earth epoch, we find the anthropoid ape approximately during the whole Miocene period; in the twenty-first, the man-ape which does not yet possess speech and a corresponding brain. In the twenty-second period, Man finally appears as we know him, at least in his less perfect forms.” And now, after having cited what is to be understood as the “natural-scientific basis of the modern belief,” Topinard, in a few words, makes a significant confession. He says: “Here the classification comes to an abrupt halt. Haeckel forgets the twenty-third degree in which the brilliant Lamarck and Newton appear.”

[ 23 ] A corner in the creed of the modern believer is thereby exposed in which he points with the utmost clarity to facts, concerning which he denies his creed. He is unwilling to rise into the human soul sphere with the concepts with which he tried to find his way in the other spheres of nature.—Were he to do this, were he, with his attitude of mind acquired through the observation of external nature, to enter upon the sphere which Topinard calls the twenty-third degree, then he would have to say to himself: just as I derive the higher animal species from the lower through evolution, so do I derive the higher soul nature from the lower through evolution. I cannot understand Newton's soul if I do not conceive of it as having sprung from a preceding soul being. And this soul being can never be looked for in the physical ancestors. Were I to look for it there, I would turn upside down the whole method of nature research. How could it ever occur to a scientist to show the evolution of one animal species out of another if the latter, in regard to its physical makeup, were as dissimilar to the former as Newton, in regard to his soul, is to his forebears: One conceives of one animal species having proceeded from a similar one which is merely one degree lower than itself. Therefore, Newton's soul must have sprung from a soul similar to it, but only one degree lower, psychically. Newton's soul nature is comprised in his biography. I recognize Newton by his biography just as I recognize a lion by the description of its species. And I comprehend the species “lion” if I imagine that it has sprung from a species on a correspondingly lower stage. Thus I comprehend what is comprised in Newton's biography if I conceive of it as having developed from the biography of a soul which resembles it, is related to it as soul. From this follows that Newton's soul existed already in another form, just as the species “lion” existed previously in a different form.

[ 24 ] For clear thought, there is no escape from this conception. Only because the modern believers do not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end do they not arrive at this final conclusion. Through it, however, the reappearance of the being who is comprised in the biography is secured.—Either we must abandon the whole natural-scientific theory of evolution, or we must admit that it must be extended to include the evolution of the soul. There are only two alternatives: either, every soul is created by a miracle, just as the animal species would have to be created by miracles if they have not developed one out of the other, or, the soul has developed and has previously existed in another form, just as the animal species has existed in another form.

[ 25 ] A few modern thinkers who have preserved some clarity and courage for logical thinking are a living proof of the above conclusion. They are just as unable to familiarize themselves with the thought of soul evolution, so strange to our age, as are the modern believers characterized above. But they at least possess the courage to confess the only other possible view, namely: the miracle of the creation of the soul. Thus, in the book on psychology by Professor Johannes Rehmke, one of the best thinkers of our time, we may read the following: “The idea of creation ... appears to us ... to be the only one suited to render comprehensible the mystery of the origin of the soul.” Rehmke goes so far as to acknowledge the existence of a conscious Universal-Being who, “as the only condition for the origin of the soul, would have to be called the creator of the soul.” Thus speaks a thinker who is unwilling to indulge in gentle spiritual slumber after having grasped the physical life processes, yet who is lacking the capacity of acknowledging the idea that each individual soul has evolved out of its previous form of existence. Rehmke has the courage to accept the miracle, since he is unable to have the courage to acknowledge the anthroposophical view of the reappearance of the soul, of reincarnation. Thinkers in whom the natural-scientific striving begins to be developed logically must of necessity arrive at this view. Thus, in the book, Neuchristentum und reale Religion (Neo-Christianity and Real Religion), by Julius Baumann, professor of philosophy at the University of Goettingen, we find the following (twenty-second) paragraph among the thirty-nine paragraphs of a Sketch of a Summary of Real-Scientific Religion: “Just as in inorganic nature the physical-chemical elements and forces do not disappear but only change their combinations, so is this also to be assumed, according to the real scientific method, in respect of the organic and organic-spiritual forces. The Human soul as formal unity, as connecting Ego, returns in new human bodies and is thus enabled to pass through all the stages of human evolution.”

[ 26 ] Whoever possesses the full courage for the natural-scientific avowal of faith of the present age must arrive at this conception. This, however, must not be misunderstood;we do not maintain that the more prominent thinkers among the modern believers are cowardly persons, in the ordinary sense of the word. It needed courage, indescribable courage to carry to victory the natural-scientific view in face of the resisting forces of the nineteenth century.⁵ But this courage must be distinguished from the higher one in regard to logical thinking. Yet just those nature researchers of the present age who desire to erect a world conception out of the findings of their domain are lacking such logical thinking. For, is it not a disgrace if we have to hear a sentence like the following, which was pronounced by the Breslau chemist Albert Ladenburg, in a lecture at a recent (1903) Conference of scientists: “Do we know anything about a substratum of the soul? I have no such knowledge.” After having made this confession, this same man continues: “What is your opinion concerning immortality? I believe that in regard to this question, more than in regard to any other, the wish is father to the thought, for I do not know a single scientifically proven fact which might serve as the basis for the belief in immortality.” What would the learned gentleman say if we were confronted by a speaker who said: “I know nothing about chemical facts. I therefore deny the chemical laws, for I know not a single scientifically proven fact which might serve as the basis for these laws.” Certainly, the professor would reply: “What do we care about your ignorance of chemistry? First study chemistry, then do your talking!” Professor Ladenburg does not know anything about a substratum of the soul; he, therefore, should not bother the world with the findings of his ignorance.

[ 27 ] Just as the nature researcher, in order to understand certain animal forms, studies the animal forms out of which these former have evolved, so the psychologist, rooted in natural science, must, in order to understand a certain soul form, study the soul form out of which the former has evolved. The skull form of higher animals is explained by scientists as having arisen out of the transformation of the lower animal skull. Therefore, everything belonging to a soul's biography ought to be explained by them through the biography of the soul out of which this soul concerned has evolved. The later conditions are the effects of former ones. That is to say, the later physical conditions are the effects of former physical conditions; likewise, the later soul conditions are the effects of former soul conditions. This is the content of the Law of Karma which says: all my talents and deeds in my present life do not exist separately as a miracle, but they are connected as effect with the previous forms of existence of my soul and as cause with future ones.

[ 28 ] Those who, with open spiritual eyes, observe human life and do not know this comprehensive law, or do not wish to acknowledge it, are constantly confronted by riddles of life. Let us quote one example for many. It is contained in Maurice Maeterlinck's book Le Temple Enseveli (The Buried Temple). This is a book which speaks of these riddles, which appear to present-day thinkers in a distorted shape because they are not conversant with the great laws in spiritual life of cause and effect, of Karma. Those who have fallen prey to the limited dogmas of the modern believers have no organ for the perception of such riddles. Maeterlinck puts [forth] one of these questions: “If I plunge into the water in zero weather in order to save my fellow man, or if I fall into the water while trying to push him into it, the consequences of the cold I catch will be exactly the same in both cases, and no power in heaven or earth beside myself or the man (if he is able to do so) will increase my suffering because I have committed a crime, or will relieve my pain because I performed a virtuous deed.” Certainly; the consequences in question here appear to an observation which limits itself to physical facts to be the same in both cases. But may this observation, without further research, be considered complete? Whoever asserts this holds, as a thinker, the same view point as a person who observes two boys being taught by two different teachers, and who observes nothing else in this activity but the fact that in both cases the teachers are occupied with the two boys for the same number of hours and carry on the same studies. If he were to enter more deeply upon the facts, he would perhaps observe a great difference between the two cases, and he would consider it comprehensible that one boy grows up to be an inefficient man, while the other boy becomes an excellent and capable human being.—And if the person who is willing to enter upon soul-spiritual connections were to observe the above consequences for the souls of the human beings in question, he would have to say to himself: what happens there cannot be considered as isolated facts. The consequences of a cold are soul experiences, and I must, if they are not to be deemed a miracle, view them as causes and effects in the soul life. The consequences for the person who saves a life will spring from causes different from those for the criminal; or they will, in the one or the other case, have different effects. And if I cannot find these causes and effects in the present life of the people concerned, if all conditions are alike for this present life, then I must look for the compensation in the past and the future life. Then I proceed exactly like the natural scientist in the field of external facts; he, too, explains the lack of eyes in animals living in dark caves by previous experiences, and he presupposes that present-day experiences will have their effects in future formations of races and species.

[ 29 ] Only he has an inner right to speak of evolution in the domain of outer nature who acknowledges this evolution also in the sphere of soul and spirit. Now, it is clear that this acknowledgment, this extension of knowledge of nature beyond nature is more than mere cognition. For it transforms cognition into life; it does not merely enrich man's knowledge, it provides him with the strength for his life's journey. It shows him whence he comes and whither he goes. And it will show him this whence and whither beyond birth and death if he steadfastly follows the direction which this knowledge indicates. He knows that everything he does is a link in the stream which flows from eternity to eternity. The point of view from which he regulates his life becomes higher and higher. The man who has not attained to this state of mind appears as though enveloped in a dense fog, for he has no idea of his true being, of his origin and goal. He follows the impulses of his nature, without any insight into these impulses. He must confess that he might follow quite different impulses, were he to illuminate his path with the light of knowledge. Under the influence of such an attitude of soul, the sense of responsibility in regard to life grows constantly. If the human being does not develop this sense of responsibility in himself, he denies, in a higher sense, his humanness. Knowledge lacking the aim to ennoble the human being is merely the satisfying of a higher curiosity. To raise knowledge to the comprehension of the spiritual, in order that it may become the strength of the whole life, is, in a higher sense, duty. Thus it is the duty of every human being to seek the understanding for the Whence and Whither of the Soul.

• 1. It is necessary to make this statement, for today superficial readers are numerous, and they are always ready to read all manner of nonsense into the expositions of a thinker, even though the latter takes great pains to express himself precisely. For that reason I should like to add here quite especially that it would never occur to me to fight those who, resting upon scientific premises, follow up the problem of “spontaneous generation.” But even though it may be a fact that somehow mere “lifeless” substances do unite to form living albumin, this does not prove that, rightly understood, Redi's conception is wrong.
• e1. While research has been undertaken in the “field of the soul” by modern psychologists, the only difficulty is that modern psychology denies the existence of the soul apart from the physical body. (Editor.)
• 2. The adherents of Wundt must feel disagreeably affected by my speaking of “soul” in such outmoded fashion, while they swear by the words of their master who just recently has proclaimed that we ought not to speak of “soul” since, after the “mythologizing of phenomena has evaporated into the transcendental,” nothing has remained of this “super-real” soul substance but an “interrelated occurrence.” Well, Wundt's wisdom resembles the assertion that we must not speak of “lily” because we are merely concerned with color, form, the process of growth, and so forth. (Wundt, Naturwissenschaft und Psychologie, Natural Science and Psychology.)
• 3. There may be many people today who wish to inform themselves quickly about the teachings of spiritual science. They will find it very bothersome if we first present to them explicitly the natural-scientific facts in a light that will make them serve as the basis upon which an anthroposophical view may be erected. They say: we wish to hear something about spiritual science, but you give us natural-scientific facts which every educated person knows. This is an objection which shows very clearly how little our contemporaries are inclined to think seriously. In reality, those who make the above statement know nothing at all about the far-reaching consequences of their knowledge. The astronomer knows nothing about the consequences of astronomy, the chemist nothing about those of chemistry, and so forth. There is no salvation for them but to be modest and to listen quietly when they are shown that, because of the superficiality of their thinking, they know nothing at all about that which in their conceit they believe they have completely exhausted.—And even anthroposophists often believe that it is unnecessary to prove the convictions of karma and reincarnation by means of the findings of natural science. They do not know that this is the task of the human groups to which the inhabitants of Europe and America belong; and that without this basis the members of these groups cannot truly attain to spiritual-scientific insight. Whoever wishes merely to repeat what he hears from the great Teachers of the East, cannot become an anthroposophist within the European-American culture.
• 5. The writer of this essay cannot be charged with failure to acknowledge the great merits of our modern believers for the very reason that he himself, in his book Die Raetsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy), has presented these merits in connection with the spiritual evolution of their epoch, fully appreciating and acknowledging their value.