The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The day before yesterday I endeavored to show you the universal mystery of necessity and freedom in its two equally significant aspects: world processes and human action. I began by drawing your attention to the full significance and difficulty of this mystery that is both cosmic and human, and today we will continue along the same lines. I used a hypothetical example demonstrating this difficulty in regard to world events. I said, “Suppose a party of people had set out to drive through a ravine where there is an overhanging rock, and had arranged to go at a definite time. The chauffeur, however, is negligent and delays the departure by five minutes. Because of this, the party arrives at the spot beneath the rock at the very moment when the rock falls down.” According to external judgment, and I say “external” deliberately, one would have to say that all those people were buried beneath the rock because of the chauffeur's negligence, that is, because of a circumstance that was apparently someone's fault.

Last time I wanted mainly to emphasize that we should not approach a problem of this sort too hastily with our ordinary thinking and believe we can solve it that way. I showed that in the first place we use our thinking only for the physical plane, therefore it has become accustomed to dealing with those requirements only, and gets confused if we go a bit beyond these.

I would like today to go on to show the serious nature of the whole problem. For we shall not be able to approach any kind of solution in the lecture intended for Sunday, unless we also examine all the implications for human knowledge itself, unless we fully examine why we get lost in blind alleys of thinking precisely in life's most difficult problems, why we are, so to speak, lost in the woods and imagining we are making progress when we are really just going round in circles. We do not notice we are going round in circles until we realize we are back at our starting point again. The strange thing is that where our thinking is concerned, we do not notice that we return again and again to the same point. We will have more to say about this.

I have indicated that this important problem has to do with what we call the ahrimanic and luciferic forces in world events and in what approaches the human being in his actions and his whole thinking, feeling, and willing. I mentioned that as late as the fifteenth century people had a feeling that just as positive and negative electricity play a part in natural processes, and no physicist would hesitate to speak about them, so Ahriman and Lucifer could also be seen in events of the world, even if people did not use these names. I showed this by the apparently remote example of the clock in the old town hall of Prague that is so ingeniously constructed that in addition to being a clock it is also a sort of calendar showing the course of the planets and eclipses of the sun and moon. In fact, it is a great work of art created by a very talented man. I told you that there are documents showing that it was a professor of a Prague university who made this work of art, though this point is of no further interest to us, for those are only the processes that took place on the physical plane.

I explained that a simple folk tale grew out of the feeling that in an affair of this sort ahrimanic and luciferic forces play their part. The story tells us that this clock in the Prague town hall was made beautifully by a simple man who received the power to create it entirely through a kind of divine inspiration. The story then goes on to say that the governor wanted to keep this clock all for himself and would not allow anything like it to be made in any other town. So he had the clockmaker blinded and forced him to retire. Not until he felt death approaching was the clockmaker allowed to touch the clock again. And then, with skillful manipulation, he gave the clock such a jolt that it could actually never be put right again.

In this folk tale we feel that on the one hand there was a sensing of the luciferic principle in the governor who wanted to have sole possession of the clock that could only be constructed by a gift of grace from the good, progressive powers, and that as soon as Lucifer appeared, he was joined by Ahriman, for the clock-maker's ruining of the clock was an ahrimanic deed. The moment Lucifer is summoned—and the opposite is also the case—he is countered by Ahriman. It is not only in the composition of this story that we see people's feeling for Ahriman and Lucifer, we also see it in another aspect, namely in the form of the clock itself. We see that the clockmaker, too, wanted to include ahrimanic and luciferic forces in the very construction of the clock, for besides all that I have already told you of its artistic perfection, this clock included something else as well. Apart from the clock face, the planetary dial, and all the other things it had, there were figures on both sides of the clock, Death on one side and two figures on the other. One of these figures was a man holding a money-bag containing money he could jingle, and the other figure represented a man holding a mirror in which he could see himself all the time.

These two figures are exceptionally good examples of the person who gives himself up to external values: the rich miser, the ahrimanic person—and the luciferic person who wants perpetually to have his vanity aroused, the man looking at himself in the mirror. The clockmaker himself confronts ahrimanic and luciferic qualities and on the other side there is Death, the balancer (we shall say more about this later), put there as a reminder that through the constant alternation of life between death and birth and between birth and death human beings rise above the sphere in which Ahriman and Lucifer are active. Thus in the clock itself we see a wonderful presentation of the feeling still existing at that time for the ahrimanic and luciferic element.

We must bring a feeling for this element to life again in a certain way if we want to solve the difficult question we have introduced. Basically the world always confronts us as a duality. Look at nature. Mere nature always bears the stamp of rigid necessity. In fact, we know that it is the scientists' ideal to be able to calculate future occurrences mathematically on the basis of past ones. Ideally, scientists would like to deal with all natural phenomena in the same way as with future sun and moon eclipses, which can be predicted through calculations based on the constellations in the heavens. In relation to natural phenomena people feel they are confronting absolute rigid necessity. Ever since the fifteenth century people have grown accustomed to accepting rigid necessity as the model for their world outlook. This has gradually led to historical phenomena also being perceived as imbued with a similar rigid necessity.

Yet where historical phenomena are concerned we should also consider another aspect. Let us take an example quite apart from our own life situation, for instance, Goethe as a historical phenomenon.¹ In certain respects we also are inclined to regard the appearance of Goethe and all he produced as being based on a sort of rigid necessity. But someone might bring the argument “Goethe was born on August 28, 1749. If this boy had not been born into this family, what would have happened? Would we have had Goethe's works?” It might be pointed out that Goethe himself refers to the fact that his father and mother brought him up in a special way, each contributing something toward what he later became. Would his works have been created if he had been brought up differently? Again, let us look at Goethe's meeting with Karl August, Duke of Weimar.² If the duke had not called Goethe to him and given him the kind of life we know he had from the 1770s onward, would entirely different works have resulted? Or might not Goethe even have been quite an ordinary cabinet secretary if he had been brought up differently at home, and the poetic urge had not already been so alive in him? What would German literature and art after Goethe's time have been like if all these things had been different?

All these questions can be asked, and they show the very profound significance of this question. But we have not yet fully arrived at an answer which would be other than superficial. We can go deeper still and ask different questions. Let us return to the artist who made the old Prague town hall clock. He put on it the figures of the rich miser with the money-bag, the vain man and, opposite them, Death. Now it is possible to say that the man accomplished something by putting the figures there. But if we express it like that, we are naming a cause of countless possible effects. For just imagine how many people have stood in front of that rich miser, the vain man looking at his reflection, and Death. And how many people have also seen an even smarter thing the clockmaker arranged. Namely, every time the clock was about to strike, Death began to move first, accompanying the striking of the hour with a ringing apparatus, then the other figure moved. Death nodded to the miser and the latter nodded back. All these things were there to be seen, and they were important guides for life. They made a deep impression on the beholder.

We see this from the fact that the folk tale goes on to relate something unusual. Whenever the clock was about to strike, the skeleton, Death, opened its mouth and people saw inside it a sparrow that longed for nothing more than to break free. But just as it was about to do so, the mouth closed, and it was shut in again for an hour. People told an ingenious legend about this opening and shutting of the mouth, showing what a significant thing “time” is—what we so abstractly call “time” and “the marching on of time.” They wanted to give an indication that there are deep secrets hidden here.

Let us imagine that a person might have stood in front of the clock. I want to mention this folk tale as an indication of the thoughts a person might have about it, or rather the imaginations a person might see, for that sparrow was not mere invention. Some of the people who looked at the clock saw the sparrow as an imagination. I just wanted to mention that. Let us look at it rationally for a moment. A person in a state of moral uncertainty might observe the clock and see Death nodding both to the rich man, who has become dependent on his riches, and to the vain man. And the impression this has on him could divert him from the possibility of being misled in his own state of moral wavering.

We can also imagine something else. Taking this aspect into consideration we could say that the man who constructed this work of art through divine inspiration has done a great deal of good. For a lot of people may have looked at this work of art and improved morally in certain respects. It might be said what a favorable karma this man must have had, being able to have a good effect on so many people's souls! And one might begin to wonder just how many people's souls he had helped by means of this imagination. One might begin to think of the artist's karma. One might say that the making of that clock and placing Death and Ahriman and Lucifer upon it was the most wonderful starting point for a favorable karma. One might indulge in such an outlook and say that there are people who trigger off a whole series of good deeds by means of one single deed. So this series of good deeds must be put down in their karma. And one could begin to wonder how each of one's own deeds should be carried out so that a similar series of good deeds can arise.

Here you see the beginning of a train of thought that can go astray. An attempt to think out how to set about doing deeds that produce a series of good deeds would be nonsense when it comes to making it a principle of life, wouldn't it? Someone might suggest that a stream of good deeds does spring from what that man did. But someone else could argue “No, I have followed up the matter of this clock and am convinced that there has not been much in the way of such results.” That person might be a pessimist and say that times are too evil for such good effects. People do not believe it when they see things like that. He has seen something quite different happening in many cases. He has seen people looking at the clock who had a democratic frame of mind and a smoldering hatred of the rich. And when a person like that saw the clock, he noticed that it was only the rich man to whom Death nodded and who nodded back. “I will put that into practice” he said, looked for the first miser he could find and murdered him. Similar deeds of hatred were done by other people. The clock-maker brought all these about through his work of art. That is what will have to be put down in his karma.

And again, taking a shortsighted view, someone could say “Perhaps after all one should not make a perfect work of art, one that has great inner value, because it might have the worst possible effects; it might have countless bad effects on one's karma.”

This draws our attention to an immense temptation for the whole range of human soul capacities and knowledge. For one only needs to look at oneself a little to see that people have the greatest inclination to ask about everything, “What was the result of it?” and to estimate the value of what has been done in accordance with the results. But in the same way as we started to speculate when we tried to think out whether the double numbers in the right column were as many as those in the left column or half as many, which was the example I gave you last time—just as we became mentally confused then, we are bound to become confused in our thinking now if we want to judge our actions by asking, “What result will they have, what effect will they have on my karma?”

Here again the folk tale is wiser, even more scientific, in the sense of spiritual science. For it is a very trivial thing to say, of course, but the folk tale does say that the clockmaker was a simple man. He had no intentions beside the thought that inspired him; he made the clock according to that, and did not speculate on what the results of his deed might be in any direction.

True, it cannot be denied—and this is what is so tempting—that you really may get somewhere if you think along these lines and ask what the results of a deed will be. It is tempting for the very reason that there are such things as actions where you have to ask what the consequences will be. And it would obviously be one-sided to draw the conclusion from what I have said that we should always behave like that clockmaker and not consider the consequences of our actions. For you have to have the consequences in mind if you thrash a boy for having been lazy. There are obviously cases like this where we have to have the consequences in mind. However, here lies the very point we must take to heart and examine closely, namely, that we relate to the world in two ways.

On the one hand, we receive impressions from the physical plane, and on the other hand we receive impressions from the spiritual world, as indicated in the legend, when it tells us that the artist was a simple man inspired by a gift of grace from above. When we are given these impressions by the spiritual world, when our souls are stimulated to do a particular thing, those are the moments in life when we have a second kind of certainty, a second kind of truth—not in an objective but a subjective sense—when we are guided by truth, we have a second kind of certainty, which is direct, and which we cannot but accept as such. This is the root of the matter.

On the one hand we are in the physical world, and in this world it looks as though every event follows naturally from the preceding one. But we are also within the spiritual world. In the last lecture I tried to show that just as we have an etheric body within our physical body, there is also a supersensible element active in the whole stream of events of the physical world. We are also placed within this supersensible activity, and from this proceed those impulses that are absolutely unique and that we have to follow quite regardless of the results, especially those in the physical world. Because human beings are in the world, they acquire a kind of certainty when they examine external things. This is how people observe nature. Observing natural phenomena is the only way to come to any certainty about cause and effect. On the other hand, however, we can receive direct certainty if we want it, by really opening our souls to its influences. Then we have to stop and give our full attention to a phenomenon, and know to evaluate it on the basis of its intrinsic value.

This, of course, is difficult. Yet we are constantly being given a chance, a crucial one, by the very phenomena themselves, particularly historical ones, to appreciate events and processes according to their intrinsic value. This is always necessary. But if we go more closely into questions that would lead us very far if we understood them rightly, we find a sphere where confusion in thinking is very marked. As a rule this confusion cannot be controlled by the individual. Let us take the phenomenon of Goethe's Faust.³ It is an artistic creation, isn't it? There will be very few people in this hall, particularly as we have made a number of studies of Faust, who will not hold the opinion that Goethe's Faust is a great work of art, one that is tantamount to an inspiration of grace.

Through Goethe's Faust, German cultural life in a sense conquered the cultural life of other nations too. Even in Goethe's lifetime Faust had a strong influence on many people. They regarded it as an absolutely unique work of art. However, a certain German was particularly annoyed that Madame de Stael expressed such an extraordinarily favorable opinion of it.⁴ I would just like to read you this man's opinion, so that you see that about such things that have to be judged individually there can be different opinions from those you may consider at this moment to be the only opinions one can possibly have of Goethe's Faust.

This critical opinion was written down in 1822 by a certain Franz von Spaun.⁵ Here is his criticism of Goethe's Faust, which begins right away with the “Prologue in Heaven:”

[Right from the Prologue] we see that Herr von Goethe is a very bad versifier and that the Prologue itself is a true sample of how one ought not to write verse.

Past ages show nothing that can compare with this Prologue for presumptuous paltriness. ... But I must be brief, for I have undertaken a long and, alas, wearisome piece of work. I have to point out to the reader that this notorious Faust enjoys an usurped and unmerited renown that it owes only to the pernicious esprit de corps of an Associato obscurorum vitorum. ... It is not because I wish to rival this renown that I am compelled to vent the sarcasm of harsh criticism upon Goethe's Faust. I do not travel by his path to Parnassus, and should have been glad if he had enriched our German language with a masterpiece. ... Among the multitudes who applaud, my voice may be extinguished, yet it is enough for me to have done my best; and if I succeed in converting even one reader and recalling him from the worship of this atrocity, I shall not grudge my thankless labor. ... The wretched Faust speaks an incomprehensible gibberish, in the most atrocious rhyme of any fifth grade student. My teacher would have thrashed me soundly if I had made inferior verses such as the following:

Oh, broad bright moon, if this might be
The last of the nights of agony,
The countless midnights of toil and ache,
I've pass'd at this dreary desk awake!

Concerning the baseness of the diction, the paltriness of the verse, I will henceforth be silent; what the reader has seen is sufficient proof that the author, as far as the construction of his verse is concerned, cannot stand comparison with the mediocre poets of the old school. ...

Mephistopheles himself realized even before the contract was signed that Faust was possessed by a devil. We, however, think he belongs in a lunatic asylum rather than in Hell, with all his accessories—hands and feet, head and posterior. Of sublime galimatias, of nonsense in high-faluting words, many poets have given us samples, but Goethe's nonsense or galimatias might be called a popular galimatias, a genre nouveau, for it is presented in the commonest, most atrocious language.

The more I think about this long litany of nonsense, the more probable it seems to me that there must have been a wager to the effect that if a celebrated man permitted himself to patch together the dullest, most boring nonsense, a legion of literary simpletons and deluded readers would find deep wisdom and great beauty in this insipid nonsense and know how to expound upon it. Famous men have this in common with Prince Piribinker and the immortal Dalai Lama that their rubbish is served up as sweetmeats and revered as relics. If this was Herr von Goethe's intention, he has won the wager....

There may well be some intentions behind Faust, yet a good poet does not hurl them at his readers; he should know the art of presenting and illuminating them properly. A richer theme for poetry than this is not easy to find, and people will be cross with him for bungling it so miserably. . ..

This diarrhea of undigested ideas is not caused by an excessive flow of healthy fluids but by a relaxation of the floodgates of the mind, and is an indication of a weak constitution. There are people from whom bad verse flows like water, but this incontinentia urinae poeticae, this diabetes mellitus of lame verses never afflicts a good poet. ... If Goethe's genius has freed itself from all fetters, the flood of his ideas cannot break through the dams of art, for they have already been broken through. Yet although we do not disapprove of an author's breaking away from the conventional rules of composition, he must still hold sacred the laws of sound human reason, of grammar and rhythm. Even in dramas where magic plays a part, he is only allowed the machinery of hypothesis, and he must remain faithful to this. He must make a good plot with a knot to be unraveled and the magic must lead to grand results. In the case of Faust the outcome is to seduce the victims to dastardly crimes, and his seducer does not need magic; everything he does any matchmaking scoundrel could have done just as well without witchcraft. He is as stingy as a miser, not using the hidden treasures at his command.

In short, a miserable wretch who might learn something from Lessing's Marinelli. Therefore, in the name of sound human reason I quash the opinion of Madame de Stael in favor of the aforesaid Faust and condemn it, not to Hell, which might be cooled off by this frigid production that even has a wintry effect on the devil, but to be thrown into the sewer of Parnassus. And by rights.

As you see, this judgment was actually passed upon Faust at one time, and the context in which the man passed it does not at all prove him to be entirely dishonest, but someone who believed what he wrote. Now imagine what would have happened if this man, who said that his own fifth grade teacher would have kept him from writing such rubbish as Faust, had himself become a school teacher and passed on this nonsense to a great number of boys. These boys might in their turn have become teachers and remembered something of this verdict on Faust. Just think of all the speculations you can make regarding all the karmic damage this person might have done by means of his judgment.

However, I am less concerned about that than about the fact that it is difficult to form a true, permanent judgment concerning events possessing their own intrinsic value. I have emphasized in some of my lectures that many a great personality of the nineteenth century will no longer be considered great in centuries to come, whereas people who have been quite forgotten will by that time be regarded as very significant indeed. Time puts such things right. I only wanted to point out how extremely difficult it is to form a judgment about an event needing to be looked at on its own merit.

We must now ask why that causes us such difficulty. We shall begin our reflections by seeing the critic as a different person from the one who is being judged. Nowadays we would say that the people who even in those days considered Goethe's Faust to be a great work of art and in a certain way judged it objectively eliminated themselves, so to speak. The man who wrote what I have just been reading to you did not eliminate himself. How do we arrive at judgments that are not objective? People judge without objectivity so often that it never occurs to them to ask why they do this. They do it because of the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Without sympathy and antipathy our judgments would never be other than objective.

Sympathy and antipathy are necessary in order to obscure the objectivity of judgment. Does this mean they are bad, however, and that we ought immediately to do away with them? We need only reflect a little to find that this is not so. For no sooner do we engross ourselves in Goethe's Faust than we like it and develop more and more feelings of sympathy towards it. We must have the possibility to develop sympathy. And after all, if we were unable to develop antipathy we would not arrive at an absolutely correct judgment of the man whose opinion we have just heard. For I imagine some antipathetic feelings against the man may have arisen in you, and they could well be justified.

But there again we see that it depends on not accepting these things as absolute but considering them in their whole context. It is not merely that human beings are brought to feelings of sympathy and antipathy by outer things but that we carry sympathy and antipathy into life. We bring our sympathy and antipathy to meet the things themselves, so that they do not work upon us but upon our sympathy and antipathy. What does this mean? I approach an object or a process accompanied by my sympathy and antipathy. Naturally the man I was speaking about did not exactly bring along his antipathy to Faust but he brought the kind of feelings that made him see Faust as antipathetic. He judged absolutely according to his instincts.

What does this signify? It means that sympathy and antipathy, to start with, are only words for real spiritual facts. And the real spiritual facts are the deeds of Lucifer and Ahriman. In a certain way Lucifer is in every expression of sympathy and Ahriman in every expression of antipathy. By letting ourselves be carried through the world by sympathy and antipathy, we are letting ourselves be carried through the world by Lucifer and Ahriman. Only we must not fall into the mistake I have often described and say yet again “We must flee from both Lucifer and Ahriman! We want to become good. So we must avoid Lucifer and Ahriman, avoid them at all costs! We must drive them away, right away!” For then we should also have to leave the world. For just as there can be both positive and negative electricity and not only the balance between them, so we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman wherever we go. It all depends on how we relate to them. These two forces must be there. The important thing is that we always bring them into balance in life. For instance, without Lucifer art would not exist. What matters is that we create art that is not purely luciferic.

Thus it is a matter of becoming aware that when we confront the world with sympathy and antipathy, Lucifer and Ahriman are at work in us. That is to say, we must be able to allow Lucifer and Ahriman really to be active in us. But while we are conscious that they are at work in us, we must nevertheless acquire the capacity to confront things objectively. This we can do only if we consider not merely how we judge external things and events in the world outside us, but also consider how we judge ourselves in the world. And this “judging ourselves in the world” leads us a step further into the question and the whole complex of questions we started with. We can form a judgment of ourselves in the world only if we apply to ourselves a uniform method of consideration. We must now consider this problem.

We look out upon nature. On the one hand, we see rigid necessity; one thing arising from another. We look at our own deeds and believe that they are subject only to freedom and are connected solely with guilt and atonement and so on. Both views are one-sided. In what follows it will be shown that each view is one-sided because neither correctly estimates the position of Lucifer and Ahriman. If we look at ourselves as human beings existing here on the physical plane, we cannot look into our own souls and see only what is taking place in the immediate present. If each one of us were to ask ourselves what is taking place within us right now, it would certainly be a piece of insight into ourselves. Yet this insight would be far from giving us everything we required even for superficial self-knowledge.

Without hurting anyone's feelings, of course, let us consider all of us here: I who am speaking and you who are listening. I would not be able to speak as I do if it were not for everything that has previously happened in my present life and in other incarnations. Looking only at what I am saying to you now would produce a very one-sided kind of self-knowledge. But without hurting anyone's feelings it must be obvious that each one of you listens differently, and understands and feels what I say slightly differently. That goes without saying. In fact your understanding is in accordance with your life up to now and your previous incarnations. If each one of you did not grasp differently what is being said, you would not really be human beings.

But that leads much further. It leads to the recognition of a duality in ourselves. Just think for a moment that when you pass judgment, you do it in a certain way. Let us take a random example. If you see one thing or another, a play directed by Max Reinhardt, for example, you say, “It is charming!” while someone else says “That is the ruin of all art!”⁶ I am certainly not criticizing either opinion just now. It is possible for one person to say this and another that. On what does it depend that one person has a different opinion from another? That depends again on what is already in them, upon the assumptions with which they approach matters.

But if you think about these assumptions, you will be able to say “At one time these assumptions did not exist.” What you saw when you were eighteen, for instance, or learned at the age of thirteen, enters into your present judgments. It has become part of your whole thinking, resides in you, and contributes to your judgment. Everyone can of course perceive this in himself if he wishes to do so. It contributes to your judgment. Ask yourself whether you can change what is now in you, or whether you can tear it out of yourself. Think about it for a moment! If we could tear it out, we would be taking away the whole of our life up to now; we would be obliterating ourselves. We can no more get rid of our previous resolutions and decisions than we can give ourselves another nose if we do not like what we see in the mirror.

It is obvious that you cannot obliterate your past. Yet if you wish to rise early in the morning, you see, a resolution is always necessary. This resolution, however, is really dependent upon the prior conditions of your present incarnation. It depends on other things as well. If we say it depends on this or that, does that detract from the fact that I have to resolve to get up? This decision to get up may be so faint that we do not notice it at all, but at least a faint resolve to get up has to be there, that is to say, getting up must be a free deed.

I knew a man who belonged for a time to our Society and who is a good illustration of this, for he actually never wanted to get up. He suffered terribly because of it, and often deplored it. He said, “I simply cannot get up! Unless something occurs in the way of an external necessity to make me rise from my bed, I would stay there forever.” He confessed this openly, for he found it a terrible temptation in life not to want to get up. From this you can easily see that it really is a free deed. And although certain prior conditions have been laid down in us which suggest one or another motive, it does not prevent our doing a free deed in the particular instance.

In a certain way it is like this: Some people drag themselves out of bed with the help of strong determination, while others enjoy getting up. We could easily say that this shows us that the existing prior conditions signify that the one was brought up well and the other badly. We can see a certain necessity there, yet it is always a free decision. Thus we see in one and the same fact, in the fact of getting up, free will and necessity interwoven, thoroughly interwoven. One and the same thing contains both freedom and necessity. And I beg you to note well that, rightly considered, we cannot dispute whether a person is free or unfree in a certain matter, but we can only say that first of all freedom and necessity are intermingled in every human deed.

How does this happen? We shall not progress with our spiritual science unless we realize that we have to consider things both from the human and the cosmic standpoint. Why is this so? It is because what works in us as necessity—I will now say something relatively simple yet of tremendous significance—what we regard as necessity belongs to the past. What works in us as necessity must always be from the past. We must have experienced something, and this experience must have been stored up in our souls. It is then within our soul and continues to work there as necessity.

You can now say that everybody bears his past within him, and this means bearing a necessity within him. What belongs to the present does not yet work as necessity, otherwise there would be no free deed in the immediate present. But the past works into the present and combines with freedom. Because the past works on, freedom and necessity are intimately connected in one and the same deed.

Thus if we really look into ourselves, we will see that necessity exists not only outside us in nature but also within ourselves. When we look at this latter kind of necessity, we have to look at our past. This is an extremely important point of view for a spiritual scientist. He learns to understand the connection between past and necessity. Then he begins to examine nature, and finds necessity there. And in examining natural phenomena he realizes that all the necessities the natural scientist finds in nature are the result of past events. What is nature as a whole, the whole realm of nature with its necessity?

We cannot answer that unless we look for the answer on the basis of spiritual science. We are now living in earth existence, a condition which was preceded by the moon, sun and Saturn conditions. In the Saturn condition, as you see in Occult Science, the planet did not look like the earth does now but entirely differently.⁷ If you examine Saturn, you will see that then everything was still of a thought like nature. Stones did not yet fall to the ground. Dense physical matter did not exist as yet. Everything came from the activity of warmth. This state is similar to what goes on within the human being itself. Everything is soul activity, thoughts that divine spirits have left behind. And they have remained in existence.

All of present nature that you understand with its necessity was once in a state of freedom, a free deed of the gods. Only because it is past, because what developed on Saturn, sun, and moon has come to us in the same way as our childhood thoughts continue to work in us, the thoughts of the gods during Saturn, sun, and moon continue their existence on earth. And because they are past thoughts, they appear to us as necessity.

If you now put your hand on a solid object, what does that mean? It means that what is in the solid object was once being thought in the long distant past, and has remained in the same way as your childhood thoughts have remained in you. If you look at your past, regarding past activities as something living, you see nature in the process of becoming within you. Just as what you now think and say is not a necessity but is free, so earth's present state was once free in earlier stages of existence. Freedom continually evolves, and what is left behind becomes necessity. If we were to see what is taking place in nature now, it would not occur to us to see it as a necessity. What we see of nature is only what has been left behind. What is happening now in nature is spiritual, and we do not see that.

This gives human self-knowledge a very special cosmic significance. We think a thought. It is now within us. Certainly we might also not think it. But if we think it, it remains in our soul, where it becomes an activity of the past. It now works on as a necessity, a delicate, insubstantial necessity, and not dense matter like outer nature because we are human beings, not gods. We can perceive only the inner nature that remains in us as memory and is operative in what are necessities for us. But our current thoughts will become external nature in the coming Jupiter and Venus conditions. They will then be the external environment. And what we now see as nature was once the thoughts of the gods.

Nowadays we speak of angels, archangels, archai, and so on. They were thinking in the past, just as we are thinking today. And what they thought has remained as their memory, and it is this memory we now perceive. We can only perceive within us what we remember during earth existence. But inwardly it has become nature. What the gods thought during earlier planetary conditions has been externalized and we see it as external nature.

It is true, profoundly true, that as long as we are earthly human beings we think. We send our thoughts down into our soul life. There they become the beginning of a natural world. But they remain in us. Yet when the Jupiter existence comes, they will come forth. And what we are thinking today, in fact all that we experience, will then be the external world. The external world we will then look down upon from a higher level will be what is now our inner world. What is experienced at one time in freedom changes into necessity.

These are very, very important aspects, and only when we see the world in this way will we be able to understand the real course of historical events and the significance of today's events. For these lead us directly to the point where we always pursue the path from subjectivity to objectivity. Strictly speaking, we can be subjective only in the present. As soon as the present is over, and we have pushed the subjective elements down into our soul life, they acquire independent existence, though at first only within us. As we continue living with other thoughts, the earlier thoughts live on, only in us, of course. For the time being we still house them. But this covering will some day fall away.

In the spiritual realm matters are very different. So you must look at events, such as the hypothetical one I gave you, from this different point of view. Looked at from outside, a boulder fell and buried a party of people. But that was only the external expression of something that happened in the spiritual world, this latter event being the other half of the experience and existing just as objectively as the first one. This is what I wanted to present to you today, showing how freedom and necessity play into one another in world evolution and in the evolution in which we are involved as living beings; how we are interwoven with the world, and how we ourselves are daily, hourly, becoming what nature shows us externally. Our past, while within us, is already a piece of nature. We progress beyond this piece of nature by evolving further, just as the gods progressed in their evolution beyond their nature stage and became the higher hierarchies.

This is only one of the ways, of which there are many, that ought to show us again and again that nothing taking place on the physical plane can be judged solely according to its physical aspect, but should be judged based on the knowledge that it has a hidden spiritual content in addition to the physical one. As sure as our physical body has an etheric body in it, everything perceived by the senses has a supersensible part underlying it. Therefore, we must conclude that we are really regarding the world in a very incomplete way if we examine it solely according to what it presents to our eyes and according to what takes place externally, for while something quite different is taking place externally, inwardly something can be happening spiritually that belongs to the outer event and is of immensely greater significance than what is presented to our senses. What the souls of the people who were buried under the boulder experienced in the spiritual world may be infinitely more important than what happened physically. The occurrence has something to do with the future of those souls, as we shall see.

Let us interrupt these thoughts at this point today and continue them next Sunday. My aim today was to bring your thoughts and ideas into the direction that will show you that we can only acquire correct concepts of freedom and necessity, guilt and atonement, and so on, if we add the spiritual aspect to the physical one.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist.
• 2. Karl August, Duke of Weimar, 1757–1828, Duke of Saxony and Weimar 1758–1828.
• 3. Faust, dramatic poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• 4. Madame de Stael (Germaine de Stael), 1766–1817, French writer and intellectual.
• 5. Franz von Spaun, 1753–1826, German essayist. The quotation from Faust is from Part I, “Night,” Translated by Sir Theodore Martin. Everyman's Library, (London: Dent, 1971).
• 6. Max Reinhardt, 1873–1943, director of the German theater in Berlin.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1972).

Spiritual science that wants to live into the modern cultural current does not want to be something new and precisely in this way differs from the many world views and other schools of thought that come forward and believe that they can prove their right to exist by claiming to bring something new to this or that question of spiritual life. In contrast to this, the subject that is called spiritual science should emphasize that the sources of its knowledge and its life have been present in the same way at all times when people have thought and striven for the highest questions and riddles of existence. I have often been able to emphasize this, also in this city, when I had the honor of speaking in previous lectures.

It must now be particularly appealing to consider not only the various religious beliefs and world views that have emerged in the development of humanity from this point of view, but also to look at personalities who are close to us from this perspective. For if something is to be true in spiritual science, then at least a kernel of this truth must be found in all those who have honestly and energetically striven for knowledge and for a dignified human existence.

Now when spiritual science is discussed today, the most diverse judgments are asserted from one side or the other, and those who have not penetrated deeper into the corresponding field, who have gained a superficial knowledge from these or those lectures or pamphlets, will, depending on his point of view, regard this spiritual science as the fantasy or reverie of a few unworldly people who have strange ideas about life and its foundations. It must be fully admitted that, if one does not look more closely, such a judgment may seem understandable, because although today we are not talking about a specific topic, it should be pointed out that some of the main insights of this spiritual science are based on a special theme. And as soon as these are mentioned and characterized, our contemporaries may well feel, in all honesty, “What curious stuff is this?”

On the whole, spiritual science, if taken seriously, is based on the premise that what surrounds us in the sensual world, what we can perceive with our senses, what we can grasp with the mind that is bound to our senses, is not the whole world, but that behind everything that is sensual lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world is not in an indefinite hereafter, but is always around us, just as the phenomena of color and light are also around the blind. But in order for us to know about something that is around us, we need to have an organ to perceive it. And just as the blind man cannot see color and light, so too, as a rule, people in our age with normal abilities cannot perceive the spiritual facts and beings that are around us. But when we have the good fortune to operate on a blind person, then there comes for him the moment of the awakening of the eye, and what was not there for him, light and colors, now floods into his inner being. From the moment of his operation, this is a perceptible world for him. In the spiritual realm, there is a higher awakening, the awakening through which a person becomes initiated into the spiritual world. To speak with Goethe, there are spiritual eyes and ears, but as a rule, human souls are not ready to use them. But when we apply the means and methods by which these powers come into existence, then something happens in us on a higher plane, as when a blind person is operated on and is then flooded with the world of colors and light. When a person's eyes and ears are opened, he becomes awakened. A new world is around him, a world that was always there, but which he can only perceive from the moment of awakening. But then, when a person is ready, he learns to make various insights his own, insights that brighten life, insights that can give us strength and security for our work, that enable us to see into the essence of human destiny and the secrets of fate.

And only one of these insights will be discussed here, one of those insights that, if not crazy, must often seem strange and dreamy to today's people. It is an insight that is nothing more than the revival of an ancient process of knowledge, its continuation in a higher realm, a truth that was only recently attained for a lower realm. In general, humanity has a short memory for great events in the spiritual world, and that is why so few people today remember that in the 17th century not only laymen but even scholars believed that lower animals, even worms and fish, would develop from river mud. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first pointed out that no earthworm or fish grows out of dead river mud unless an earthworm or fish germ is present in it beforehand. He stated that life can only come from life, and from this it can be seen that it is only an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that a fish or worm can grow out of lifeless river mud. A closer examination shows that we have to go back to the living germ, and that this living germ can only draw from its environment the forces that are there to bring to the greatest development what is alive in the germ.

What Redi said, that living things develop only from living things, is taken for granted by science today. When Redi uttered these words, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Such is the way of the development of humanity. First, a truth must be so hard won that those who first express it are branded as heretics. Then it becomes a matter of course, the common property of humanity. What Redi did for natural science should be done for the spirit through spiritual science today, by transferring the sentence that Redi pronounced for natural science from the knowledge of the awakened spiritual eye and spiritual ear to the soul realm. And there this sentence means: The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. This means that it is an inaccurate way of looking at it when we see a human being come into existence, to believe that everything that comes into life comes only from the father and mother and the ancestors. Just as we have to go back from the developing earthworm to the living earthworm germ, so we have to go back from the human being, who develops from the germ into a specific being, to an earlier spiritual existence, and we have to realize that this being, which comes into existence through birth, draws from its bodily ancestors only the strength for its development, just as the earthworm germ draws strength from its inanimate surroundings. And in a corresponding extension, this sentence: Living things can only come from living things, leads to the other sentence: The present life, which comes into existence through birth, not only leads back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries back to an earlier spiritual-soul. And if you delve deeper into it, you will see that it is scientifically shown that there is not just one, but repeated lives on earth, that what is in us now between birth and death is the repetition of a spiritual soul that was already there in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is in turn the starting point for subsequent lives. Spiritual-soul-like comes from spiritual-soul-like, goes back to spiritual-soul-like, which was there before birth, which descends from the spiritual world and lives in physical embodiments. We now see something completely different when, for example, we as educators are confronted with a child who gradually develops his powers. At birth we see something indeterminate on his face, how something unfolds from within, ever more distinctly and distinctly, which does not come from heredity but from previous lives. We see how this center of the spiritual soul unfolds more and more from birth through talents.

Today, spiritual science has something to say about repeated lives on earth. Today it may be a mere reverie, as what Francesco Redi said in the 17th century was considered a mere reverie. But what is considered a mere reverie today will become a matter of course in the not too distant future, and the sentence: spiritual-mental comes from spiritual-mental, will become common knowledge for humanity.

Today, heretics are no longer treated as they were in the past. They are no longer burned at the stake, but they are considered fools and dreamers who speak out of random fantasy. They are ridiculed, and those in the know sit in the high chair of science and say that this is not compatible with real science, not knowing that it is true, genuine science that demands this truth. And now we can cite a hundred and a hundred such truths that would show us how spiritual science can illuminate life by showing that there is an immortal essence in man that passes through death into the spiritual world and, when it has fulfilled its destiny there, returns to physical existence to gain new experiences, which it then carries up through death into the spiritual worlds. We would see how the ties that are woven from person to person, from soul to soul in all areas of life, those traits of the heart that go from soul to soul and cannot otherwise be explained, can be explained by the fact that they were formed in previous life circumstances. And just as the spiritual bonds we weave today do not cease when death draws over existence, but just as what passes from soul to soul as bonds of life is immortal like the human soul itself, how it lives on through the spiritual world and will revive again in other, future earthly conditions and new embodiments. And it is only a matter of development that people will also remember their earlier experiences on earth, what they have gone through spiritually and soul-wise in earlier lives and states of existence.

Such truths will become established in human life in the not too distant future as necessary things, and people will gain strength and hope and confidence from such conditions. Today we can only see that a few individuals in the world are drawn by their healthy sense of truth to what spiritual researchers have to proclaim from their experiences in the spiritual world. But spiritual-scientific knowledge will become the common property of mankind and will be assimilated by those who earnestly seek the truth. And those who have trodden the paths of earnest seekers after truth have always, in all that they have offered to mankind, developed the great wisdom and knowledge that spiritual science brings again today.

An example should arise before our soul in a personality that is close to our modern life: the example of Goethe, and with him again that which occupied him as his most comprehensive and greatest work throughout his life: his “Faust”.

If we approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with what spiritual science can give, we can actually start quite early on. One can say that from his entire disposition, one recognizes in Goethe how there was soul and spirit in him. Everything that pushes one to seek a spiritual element behind the phenomena of the sensual world was an early predisposition in him. There we see the seven-year-old Goethe, who could have absorbed ordinary ideas from his surroundings, as a boy can absorb them, for his first soul perception. That does not satisfy him; he recounts it himself in 'Poetry and Truth'. There we see how the seven-year-old boy begins something quite remarkable to express his yearning for the divine. He takes a music stand from his father's collection and makes an altar out of it, placing all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature on it, from which the spirit of nature speaks. The boy's soul builds an altar, puts a little incense on it, takes a burning glass, waits for the morning sun to rise, collects the first rays of the rising sun with the burning glass, lets them fall on the little incense, so that the smoke rises. And in his later years, Goethe remembers how, as a boy, he wanted to send his pious feelings up to the great god of nature, who speaks through minerals and plants, who sends us his fire in the rays of the sun. This grows with Goethe. We see how, at a more mature stage – but still out of a yearning soul, as it lives in Goethe – after he comes to Weimar and is appointed by the duke as his advisor, how this feeling for the spirit that speaks through all of nature is expressed in the beautiful prose hymn. There he says: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Unwarned and uninvited, it takes us into the cycle of its dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall into its arms. We have not done what we do, she has done everything; she is constantly thinking and pondering, looking at the world with a thousand eyes.” And again later, in the beautiful book about Winckelmann, ‘Antiquities’: ”When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmony of pleasure gives him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in reaching its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. Thus Goethe felt, like everything that lives and moves outside in nature, a resurrection celebrating from the human soul, and like a higher nature, a spiritual nature is brought forth from the spirit and soul of man. But it took Goethe a long time to fully grasp the spiritual realization of nature. And there is no clearer or more obvious example of how Goethe was a lifelong seeker who never rested or paused, always striving to reshape his knowledge and reach higher levels, than his life's poem, “Faust.”

From his earliest youth, he had begun to put everything that filled his yearning and intuitive soul into his poem; and as an old man in his later years, shortly before his death, he completed this poem, on which he had worked for over fifty years and into which he had put the best of his life. The second part was sealed at his death, like the great testament he had to give to humanity. It is a momentous document. We can only understand this document if we follow Goethe a little, as he himself sought to struggle towards knowledge.

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For example, there is the student Goethe at the University of Leipzig. He is supposed to become a lawyer, but that is of secondary concern to him. Even then, the young student was possessed by an invincible urge to fathom the secrets of the world, to seek the spiritual. He therefore immerses himself in everything Leipzig has to offer in the way of knowledge about nature. He seeks to eavesdrop on what nature has to say to us in its phenomena, to eavesdrop on the world's riddles of existence. But Goethe needed, in order to rework what natural science could offer him, to re-melt it in his soul to that all-powerful urge of his inner being, which does not seek abstract knowledge but warm hearted a great experience, an experience that really leads the human being to that knowledge which is the gate toward which we intuitively look, the gate that closes for today's normal human being, the invisible, the supersensible: the gate of death. At the end of his student days in Leipzig, he experienced death. A serious illness had prostrated him, brought him close to death. For hours and days he had to face the fact that at any moment he could pass through that mysterious portal. And the mysterious, impetuous urge to understand demanded the utmost seriousness in the pursuit of knowledge. With this newly formed attitude of knowledge, Goethe returned to his native city of Frankfurt. There he found a circle of people, headed by a woman of great and profound talent: Susanne von Klettenberg. Goethe created a wonderful monument to her in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. He showed how this personality, to whose spiritual world he had such close access at the time, contained something that can only be described as a soul. In Susanne von Klettenberg, there lived a soul that sought to grasp the divine within itself in order to find, through the divine within itself, the spiritual that lives through the world. Goethe was introduced at that time by the circle to which this lady belonged, to studies that, if you, as a truly modern person, let them have an effect on you today, seem crazy. Goethe immersed himself in medieval writings. Those who pick them up today cannot do anything with them. When you see the strange signs in them, you ask yourself: what is the point of this in the face of science's modern quest for truth? — There was a book called “Aurea catena Homeri”, “The Golden Chain of Homer”. When you open it, you find a strange symbolic illustration: a dragon at the top in a semicircle, a dragon full of life, bordering on another dragon, a withering dragon dying within itself. All kinds of signs are linked to it: symbolic keys, two interlocking triangles and the planetary signs. To our contemporaries this is fantasy, to today's science it is fantasy, because one does not know what to do with these signs. Goethe senses in his intuition that they express something, that one can do something with them when one looks at them. They do not immediately express something that can be found here or there in the world. But if you let these signs take effect on you, by memorizing them so that you become deaf and blind to your physical surroundings, only letting these signs take effect on you, then you experience something very peculiar, then you experience that the soul within itself senses something that was dormant before, like a spiritual eye that opens. And if you have enough stamina, you will grasp what you can call meditation, concentration, which will develop your soul to such an extent that you will actually undergo something like an operation of the spiritual eye, through which a new world will open up. At that time, a new world could not yet be opened up for Goethe; he was not yet that far. But what came to life in his soul was the inkling that there are keys to this spiritual world, that one can penetrate into this spiritual world. One must visualize this mood; the vivid sensation, the vivid feeling: something is being stirred in me, something is coming to life; there must be something that leads into the spiritual world. But at the same time he senses: he cannot yet enter it. If Goethe had ever been identical with Faust in his life, we would say: Goethe was in the same situation in which Faust appears at the beginning of the first part, when Faust, after having studied the most diverse fields of human science, opens books in which there are such signs and feels surrounded by a spiritual world, but cannot enter into the spiritual world. Goethe never felt identical with Faust. Faust was a part of him, but he outgrew what was only a part of himself. And so, what went beyond Faust in Goethe grew because he, fearing no discomfort, always strove further and further, saying to himself: “One does not get behind the secrets of existence in a flash , not by incantations and formulas, but by patiently and energetically penetrating, step by step, in a truly spiritual and soulful way, whatever comes our way in the physical world. — It is easy to say: “What is higher knowledge must be absorbed by the soul.” This higher knowledge must penetrate the soul, but it only takes on its true form when we strive with patience and perseverance to get to know the real phenomena of the physical world step by step and then to seek the spiritual behind these phenomena of the physical world. But with what Goethe took with him from his time in Frankfurt, he was able to summarize everything else, he was able to see everything in a different light.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city, Strasbourg. We could cite many things that led him higher here. But what is particularly characteristic is how that which has such great significance in this city came before his soul: the cathedral, the minster. At that time, the idea of this wonderful building presented itself before Goethe's soul, and he understood why every single line is as it is. He saw with spiritual vision, with the vision gained through his immersion in Frankfurt, every triangle, every single angle of this significant building as belonging to the whole, and in his soul the great idea of the master builder celebrated a resurrection, and Goethe believed he recognized what had flowed into this building as a thought, as an idea. And so we could cite many instances of what had entered this soul as an inner vision and what it had taken up from external world processes entering into a marriage in Goethe's soul. Therefore it is not surprising that when he later came to Weimar, he took up natural science from a new angle, botany, zoology, bone theory and so on, in order to consider everything like letters that together make up the book of nature, leading into the secrets of existence. This is how his studies of plant development and the animal world came about, which he later continued as a student, only that he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence everywhere. Thus we see how, during his Italian journey, he regarded art on the one hand and natural objects on the other, and how he observed the world of plants in order to recognize the spirit that reigns in them. The words he wrote to his friends, while he was engaged in this kind of spiritual natural science, are great and beautiful. He said: Oh, here everything presents itself to me in a new way; I would like to travel to India to look at what has already been discovered in my own way. — That is to say, as his development demanded, according to the indications we were able to give. And so we see how he also looks at the works of art that come to him. He writes in a letter: “This much is certain: the ancient artists had just as great a knowledge of nature and an equally sure concept of what can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer. Unfortunately, the number of works of art in the first class is all too small. But if one also sees these, one has nothing to wish for but to recognize them correctly and then to go there in peace. These lofty works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, produced by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” Just as the great spirit of nature spoke to the seven-year-old boy from the altar he had erected, so the great spirit of the existence of the spiritual world spoke to him from these works of art, which he regarded as a unity. Thus Goethe gradually arrived at the contemplation of the individual in energetic, devoted work. Then he could calmly await the moment when a real insight into the spiritual world leaped out of his observations, a true spiritual science, which then confronts us, artistically transformed and reworked, in his “Faust”.

Thus the first sections of Faust that were written have all the atmosphere of a man who senses the secrets of existence but is unable to penetrate these secrets. We see how Faust allows the signs to take effect that surround him with spiritual reality, but we also see how he is not yet mature enough to really feel this spiritual reality. These are the sentences where Faust, as the Nostradamus aura, allows the signs of the macrocosm and the earth spirit to take effect on him, where the spirit of the earth appears before him. Faust characterizes the earth spirit in wonderfully beautiful words. We see how he senses that what the planet Earth is, is not simply the physical sphere that natural science regards it as, but rather, just as the body contains a soul, so the Earth body contains a spirit.

In the tides of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

That is what lives in the earth as the spirit of the earth, just as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe characterizes Faust as not yet mature, his spirit as still unfinished. He must turn away from the terrible sign like a timid worm curled up. The earth spirit answers him: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” In Goethe's soul there lived the realization, even if at first only a presentiment, that we cannot declare ourselves satisfied at any stage, but must strive from each stage to higher and higher stages, that we cannot say at any stage that we have achieved something, but must always strive higher from each stage. Goethe was led into these secrets by his diligent studies from phenomenon to phenomenon. And now we see him grow.

The same spirit that he first summoned, and of whom he could only say, “Terrible face!” is addressed by Goethe through Faust, after Goethe himself had reached a higher level after his trip to Italy, after his journey, which I have characterized as one in which he wanted to permeate all of nature and art with his vision. Now Faust is attuned to the same spirit that Goethe himself was attuned to. Now Faust stands before the same spirit, which he thus addresses:

Eminent Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious Nature's kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, amazed visitors,
Grant me into their deep chests
To look as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, brushing neighboring branches
And squashing neighboring trunks,
And the hill thunders hollowly hollow;
Then you lead me to the secure cave,
Then you show me myself, and my own breast,
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And when the pure moon rises before my gaze,
Soothingly across: silver figures of primeval times,
and ease the strict desire of contemplation.

There Goethe has arrived, and with him Faust, to the heights, no longer turning away from the spirit that he had wanted to reach by leaping. Now the spirit presents itself as such that he no longer needs to turn away from it. Now he recognizes it in all living things, in all realms of nature: in forest and water, in the silent bush, in the giant spruce, in storm and thunder. And not only there. After it has appeared to him in the great outdoors, he also recognizes it in his own heart: its secret, deep wonders open up.

This is a step forward in Goethe's knowledge of the spirit, and Goethe did not rest on his laurels. We then see how, spurred on by Schiller, he sought to deepen his knowledge, particularly in the 1890s. This knowledge enabled him to go beyond the vague characterization of spiritual consciousness that a spirit lives in everything. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in a concrete way. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to depict the life of the human spirit in the sense that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. However, the fact that Goethe never failed to attempt to get deeper is shown by some of the works he created before the second part of Faust was completed. The second part of Faust shows the heights to which he has risen. Some have already turned away from him when they got to know the introspective Goethe in Pandora. Even today we hear people say: the first part of Faust is full of life, it breathes direct naturalness, but the second part is a product of Goethe's old age, full of symbols and contrivances. Such people have no idea what is in it, what infinite wisdom is in this second part of “Faust”, which only the Goethe of his rich life could have produced in his old age, leaving it as a testament. Therefore, we also understand when Goethe writes the lines about some works that already breathe the spirit of “Faust”, and we know that he presents Faust as a struggling soul, a soul that has been overtaken by something new. We recognize it in the anger he poured out on those who called “Faust” an inferior work of old age. He says of them:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor;

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
They think the riffraff,
It would no longer be!

Goethe once put into words his feelings towards those who believe that only what Goethe achieved in his younger years has validity, who do not want to ascend to what he achieved in his more mature years.

After Goethe has introduced Faust into the life that directly surrounds us, and has allowed him to experience that wonderful tragedy of Gretchen, he leads him out into the world that is outwardly the great world, first of all into the world that is outwardly the great world: the world of the imperial court. There Goethe now wants to show that Faust should now really penetrate spiritually into the secrets of this world. But then Faust should be introduced to the real spiritual world, to the supersensible world.

Right at the beginning of the second part, we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by all kinds of spiritual beings. This is to express that Faust is not only to be led into an external physical world, but that he is also to experience what can be experienced by someone whose spiritual eye is open, whose spiritual ear is learning to perceive. Therefore, in the second part, Goethe shows us step by step the nature of the human soul, human development. What is Faust to experience? He is to experience the knowledge of the supersensible world. He is to be initiated into the secrets of the supersensible world. Where is this supersensible world?

When we consider the spiritual content of “Faust”, we can only begin to address the question of Mephistopheles, the spirit that surrounds Faust from the very beginning and plays a part in everything Faust undertakes. But it is only in the second part, where Faust is to be led into the spiritual world, that we see what role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has gone through the events at the “imperial court”, he begins to see what is no longer there in the sensual world: the spirit of Helen, who lived centuries and centuries ago. She is to be found for Faust. She cannot be found in the physical world. Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to this world, but he cannot enter this spiritual world himself; he can describe it intellectually. He can say: You will descend. One could also say: You will ascend. He then actually describes the spiritual world into which Faust is to descend in order to get to know it supersensibly, to find in it the spirit, the immortal, the eternal that has been left behind from Helena. A word is spoken, a wonderful word: Faust is to descend to the Mothers. What are the “Mothers”? One could talk for hours if one wanted to characterize exactly what the Mothers are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times what man gets to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited. When he enters the spiritual world, he comes into something from which all physical things come out as ice comes out of a water pond. As one who could not see the water would say: Nothing is there but ice, it piles up out of nothing — so says he who knows not the spirit: Only physical things are there. He sees not the spirit that is between and behind physical things, out of which all physical things are formed as ice is formed out of water. There, where the source of physical things is, which is no longer visible to the physical eye, are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is the being that is to represent that intellect which only knows what is outwardly formed in space, which knows that there is a spiritual world but cannot penetrate into it. Mephistopheles stands there beside Faust, as the materialistic thinker stands today beside the spiritual researcher, and says: “Ah, you spiritual scientist, you theosophist, you want to see into a spiritual world? There is nothing in there, it is all a dream. It is all nothing. To the materialist, who wants to build firmly on what the microscope and the telescope reveal, but who wants to deny everything that lies behind physical phenomena, the spiritual researcher cries out: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialistic thinker stands opposed to the spiritual man, who hopes to find the spirit precisely where the other sees nothing. These two powers will confront each other forever. And from the very beginning, Mephisto confronts Faust as the spirit that can lead to the door, but cannot cross that threshold. The theosophist or spiritual scientist does not say: material science is nothing, is unnecessary. — He says: we must take this science seriously, study it, but it only has the key, it leads us to where the true spiritual life is to be found.

Faust then descends into the realm of the mothers, into the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up the spirit of Helen. But he is not yet mature enough to truly connect this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where passion stirs in Faust, where he wants to embrace the image of Helen with sensual passion. That is why he is repulsed. This is the fate of everyone who wants to approach the spiritual world from personal, selfish feelings. He is repulsed, as Faust is repulsed when he has brought up from the realm of the mothers the spirit of Helen. Faust must first mature, learn to recognize how the three members of human nature really come together: the immortal spirit that goes from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment; the body that lives between birth and death; and the soul that stands between the two. Faust is to learn how body, soul and spirit are connected and how they belong together. Faust has already sought the archetype of Helen, the immortal, the eternal that passes from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, but in an immature state. Now he is to mature in order to become worthy of truly entering the spiritual world. To do this, Faust must learn how this immortality first approaches the human being when he can embody himself again in a new life between birth and death in his physical existence. Therefore, Goethe must show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how it places itself between the immortal spirit and the body that stands between birth and death. This is what Goethe shows us in the second part of “Faust”.

In Goethe, the soul is hidden in that wondrous structure about which Goethe researchers do not know much to say, in which spiritual researchers who are well-versed recognize the archetype of the soul. This is nothing other than the wonderful structure of the homunculus, the little human being. This is an image of the human soul. What does this soul do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must draw the elements of the body from all realms of nature in order to connect with them. Only then can it be united with the immortal spirit. Thus we see how Faust is led by this homunculus into the realm of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales, who have been reflecting on the origin of nature and life.

Therein is shown the true doctrine of evolution, which goes back to the fact that not only an animalistic element underlies human development, but also a soul that gathers the elements from nature to gradually build up the body. Hence the advice given to the homunculus: you must start from the lowest realm in order to ascend to higher and higher ones. The human soul is first referred to the mineral kingdom. Then it is told: “You have to go through the plant kingdom.” There is a wonderful expression here: “It grunts so” to describe the passage through the plant world, the juicy green. There the soul gathers all the elements of the natural kingdoms in order to ascend. It is explicitly said: “And you have time until you reach the human being.” Then we see how the spirit of love, Eros, approaches after the soul has formed the body out of all the realms of nature. There it unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. Here that which is the soul of the homunculus, that which it organizes into the body, unites with the spirit of Helen. That is why Helen can appear to us in the third act of the second part in the flesh. We see the doctrine of re-embodiment poetically and artistically enshrined in the second part of Faust. One does not unite with Helena by drawing her to oneself in stormy passion, but by truly living through the secrets of existence, truly living through the re-embodiment.

Goethe was not yet able to express the idea of repeated lives on earth in the way we can today, but he did include it in the second part of his “Faust”. That is why he was able to say to Eckermann: “I have written my ‘Faust’ in such a way that it is suitable for the theater; that the images it presents are outwardly sensually interesting for those who only want to see outwardly sensually. But for those who are initiated, it will be evident that the deepest things have been woven into the second part of “Faust”. - Goethe expressly pointed out that one can find his view of life, his spiritual view, in this poetry. And so we now also understand that Goethe was able to illustrate to us in this reconnection of Faust with Helena what true mysticism is.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is born, but Euphorion, who is as true as he is poetic. He represents for us what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world. When the soul penetrates into the secrets of the spiritual world, there comes a moment of development in the soul that is of tremendously deep significance for that soul. Before the soul can go further, it must first, for brief moments, gain connection with the spiritual world, to know for a very short time what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if a spiritual child were born out of spiritual knowledge. But then come the moments of life again, when this spiritual child seems to have disappeared into the spiritual world. One must grasp this with the heart, full of life, then one feels, like Euphorion, the mystic's spiritual child, despite all the poetic truth of life, sinks down into the spiritual world, cannot yet fully enter Faust, but as he passes over, something else does. That is an experience of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual seeker, when our soul has the hour when it truly senses its relationship to the spiritual world, and when knowledge appears as a child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then it experiences it deeply when it sinks into the everyday, and it is as if it takes with it the best that we have. It is as if our own soul were to escape and go with it into the spiritual world. When one has felt this, one feels the spiritual words of Euphorion, who has sunk down, and who cries out from the dark depths: “Let me not alone in the gloomy realm, mother, let me not alone.” The true mystic knows this voice, the voice that calls from the spiritual child to our soul as its mother.

But this soul must go further. It must break away from that which is only personal passion. We must be able to devote ourselves to the spiritual world impersonally. As long as there is still self-interest, self-will, we cannot grasp the spiritual world. Only then can we grasp this spiritual world when all that is personal has been erased before the higher things of the spiritual world; only then can we truly enter the spiritual world permanently. But there are still many moments when we have already experienced that moment that pushes us back into the physical world, moments that take away all mysticism for a long time. These are the moments when we have to say to ourselves: Yes, even if we have overcome all selfishness and self-will, there still remains this or that, as it is left behind in Faust, even after he has said: “I stand here in the open, I only want to work, to gain everything from nature, to do something only for others.” But he has not yet come that far. As he looks at the hut of Philemon and Baucis, something disturbs his view, he shows: he has not yet overcome the selfishness that wants to be pleased by the sight. He wanted to create a possession, selflessly, but he cannot yet bear what disfigures him: the hut of Philemon and Baucis. Then the spirit of evil approaches him once more. The hut is burnt down. Then that appears to him which appears to everyone who undergoes development: the worry that approaches everyone who still has selfish aspirations within them and which does not allow them to ascend into the spiritual world. Here it is, worry, and we learn to recognize it in its true form; then it is something that can lead us to the last of real spiritual knowledge. It is not intended to show that man should become unworldly, hostile to the world, but how man in the world should get to know that which does not let him go from the world. In wise self-knowledge, we should let worry take a back seat so that we can become free from the selfishness of worry, not from worry itself, which is illustrated by the fact that worry says it creeps in through a keyhole. When we get to know this worry, not just feel it, but learn to bear it, then we attain that degree of human development that opens the spiritual eye to us. This is illustrated by the fact that Faust goes blind in old age, can no longer see with his physical senses, but can look into the spiritual world. “The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper.” It is dark on the outside, but inner bright light, the light that can illuminate the world, shines, the light in which the soul is between death and birth: the realm of the mothers. Only now can Faust begin his journey into the spiritual world, where his ascension is so beautifully described.

Then Goethe can summarize what has become of Faust, from the intuitive striving of that person who despairs of science and turns away, to what he has become from that stage to the highest spiritual knowledge. He can summarize it in the Chorus mysticus, which, as its name indicates, is intended to signify something deeper. In this Chorus mysticus, it is intended to summarize paradigmatically in a few words what holds the key to all the secrets of the world, how everything that is transitory is only a parable for the immortal. That which the physical eye can see is only a parable for the spiritual, the immortal, of which Goethe showed that he even attained the knowledge of re-embodiment when he entered into this spiritual. It shall finally be shown that when man enters into the spiritual kingdom, then all that is present in the physical world as presentiment, as hope, is there a truth. What is striven for in the physical world becomes a presentiment in the spiritual world.

It may appear pedantic when I state here something that one must know to understand the final words.

Goethe spoke somewhat unclearly in his old age because he was toothless. He dictated the second part of his “Faust” to a scribe. Since he still had some of the Frankfurt dialect, some words and sounds came out a bit unclear. So for some words, the scribe used g's where there should have been ch's. For example, “Erreichnis” was written as “Ereignis”. When dictating the final words of Faust, Goethe spoke “Erreichnis”. The inadequate becomes here something that can be achieved, an “Erreichnis”, that is, with two r's and two ch's. Everywhere, in all editions of Goethe's works, you will find “Ereignis” written. Goethe researchers know so little about penetrating into the sense. That which is inadequate in the physical world becomes “achievement” in the spiritual world. What cannot be described in the physical world is done in the spiritual world. There it becomes a living deed.

And finally, we experience the great thing that Goethe is allowed to express in the closing words of the second part of “Faust”: “The eternal feminine”. Oh, it is a sin against Goethe to say that Goethe means the female sex by this. Goethe means that depth which the human soul represents in relation to the mystery of the world, that which longs as the eternal in man: the eternal feminine, that draws the soul up to the eternal immortal, the eternal wisdom, and that gives itself to the eternal masculine. The eternal feminine draws us up to that which is the eternal masculine. It does not refer to something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore, we may well seek this eternal feminine in man and woman: the eternal feminine that strives towards the eternal masculine in the cosmos in order to unite, to become one with the divine-spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world, towards which Faust strives. This secret of men of all times, towards which Faust has been striving from the very beginning, this secret to which spiritual science in a modern sense is to lead us, is expressed by Goethe in a paradigmatic and monumental way in those beautiful words at the end of the second part of Faust, which he presents as a mystical spirit-choir, that all physical things which surround us in the world of sense, Maja, illusion, deception, are a parable of the spiritual. But we see this spiritual when we penetrate to what covers it like a veil. In this spiritual we see what cannot be achieved here on earth. We see that which is indescribable for the mind bound to the senses, transformed into real action when the spirit of man unites with the spiritual world. “The indescribable, here it is done.” And we see that which is significant, where the soul unites, lives together with the eternal masculine of the great world, which lives through and weaves through this world. That is the great secret that Goethe expresses with the words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on.

Goethe was able to say to himself: Now I have done my life's work. It does not really matter now what I accomplish on earth during the rest of the time I have left to live.

Goethe sealed up the second part of his “Faust”. And this second part was not given to mankind until after his death, and mankind will have to draw on all of its spiritual science to penetrate the secrets of this mighty work.

Today, only sketches could be given. One could spend hours and weeks using all the means of wisdom to illuminate what Goethe gave to mankind as a testament. May humanity open up this testament more and more! Seal after seal will fall, the more people will have the will to penetrate the secrets of the second part. The voices of those who say, “You are seeking to find something in there that Goethe never intended to put in his work,” will fall silent. Those who speak thus do not know the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those who see the highest in this work and in what Goethe condenses into the mystical chorus, which can conclude so many reflections that are intended to lead to the spirit, recognize this.

On the essence of practice
Transcription for Prof. Dr. Hans Wohlbold, Munich, from 1917.

The essence of practice lies in the appropriation of the imaginative activity that can elevate spiritual reality to knowledge. The essential thing is that this imaginative activity is experienced independently of the physical organization. It is a matter of experience to know: now I notice how I am able to think, etc., without the usual conditions of the imagination being tied to the physical body. This point in time occurs in the course of practice. In particular, I advise:

1.) In the evening, a backward imagining of the day's experiences. This is a first step with an imagining that does not bind itself to the usual pursuit of imagining. The imagining becomes freer.

2.) To concentrate in complete calm on a short train of thought. This should be completely manageable, so that one does not mix in unconscious or subconscious reminiscences of images, etc., but really remains in a mental activity with complete awareness. Then one lets the thought-content fall away in consciousness and tries to retain the energy, to remain consciously for a short time without thought-content. In this way one brings the ability to perceive to that calm energy which is necessary to grasp the spiritual, which otherwise, as it were, falls through the meshes of ordinary thinking and thus does not come to consciousness.

I advise doing exercises 1 and 2 in the evening.

In the morning it is good to do a kind of thought-concentration similar to the second one. Pictorial imagination can play a role here, as I have discussed in principle with the rose-cross exercise in the second part of “Occult Science”. In order to gain the necessary calmness of thought concentration, it is good to do the six exercises (as auxiliary exercises) described in the second part of my “Secret Science”.

The purpose of practicing lies partly in the application of stronger soul activity in contrast to the ordinary. Just as in the physical world, at critical points, the quantitative naturally changes into the qualitative, so the increase of the ordinary capacity for knowledge becomes that which can have the spiritual world as its object.

Exercises for Adolf Arenson
given in Stuttgart at the beginning of April 1904
Manuscript archive number 5299, 5300, 5301.

I. Every day, review the experiences of the personality during the day. You consider the most important experiences you had during the day and the way you behaved within them. All this is done with the aim of learning from life. How can I do a better job of something I did today? Such questions are asked. This does not make you dull to pleasure and pain. On the contrary. You become more sensitive. But you don't get stuck worrying and regretting what you've done; you turn it into a resolution to do better in the future. You become your own architect. Just as an architect does not stand and regretfully lament over a house he has built, that it is not better, but rather evaluates the experiences he has with the less good one for a next possible construction, so man does the same with himself. Our personality is lost in regret and worry; through learning it rises. Regret and worry are of no use; we should spend the time we waste on them on our upward development. The whole process should not take more than three to four minutes. You then fall asleep with a manas that has received the strength to develop upwards within itself. If you can add an important resolution for life or even a good thought for fellow human beings, it is particularly good. This gradually transforms you, because you have given the manas, which is free of all personal barriers during sleep, a worthy content that promotes development.

II. In the morning as the first mental work of the day:

a) Elevation to one's own higher self through complete surrender to the formula:

I am the living urge in my covers.
My higher self is pure like the purest crystal.

b) Concentrated devotion to a high thought. The meditation of Bhagavad-Gita, chap. III, Karma Yoga, is best. From the third verse onwards:

3. As I have already told you...

Always just one verse. You stay with one verse for two weeks. After two weeks, you choose the next one and so on. In this meditation, as well as in the previous elevation to the higher self, the field of vision of consciousness must be completely pure. Every other thought must be kept away completely. If one should arise, it must be banished with all one's strength.

c) Devotional mood toward that which is most sacred to one. (The Creative All, God, etc., according to the personality, according to what one has learned to honor and name as the highest.)

For the morning meditation, 8-10 minutes.

Patience and perseverance, absolute earnestness are absolutely necessary. One must get into the mood in which the spirit perceives this meditation as a need as natural as the body's physical needs. And then one waits to be given. It will be given to everyone in due time.

It can be started now on April 16 (not earlier), then again on May 16.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3105/06

Morning meditation - 5 minutes

1. Brighter than the sun
purer than snow
finer than ether
is the Self
the spirit in my heart
That Self is me

2. 5 minutes

Inhalation: seek the way - 1 time (deep, calm)

Breathing retention: Search for the path in contemplation – 3 times.

Exhalation (not in spurts): Search for the path by boldly stepping out of yourself – 2 times.

(3 times)

because:

14 days: Before the eye sees
14 days: Before the ear
14 days: Before
14 days: Before them

3. Devotional surrender to one's own divine ideal. 5 minutes

Ending:
1st month: Self-confidence
2nd month: self-control
3rd month: presence of mind
4th month: energy

In the evening

Review of the day: If there was an experience:
Have I learned enough from it?
If there was an action:
Can't I do it better?
Without regret. Only with the intention of learning from life.
From back to front. From evening to morning.

Without alcohol.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3107

In the morning

I.) Brighter than the sun
purer than the snows
more subtle than the ethers
is the Self
its spirit in my heart
this Self am I
I am this Self.

Full waking consciousness.

II.) Think of the left hand and the heart and at the same time imagine:

Seek the way

Now you stop at the heart and think:

Seek the way of inner contemplation.

Now think of the right hand and fold it over the left, imagining:

Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself.

III.) Devotional surrender to that which one regards as a divine ideal.

In the evening

Review of the day.
Without regret.
From evening to morning. Backwards.
You can fall asleep doing this!!

Exercises from a Notebook: Archive number 105, 1906

February 16.

1.) Radiant ---

2.) Inhalation, exhalation, holding the breath.

I am, which is poured through the whole body.

This three times in succession, whereby actually the “I am” should accompany
the whole process.

Inhalation, exhalation, retention of breath
It - whereby it is actually “I” - It is
This again three times

Inhalation, retention of breath, exhalation The inner being

3.) The currents within the body.

Then, after the meditation, a sinking into and letting oneself be affected by the following figures:

What does it mean to disappear into oneself and to arise again from one's disappearance?

How does a point become a circle, and how does a circle become a point?

What is inner, what is outer; what is upper, what is lower; what is matter, what is spirit; what is physical matter, what is ether?

What is astral?

How do the spirits of the sensation affect the wearer of the substance?

Imagine that the lines are clasps made of whalebone, which are in the above position; but in every moment they resist this length through their strength.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3187/88

In the evening

First look back over the life of the day, presenting individual episodes of this life in pictures. Going back from the evening to the morning. This need only take 5-7 minutes. Then, with the feeling, “From the spiritual world my self flows to me,” concentrate on the center of the eyebrows and direct the words to this point:

“I am.

Then, with the feeling, ‘The spiritual world lives soulfully in the silent word,’ concentrate on the larynx and direct the words to this point:

”It thinks”.

Then, with the feeling: “The spiritual world creates its knowledge,” concentrate on the heart, arms and hands and direct the words into this area:

“It feels.”

Then with the feeling: “In me the spiritual world creates its self-awareness,” concentrate on the aura, which is thought of as egg-shaped and surrounding the body; at the same time, direct the words into this area:

"It wills.

The meditation should last 10-15 minutes.

In the morning

The meditation of the Rose Cross, as described in “Occult Science”.

In addition, the 6 subsidiary exercises.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 6860-62 with note:
End of August [1906] Stuttgart.

Immerse yourself completely in the idea of

an impersonal higher self

It is not important that you visualize something prescribed by someone, but that you try to form the best idea of the “higher self” that you can, based on your level of development.

Now treat this idea as if you were placing it in the place inside the head where the pineal gland (Z) is located. Transfer your consciousness there for a while and fill it completely with the above idea of an “impersonal higher self”. So for a while you imagine that your own being is in Z, compressed, and that you are the above idea. Banish everything else from your consciousness.

Once you have done this for a while, slowly guide the above idea from Z in a line to the beginning of the spinal cord, approximately where the brain passes into the spinal cord. Then you continue it from there approximately down the area of the spinal cord to a point called K (kundalini). After imagining that you have imbued the above idea with kundalini power (spiritual) fire, you slowly guide it back up along the spinal cord to a point inside the head: approximately at the point (B) of the small brain (back of the head). Now you imagine (impersonal higher self) from this point in two lines to the two eyes and let it flow out through them, as it were, into infinite space. Then you draw it back in through the eyes and guide it to point B. Do this again by leading the image from B to the two ears, letting it flow through them into infinite space and then back

to B through the ears. Once you have imagined that you have led the “impersonal higher self” through space twice and filled it with its content, then lead the thus enriched idea again from B through the spinal cord to K, imbue it there in the imagination with the spiritual fire and now lead it very slowly (so slowly that the time during which one ascends from K to the point at the throat at laryngeal level takes about 20 minutes) to the throat (at laryngeal level). There one now thinks intensely:

I am not you.

I, the concept of the higher self according to all the paths it takes in the above sense.

You, the ordinary self that one does not identify with at this moment.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3192

Christian Gnostic Meditation

I. Early in the morning, immediately after awakening, when no other impressions have yet passed through the soul, one seeks to free the consciousness completely from all memories of everyday life, one seeks to distract one's attention from all external perceptions. Then, when one has attained this inner silence, one lets live alone in the soul:

The first five verses of the Gospel of John. II. Then, for the first fortnight, one should try to recall one's whole past life in order to get to know oneself completely. After the first fortnight, one should read the whole Gospel of John, so that one lives in one chapter every day for seven days.

So in the first 7 days: 1st chapter from sentence 6 to the end
So in the second 7 days: 2nd chapter
etc.

When you have reached the 13th chapter, you try to experience

foot washing to experience the feeling of how every higher being owes its existence to the lower ones, and must therefore humbly bow down to them.

Flagellation the feeling that one can stand upright facing the scourging of life, i.e. facing all suffering and pain.

Crowning with thorns: the feeling that you have to stand tall, even in the face of all scorn and mockery.

Crucifixion: the feeling that your own body is something alien that you carry and to which you are tied from the outside.

Mystical death: You experience the curtain that still covers the spiritual world, but then also how it tears and you look into the spiritual world.

You learn to see the causes of evil and the evil ones: descending into hell.

Entombment: You feel at one with all beings on earth, with the earth itself. You are immersed in it.

Resurrection: This can only be experienced because the words of ordinary language are insufficient to describe it.

III. Then one calls the figure of Christ Jesus to mind and delves into the following image:

I, in Your Spirit.

In the evening: review of the entire day.

I and III are the same every day; only II changes every 7 days, as described.

After completing cycle II, you start again from the beginning and so on forever. After a long time, you may experience the inner and outer symptoms mentioned in the description of Christian development.

Outwardly one feels as if one's feet are surrounded by water.

Outwardly one feels a burning sensation etc. over the whole skin.

Outwardly one feels pain in the head.

Outwardly the wounds redden during meditation.

Internally, one experiences the vision as if one were personally performing the washing of the feet.

Internally, one sees oneself being scourged.

Internally, one sees oneself wearing the crown of thorns.

Inwardly you see yourself crucified.

Exercise with the Rose Cross Visualization.
Handwritten manuscript archive number 3229

Evening:

1.) Retrospective. Pictorial. Retrospective.

2.) Search You, my soul, to plunge into yourself, sensing you;
At the bottom of you lies your spirit;
In your spirit the spirit of the world is at work.
I am in all this
thinking feeling
living.

(Peace of mind)

In the morning:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

In you, you world letter
I see
The sevenfold workings of the spirit
In seven rose stars
The dark paths of life
In the black wood of the cross
I am in all this.

(Peace of mind)

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3236/37/38

In the morning:

Concentrate on a line that goes through the body, so

The line does not go through the spinal cord, but a little in front of it through the body.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Then meditate on the following words:

Warming light penetrates into me from above
The gravity of the earth spreads warming light within me
and shapes me,

Then, for a longer period of time, hold the idea

I am

Then do not imagine anything, but wait in empty consciousness for what comes.

In the evening: try to concentrate on your own physical sensations in the following stages:

I am my head
I am my neck
I am my arms
I am my chest wrapping
I am my heart
I am the blood that circulates in me
I am my lungs

Then, concentrate on the breath in the following way:

Concentrate on inhalation and perceive the inhaled air as J

Concentrate on the inhaled air filling the body and perceive it as A

Focus on the exhalation and feel the air leaving the body as O

Do this for seven consecutive breathing cycles;

then focus contemplatively on the inside of the head (point a)

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Feel as if the sound J A O were resounding there; hold this sound for one to two minutes, then imagine nothing but wait in empty consciousness for what comes. Neck: luminous stream along the spine A

Luminous stream from the center of the eyebrows to the neck: J

Luminous stream along the spine: A

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Light flow inside from the spine back to the center of the eyebrows: O

(seven times every 2 minutes (14 minutes)

J A O penetrates into me through me out of me

J A O creates forces in me through me out of me as often as

J A O lives, webend in me through me out of me, possible.

Mood:

J A O as the name of Christ
This is connected with the secret of
how Christ works in man.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 5273

1.) Evening: 4-5 minute review of the day's life (in reverse chronological order).

2.) Evening: The following meditation for 4-5 minutes:

I feel myself in the space of light (thereby imagining the light-filled world around me)

Light weaves my etheric body (imagining my own body consisting of light)

I feel myself in the world of colors (imagining a sea of colors in which you yourself are)

The world of colors of the mind gives me the soul (imagining your own soul).

In light and color, My Self thinks, feels and wills.

3.) In the morning: Imagine a black cross with seven shining stars.

Meditate on this:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

4-5 minutes:

My Self
Thinks, feels and wills
Through light and color 4-5 minutes
I rest quietly
In my higher self
My I In
Christ.

In addition, the six exercises: concentration of thought, etc., as they appear in Occult Science.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3233

I. Day: Evening, 10 minutes:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transformation into a mathematical or physical symbol.

Breaths:

Inhalation: Consuming the symbol for several minutes through the head.

Holding the breath: Storing the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine letting the symbol out along with the air you breathe out, without the symbol.

Morning: 15 minutes:

Repeat the same exercise.

Remain with an even inner soul, without external impressions and without memories of life on the physical plane.

Day 2:

Evening:

Summarize a realization into one sentence.

Transform it into a plant symbol.

Breaths:

Inhale: Consume the symbol through the heart.

Holding the breath: Holding the symbol

Exhaling: Imagining that you are holding the symbol within you and letting out air without a symbol.

Morning:

Repeat the exercise and remain as on the first day.

III. Day:

Evening:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transform it into a symbol from the animal kingdom.

Breaths:

Inhale the symbol through the larynx.

Hold your breath: Hold the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine that [the] symbol remains inside and empty breath goes out.

Morning: Repeat as on other 'days.

No alcohol. No lentils, beans, peas.

Handwritten Exercise: archive number 5269

Evening:

1.) Retrospective review of the events of the day in reverse chronological order. 4-5 minutes.

2.) First, concentrate on the visualization: I think things and facts.

Hold this visualization for about a minute, excluding other thoughts.

Then concentrate on the visualization:

My thinking flows in time.

Hold this image again for a minute.

After this preparation, concentrate on the following in succession (3-4 minutes):

I follow the flowing thought
I will recognize my will in my thinking
I will find my I in my thinking will
I will live as I in my thinking will
I await the solution of the I from the I.

Then a calm inner frame of mind.

In the morning: visualization of a blue circular area with a red surrounding.

Then transform it into a red circle with a blue surrounding. Transform back into the previous state.

Do this 7 times in a row.

Observe inwardly how, as a result, thinking gradually becomes mobile, free within itself and ultimately elevated to a body-free state.

With the soul thus prepared, concentrate on some simple object and observe how this inner activity is now different from what it would be without this preparation.

The whole thing takes 4-5 minutes.

Do the six exercises as in the second part of “Occult Science”.

The time indications are, of course, based on how you feel.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3230.

In the morning:

I recognize the thought-image
of a being
in my head;
I think the feeling-rhythm
invigorating my being
in my heart;
I feel the willpower strengthening my limbs in my entire body.

At noon:

Let the power of the right eye flow into my left arm and the power of my left arm into my right leg.

Let the power
of the left eye flow
into my right arm
and the power of my right arm
into my left leg.

Before falling asleep:

I will
leave my body
My feelings follow me
My will enters the spiritual realm
power permeates him
He seizes all limbs when awakening

Supplement

End of an exercise with no beginning. Archive number 1704.

Now, with all your strength, as far as your memory reaches, go through your own life in concrete terms and feel responsible for descending into this incarnation; say to yourself that every part of one's destiny has been earned by myself – then realize the distance that exists between the life in such an incarnation, burdened with unbalanced karma, and the life of the purified person – with a completely balanced life account (karma).

Looking up to the idea of a purified Master.

That is what I shall become, that is what I want to become.

Notes on “Light on the Path”. From a notebook from 1906. Archive number 105. It is not known what the individual dates refer to.

II/1 (meditation of 1/11) is about the following:

When the higher self has taken complete possession of the person, when the personality shell has fallen away, then the whole choir of higher spirits can speak through him, just as the sensual world speaks through him before – in order to prepare for this moment, one must develop within oneself the attitude that renounces defending one's own, separate self. One ceases to be a warrior; one becomes an instrument of the Warrior.

The saying does not refer to the higher fact itself, but gives the instruction for developing the attitude through which the higher fact is attained.

On the meditation of 12/1.

Instead of “king”, it should be “kings”, because [one] is dealing with whole hosts of higher spirits; however, one can only speak of one fighter because at this level of being, the many resonate in complete harmony so that their expression appears as one.

From the meditation of 13/1.

Nothing – at least nothing essential – is left behind, but is redeemed in the course of time, i.e. absorbed into the higher. The higher (good) itself absorbs evil in the course of time and transforms it into good through its own power.

First of all, we are dealing with the divine spirit. It could not develop up to certain levels if it did not repel evil from itself and thus first reached a certain height without this evil.

264-17

With the evil in him, he could not have reached a height; but now at this height he is able to retrieve the evil and take it with him on his further journey.

The saint redeems the criminal. God redeems Satan.

Regarding 16.1

Wherever intuitive knowledge is mentioned here, it should be read as 'imaginative' knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is developed through [the] second sentence: unlearning sensitivity.

1. Sensory knowledge: everyday knowledge.

2. imaginative knowledge: spiritual seeing (pictures)

3. intuitive knowledge: spiritual hearing (the inner word).

4. knowledge of God - complete oneness with the absolute.

The realization regarding [name] is quite correct, and the more you attain in this direction, the faster you progress. However, we must give each such thought the right spiritual weight by acting as if we could do everything despite the opposite assumption:

1. I am clear in my feelings that [the person concerned]'s fate is the right one.

2. I am clear in my will that I should nevertheless act as if I could extend [the person concerned'] life into the immeasurable.

Feelings and will must always go in opposite directions. Otherwise, the realization is not spiritual, but abstract.

Except during meditation: reflection.

During meditation: live with the contemplative thought.

Regarding January 19:

When considering such ideas, it is always important to keep the counter-thought in mind: Inner peace should never be bought by turning away from the outside world, but always only after harmonizing with the outside world. This is just the same as with two other pole thoughts, for example; the esotericist never thinks or speaks one or the other without at least subtly striking the corresponding opposite pole in the background. Say, for instance,

God is in me

, then I should at least think subtly:

I am in God

, and thereby the one-sided thought-form is always paralyzed by the corresponding other, as for instance the physical body is paralyzed by the etheric body.

264-18

The forces (r ) act within the body and would immediately dissolve it if the pole forces did not hold it together from the outside. Dynamically, the etheric body is the positive pole and the physical body is the negative pole.

20.

Excessive emphasis on the inner self can easily lead to rigidity in the ahamkara. One can rise very high and still remain in it. That is why all esotericism has an important sentence:

Everything contributes to your immortality,

what is not done for this immortality

is done.

For example: if I devote myself to a teaching, I do raise myself, but not completely. If I build this teaching into a Gothic cathedral or into the soul of another person, or even just into my dealings with people, then what I have planted outside myself becomes part of my eternal body.

164-19

The building plan as such

The master builder dies.

The effects of the cathedral become the building blocks of the eternal soul of the master builder. This is also the basis of the sentence:

Pray and work.

Contemplating the absolute, the relative has lost all power over you. Polarity thought:

You cannot recognize an absolute without shining the light of the absolute into the relative.

A criminal is only recognized in his relativity if one is clear about how the divinity in the criminal reveals itself.

Such a dream can be a very good pointer: Tired swallow - Looking into development (symbolized by the swallow emerging from the reptile) is initially tiring and allows the wings to unfold less than independent progress in dullness. Seen more deeply, however, the former leads safely to the goal. It is precisely the deepest wisdom that appears worthless to people who live only in the moment. Such thoughts play around you and sometimes break through in dreams.

The dream of the 24th is significant. All such dreams are symbols of higher truths. The first part: floating in the vegetable corresponds approximately to the image of man in the 5th round. (There is no longer any mineral present). All visions that have a basis are prophetic to a certain extent, for no highly developed human being can see anything that will not later become part of the experience of all human beings.

Consciousness will only achieve continuity when experiences are present not only in dreams but also in dreamless sleep.

Dream experiences are images analogous to the seen image. Dreamless sleep experiences are always hearing experiences and, if they are to be of any value, articulated hearing experiences, e.g. words.

Sometimes you don't even need to understand the words. Because they can appear in the reminiscence as in a language that is not understood by us.

ad. 25.

All forms are at the same time expressions of the eternal. If we seek the eternal in form, we find it; if we seek it by fleeing from form, we separate ourselves even further.

264-20

ad. 26.

The subtlety of vibrations causes a heightened sensitivity to the outside world. A drunkard is immune to the vibrations of another drunkard. Therefore, at first the drinker becomes unpleasant to the non-drinker. It is the same with everything. Through the subtlety of vibrations, evolution precisely unlocks all impurity, baseness, etc. of the surrounding world, and in this way only an intensification of crucifixion in the material world can be achieved. The capacity for suffering in the world around increases with evolution. Only when one has overcome oneself, i.e., has stepped beyond the subtlety of the vibrations, then comes peace. But then one has not finer, but on the contrary simpler vibrations in oneself. Not refinement, but simplification of the vibrations is what matters.

I. Two undeveloped people.

264-21

The vibrations correspond to each other, and consequently they coincide; one does not perceive the other.

264-22

II. An undeveloped and a developed person.

264-23

Each individual rhombus of the second one perceives those of the first one, but cannot paralyze them.

III. An undeveloped and a more highly developed human being.

264-24

The simple vibrations of the second one do notice the deviations in the first one, but they are strong enough to paralyze them.

ad. 27.

This in particular should be considered in the light of the previous law of simplification. Man becomes greater when he becomes simpler.

ad. 29.

It is important to understand that sensitivity is not the same as sensitivity. It therefore means:

Before the ear is able to hear, it must replace sensitivity with a simplified perception. In sensitivity, the person reacts to the external world. In the perception, the eternal that is absorbed into the person permeates the external world with the simple rhythms of infinity.

ad. 30. All in the sense of I II III.

ad. 3/2.

The masters are not a bulwark against evil, but the guides to the absorption of evil. We should not exclude evil, but absorb it and use it in the sphere of good. The lion's rage is only evil as long as it is used selfishly by the lion; if a ruler could appropriate the lion's rage and use it to build welfare institutions, it would be good. Therefore, evil is to be recognized as non-real. There is no evil. Evil is only a displaced good. Only with this realization is spiritual alchemy possible.

ad. 6.

That is precisely the progress made by Christianity, that the personality is taken along into eternity.

Therefore the Christian principle is correct: You will rise with your transfigured body, i.e. through Christian thinking the personality becomes eternal.

Pentagram and hexagram exercise

as a supplement to the letter to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden dated November 15, 1908

Memorandum of the esoteric lessons in Berlin, November 29, 1907 and January 7, 1908

Berlin, November 29, 1907. Memory notes by Günther Wagner.

A current flows through the etheric body in the form of a pentagram: from the point of the I in the forehead to the two feet, from there to the antipolaric hands and from one hand to the other through the heart. When the body and limbs are bent, the currents also bend. The various planets are connected with the various parts of the currents as indicated. The planets are to be understood more as principles that actually always work on all globes, only on the individual in an outstanding way.

The principle of Saturn is the physical basis
of the sun: eternal growth, eternal progress
of the moon: holding back, retarding, solidification
of Mars: courage to introduce the aggressive into the life of the senses, the red blood
of Mercury: leading out of the life of the senses
of Jupiter: liberation of the ego
of Venus: rising in love.

The colors correspond to these planets and the principles:

Saturn - Green
Sun - Orange
Moon - Violet
Mars - Red
Mercury - Yellow
Jupiter - Blue
Venus - Indigo ¹

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body, but this is not to be understood as a line figure; the double triangle is only an average. (While the currents in the etheric body form the lines of a pentagram, the hexagram represents the currents in the astral body.

Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise

264-25

On the Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise of the Esoteric Hour, Berlin, November 29, 1907.

264-26

the astral body in a completely different way, not linearly, but two-dimensionally physically.) If the figure is turned on its vertical axis, the real figure emerges, although the horizontal cross-section does not quite correspond to a circle (oval). The horizontal lines thus actually form a surface; the upper one at arm level, the other at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle has to do with the bodies: the astral body (Moon), etheric body (Sun), physical body (Saturn principle). The other triangle with the higher parts: sentient soul (Mars), intellectual soul (Mercury) and consciousness soul, which is only at the beginning of its development (Jupiter). Accordingly, the colors.

One should meditate on these figures and the meaning of their details in order to become aware of one's own inner life and its relationship to the cosmos. One will then awaken strange feelings within oneself.

Memo notes from the same session by Camilla Wandrey

The principle of Saturn (Oriphiel. Green. Lead): the physical basis, but spiritual.

The principle of the Sun (Michael. Orange. Gold): eternal growth, eternal progress. Individual life.

The principle of the moon (Gabriel. Violet. Silver): Holding. Retarding. Freezing. Appearance in Maya.

The principle of Mars (Samael. Mars. Red. Iron): Courage. The aggressive. Introduction to the sensual life through the red blood. Consciousness.

The principle of Mercury (Raphael. Yellow. Mercury): leading out of the life of the senses. Divine intelligence. Holy Spirit.

The principle of Jupiter (Zachariel. Blue. Tin): Liberation of the ego. Power. Father. The principle of Venus (Anael. Indigo. Copper): The rising in pure love. Love. Son. Transition from God to man. Mediator.

The pentagram

The hexagram

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body. But it is only an average. If the figure were rotated around its vertical axis, the real figure would emerge, the horizontal average of which corresponds approximately to a circle. The upper surface can be experienced at arm level, the lower at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle is connected to the physical body, Saturn. Moon: astral body. Sun: etheric body. The upward-pointing triangle with the higher parts: Mars (the soul of feeling). Mercury (the soul of mind). Jupiter (the soul of consciousness).

Through intense meditation on these figures, man gains knowledge of himself and his connection with the macrocosm. The pentagram represents the currents of the etheric body and their connection with the planets.

The physical body is connected with all the forces in the universe. It is the center of the irradiation of all the forces of the zodiac.

The etheric body is initially connected to the center of the earth.

The astral body is connected to the center of the moon.

The I is not only a point that has gradually united through the growth of the forehead and the retraction of the etheric body at the upper root of the nose, but there is a second point in front of it. The connecting line to this point changes, the direction of this line points to the center of the sun. The more a person develops, the closer the two points come together. The developing human being must place himself in this second point, that is, outward, and he must learn to look at his body as at anything physical besides him (Tat tvam asi [= That art Thou! Famous formula of the Veda]); this frees the human being from egoism. A vivid reliving of the mystery of Golgotha and the fact that the superfluous, egoistic blood of humanity has flowed there is a help in this.

Meditation should be like sacrificial smoke rising to the gods.

Berlin, January 7, 1908 (continued from November 29, 1907) Memory notes by unknown hand

If we want to profitably observe such an occult figure (the hexagram) as in the previous lesson, it is not enough to stare at it constantly. Rather, we must picture it over and over again in our minds in quiet hours and meditate on the meaning of the individual colors. Only in this way will we gain the advantage and benefit that such occult signs can have when viewed in the right way. For the whole wisdom of the world is given to us in a few such occult figures. And by delving into them, the spiritual connections of the higher worlds will gradually become clear to us.

Let us take two colors from the hexagram that are opposite each other: red and green. These two colors are deliberately placed opposite each other. What might the red color mean, what the green? We find the green color in the plant world outside, covering the earth with its blanket. And what is the relationship between man and plants? We know that man on Saturn led an existence that in some respects corresponds to our present-day minerals. Not that man was ever a mineral! Our present-day mineral kingdom is in fact the youngest of the natural kingdoms. We also know that man on the Sun led a plant-like existence. Today a greenish sap flows in plants. A similar sap flowed through the human being of that time. If, by some magic, astral components were to be pressed into the plant today, it would turn red! The fact that man on the moon acquired the astral body turned the inner sap red – the red blood came from it.

Consider that the plant is chaste, it has no desires, passions: anger, fear, dread. By becoming in some respects worse than the plant, man received something that elevated him above the plant: the waking day consciousness. The plant world of today is asleep. A plant is the reverse of a human being. A plant's roots point towards the center of the earth, where its I is located. The same force that works downwards in the plant works upwards in the human being. The fact that the human being received blood expresses the reception of the I. The expression of the I is the red blood.

If you look at the inner surface of a green leaf with spiritual eyes, it will appear red to you. This red power is, so to speak, spiritual. If you see a red surface against a white background, look at it sharply and then look at the white surface, a green spot will appear. And the same is true the other way round. These colors are called complementary colors. Thus, the inner spiritual connection is also expressed in such a physical phenomenon.

Or let us take two other colors: blue and orange, which are opposite each other. You should know that orange has two aspects: orange and gold.

Where do we find the color blue in nature? When we look up into the boundless distance of the vaulted sky! And where do we find the color gold? In the paintings of the old masters, we see golden backgrounds. These old masters still painted according to a tradition that possessed some knowledge of the phenomena and beings of higher worlds. When we look out into the celestial space with spiritual eyes, it appears in golden depths. That is why we see angelic heads on a golden background in the old paintings, because when you look out (mentally) into the celestial space, it appears to you in golden colors.

Thus we must search for and gather together what is scattered throughout the cosmos, for the building of our soul. Just think how all the foodstuffs needed for the building of our body are scattered over the earth. Imagine that vividly! It is exactly the same in the spiritual realm. From the chaos the soul must also gather together what is suitable for its building up.

When a soul begins to meditate in this way, an organ in the physical body begins to develop: the mucous gland. In the normal average person, the mucous gland is an organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, located behind the pineal gland. But it contains disproportionately great powers. It regulates the correct build-up of the body in relation to its size. The so-called giants who are shown around have a disease of the mucous gland. In some way, the forces set in motion by them must be allowed to run their course. When the Meditand begins to work on himself, forces are awakened in the mucous gland. From the mucous gland, the organic structure from the chaos of sensations to the astral body takes place. When the mucous gland flows around the pineal gland with golden threads, then the time has come when the transformation of the astral body into the spirit self, into manas, has progressed so far that the etheric body can now be transformed into the buddhi.

Those who meditate on such occult signs in this way will work purposefully on building up their higher bodies. Sometimes, in the briefest of moments, the soul can grow tremendously. One could say that it is not time that is needed for development, but rather profound inner calm.

From the same hour, memory notes by Günther Wagner:

Meditating on the hexagram. Pointed end up red, pointed end down green. Contrasts: complementary colors. Green is the color of plants. Red is the color of human blood.

Human beings have only been able to achieve progress by also accepting desires and passions. That part of the earth's astral body that belongs to the plant world is red. Thus, physically green, spiritually red: the plant. In plants, the red astral forces point downwards towards the center of the earth, while in humans, the same forces have reversed and point upwards.

Green and red: opposites. Likewise blue and orange, or rather in one of the two aspects: golden [addition in a different hand: violet and golden]. These too are complementary colors. In the physical world the sky is blue, in the devachan world it is golden, as can still be seen in old, early medieval paintings. Such are the other opposites.

By contemplating such symbols given to us by the masters, we transform and shape our astral body, especially the aura, around (to the manas). All sorts of scattered outer experiences may point out to us these color relations, and so our spiritual body is formed, shaped, and developed by the assimilation of all sorts of scattered experiences, as our physical body is by the assimilation of all sorts of physical food gathered from the face of the whole earth.

And as our astral body thus orders and organizes itself, it acts specifically on the mucous gland or pituitary body (hypophysis), a small organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, which is initially involved in the growth of the body. Through such an organization of the astral body, the mucous gland begins to become more and more luminous; it emits rays and gradually envelops the pineal gland lying before it, stimulating it; as a result, the effects on the astral body expand and begin to impress and reorganize it.

• 1. In other contexts, different correspondences are sometimes given, e.g. for eurythmy or on the color sketch “Man in Connection with the Planets”. This should not be understood as a contradiction, but as an expression of different aspects. See, for example, the lecture in Vienna, June 1, 1918.

Morning Session:

Mr. Emil Leinhas opens the meeting at 9 am.

Address by Dr. Rudolf Steiner

My dear friends! After the way our meeting went on the first two days, I felt compelled yesterday to give a few guidelines — as I already said: out of my concern for the further course of the negotiations. Because today we have to come to a positive result, and it must not be the case that our dear friends who have traveled to this assembly of delegates leave tonight in the same way as they arrived on Sunday. We must arrive at a positive result. I tried to say what I said based on the reality that emerged from the negotiations. We must always take things as they appear in reality, and our present reality is what emerged from the negotiations over the past two days. We could not come to this meeting with a finished program, because then we would not have needed to meet. Otherwise, some program could have been worked out and sent to each individual, and that would have been the end of it. The point is that these negotiations are to be taken seriously and that every member of this assembly is to have a say through the delegates.

Now it has become clear that, quite apart from smaller groups, two main groups have emerged in the membership and that it is quite hopeless to expect these main groups to agree on an absolutely common program.

I will start with a completely different point to show how things really are. At the beginning of my lecture yesterday, I said: In the two decades of the Anthroposophical Society's life, something has been experienced. The Anthroposophical Society is not something that can be newly founded, something that can be spoken of as it was 15 or 20 years ago. But that is how someone who has only recently joined must speak. That can be extremely good, but it is spoken from a different point of view. I had to experience this life of the Anthroposophical Society from my point of view. And for this experience of mine, the shades that emerged in the last two years were very sharply present. How were they present? You see, my dear friends, when I came to Stuttgart, I met the leading figures of the Anthroposophical Society here. That is how the really experienced circumstances had unfolded. When I came here, I came for certain reasons, there were intentions to be carried out, purposes to be carried out. When I spoke here in Stuttgart with someone who had been involved in his work here for many years, then, so to speak, I only needed to press a button and in a few minutes what I had to say was done. They understood me, they knew the needs of the Anthroposophical Society. For example: a Waldorf school teacher is immersed in his subject for a long time, because he was already immersed in education from an anthroposophical point of view before he became a Waldorf school teacher. The mistake was not that I was not understood in Stuttgart – most people assume that. I was understood – it was just that what was understood was not carried out. But that is what is needed. Of course, I do not have the time to explain all this in detail. I will explain why there is no time for that in my lecture today.

So on the one hand, here in Stuttgart, people who are really well informed and strengthened by the experience are immediately understood. In terms of understanding, everything goes like clockwork. These are the old, good members who have developed a kind of intuitive genius for anthroposophical matters. In this respect, everything is in order. And I only had to make the effort to find the committee myself, after weeks of back and forth negotiations, to tell us how it wants to find the bridge from easy understanding to the will! Therefore, my appeal to this committee is to finally tell us what it actually wants.

It was not right, how the essentials were misunderstood. It seemed grotesque to me when, out of complete ignorance of the circumstances, a proposal was put forward that we should now, in the midst of all the unfinished business, start to elect a new central committee. How impossible that is, will be understandable when I now characterize the other party.

You see, the following is quite natural: when I negotiate with someone, be it a group or an individual coming on behalf of a group, at first they understand nothing of what I say. That is quite natural — they understand nothing of it, absolutely nothing! But there is an infinite amount of activity, an infinite amount of goodwill. Anything that has not been understood will be done immediately! The speeches of those coming from outside are imbued with the noblest anthroposophical intentions. But one must grow into the old history, one must become familiar with all the details! And no matter how long these two groups may say to each other: We have the best will to grow together, they will not come together, they will always talk past each other. Do not think that I am only referring to the Youth Group. There are very old members of the Anthroposophical Society who are in the same situation. They do everything I say — but they do what has not been understood. Now we are faced with the truly worrying necessity of nevertheless continuing the Society in absolute inner solidarity and solidity. This can only be done if we find a form for it in which both groupings can flourish; in other words, if the old Anthroposophical Society continues to exist in accordance with our principles, and in such a way that it is led first by the committee of nine, which was not brought about as a mere [*] See note on p. 571.

was brought about not as a mere matter of necessity, but also arose out of historical circumstances. So that which has become historical must be carried forward historically. And the others will form a loose association, regardless of whether they are old or young, ninety-five or fifteen years old, whether they are Waldorf students or senior citizens – they are still members of the Anthroposophical Society – so that they then have an inner esoteric connection according to the karmic connections of these or those members, so to speak. Something definite will come out of this loose association. The group that represents history will have to indicate, from its experiences, which are abundant, what it and each individual wants to do next. But those who form the loose association will initially form this loose association by saying to themselves: We are genuine, true anthroposophists – these are often the youngest ones – and we will now continue to seek a form for our work. They don't need to come to any kind of election or the like right away; they will try to bring their loose association so far that we can then create the binding link between the two.

After our negotiations ended yesterday, I was asked at 12 o'clock [at night] to come to another meeting at Landhausstraße 70. At the end of the meeting, the objection was raised: We have seen that those who represent the old society, which has its leading figures here in Stuttgart, cannot properly relate to the individual institutions and enterprises from an anthroposophical point of view. Those who do not agree with this now, certainly not! If that were the case, these enterprises would be a complete failure and would have no following. I said that if that were the case, then the desirable state would have been reached, because the abstract desire to help is worth nothing. A healthy state will only come about if the enterprises here in Stuttgart – I do not mean this ironically – are left alone with good advice. The mistake made by the departments was that they always talked about the enterprises and not about the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society in relation to the enterprises. The enterprises as such are either in order or not in order. The eurythmy enterprise is in order, the Waldorf school is in order, the Kommende Tag is in order. The Federation for a Free Spiritual Life, however, is not in order. But a federation for a free spiritual life will not be founded out of this assembly; nor, my dear friends, will the two magazines ¹ can be edited by this meeting. The point at issue is that the Stuttgart undertakings must be left alone. One can have confidence in them, and there is no question of the personalities who are in these institutions being tested for trustworthiness. Every day at the Waldorf School, for example, shows that the Waldorf School has excellent leadership. We are here to talk about what the Anthroposophical Society should become in the future. The point is that we proceed in such a positive way - I ask you to discuss my proposal - that all those who can feel: are not connected historically with the time when one only had to press the pen for their joint work within the whole of anthroposophy, will find such a form that has lasting value. Then there will be absolutely no need for the concern, which can be formulated something like this: What will the old Society do with the enterprises if the young do not participate? The loose association will take an interest if – forgive the ugly word – it is organized the way they want it. Then interest will awaken. I would like a form to be found within which real interest can exist.

That, my dear friends, is what it is about: not a division into two groups, but a classification so that those who are familiar with the things that need to be present can actually continue to prevail in their way, but without disturbing the others, and so that both groups can work together in harmony. You can't try to bring them together. They will never talk to each other, but they will work together splendidly. Everyone must do what they are good at and are predisposed to do. So we actually come to find a way for society to continue to exist.

I would like to mention a grotesque fact again and again. The Federation for Threefolding has had three heads in succession.² The first head — as I have already briefly explained — remained until I declared: I can no longer participate. The second main person was someone who, when working in the right place, worked extraordinarily well; this was demonstrated in many places within the Anthroposophical Society. I had not been there for a long time when I came back. A meeting was taking place with the leadership of the Federation for Threefolding. I asked what had happened, and I was told: We have created a card index of such and such slips of paper; all the newspaper clippings are here and there; then we have larger slips of thicker paper, and then there are all the opposing articles; and then we have other slips of paper that are thinner and can be folded, with the indentations and so on. So I finally said: Yes, but my dear friends, I don't want to know what you have in your card catalogs. Don't you also have heads? I don't want to deal with card catalogs, but with heads. — The heads were not absent, but they were eliminated, and a card catalog was placed opposite me.

They laugh at it! In a sense, it's not even funny.

Those who are thinking of realizing a more original form of the principles of an Anthroposophical Society, of being in a union of smaller groups in which they are not constrained, will be able to live it up. And that is what matters first. I do hope that in this way we will get to the point where everyone knows which group they belong to. Then it can continue, then the loose union can form, can give itself a head in such a free or unfree way as it wants. A connecting link can then be created — not between the two Anthroposophical Societies, but between the brothers, the two groups of the unified Anthroposophical Society. But we will have to discuss that, my dear friends. I just threw that in as a guideline.

On behalf of the nine-member board, which has now taken the place of the old central board, Dr. Unger makes the following statement:

1. Mr. Uehli has definitively left the old central board.
2. The other two members of the central board have co-opted the members of the committee and are willing to co-opt further individuals to form an extended board.
3. These individuals on the committee are willing to take over the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society as the new board.
4. The members of the new executive council residing in Stuttgart will take over the administration of the Society's affairs.
5. They will assume particular responsibility, together with the leading figures of the institutions founded in Stuttgart, for the proper integration of these foundations into the Anthroposophical Society.

The new leadership of the Society has set itself the following guidelines:

1. The leadership will feel responsible for ensuring that the life of the anthroposophical movement as a whole is led into all parts of the Society. This includes reports on lectures, research and the fruits of anthroposophical work. A newsletter as the organ of the Society should serve these purposes.

2. The leadership of the Society will feel responsible for ensuring that the individual creative powers in the Society can develop and that the personalities involved in the work feel supported by the interest that the Society takes in their work.

For both tasks, the leadership relies on trusted personalities in the sense of the draft principles of an Anthroposophical Society.

The Executive Council hopes to find support for the affairs of the Society and help in carrying out its tasks in a body of trusted individuals to be formed.

The following tasks are among the objectives that the Anthroposophical Society has set itself in accordance with the draft principles: cultivation of universal anthroposophical life — development and cultivation of anthroposophical community — imparting of anthroposophical teachings to the outside world — introduction and continuation — study groups — organization of defense against opponents - focusing the work on the future.

Dr. Hans Büchenbacher, Stuttgart: Our group is still in the process of coming into being, and it is therefore clear that we cannot come up with a program at the beginning of this process. That is quite impossible. So I can only give you a very brief description of how we actually view this whole undertaking, so to speak, from within. The starting point is that what we see as anthroposophical striving for development has not been realized in the narrow-mindedness of the Anthroposophical Society, so that we were initially in a position where we could not communicate at all and were the impetus for what could have ultimately led the Society into chaos yesterday. When Dr. Steiner suggested dividing the Society into two societies because of the two different directions of will, we were shocked by this conclusion. But then we realized that it was precisely through this structure that harmony in society could arise again. So we are very grateful to Dr. Steiner for helping us to find a way to continue our own anthroposophical development without having to contribute to the creation of such chaos, an atomization of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, it is now a matter of us having to try to assert our own developmental conditions in a certain independence from what has become the historical society. But it is self-evident for us – if we now have the opportunity to grow further as anthroposophists – that the fruits of this development must then benefit the whole anthroposophical movement. That the development of the Anthroposophical Society will then have its strongest supporters in us, and that we are convinced from the outset that we need the individual institutions, the publishing house, the institute and so on, but that we can bring our development to fruition better with a certain independence, with a certain distance.

If older members of society sympathize with us, then it is quite natural for us that these “young people” can also include those who are ninety-five years old, as Dr. Steiner said. For example, it is perfectly possible, according to this view, for one and the same person to be actively involved in both branches of anthroposophy, and every member of the older friends can work with us. We want to be completely free in this, depending on whether people come together out of human or anthroposophical impulses.

For us, this actually anthroposophical aspect is such that this difference between age and youth, which has often complicated the debate in a highly philistine way, does not exist. The fact is that I myself am older than some of those who did not get on with the youth. So from this side it can be said that, with regard to the danger of further disintegration and fragmentation, we are convinced that this danger does not exist. It is part of a basic impulse that there must be no difference whatsoever in age, status or occupation, that for us these things are so entwined with the anthroposophical that we would immediately become untruthful if we were to make any distinction in this regard. We must see to it that we introduce anthroposophical truthfulness.

We can try to work from these developmental possibilities to strive for a certain connection that will then lead to a free organization. But that is not really the first concern, nor what this connecting link to the old society will look like. I am thoroughly convinced that these things will arise of themselves, if, on the one hand, the Anthroposophical Society can continue to work out of its own developmental conditions, undisturbed by an opposition that cannot help it and thus does not help itself either, and if, on the other hand, the youth group can also develop according to its own nature. Then this connection will come about of its own accord, because after all, we are aware of both sides: they are anthroposophists and we are anthroposophists. Thus the connecting link, as whose representative Dr. Steiner is here, is present.

From the points of view presented by Dr. Steiner, Dr. Unger and myself, the discussion could now be continued in a truly friendly and objective manner and take on a completely different character from yesterday's. It would be necessary for us to stick to the good starting points and persevere with what we have begun as a positive path shown to us by Dr. Steiner.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart, talks about the formation of a trust organization ³ and warns against letting it develop in a bureaucratic way. A real trust organization must form itself through living relationships. The minimum is the right of the trusted personalities to propose members for admission to the society. In addition, the most diverse relationships must arise between the society's board and the trusted personalities. The board must have the opportunity to work with very different personalities as trusted persons in different matters. The trusted personalities should be appointed by the board, not elected by the members, but they should be trusted by the members. In principle, the matter of the trusted organization is already regulated in a comprehensive way by the “principles”. On the basis of these principles, the relationship with the youth group can also be organized in a way that is satisfactory to both sides.

When approaching such a matter as the creation of a trust organization, one must be careful not to fall into a sense of optimism. We have to go back to what was given at the starting point of the Anthroposophical Society when it was founded as a draft of the principles. There we find exactly how a trust organization must be managed.

For example, one might think that a person of trust can be appointed by one member being proposed to that effect by seven others. The persons of trust have to provide a guarantee when members register. That is, so to speak, the minimum of what the persons of trust would have to do; beyond that, the organization of the persons of trust would have to be built up. I now believe that it is important that we do not appoint trusted personalities in some theoretical way, but that such an organization is formed out of the work. The starting point would be that trusted personalities are proposed and the Central Committee recognizes these personalities. Then a basis is created for admitting members, and the relationship of trust must begin to develop. This must now arise out of the work that the Central Committee and the trusted individuals thus appointed do. It cannot be a matter of the Central Committee saying yes and amen to everything, but it must satisfy itself that it can take responsibility. Of course, it is easy to find seven people whom one does not know at all and thus bring in trusted individuals who are not really trusted at all. We cannot work only from the bottom up in the Anthroposophical Society; we must also work from the top down. This must not be forgotten, otherwise we will end up with a kind of democracy or Bolshevism.

Then there is the question of a trusting, lively interaction. But both parts belong to this. Good will must be shown by both the leadership and the members.

Furthermore, Dr. Steiner must be relieved of the enterprises, but not dismissed. Dr. Steiner has often said the same thing over the years, and it was not heard. And finally today we are coming to the realization that we actually have to do what Dr. Steiner said years ago. I could show you this with practical examples. If he is heard, then he gets by with very little time, and we have our hands full implementing it. For the rest, they have to say to themselves: We should not interfere in the enterprises. What kind of advice do you think I received in the first place regarding commitments? Everyone should say to themselves: Not what should the others do, but what should I do?

Mr. Leinhas reports that there are about 55 requests to speak and some written communications.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: Now that it has been made clear that such a division is not a “split” but an “outline,” I would like to say that I do not want to hold on to what I have said about it.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, Jena, emphasizes the necessity of young people working together with old people.

Count Hermann Keyserling, Koberwitz near Breslau: The depression that has probably weighed on all of us has given way to a joyful feeling when Dr. Steiner kindly helped us out of our plight. Speaker thanks the committee of nine for the selflessness with which they have undertaken such a great task as the preparation of this conference. Speaker moves that the discussion should not continue, but that a vote should be taken on the committee of nine's program.

Mr. Otto Coppel, Edenkoben, says that the management has not made it sufficiently clear what it wants. Therefore, the attempt to break up the meeting the day before yesterday, as nonsensical as it was, was only natural. Now, before voting, the program should be discussed.

Now a procedural debate is taking place as to whether a vote should be taken or whether the discussion should continue.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, Jena: We are in danger of going in the wrong direction. We are all anthroposophists and differ only in the way we have become so; the question is not whether we should vote or continue the discussion, but I would like to make the following suggestion: Now that the direction for further development has been set, it would be necessary for a number of people to step forward and say: I believe that this and that is the right thing, and I think it is good for the following reasons.

Mrs. Emma von Staudt, Munich, emphasizes that one should not overlook the tremendous amount of self-criticism and self-knowledge that has been practiced from within. It will be difficult to live with two families under the same roof. Therefore, she would like to make a tactical suggestion for living together. If the three different directions: art, science and religion were represented more, without prejudice to the actual leadership of the branches, this coexistence would be easier.

Mr. E. A. Karl Stockmeyer, Stuttgart: It is not a matter of voting on whether to join the old or the new society, but rather of recognizing that things have become so and that we can only continue within the Anthroposophical Society if we now work on the one hand in the way history has developed, and on the other hand in the way that seems right to those for whom Dr. Büchenbacher has just spoken. It was mentioned earlier that individual parts of society do not understand each other with other parts. It seems to me that this cannot be the case, they do understand each other. But it would depend on whether it would be expressed as strongly and from as many sides as possible, to what extent they can understand each other very well, how they can establish a connection with the institutions and an understanding for these institutions among the members. It seems to me to be very necessary that it not be expressed simply through silence: yes, now it is just so, we agree with it, but that this agreement be expressed through speeches. It would be necessary to speak very briefly about how one understands the whole matter, how one believes one can work within this so-divided society.

Of course, one or two things could be said about Dr. Unger's program, but it seems to me that the important thing is not to discuss the program, but to implement it.

At the request of the chairman, the assembly unanimously approves the program.

Mr. Louis Werbeck, Hamburg, points out that a relatively large amount has been achieved in Hamburg; he speaks of a “Hamburg system” based on the activation of the human being. The personalities here have earned antipathy as well as sympathy because the “activation of the human being” has not happened. However, he has already found some things in the work of the committee that go in this direction. He said that he would do whatever lay in his limited power to ensure that this “activation of the human being” gradually became decisive in the committee, which would be expanded. Mr. Ernst Uehli, Stuttgart: I would like to say a few words about the situation that has now been created, which I could not say yesterday because I did not understand it. As you have heard, I resigned from the Central Executive Committee because I was unable to work fruitfully. Now the situation is such that I am growing naturally into the organization of the Free Community because I believe that I can work in the way that is possible, out of friendship for people. Whether I continue with the other things or not is a matter for the committee; it does not belong here, for example, the 'Federation for a Free Spiritual Life' or the newspaper 'Drei'. I want to be able to work as a free human being.

Mr. August Everbeck, Brake: Yesterday the Society threatened to dissolve into chaos - today the difficulties no longer exist after listening to Dr. Steiner. (He wants to explain how the Stuttgart work looks from the periphery. — There is an interjection: Positive suggestions! - The speaker then summarizes his remarks: The only thing that was missing in the branches was the connection with Stuttgart.)

Dr. Josef Kalkhoff, Freiburg: If we had absorbed “Practical Thinking” and “The Philosophy of Freedom”, then we would not have needed a great physician to tell us what is missing. Anyone who believes that they have things to contribute to the discussion can send a paper to Stuttgart, and it will be processed – or thrown away.

What needs to happen is not terribly new, it just needs to be brought to consciousness. We have a medical working group. One can also continue to work in the threefold order, because it is not work that should be abolished, only the organization. What emerges from the discussion should not be thrown in the trash. We should not commit ourselves to a program; that would take care of itself.

Professor Hermann Craemer, Bonn: These are practical suggestions for the future, and what the assembly has suggested should be put into practice, and to be clear about the first steps, based on the nature of such an assembly. There are over a thousand people who are supposed to communicate with each other, and that is extremely difficult. We have also seen that within this large group there are individual groups, especially the youth movement, who, when one person stands up, understand each other perfectly without the person concerned having said much. We still have to learn the art of communicating in large gatherings and not talking at cross purposes. This can be achieved if the branches practice learning to listen to the other person, to be interested not only in the content of what he says, but in the fact that he is saying it. If we practice this coming-to-the-experience-of-you in the branches and continue to practice it in somewhat larger circles, we will gradually come to understand each other in larger gatherings as well. People who live in geographic districts should work together, starting with the simplest personal interaction and working through the problems we face. Here we have to start from scratch and spare no sacrifice so that we can grow together from fragmentation and atomization into one organism.

Mr. Heinrich Weishaar, Stuttgart, agrees with the program of the new central committee as the spokesperson for the Kerning branch in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, it was noted that there is a discord against one person of the new central committee, which he also shares; this is the person of Dr. Carl Unger (heckling). Speaker Leinhas explains that he will talk to Dr. Unger personally.

Dr. Praussnitz, Jena, fully supports Mr. Leinhas and has a request to make to the assembly: to return to the religious revival movement this evening.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, Jena: There can be no question as to whether the Neuner Committee should continue the matter or not. The matter requires that the affairs of this committee be continued.

Mr. Louis Werbeck, Hamburg, discusses the matter of founding the Free University; he reports that Mr. Emil Molt has donated ten million marks for the Free University.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart: You, the members of the Committee of Nine, are wondering what we should do when we are carried by the trust. Please do not think that it is only an honor to sit here at the committee table and be flattered. That is not what motivates us; rather, we make ourselves available out of a sense of duty and responsibility. It should not be so difficult for you to say: You must!, as it is difficult for us to say: We must! When we meet again, we will not be able to make excuses: We have not had time! (A voice from the audience asks the assembly to shout unanimously: You must!)

End of the morning discussion.

II. Lecture by Dr. Rudolf Steiner on “The Conditions for Building a Community in an Anthroposophical Society” [in GA 257]

Afternoon Session:

Mr. Emil Leinhas opens the meeting at half past two.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, of Jena, announces that a committee has been formed consisting of the following members: J. G. W. Schröder, Dr. Hans Büchenbacher, Rene Maikowski, Jürgen von Grone, Dr. Maria Röschl, Wilhelm Rath, Berlin, probably Rector Bartsch and Ernst Lehrs.

Mr. Rene Maikowski, Stuttgart, announces the personalities of the committee that will deal with the founding and tasks of the School of Spiritual Science: Emil Molt, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Ernst Lehrs, Werner Rosenthal, Louis Werbeck, Rene Maikowski.

Mr. Manfred Kries, Jena, points out the necessity of working together, especially in the field of medicine. As physicians, one must begin with anthroposophy. The moral, the powers of love, are what one must start from. We can only be successful in spreading the remedies if we have the necessary support from the clinic. We cannot work only in a propagandistic way; we need the experience of those who stand behind us. There is a characteristic that shows how differently the young and the old approach medicine. We cannot appropriate a new method from our own experience and proceed from there to the physical plane. We have to start from pure anthroposophy. We have to develop to the point where we can specialize the purely human, the general, to such an extent that we can penetrate to the individual physical organ.

Mr. Otto Maneval of Stuttgart said that concern for the Waldorf School is an important task of the Anthroposophical Society. Not all members of the Anthroposophical Society are members of the Waldorf School Association. The idea of the Waldorf School must also be brought to bear on the state by professing it.

Mr. Wilh. Salewski, Düsseldorf, believes that the basis for genuine community building is an artistic and educational approach. One should not only find common ground with anthroposophists, but also with non-anthroposophists. With such people one could work in some area. If one does it right, such work will automatically lead to anthroposophical work. If you come from the Ruhr area, you feel a particular need to speak to people in the moment, to grasp them morally in the world situation. We have to pay attention to this: what is the spiritual world saying, what is Dr. Steiner saying, what needs to be done today? If we listen to this, a rhythmic inhalation and exhalation will arise. The bridge to other people can only come from the heart, from love. Mr. E. A. Karl Stockmeyer, Stuttgart, points out that what Mr. Maneval said earlier should be taken into account. The financial situation of the Waldorf School is very difficult, and in this regard he must remind us of the dangers that Dr. Steiner spoke of at the last general assembly of the Waldorf School Association. It is absolutely essential for the economic survival of the school that it be the constant concern of all Anthroposophical Society members. The school would not have been able to survive at all without the help of friends abroad. But this is by no means enough. It should be pointed out to the state that the 1925 primary school law allows the admission of pupils to the first class of private schools for the last time. It is therefore important for the Waldorf School to gain such strong support that this paragraph cannot apply to it. So material means and ideal interest, that is what could ensure the continued existence of the Waldorf School.

Mr. Jürgen v. Grone, Stuttgart: My dear friends! I have been asked to serve on the provisional committee of the younger generation and am thus active in both committees. To explain my position, I would like to refer to an experience I had in Berlin in 1908.

Around this time, several young people from very different walks of life, from different parts of the world, came together and met weekly at Motzstraße 17 to study Dr. Steiner's philosophical writings intensively. It was a seemingly random community. But the significant thing was that what moved people to come together in community was the love that each person had for delving into the world of ideas. Through this collaboration in Motzstraße, the personalities involved were able to get to know each other very intimately, and, as I was later able to observe, this work created links of destiny. When I came to Stuttgart a few years ago, I met people again who had belonged to this circle, and I can assure you that we immediately felt how a shared inner experience had connected us precisely through this study of the philosophical works. Our eyes lit up, so to speak, when we saw each other again.

After the war, when I was studying the 'Kernpunkte' and realized that something needed to be done from an anthroposophical perspective that would directly address the social needs of the present, it was this impulse that led me to work on the newspaper. For me, there was indeed a strong connection between the memories from 1908, the anthroposophical experience of that time and the will to translate this anthroposophical experience into social action. On the other hand, I must emphasize that since the seemingly so spontaneous community work in the past, I have a deep, inner understanding of what today's anthroposophical youth and all those who feel connected to it want. Since then, I have taken a keen interest in working with those communities that, above all, consider it necessary to promote true anthroposophy in a group of people through intensive collaboration.

I only wanted to point out these two points of view so that you can see why I agreed to be a member of the committee and why, on the other hand, I agreed to be a member of the provisional committee for the time being.

Dr. Gabriele Rabel, Stuttgart: I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak before a larger circle of anthroposophists. I want to make my personal position on anthroposophy as clear as possible. I joined two years ago in order to get to know anthroposophy thoroughly. At the time of my admission, everyone knew that I was not a follower. It was also Dr. Steiner's intention that I should be offered the opportunity to study the matter thoroughly. The result of these two years of examination is a peculiar mixture of sympathy and antipathy.

I feel warm sympathy for everything I have observed in the movement that is personal and human, in the soul, and in the honest striving for spiritual perfection; I feel the warmest sympathy for what is happening in Landhausstrasse and here in these days. It was wonderful of Dr. Steiner to have made such wise use of the burning of the Goetheanum, to have taken it as an opportunity to inaugurate a great movement of repentance and reflection.

The spirit of self-knowledge that shone through these speeches suggests that it could easily be the case that in a few years the fire at the Goetheanum will be seen not as a disaster but as a piece of good luck. Every event is only what we make of it.

I have heard the word: the Goetheanum could not have burnt down if we had been what we should have been. That is a distinctly religious attitude. My personal conviction is that it is in this attitude, in the emphasis on the religious character, that the salvation and future of anthroposophy lies.

On the other hand, I am very skeptical about another area to which Dr. Steiner attaches great importance: anthroposophical science. I am an opponent of that. I am not just a so-called opponent, as Dr. Steiner said, I am a real opponent. I have truly shuddered at the abyss of ignorance, inability to think and arrogance of people that I have encountered in a large number of anthroposophical works. It is truly disheartening to read such works. They are written by people who have no idea of natural science. And the people in question have doctorates. Unfortunately, it is one of the saddest chapters of the universities today that a doctorate can be acquired very easily.

Of course, I cannot prove these assertions in detail here. I have already begun to provide evidence in the last article in “Drei,” and I want to continue doing so as long as the editorial staff of “Drei” is so loyal and kind as to publish my critique. I feel obliged to offer a critique. It is necessary to address the details objectively. But it is not enough to say that the whole polemic is insubstantial. It is necessary to show in detail where the errors in thinking lie. I will endeavor to do this as clearly and distinctly as possible.

This discussion about atomic theory has made me clearly recognize the dangers of the Anthroposophical Society in another way. These are dangers that have been pointed out many times, including by myself. But it is quite a different matter whether one speaks of something in general or whether one has concrete examples that can be used to show: There it is. In the first article I wrote the following: the position of anthroposophy on atomic theory is completely unclear. Dr. Steiner himself did not believe in the reality of atoms in the past, but has since been persuaded by the facts, as he mentioned in conversation, and now believes, like us, in the existence of atoms. In response to this, I was told by the anthroposophical side that this is yet another myth that is being peddled solely for the purpose of undermining trust in Dr. Steiner's personality. A scientific person is completely baffled and at a loss in the face of such an attitude. It would be natural for me to lose all trust in him if he could not be belied by facts and stubbornly clung to something he had once said just because he had said it.

But what about anthroposophy? If you believe that Dr. Steiner is not dependent on considering the facts, that he sees through all connections from his own thinking, then of course it is only logical when one comes to such views. There is a gulf between anthroposophy and science. As anthroposophists, you believe in the infallibility of Dr. Steiner; as scientists, you cannot believe in it. I know very well that you will tell me: We do not believe in the infallibility of Dr. Steiner, on page so and so much it says: The clairvoyant can err. Yes, there it is, you can read it there, but in practice I have never known anyone to express doubt about what Dr. Steiner said. If he took the floor in a procedural debate or in some kind of scientific discussion, then the case was settled. And now Dr. Steiner spoke recently about the atomic discussion and confirmed the legend that I had told at the time. He explicitly said that I (this opponent) was right, that it was useless to deny the results of science. Yes, what do these gentlemen do now, who have been so fanatically committed to the fact that atoms do not exist? If you have arrived at this conviction, not through blind faith in authority but after careful consideration of the facts, then you cannot just let go of your conviction so easily. This thought seems quite absurd to you, that one of you could polemicize against Dr. Steiner. That is the great cancer. That is what we cannot understand. It is a religious attitude. I use the word religious here in the best sense, that one's own judgment is subordinated to something that one perceives as a higher power, to which one looks up in humility and reverence. I do not want to disgust you with this attitude. But it is not the scientific attitude. The scientific person must be completely free to form his or her own judgment. And so, the more I delve into anthroposophy, the more deeply I am convinced — earlier it was only a hunch — that no synthesis is possible between faith and science, because the scientific person must be free and independent, and the religious person desires to be the opposite. Both attitudes have their good and beautiful aspects. But you cannot mix them. I have the impression that what is being criticized as the system of double accounting is the only possible clean separation: on the one hand, a scientist, on the other, a religious person. I just wanted to say that these are some of the reasons why science must view anthroposophical science with skepticism. I cannot see at present that this conflict can be resolved unless anthroposophical science teaches me better.

There is one more point I would like to mention, which is also a major stumbling block for science. I know you and I are already bored by this, but it is the unholy mystery of Dr. Steiner's changes. It is not possible to get past this point. This question must be thoroughly addressed.

Recently, I have read all the articles that Dr. Steiner wrote between 1886 and 1903. I have read all the articles and found much that is beautiful and good. But I absolutely do not see how one should get over these contradictions.

Speaker reads the following passages:

“But however hard one may try, no one will ever succeed in reconciling the Christian and the modern scientific world view. Without a personal, wise leadership of world affairs, which announces itself in times of need by pointing the way, there is no Christianity. Without the denial of such a leadership and the recognition of the truth that all the causes of events lie in this world accessible to our senses, there is no modern way of thinking. Nothing supernatural ever intervenes in nature; all events are based on the elements that we reach with our senses and our thinking. Only when this insight has penetrated not only into thinking but also into the depths of feeling can we speak of a modern way of looking at things. But our modern minds are quite far removed from this. It works with thinking. The minds of contemporaries are gradually coming to terms with Darwinism. But the feeling, the feeling, are still thoroughly Christian.“ ⁹

"We are entering the new century with feelings that are essentially different from those of our ancestors, who were educated in Christianity. We have truly become ‘new men’; but we, who also profess the new world view with our hearts, are a small community. We want to be fighters for our gospel, so that in the coming century a new generation will arise that knows how to live, satisfied, cheerful and proud, without Christianity, without an outlook on the hereafter.” ¹⁰

I cannot bring myself to read this and then read the essays that appeared five years later in Lucifer-Gnosis and then assume that the man who wrote the two essays has not changed. If a conversion has taken place, I would find it understandable. I have given myself the interpretation that it happens very often in world history that one condemns everything one preached before and vice versa. But that without such a transformation both opinions can be reconciled, I do not understand. I have not received any explanation about this from anyone. The agreement with Haeckel goes so far that he could say: We, the small Haeckel community, are the community of the future, we proclaim the gospel. In an article in the journal Drei, he tried to say what would have captivated him, and it would have been the artistic element. I must urgently ask, also in the name of all the scientists who are trying to have faith in Dr. Steiner: Well, the gods are on this side; the gods also belong to nature. These are conjurer's tricks. I request that this question be addressed. I am very willing to be educated and will gladly proclaim, publicly and loudly, as I stand here with my accusation, that Dr. Steiner has been wronged and that the matter has now been clarified for me.

The speaker concludes with a request that Dr. Steiner himself comment on this question if possible.

Dr. Praußnitz, Jena: I must first express my appreciation of the extraordinary courage that Dr. Rabel has shown by presenting her point of view calmly and unconcernedly. I know what it takes for an anthroposophist to speak in the face of opponents. Regarding the question of the atomic theory, I must state that I am also a specialist in the field; I have encountered the same difficulties as Dr. Rabel, and for me, too, the path from the philosophical side was the only possible one to approach it for the first time. I also openly admit that I have not yet been able to deal with the anthroposophical treatment of science.

One must ask the question: has anthroposophical science, as represented in Stuttgart, actually taken the path it must take to make itself understood to other, outside natural science? I believe that this is where the catch lies... Our young friends want us to become different people through anthroposophy, not just to concern ourselves with anthroposophy. I myself have been involved in the movement for a long time and have not yet had the time to immerse myself in the science as you have. We can only approach this science when we have become different people. —Speaker discusses further details of atomic theory.

Dr. Walter Johannes Stein: Dr. Steiner pointed out in his lecture that all the individual actions of our opponents are ultimately based on the fact that they say to themselves: “How do we force the spiritual researcher to defend himself?” Dr. Rabel's remarks culminated in her request that Dr. Steiner comment on what she had said against him. Dr. Steiner should therefore defend himself.

Now, I don't know if he will do that, but I would like to present what I have to say in the way that he has asked us to behave towards our opponents. Dr. Steiner called on us to immerse ourselves with all our love in the souls of our opponents. It is far from my mind to believe that something like what I am about to mention is consciously present in Dr. Rabel. But it works in her, as in every opponent, that which Dr. Steiner just said underlies all opponents' actions. And we should pay attention to this fact. Dr. Steiner said that it is of the utmost importance to know the limits of the different states of consciousness and not to blur them. One must not carry dream consciousness into the sense world, nor what is right for the sense world into the supersensible world. One must change one's way of thinking when moving from one realm to the other. But that is precisely what Dr. Rabel does not do. What she does not understand in Dr. Steiner's work and attitude is because she uses the same habits of judgment and forms of thinking that are right for the field of ordinary science, but she also wants to include what belongs to the spiritual realm of the supersensible. Of course, this would have to be shown sentence by sentence, but one could show that Dr. Steiner's lecture answers point by point what he himself has to say about Dr. Rabel's objections, with the exception, of course, of the quotations that have been put forward, but otherwise really everything. You see, what Dr. Rabel cannot properly observe is what we call the right crossing of the threshold, that is, the actual demand of reality that one must have a different way of behaving in the sensual than in the supersensible. She says: I can sympathize with the religious, but not with the scientific. She also sees a separation between these fields. But what is the reason that forces her to speak of double bookkeeping? The reason is that she does not bring to consciousness the act that a human being must perform when crossing the threshold from one to the other in the right way. Therefore, she does not understand why Dr. Steiner behaves in one way in one area and in a completely opposite way in another area, even for the different areas of life or the objects of knowledge. For her, the areas stand side by side, and she would like to embrace them all in one way or keep double books for them, instead of recognizing the metamorphosis as factually grounded in the area. That is where the difficulty lies for her, and she does not have the right understanding for it. Nor does she have the right understanding for what Dr. Steiner discussed today: tolerance. For the essence of tolerance is that one always speaks from the heart of the matter. When Dr. Steiner arrives at certain forms of judgment in his essays in the 'Magazin', he does so on the basis of very definite presuppositions, and these must be taken into account.

I have repeatedly tried, and really tried in good faith, to make it clear to Dr. Rabel how things stand in this area. But the misunderstanding is surely due to the fact that two basic conditions have not been sufficiently taken into account.

1. As Dr. Steiner explained, the consideration of the changeover when crossing the threshold between the sensory world and the supersensible world.
2. The consideration of the changeover when moving from one area of fact to another.

Of course, all the sentences that were read by Dr. Rabel and that are quoted in the “Magazin für Litteratur” are written in such a way that Dr. Steiner could write them down today word for word exactly as they are there. For when he rejected Christianity there, he did not mean the Christianity that he later presented in his spiritual scientific works, but rather he wanted to show how he had to reject at that time the Christianity that was known at that time as the only one in the world: namely, the Christianity of Christian theologians. And these theologians reject Dr. Steiner today just as much with what they call Christianity as they reject him. So I don't see how there could be any change in Dr. Steiner's position. There is none in the sense that Dr. Rabel suggests. It is simply a matter of getting fully involved in the matter and judging it from that point of view. Then one understands Dr. Steiner, understands his behavior, and does not speak of sleight of hand out of one's own lack of understanding. But for us anthroposophists, something else is important. We must be vigilant in our society in the future. And vigilance also means noticing this powerful phenomenon, which consists of Dr. Steiner's appearance and self-defense in his lecture, and the fact that the accusation is brought forward with the demand that Dr. Steiner be forced to make a statement, to defend himself.

Evening Session:

The chairman, Mr. Emil Leinhas, opens the meeting.

Dr. Hans Theberath, Stuttgart: If Dr. Rabel sees something dangerous in anthroposophical science, she cannot be referring to my atomic essays, since Dr. Steiner himself described these essays as anti-anthroposophical. However, there is no reason to oppose anthroposophical science on the basis of these essays.

Dr. Steiner has not denied the existence of atoms in the past either, but only opposed interpreting atoms into phenomena. Therefore, I referred this alleged change of heart by Dr. Steiner to the realm of myth.

Dr. Rabel asks what those gentlemen who did not believe in atoms in the past are doing now. I do not know, because I have always believed in the existence of atoms. [See Notes below.]

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: I would just like to say a few words about the fact that the events that have taken place here in the Anthroposophical Society are connected with the destruction of the Goetheanum. It has been repeatedly emphasized here that all these events are completely independent of the Dornach catastrophe, since the origins of this crisis go back to December 10, when the aforementioned conversation with Mr. Uehli took place. It is necessary to emphasize this in view of the misunderstandings that could arise if one speaks ironically about matters that should be most sacred in the Anthroposophical Society. We cannot allow ourselves to be treated in this way.¹¹

In response to the polemic in the “Drei”, I would like to say that Dr. Rabel's essay has been accepted and will appear at the same time as an essay of mine that will attempt to lead this entire polemic out of the deadlock in which it has been mired.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, Jena: The words spoken by Dr. Rabel in her “Farewell Address to the Anthroposophical Society” vividly reminded me of what Dr. Rittelmeyer said during the conference when we were dealing with the question of opponents. He said that we must achieve a situation in which the many people of good will who, although they could not profess anthroposophy themselves, consciously had the attitude: “But it is something whose seriousness and high striving we have recognized too clearly to allow it to be destroyed by wickedness,” that they, as a ‘league of decent people,’ could be a wall around the movement. Well, I could feel that Dr. Rabel belongs to such people, and I sincerely hope that she will continue to belong to them! And we can be grateful that, among all the muck and filth of opponents, we were able to hear a person who has really tried to engage with anthroposophy.

I would like to address two points in Dr. Rabel's words: first, Dr. Steiner's article from the “Magazin”, and then the atomic theory.

With very few exceptions, which are also known to the public, I was previously unaware of any of the passages quoted by Dr. Rabel from the “Magazin”. However, I immediately noticed the exclusivity with which Dr. Steiner refers to the actual results of sensory research. In those articles he does not once acknowledge the mental speculations about the background of the phenomena of the senses! And conversely: at the very latest scientific course at the last turn of the year in Dornach, the call went through Dr. Steiner's entire cycle to recognize the tremendous results of sensory research, yes, it is to be redeemed at all from their sleep of magic, in which the intellectualism has banned, by spiritual research methods! If, therefore, we look closely, we see that the opposite of the alleged 'break in world-view' is the case. Nevertheless, we may perhaps wonder at first why Dr. Steiner once championed with such energy the world-view that had emerged from Darwinism. When I heard Dr. Steiner's words for the first time, as I said, I had a wonderful experience. I realized what a situation he was in with regard to a world view. And it cannot be better described than with Nietzsche's words, which he used in the speeches “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions”, already quoted on another occasion, where he talks about the grammar school. In the few words that I will quote, all you have to do is replace the word “grammar school” with “ruling world view”. With this change, the passage reads:

"We both know the prevailing worldview; do you also believe, for example, with regard to this, that the old tenacious habits could be broken up with honesty and good new ideas? Here, in fact, it is not a hard wall that protects against the battering rams of an attack, but rather the most fatal tenacity and slippery nature of all principles. The attacker does not have a visible and solid opponent to crush: this opponent is rather masked, able to transform himself into a hundred forms and in one of them to escape the gripping attack and always confuse the attacker anew through cowardly yielding and tenacious rebounding."

That was the terrible situation in which Dr. Steiner found himself at the time! No one before Haeckel had had the courage to be a materialist not only on weekdays but also on Sundays! A muggy, soft haze obscured the view of the consequences of the life of knowledge. Dr. Steiner's words swept in like a fresh spring wind. A viscous paste of philistine mental and spiritual laziness was spread by the spiritually dominant class around everything. And if Dr. Steiner saw it as his task to break down the wall of materialism, then he himself had to first help harden and erect this viscous mass into a wall. But what was the hardening agent? Consistency! Dr. Steiner first had to force the world to be consistent! No call for spiritual consistency could find resonance without materialistic consistency. And that is what is so close to the hearts of us young people, the consistency of thinking, feeling and morality that the world still does not know! And so those decades-old words of Dr. Steiner are said precisely from the heart to us youngest in the Anthroposophical Society!

And now to the controversy over the atomic theory, which Dr. Steiner has so vigorously opposed of late. What has happened here, and what has Dr. Steiner, and in fact every anthroposophist, had to oppose? In the discussions as they were conducted in the “Drei”, our scientists allowed themselves to be drawn by Dr. Rabel from the field of anthroposophy into their own field, instead of forcing them to enter the anthroposophical field! The whole battle was not at all in the anthroposophical field, but in the intellectual field! For they have fought with proofs. Just during the conference, we were able to hear again from Dr. Steiner what is to be thought of “proofs” in the field of anthroposophy. One can actually “prove” every assertion and its opposite: it just depends on one's attitude! Dr. Rabel cannot be refuted because she is right! Anyone who tries to refute her by providing evidence is wrong!

An example from a different area that I recently experienced can shed a bright light on the point at issue here. An anti-Semitic publishing house has issued a pamphlet entitled “Moses, a dynamiter and manufacturer of explosives!” It claims that Moses was a great initiate. The initiatic system consisted of certain personalities having power over the higher forces of nature. The higher forces of nature are those that have been accessible to all people since the dawn of the scientific age: the physical and chemical energies. There are no others. This explains the fire on Sinai, the untouchability of the Ark of the Covenant, etc., etc. Moses instilled in the Jewish people a fear of God by means of fireworks and the like, by which he could make himself their lord, and under the lying sign of which all Jewish development has stood since then. Etc.! Here then we have the strange fact that this book, just as we do, calls Moses a “great initiate”! But the terrible thing is that it is right in its conclusions if one asserts: there are only material energies! Can the opposite be proved? No! Two world-views are confronting each other: both call Moses a great initiate, one recognizes only material forces, the other also supersensible ones; one comes to the conclusion that Moses was a swindling explosive bomb manufacturer, the other sees in him a messenger of the gods! What alone can bring the decision here? Only by pursuing these trains of thought to the point where they become moral, where they touch on human value and human dignity. And there it shows that if you try to experience yourself in the stream of becoming human with all the consequences, with the attitude of those books, you can't do anything but hang yourself from the nearest window nail, while the other attitude lets you carry your head higher, makes your step more proud and yet lets humility and love prevail in your heart! Only in this way does Anthroposophy “prove” itself!

And only in this way can Dr. Rabel prove the validity or invalidity of the atomic theory. She continues to assert it, to pursue it, to teach it, because it is her duty, as long as she has not experienced “the other”! But she never will, as long as she is attacked where she is right by herself! Rather, I call out to her in farewell: “You spoke of your religious feeling, to which anthroposophy is so sympathetic. Now I ask you from the bottom of my heart: Go through the coming decades of your life with an ever clearer view of the souls of the people you meet! Become more and more alert in these experiences! Take them deeper and deeper into your heart and let them grow and grow in the warmth of your religious feeling! And when you begin to suffer from the fact that it is increasingly cold and unworldly souls that may still be interested in your atomic theory, but that all those whose nature you affirm from the bottom of your heart will call out to you more and more: Oh, how I suffer from your atomic theory, how it kills my noblest, how I freeze in the coldness of your science! Where, where is the science in whose warming light the flower of my life can flourish! — When these calls will resound to you, shaking you to the marrow of your life, then perhaps the reality of the atomic theory will prove itself to you!"

Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer of Stuttgart, speaking on behalf of the religious movement, first expressed his deepest gratitude to Dr. Steiner for the tremendous benefit to life that he has provided to humanity through his help and advice in this movement, in the most selfless purity and greatness. He then also thanked the anthroposophists, who have prepared the way by their voluntary support in the movement's first most difficult days. In many places, it has not yet been possible to reach non-anthroposophical circles, for which one is determined to work. Also, before Dr. Steiner's Dornach lecture, Steiner's lecture in Dornach, the dangers that arise particularly from the new movement of the Anthroposophical Society were not sufficiently perceived, both in that financial help is withdrawn from it, and in that the satisfaction of human community needs in the cultic community distracts many from the Society, and above all in that many exchange the path of knowledge, which they once embarked upon, for the more beneficial path of cult. The Christian Community cannot take pleasure in Anthroposophical members who neglect their financial responsibility to the Anthroposophical Society in favor of the Christian Community, or who cannot find a way to remain fully loyal to their path of knowledge. On the other hand, he asks the Anthroposophists to regard those members of the Christian Community who, now or in the future, wish to work with both movements out of their own free will and with knowledge of the material, as fully Anthroposophical, since the cult offers many opportunities for inner participation and does not necessarily have to be celebrated only by emotionally immersing oneself in it, which is certainly un-Anthroposophical, but also spiritually, not soul-like and passive, but spiritually, actively. He further asked the Anthroposophists never to expect any special privileges as members of the Anthroposophical Society in the Christian Community, since the new movement must place itself on an equal footing with all people if it is to fight its way through successfully. And finally, Dr. Rittelmeyer asked for ongoing support in the The Christian Community finding the people it needs, and for inner understanding and support in the tremendously difficult task it has to fulfill.

Dr. Carl Unger, Stuttgart: Mr. Weishaar did not speak this morning. However, it is extremely important to me to do and say what I consider necessary on my own initiative, so that in the future, as far as my relationship with the Kerning group and its leader, Miss Völker, is concerned, there will be no further misunderstandings. I regret that remnants may still be apparent from a time when it was necessary to make a point of distancing myself from the Theosophical Society and to act against various phenomena that were connected with the unjustified mysticism or mystical eccentricity in the Anthroposophical Society. Perhaps I sometimes overshot the mark. But as far as my relationship with the group and its leader is concerned, I would like to emphasize that for many years I have always advocated that the fully-fledged working method of this working group and its efforts to carry out this work in a closed circle must be respected. As for my personal relationship, I can only say that I have known Ms. Völker for many years, that we have been together frequently and have discussed anthroposophical matters, and that I hope this will continue to happen in the future.

Mr. Heinrich Weishaar, Stuttgart: Miss Völker cannot yet be completely satisfied with these explanations. But I do not want to bother the assembly with this. I would like to hand over the whole matter to the new central committee for further action and hand over the relevant files to them.

A distinction must be made between the personal relationship between Ms. Völker and Dr. Unger. In this regard, Ms. Völker is completely satisfied and in agreement with what Dr. Unger has said. But we must also consider another point of view: that Fräulein Völker, as the chair of an old working group, is on one side and Dr. Unger, as a member of the old central committee, is on the other. It is therefore necessary to provide clarification with regard to matters that need to be addressed; but the matter will then be settled.

Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Stuttgart: Lecture on “The Opponents” [see references below]

Our opponents want to block the source from which spiritual knowledge flows. Because they consciously or unconsciously serve a current of spiritual world view that believes the publication of spiritual knowledge must be prevented. The first sentence in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is: “There are abilities slumbering in every human being through which he can acquire knowledge of higher worlds.” This is the voice of a school of thought that wants to include all people in the transcendental knowledge, who want to attain such knowledge themselves or want to know how others attain it. In this way, anthroposophy documents itself as a spiritual path that cannot include any aspirations to power. Power arises from knowledge that is withheld from others. The schools of thought that have aspirations to power have a different cosmic goal than the school of thought that wants to develop freedom and love for all beings.

To give you an idea of what the unfolding of these effects is based on, the following should be presented to you: In his book “Exercitia spiritualia”, Ignatius of Loyola gives the following meditation: “Imagine Lucifer planting his standard on a desolate rock near Babylon, where everything is in the greatest confusion and turmoil; how he sends the demons into the world to lure human souls to follow him. Christ, on the other hand, planted the cross banner in a field near Jerusalem, where everything is at its most beautiful and peaceful; he sends out his holy “soul zealots” to invite the whole world to follow him, with the assurance that everyone who swears obedience to the cross banner, patiently endures contempt and suffering, will possess his heavenly kingdom for all eternity. Here you have initially placed two images, which will be discussed in more detail in a moment. Both show that we are dealing with a spiritual-military organization that is not based on freedom but on obedience. This obedience even extends to the ability to comprehend: “[...] it cannot be denied that obedience includes not only the execution – that one does what is commanded – and not only the will – that one does it willingly –; but also the judgment, so that everything the superior commands and judges appears both right and true to the subordinate, so that, as I said, with his strength, the will is able to bend the power of judgment.” (Quote from a letter by Ignatius of Loyola from April 1553. Cf. ‘Jesuitica’ by Roman Boos, Dreigliederungszeitung No. 40, April 1920.) So we are dealing here with a spiritual-military organization that exerts power deep into the innermost being of the human being. But now let us see – let us see by means of an historical example – how such power works. In Schiller's 'Thirty Years' War', in the first book, we read about Ferdinand II that he was educated and taught by Jesuits at the Academy of Ingolstadt. And then it says: “On the one hand, he was shown the indulgence of the Maximilian princes towards the followers of the new doctrine and the confusion in their lands, and on the other hand, the blessing of Bavaria and the relentless religious zeal of its rulers; he was given the choice between these two examples.” Here you have a historical example of how a prince received a meditation, the effectiveness of which is proven by the course of history. That was the case during the Thirty Years' War. At that time, it was necessary to eradicate a spiritual current that can be symptomatically grasped in the work of Comenius, which was entitled Pansophia. Why did Comenius call what he represented a pansophia? Because he wanted to create a wisdom for all people. He was moved by the same impulse to which the first sentence in “How to Know Higher Worlds” refers: he wanted to address what lives in every human being. That is why he spoke of a pansophia. It has been eradicated by impulses that have already been characterized.

In our age, however, people speak differently. They say to young Solothurn: “Gather together! Storm the Goetheanum!” (See “Das Goetheanum” of January 7, 1923.) These words were spoken at a meeting of Catholic associations from Dornach, Arlesheim and Reinach. It was in the afternoon of September 19, 1920 at the Hotel Ochsen in Dornach-Brugg. The speaker at this meeting was Pastor Kully. A brochure written by this pastor Kully and directed against Anthroposophy concludes with the words: Christus vincit / Christus regnat / Christus imperat.

It is not without significance that another book, the Jesuit Baumgartner's biography of Goethe, ends with the same words. I characterized the book in a lecture that was then printed in issue 8 of “Die Drei”, November 1921, first year of publication. No one would want to compare the two-volume, gold-edged, painstakingly and scientifically written biography of Goethe with Pastor Kully's pamphlet. But both books serve the same impulse. It is significant that they end with the same words. One book is directed against Goethe, the other against everything that comes from the Goetheanum. Goethe's true nature is overlooked and denied. What he himself fought against is presented as his true nature. And this is because they want something very specific in the world. Goetheanism, Pansophy, Anthroposophy have their enemies. Because they address everyone, and that must not be. For higher knowledge should be possessed only by a few, to whom the many owe obedience, obedience graduated in degree. And that is to be achieved by a spirit-military system. And the reflection of this system? Where is it? There is also a militarization of economic life. The extreme end of this is Bolshevism. What was it invented for, for example, to organize the working class? Why teach them party opinions? Because there are powers that want to eradicate individual judgment and free will. In theory, this lives as a will in the materialistic conception of history, and in practice in everything that this conception of history, which is as one-sided as can be, increasingly makes the only correct one. The mirror image of a world view built on freedom and love is an associative economy in which one selflessly sacrifices one's life experience to the other, thereby renouncing any display of power, as it lives, for example, in competitive struggle. But a militarized spiritual life is reflected in a militarized economy. However different the things of the world often are, if you look deeply enough, very dissimilar things reveal a power. We could also learn a lot from the lectures given by Father Muckermann S.J. here in Stuttgart. He spoke about scientific problems. The undertone of his remarks was that science should be a mere physical science. As such, it is rightly materialistic. But science finds its limits everywhere. Beyond these limits, the Church rules. It administers souls just as science administers the body. There is no need to talk about the spirit today. It was abolished in 869. Materialistic science serves the same impulses as the Church, which administers souls. The two belong together. If science dared to embrace body, soul and spirit, then the souls would begin to govern themselves. Therefore, there must be no spiritual science. There must only be physical science. That is, materialistic natural science is needed. It serves the same impulse as all the striving for power already mentioned.

In the lectures that Dr. Steiner gave in Dornach on Thomas Aquinas, it is clearly shown how Goetheanism and Anthroposophy are straightforward continuations of what was present as realism in the Middle Ages. And in brief summary, what can be said about the position of anthroposophy in relation to Catholicism can be found in the first part of the writing “The Smear Campaign Against the Goetheanum”. There, especially on pages 24 and 25, it is shown how fully in line the methodology of the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is with what the most orthodox Catholicism has declared to be correct. Nevertheless, the Catholic side declares, as does Father Zimmermann SJ, for example, that anthroposophy is incompatible with true Catholicism. There, anthroposophy is also deliberately mixed with Anglo-Indian theosophy and presented as gnosticism and all sorts of other things. In reality, however, all sorts of things have been incorporated into Catholicism that are certainly not Christian. For example, the doctrine of the eternity of hell punishments is Aristotelian and not Christian. To prove this, I quote Brentano's words here, with which he reproduces Aristotle's teaching on page 146 of his book on Aristotle and his world view: '[...] When the departed human spirits behold the plan of the world and see themselves interwoven with their life on earth, one recognizes himself as identical with one who practices the noble, and another with one who accomplishes ignoble deeds. The knowledge they attain is at the same time an eternal, glorifying or condemning judgment of the world. .. ."

Likewise, the doctrine of creatianism is Aristotelian. This doctrine consists in denying pre-existence and thinking that the higher human being that descends into the incarnation is created by God at the time of procreation. Likewise, the mass is largely a continuation of Egyptian initiation rituals. Thus a close examination would show how Catholicism contains within itself elements that are older pre-Christian spiritual material, partly of oriental origin. The assertions that say similar things about anthroposophy are not only wrong, but project onto anthroposophy precisely that which is characteristic of the accuser himself. Anthroposophy has something of a mirror in itself. The opponent sees himself in it and, by supposedly describing anthroposophy, sketches his own portrait. Anthroposophy does indeed teach pre-existence. In doing so, it goes against the Council of 869. The aim of the latter was to eradicate the spirit. All orientalism, which always pointed to the prenatal, was covered up by Aristotelianism. Only the after-death could be talked about. This also applies to Protestant theologians. They began by appealing to the soul's egoism. The soul has an interest in outliving death, but not in having existed before. A kind of horror of the prenatal, spiritual, cosmic realm emerged, from which the soul descends into birth. This horror can be clearly observed, for example, in Professor Traub. He is afraid that the ethical significance of the mystery of Golgotha will be lost if its cosmic significance is brought to the fore. This fear is based on an important fact. This fact will be demonstrated by means of a symptomatic case. Thomas More presented the results of supersensible experiences in his work Utopia (= non-locality). He describes how Egyptian and Roman ways come to his island, but not Christianity. That is, Thomas More must form the opinion through the experiences he has that in the supersensible world he describes, Christ is not to be found. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has beatified Thomas More. So the paths of those who are beatified into the higher worlds are such that they do not find Christ there. So one can understand that a kind of horror develops before entering the supersensible world. There are reasons for it when on one side the spiritual cosmos, from which Christ once descended to earth or from which the soul descends into birth, must be thought of as being incompatible with ethics or morals. And one must understand why one needed Aristotelianism from this side, which denies pre-existence. In this case, which Dr. Steiner pointed out, one can see that certain realities underlie the horrors of the opponents, which do not have to be conscious to all those who have such horror.

Another thing became clear to me in a long conversation I once had with our opponent Gogarten. He had a different horror. He took offense at the fact that we interpose hierarchies between God and people. From what Gogarten told me, I had to assume that he had inner experiences. He described how he felt united with God, indeed experienced it. He described God. If I apply his description to what we know, I would have to say that he described what we call an angel. Now we have to understand Gogarten. We do not insert hierarchies between angels and humans either. We also believe that the angel stands directly above the human being. But we do not worship this being, which is so close to man. For the angel is, after all, the higher self of man, and each person has his own special angel. So if someone prays to his angel, he would worship a god that is not the general god of man. The result would be self-idolatry, and besides, everyone would have their god and someone else would have theirs.

You see, but these are again things that one accuses anthroposophy of. It promotes self-redemption, yes, self-deification. There are already such things, Dr. Steiner has also pointed this out - but they are not to be found in anthroposophy. If you say something about anthroposophy – that it is this or that – and it isn't, then it is just some thought form that people think, and so it must come from somewhere. Usually, those who claim something about anthroposophy that is not true attach to anthroposophy something that characterizes them. So Anthroposophy is a being that defends itself, with a shield that shines brightly, that reflects, that holds out its true face to everyone. And when you see the true face in the mirror, then you know how all our opponents are striving towards the same goal.

They live in a spiritual cosmos that they consider immoral because the Christ does not appear to them in this spiritual cosmos, or because they do not want him to appear through the paths they take. Therefore, they deny the entire prenatal spiritual world, or at least want to admit only a few into it. They lay claim to the souls for an earthly church. They teach a mere physical science and shape social economic life in such

that initiative of the will weakens and individuality dies. And over this a network of power is organized. Where does this lead? It leads to the fact that after the spirit and soul have been killed, mere bodily automatons remain, without judgment, without their own will, subordinated to higher ones, whom they obey. A subhuman race, directed and led by one or more directing group souls. They want to encircle the Earth, the Earth that will one day disintegrate into dust, and eternalize it and populate it with those subhuman beings. That is a terrible cosmic goal. They are all working towards it, consciously or unconsciously. Then the Earth's goal will be gone. Then no Jupiter development will be possible.

These powers that strive for this create a fog. A fog in which error and truth become indistinguishable. Flocks of thoughts and emotions swirl in this fog. Snatches of quotes and thoughts, enveloped in what instincts can provide as a cover, an elementary flood of fog, sweeps around the earth. In this fog, power is born. All dishonest power is based on campaigns of lies. These power instincts today arise from all kinds of group souls. Family and racial souls stand up against the movement that is based on the individuality struggling for freedom. Anthroposophy fights for a cosmic goal. Last time I was able to show you how the Zeitgeist wants to take hold of our society, today I must point to the spirit of the planet. Anthroposophy fights for the future of the earth. Its shield shines brightly, its sword flashes brightly. But this sword is the word of truth, which unfolds no power that rules, which develops love that forms. Those who fight for the future of the Earth must feel themselves to be knights not of the sword but of the word. For heaven and Earth will pass away, even if dark forces seek to perpetuate what should become dust – but the word of truth will remain if we feel responsible for the evolution and future of the Earth and humanity through love for all beings who are human beings and fellow human beings.

Rector Moritz Bartsch, Breslau: Dr. Rabel said that we are too dependent on the authority of Dr. Steiner in our views and decisions. We faithfully accept everything from him, do not see the contradictions in his work, etc. Is that right? Are we so unfree as people or do we have a different concept of freedom than many people today? Well, many of you will have felt the same way I did. If you take a superficial look at Steiner's works, you will initially come across contradictions. Many years ago, I asked Dr. Steiner about this myself. Dr. Steiner is a true modern educationalist. He does not point the facts out to you, but expects you to make an effort to find the solution to the riddle yourself. Dr. Steiner also pointed out to me that if I understood such sayings in context, I would recognize that there are no real contradictions. I did so, and after years of arduous searching I succeeded in finding the red, uninterrupted thread of development in Steiner's career: the “contradictions” dissolved. Today it is almost incomprehensible to me how one could once be so foolish, so terribly superficial. In the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings, which were written by Dr. Steiner as early as the 1880s, the idea of communion with the world spirit in the act of knowledge is put forward, among other things. In my defense, however, I must say that I had not yet studied these books at the time. — When studying spiritual science, one has strange experiences in general. Our intellectually steeped consciousness initially finds it quite difficult to understand Steiner; since we see ourselves as very clever people, we consider the spiritual-scientific writings to be unclear, confused or foolish and wrong. Over time, however, we realize that such obscure passages express very profound truths. One realizes that Fichte is right when he says that a person must be born or educated to philosophize. Indeed, a person must mature to receive the truth. One must recognize, as Fichte did, that a person's world view is what he is like. Wisdom alone knows nothing of the content of the world; thinking only provides the form for the idea content of being. In order to be able to receive it, a person must purify his character, and above all, he must have respect and reverence for the wisdom of the world. The path from modesty to reverence can be found by experiencing one's own maturing during the study of Steiner's writings and by realizing that the limits of one's own knowledge are not yet the limits of knowledge for all people, that there are spirits with much broader horizons than one's own. One becomes modest and grateful to people whose horizon extends beyond the portals of the beyond into the supersensible world. In the presence of such a person, a feeling of reverence arises as a human matter of course. And is it such a great crime for modern man to learn to look up to a greater being again, to be cured of his self-important subjectivism!? Does he thereby surrender his freedom? Not at all! Even today I have a completely free relationship with Dr. Steiner. I represent that part of spiritual science that I have made my own through years of work, and what I do not yet understand, I leave for the time being in the hope that I may yet mature to these deeper truths. Of course, before one has gained this point of view, one sometimes fears for one's independence. I once had a conversation with Dr. Steiner about this matter years ago. I believed that I would become somewhat dependent on representing Steiner's spiritual ideas in lectures. But I was persuaded that in the spiritual realm it is similar to the physical plane: the farmer did not produce the field, but he regards what he produces on it through his labor as his own. Spiritual wealth is also given to the majority of people by a few creative minds; what the individual acquires through his own efforts he may regard as his own. Today man has a false concept of freedom. He seeks it in that subjectivism which believes it knows everything better and criticizes everything. But only the person who has made the content of the world his own, and allows it to become the motivation for his actions, is truly free. Such a person follows his own path and is allowed to follow it; he is free. But this freedom is not achieved through arrogance, but through humility. Sophia only condescends to the one who worships her. — One can see: our worship of Dr. Steiner does not lead to bondage, on the contrary, it is the forerunner of true freedom. — The speaker then humorously comments on the youth movement and declares his approval of the election to the board of the Free Anthroposophical Society.

Final words from Mr. Emil Leinhas

(The event cost an awful lot of money... there are baskets set up outside for collecting money.

The committee has made a decision: to provide a report on this assembly of delegates shortly in the form of a newsletter that can then be made available to all members.

I believe that we are all convinced that we have lived through an important piece of the history of the Anthroposophical Society together during these days. After the intense preparations that have taken place, we entered the delegates' meeting with anxious concerns. And the delegates' meeting itself proved that these concerns were not unfounded. And if we emerged unscathed from some of the chaos that occurred, we owe that primarily to the fact that Dr. Steiner himself intervened in the right way at the right moment. We must therefore express our gratitude to him for his active help at the end of this delegates' meeting. If we can look to the future with joyful confidence, it is thanks first and foremost to Dr. Steiner's intervention.

We also thank Dr. Steiner and the eurythmists who contributed to the fact that not only unpleasant things were dispelled but that there was also the opportunity to find recreation in the realm of art and beauty.

Thanks on behalf of the committee to the various speakers, who, whether they received more or less applause, made a sincere effort to deliver their presentation.

Thanks also to the speakers in the discussion, who have ensured that things have got into a certain flow here. In addition to the speakers, we must not forget the delegates and members who have come here and who have made an effort to endure a great deal as hosts. We must give special thanks to the youth, who, through their intervention, have brought a certain freshness and liveliness into the deliberations of the Anthroposophical Society for the first time. May they retain this, for there are some signs of it.

It is still the most beautiful society in the world, one of our friends told me yesterday, and his joy was evident despite all the clouds. Another friend from out of town said, “Yes, when I was here in the summer, my throat felt like it was tied up, that was because of the icy air; but now I have hope again.

This gathering has had some success after all. May it also have the effect that an understanding of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society takes root in all our hearts and souls in the right way. May there not only be understanding, but may the will be ignited to fulfill the tasks. A start must be made, then the right action will also be found through the work. The progress of the work cannot come out of discussions and deliberations, but only by finding the strength in the work itself and through the work itself for ever greater and more extensive work.

The blessing must lie in the doing, not in talking about what others have to do. The doing itself, not talking, but working, should be our task. If we look at things this way, we can look forward to the future with joy.

May we all look up to our cause with great enthusiasm, and also to the example set before us, which can give us courage and strength in the face of the difficult tasks that lie ahead. May this conference help to make it very real in all our hearts, so that we all say and feel, not only when we are together here, but also when we go out to our work, that our work must be ennobled by the conviction that we represent the most glorious cause in the world today.

With that, I declare the meeting closed.

Dr.-Ing. Carl Unger, Dr. phil. Walter Johannes Stein *

• 1. “Anthroposophie” and “Die Drei”
• 2. They were: 1) Mr. Hans Kühn, 2) Mr. Walter Kühne, 3) Mr. Ernst Uehli.
• 3. See page 463 of this volume.
• 9. The passage quoted here from ‘Magazin für Literatur’ can be found in the article ”Charles Lyell. On the 100th anniversary of his birth], Magazin für Literatur 1897, No. 47 [today in GA 30], and reads:
  ”...I cannot speak of Lyell or Darwin without thinking of Haeckel. All three belong together. What Lyell and Darwin began, Haeckel continued. He expanded it in the full knowledge that he was serving not only the scientific need but also the religious consciousness of mankind. He is the most modern spirit because his world view is no longer tainted by old prejudices, as was still the case with Darwin, for example. He is the most modern thinker because he sees in the natural the only field of thought, and he is the most modern feeler because he wants life to be arranged according to the natural. We know that he celebrates the anniversary of Lyell's birthday with us because for him it must be the day that brought the one founder of the new world view. The festive day that is celebrated in honor of Lyell makes us realize that we belong to the Haeckel community. When Haeckel talks to us about the processes of nature, every word has a secondary meaning for us that is related to our feelings. He is at the helm; he is steering hard. Even if at some point we don't want to go where he is taking us, he still has the direction we want to take. He has received the rudder from Lyell and Darwin; they could not have given it to anyone better. He will hand it over to others who will lead in his direction. And our community will sail swiftly forward, leaving behind the helpless ferrymen of the old worldviews. These are the ideas that the 14th of November, on which Lyell's birthday was celebrated for the hundredth time, has stirred in me."
  In a lecture at the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Congress on September 1, 1921 (reprinted in ‘The Three’, 2nd year, issue 7/8) [today in GA 78] Dr. Steiner said the following about the passage quoted above:
  "And when I had to write in 1897, on the hundredth birthday of Lyell, a founder of the modern scientific-monistic way of thinking, Haeckel also stood before me alive in the soul's eye. A community appeared to me in spirit that could be capable of continuing the process of living in nature, which can be found in the line of spirits from Lyell to Haeckel, in the direction in which it must be continued. That is why I wrote for this ideal community, which should seek the path that had just begun with Haeckel's monism, those words which, if understood correctly, can suggest that with this monism, a wall has now been crossed, beyond which one must no longer return to earlier times if one does not want to deal with the decline of if one wishes to deal with the rising, not the declining, forces of human evolution. Yes, my dear ladies and gentlemen, we must advance from this monism; we must never go back to the old worldviews that have been overcome by this monism. That is why I wrote the words at the time: Even if in some places we do not want to immediately move past the one he leads us to (namely Haeckel) – nobody can do that when anthroposophy is germinating in their soul – he still has the direction we want to take; he has taken the rudder from Lyell's and Darwin's hands, they could not have given it to a better person, and our community is sailing forward quickly! Yes, may it absorb into itself the strict scientific spirit that true natural research has brought forth, and may it quickly advance into those depths of world existence that lie in the supersensible and yet can only be fathomed by supersensible research!"
• 10. Magazin für Litteratur 1898, pag. 310. [Today in GA 33, page 129.]
• 11. This protest was directed particularly against Dr. Rabel's statement that Dr. Steiner “made wise use” of the burning of the Goetheanum and “took it as an opportunity to inaugurate a great movement of repentance and inner reflection”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study of Spiritual Science should always go hand in hand with practical experience of how the mind works. It is impossible to get entirely clear about many things that we discussed in the last lecture unless one tries to get a kind of living grasp of what thinking involves in terms of actualities. For why is it that among the very persons whose profession it is to think about such questions, confusion reigns, for example, as to the relation between the general concept of the “triangle-in-general” and specific concepts of individual triangles? How is it that people puzzle for centuries over questions such as that of the hundred possible and the hundred real thalers cited by Kant? Why is it that people fail to pursue the very simple reflections that are necessary to see that there cannot really be any such thing as a “pragmatic” account of history, according to which the course of events always follows directly from preceding events? Why do people not reflect in such a way that they would be repelled by this impossible mode of regarding the history of man, so widely current nowadays? What is the cause of all these things?

The reason is that far too little trouble is taken over learning to handle with precision the activities of thinking, even by people whose business this should be. Nowadays everyone wants to feel that he has a perfect claim to say: “Think? Well, one can obviously do that.” So they begin to think. Thus we have various conceptions of the world; there have been many philosophers—a great many. We find that one philosopher is after this and another is after that, and that many fairly clever people have drawn attention to many things. If someone comes upon contradictions in these findings, he does not ponder over them, but he is quite pleased with himself, fancying that now he can “think” indeed. He can think again what those other fellows have thought out, and feels quite sure that he will find the right answer himself. For no one nowadays must make any concession to authority! That would deny the dignity of human nature! Everyone must think for himself. That is the prevailing notion in the realm of thought.

I do not know if people have reflected that this is not their attitude in other realms of life. No one feels committed to belief in authority or to a craving for authority when he has his coat made at the tailor's or his shoes at the shoemaker's. He does not say: “It would be beneath the dignity of man to let one's things be made by persons who are known to be thoroughly acquainted with their business.” He may perhaps even allow that it is necessary to learn these skills. But in practical life, with regard to thinking, it is not agreed that one must get one's conceptions of the world from quarters where thinking and much else has been learnt. Only rarely would this be conceded to-day.

This is one tendency that dominates our life in the widest circles, and is the immediate reason why human thinking is not a very widespread product nowadays. I believe this can be quite easily grasped. For let us suppose that one day everybody were to say: “What!—learn to make boots? For a long time that has been unworthy of man; we can all make boots.” I don't know if only good boots would come from it. At all events, with regard to the coining of correct thoughts in their conception of the world, it is from this sort of reasoning that men mostly take their start at the present day. This is what gives its deeper meaning to my remark of yesterday—that although thought is something a man is completely within, so that he can contemplate it in its inner being, actual thinking is not as common as one might suppose. Besides this, there is to-day a quite special pretension which could gradually go so far as to throw a veil over all clear thinking. We must pay attention to this also; at least we must glance at it.

Let us suppose the following. There was once in Görlitz a shoemaker named Jacob Boehme. He had learnt his craft well—how soles are cut, how the shoe is formed over the last, and how the nails are driven into the soles and leather. He knew all this down to the ground. Now supposing that this shoemaker, by name Jacob Boehme, had gone around and said: “I will now see how the world is constructed. I will suppose that there is a great last at the foundation of the world. Over this last the world-leather was once stretched; then the world-nails were added, and by means of them the world-sole was fastened to the world-upper. Then boot-blacking was brought into play, and the whole world-shoe was polished. In this way I can quite clearly explain to myself how in the morning it is bright, for then the shoe-polish of the world is shining, but in the evening it is soiled with all sorts of things; it shines no longer. Hence I imagine that every night someone has the duty of repolishing the world-boot. And thus arises the difference between day and night.” Let us suppose that Jacob Boehme had said this.

Yes, you laugh, for of course Jacob Boehme did not say this; but still he made good shoes for the people of Görlitz, and for that he employed his knowledge of shoe-making. But he also developed his grand thoughts, through which he wanted to build up a conception of the world; and for that he resorted to something else. He said to himself: My shoe-making is not enough for that; I dare not apply to the structure of the world the thoughts I put into making shoes. And in due course he arrived at his sublime thoughts about the world. Thus there was no such Jacob Boehme as the hypothetical figure I first sketched, but there was another one who knew how to set about things. But the hypothetical “Jacob Boehmes”, like the one you laughed over—they exist everywhere to-day.

For example, we find among them physicists and chemists who have learnt the laws governing the combination and separation of substances; there are zoologists who have learnt how one examines and describes animals; there are doctors who have learnt how to treat the physical human body, and what they themselves call the soul. What do they all do? They say: When a person wants to work out for himself a conception of the world, then he takes the laws that are learnt in chemistry, in physics, or in physiology—no others are admissible—and out of these he builds a conception of the world for himself. These people proceed exactly as the hypothetical shoemaker would have done if he had constructed the world-boot, only they do not notice that their world-conceptions come into existence by the very same method that produced the hypothetical world-boot. It does certainly seem rather grotesque if one imagines that the difference between day and night comes about through the soiling of shoe-leather and the repolishing of it in the night. But in terms of true logic it is in principle just the same if an attempt is made to build a world out of the laws of chemistry, physics, biology and physiology. Exactly the same principle! It is an immense presumption on the part of the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, or the biologist, who do not wish to be anything else than physicist, chemist, physiologist, biologist, and yet want to have an opinion about the whole world. The point is that one should go to the root of things and not shirk the task of illuminating anything that is not so clear by tracing it back to its true place in the scheme of things. If you look at all this with method and logic, you will not need to be astonished that so many present-day conceptions of the world yield nothing but the “world-boot”. And this is something that can point us to the study of Spiritual Science and to the pursuit of practical trains of thought; something that can urge us to examine the question of how we must think in order to see where shortcomings exist in the world.

There is something else I should like to mention in order to show where lies the root of countless misunderstandings with regard to the ideas people have about the world. When one concerns oneself with world-conceptions, does one not have over and over again the experience that someone thinks this and someone else that; one man upholds a certain view with many good reasons (one can find good reasons for everything), while another has equally good reasons for his view; the first man contradicts his opponent with just as good reasons as those with which the opponent contradicts him. Sects arise in the world not, in the first place, because one person or another is convinced about the right path by what is taught here or there. Only look at the paths which the disciples of great men have had to follow in order to come to this or that great man, and then you will see that herein lies something important for us with regard to karma. But if we examine the outlooks that exist in the world to-day, we must say that whether someone is a follower of Bergson, or of Haeckel, or of this or that (karma, as I have already said, does not recognise the current world-conception) depends on other things than on deep conviction. There is contention on all sides!

Yesterday I said that once there were Nominalists, persons who maintained that general concepts had no reality, but were merely names. These Nominalists had opponents who were called Realists (the word had a different meaning then). The Realists maintained that general concepts are not mere words, but refer to quite definite realities. In the Middle Ages the question of Realism versus Nominalism was always a burning one, especially for theology, a sphere of thought with which present-day thinkers trouble themselves very little. For in the time when the question of Nominalism versus Realism arose (from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries) there was something that belonged to the most important confessions of faith, the question about the three “Divine Persons”—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—who form One Divine Being, but are still Three real Persons. The Nominalists maintained that these three Divine Persons existed only individually, the “Father” for Himself, the “Son” for Himself, and the “Holy Ghost” for Himself; and if one spoke of a “Collective God” Who comprised these Three, that was only a name for the Three. Thus Nominalism did away with the unity of the Trinity. In opposition to the Realists, the Nominalists not only explained away the unity, but even regarded it as heretical to declare, as the Realists did, that the Three Persons formed not merely an imaginary unity, but an actual one.

Thus Nominalism and Realism were opposites. And anyone who goes deeply into the literature of Realism and Nominalism during these centuries gets a deep insight into what human acumen can produce. For the most ingenious grounds were brought forward for Nominalism, just as much as for Realism. In those days it was more difficult to be reckoned as a thinker because there was no printing press, and it was not an easy thing to take part in such controversies as that between Nominalism and Realism. Anyone who ventured into this field had to be better prepared, according to the ideas of those times, than is required of people who engage in controversies nowadays. An immense amount of penetration was necessary in order to plead the cause of Realism, and it was equally so with Nominalism. How does this come about? It is grievous that things are so, and if one reflects more deeply on it, one is led to say: What use is it that you are so clever? You can be clever and plead the cause of Nominalism, and you can be just as clever and contradict Nominalism. One can get quite confused about the whole question of intelligence! It is distressing even to listen to what such characterisations are supposed to mean.

Now, as a contrast to what we have been saying, we will bring forward something that is perhaps not nearly so discerning as much that has been advanced with regard to Nominalism or to Realism, but it has perhaps one merit—it goes straight to the point and indicates the direction in which one needs to think.

Let us imagine the way in which one forms general concepts; the way in which one synthesizes a mass of details. We can do this in two ways: first as a man does in the course of his life through the world. He sees numerous examples of a certain kind of animal: they are silky or woolly, are of various colours, have whiskers, at certain times they go through movements that recall human “washing”, they eat mice, etc. One can call such creatures “cats”. Then one has formed a general concept. All these creatures have something to do with what we call “cats”. But now let us suppose that someone has had a long life, in the course of which he has encountered many cat-owners, men and women, and he has noticed that a great many of these people call their pets “Pussy”. Hence he classes all these creatures under the name of “Pussy”. Hence we now have the general concept “Cats” and the general concept “Pussy”, and a large number of individual creatures belonging in both cases to the general concept. And yet no one will maintain that the general concept “Pussy” has the same significance as the general concept “Cats”. Here the real difference comes out. In forming the general concept “Pussy” which is only a summary of names that must rank as individual names, we have taken the line, and rightly so, of Nominalism; and in forming the general concept “Cats” we have taken the line of Realism, and rightly so. In one case Nominalism is correct; in the other. Realism. Both are right. One must only apply these methods within their proper limits. And when both are right, it is not surprising that good reasons for both can be adduced. In taking the name “Pussy”, I have employed a somewhat grotesque example. But I can show you a much more significant example and I will do so at once.

Within the scope of our objective experience there is a whole realm where Nominalism—the idea that the collective term is only a name—is fully justified. We have “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, and so on, but it is impossible to find in the expression “number” anything that has a real existence. “Number” has no existence. “One”, “two”, “three”, “five”, “six”,—they exist. But what I said in the last lecture, that in order to find the general concept one must let that which corresponds to it pass over into movement—this cannot be done with the concept “Number”. One “one” does not pass over into “two”. It must always be taken as “one”. Not even in thought can we pass over into two, or from two into three. Only the individual numbers exist, not “number” in general. As applied to the nature of numbers, Nominalism is entirely correct; but when we come to the single animal in relation to its genus, Realism is entirely correct. For it is impossible for a deer to exist, and another deer, and yet another, without there being the genus “deer”. The figure “two” can exist for itself, “one”, “seven”, etc., can exist for themselves. But in so far as anything real appears in number, the number is a quality, and the concept “number” has no specific existence. External things are related to general concepts in two different ways: Nominalism is appropriate in one case, and Realism in the other.

On these lines, if we simply give our thoughts the right direction, we begin to understand why there are so many disputes about conceptions of the world. People generally are not inclined, when they have grasped one standpoint, to grasp another as well. When in some realm of thought somebody has got hold of the idea “general concepts have no existence”, he proceeds to extend to it the whole make-up of the world. This sentence, “general concepts have no existence” is not false, for when applied to the particular realm which the person in question has considered, it is correct. It is only the universalising of it that is wrong. Thus it is essential, if one wants to form a correct idea of what thinking is, to understand clearly that the truth of a thought in the realm to which it belongs is no evidence for its general validity. Someone can offer me a perfectly correct proof of this or that and yet it will not hold good in a sphere to which it does not belong. Anyone, therefore, who intends to occupy himself seriously with the paths that lead to a conception of the world must recognise that the first essential is to avoid one-sidedness. That is what I specially want to bring out to-day. Now let us take a general look at some matters which will be explained in detail later on.

There are people so constituted that it is not possible for them to find the way to the Sprit, and to give them any proof of the Spirit will always be hard. They stick to something they know about, in accordance with their nature. Let us say they stick at something that makes the crudest kind of impression on them—Materialism. We need not regard as foolish the arguments they advance as a defence or proof of Materialism, for an immense amount of ingenious writing has been devoted to the subject, and it holds good in the first place for material life, for the material world and its laws.

Again, there are people who, owing to a certain inwardness, are naturally predisposed to see in all that is material only the revelation of the spiritual. Naturally, they know as well as the materialists do that, externally, the material world exists; but matter, they say, is only the revelation, the manifestation, of the underlying spiritual. Such persons may take no particular interest in the material world and its laws. As all their ideas of the spiritual come to them through their own inner activity, they may go through the world with the consciousness that the true, the lofty, in which one ought to interest oneself—all genuine reality—is found only in the Spirit; that matter is only illusion, only external phantasmagoria. This would be an extreme standpoint, but it can occur, and can lead to a complete denial of material life. We should have to say of such persons that they certainly do recognize what is most real, the Spirit, but they are one-sided; they deny the significance of the material world and its laws. Much acute thinking can be enlisted in support of the conception of the universe held by these persons. Let us call their conception of the universe: Spiritism. Can we say that the Spiritists are right? As regards the Spirit, their contentions could bring to light some exceptionally correct ideas, but concerning matter and its laws they might reveal very little of any significance. Can one say the Materialists are correct in what they maintain? Yes, concerning matter and its laws they may be able to discover some exceptionally useful and valuable facts; but in speaking of the Spirit they may utter nothing but foolishness. Hence we must say that both parties are correct in their respective spheres.

There can also be persons who say: “Yes, but as to whether in truth the world contains only matter, or only spirit, I have no special knowledge; the powers of human cognition cannot cope with that. One thing is clear—there is a world spread out around us. Whether it is based upon what chemists and physicists, if they are materialists, call atoms, I know not. But I recognize the external world; that is something I see and can think about. I have no particular reason for supposing that it is or is not spiritual at root. I restrict myself to what I see around me.” From the explanations already given we can call such Realists, and their concept of the universe: Realism. Just as one can enlist endless ingenuity on behalf of Materialism or of Spiritism, and just as one can be clever about Spiritism and yet say the most foolish things on material matters, and vice versa, so one can advance the most ingenious reasons for Realism, which differs from both Spiritism and Materialism in the way I have just described.

Again, there may be other persons who speak as follows. Around us are matter and the world of material phenomena. But this world of material phenomena is in itself devoid of meaning. It has no real meaning unless there is within it a progressive tendency; unless from this external world something can emerge towards which the human soul can direct itself, independently of the world. According to this outlook, there must be a realm of ideas and ideals within the world-process. Such people are not Realists, although they pay external life its due; their view is that life has meaning only if ideas work through it and give it purpose. It was under the influence of such a mood as this that Fichte once said: Our world is the sensualised material of our duty.² The adherents of such a world-outlook as this, which takes everything as a vehicle for the ideas that permeate the world-process, may be called Idealists and their outlook: Idealism. Beautiful and grand and glorious things have been brought forward on behalf of this Idealism. And in this realm that I have just described—where the point is to show that the world would be purposeless and meaningless if ideas were only human inventions and were not rooted in the world-process—in this realm Idealism is fully justified. But by means of it one cannot, for example, explain external reality. Hence one can distinguish this Idealism from other world-outlooks:

We now have side by side four justifiable world-outlooks, each with significance for its particular domain. Between Materialism and Idealism there is a certain transition. The crudest kind of materialism—one can observe it specially well in our day, although it is already on the wane—will consist in this, that people carry to an extreme the saying of Kant—Kant did not do this himself!—that in the individual sciences there is only so much real science as there is mathematics. This means that from being a materialist one can become a ready-reckoner of the universe, taking nothing as valid except a world composed of material atoms. They collide and gyrate, and then one calculates how they inter-gyrate. By this means one obtains very fine results, which show that this way of looking at things is fully justified. Thus you can get the vibration-rates for blue, red, etc.; you take the whole world as a kind of mechanical apparatus, and can reckon it up accurately. But one can become rather confused in this field. One can say to oneself: “Yes, but however complicated the machine may be, one can never get out of it anything like the perception of blue, red, etc. Thus if the brain is only a complicated machine, it can never give rise to what we know as soul-experiences.” But then one can say, as du Bois-Reymond once said: If we want to explain the world in strictly mathematical terms, we shall not be able to explain the simplest perception, but if we go outside a mathematical explanation, we shall be unscientific. The most uncompromising materialist would say, “No, I do not even calculate, for that would presuppose a superstition—it would imply that I assume that things are ordered by measure and number.” And anyone who raises himself above this crude materialism will become a mathematical thinker, and will recognize as valid only whatever can be treated mathematically. From this results a conception of the universe that really admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. This may be called Mathematism.

Someone, however, might think this over, and after becoming a Mathematist he might say to himself: “It cannot be a superstition that the colour blue has so and so many vibrations. The world is ordered mathematically. If mathematical ideas are found to be real in the world, why should not other ideas have equal reality?” Such a person accepts this—that ideas are active in the world. But he grants validity only to those ideas that he discovers outside himself—not to any ideas that he might grasp from his inner self by some sort of intuition or inspiration, but only to those he reads from external things that are real to the senses. Such a person becomes a Rationalist, and his outlook on the world is that of Rationalism. If, in addition to the ideas that are found in this way, someone grants validity also to those gained from the moral and the intellectual realms, then he is already an Idealist. Thus a path leads from crude Materialism, by way of Mathematism and Rationalism, to Idealism.

But now Idealism can be enhanced. In our age there are some men who are trying to do this. They find ideas at work in the world, and this implies that there must also be in the world some sort of beings in whom the ideas can live. Ideas cannot live just as they are in any external object, nor can they hang as it were in the air. In the nineteenth century the belief existed that ideas rule history. But this was a confusion, for ideas as such have no power to work. Hence one cannot speak of ideas in history. Anyone who understands that ideas, if they are there are all, are bound up with some being capable of having ideas, will no longer be a mere Idealist; he will move on to the supposition that ideas are connected with beings. He becomes a Psychist and his world-outlook is that Psychism. The Psychist, who in his turn can uphold his outlook with an immense amount of ingenuity, reaches it only through a kind of one-sidedness, of which he can eventually become aware.

Here I must add that there are adherents of all the world-outlooks above the horizontal stroke; for the most part they are stubborn folk who, owing to some fundamental element in themselves, take this or that world-outlook and abide by it, going no further. All the beliefs listed below the line have adherents who are more easily accessible to the knowledge that individual world-outlooks each have one special standpoint only, and they more easily reach the point where they pass from one world-outlook to another.

When someone is a Psychist, and able as a thinking person to contemplate the world clearly, then he comes to the point of saying to himself that he must presuppose something actively psychic in the outside world. But directly he not only thinks, but feels sympathy for what is active and willing in man, then he says to himself: “It is not enough that there are beings who have ideas; these beings must also be active, they must be able also to do things.” But this is inconceivable unless these beings are individual beings. That is, a person of this type rises from accepting the ensoulment of the world to accepting the Spirit or the Spirits of the world. He is not yet clear whether he should accept one or a number of Spirits, but he advances from Psychism to Pneumatism to a doctrine of the Spirit.

If he has become in truth a Pneumatist, then he may well grasp what I have said in this lecture about number—that with regard to figures it is somewhat doubtful to speak of a “unity”. Then he comes to the point of saying to himself: It must therefore be a confusion to talk of one undivided Spirit, of one undivided Pneuma. And he gradually becomes able to form for himself an idea of the Spirits of the different Hierarchies. Then he becomes in the true sense a Spiritist, so that on this side there is a direct transition from Pneumatism to Spiritism.

These world-outlooks are all justified in their own field. For there are fields where Psychism acts illuminatingly, and others where Pneumatism does the same. Certainly, anyone who wishes to deliberate about an explanation of the universe as thoroughly as we have tried to do must come to Spiritism, to the acceptance of the Spirits of the Hierarchies. For to stop short at Pneumatism would in this case mean the following. If we are Spiritists, then it may happen that people will say to us: “Why so many spirits? Why bring numbers into it? Let there be One Undivided Spirit!” Anyone who goes more deeply into the matter knows that this objection is like saying: “You tell me there are two hundred midges over there. I don't see two hundred; I see only a single swarm.” Exactly so would an adherent of Pneumatism stand with regard to a Spiritist. The Spiritist sees the universe filled with the Spirits of the Hierarchies; the Pneumatist sees only the one “swarm”—only the Universal Spirit. But that comes from an inexact view.

Now there is still another possibility: someone may not take the path we have tried to follow to the activities of the spiritual Hierarchies, but may still come to an acceptance of certain spiritual beings. The celebrated German philosopher, Leibnitz, was a man of this kind. Leibnitz had got beyond the prejudice that anything merely material can exist in the world. He found the actual, he sought the actual. (I have treated this more precisely in my book, Riddles of Philosophy.) His view was that a being—as, for example, the human soul—can build up existence in itself. But he formed no further ideas on the subject. He only said to himself that there is such a being that can build up existence in itself, and force concepts outwards from within itself. For Leibnitz, this being is a “Monad”. And he said to himself: “There must be many Monads, and Monads of the most varied capabilities. If I had here a bell, there would be many monads in it—as in a swarm of midges—but they would be monads that had never come even so far as to have sleep-consciousness, monads that are almost unconscious, but which nevertheless develop the dimmest of concepts within themselves. There are monads that dream; there are monads that develop waking ideas within themselves; in short, there are monads of the most varied grades.”

A person with this outlook does not come so far as to picture to himself the individual spiritual beings in concrete terms, as the Spiritist does, but he reflects in the world upon the spiritual element in the world, allowing it to remain indefinite. He calls it “Monad”—that is, he conceives of it only as though one were to say: “Yes, there is spirit in the world and there are spirits, but I describe them only by saying, ‘They are entities having varying powers of perception.’ I pick out from them an abstract characteristic. So I form for myself this one-sided world-outlook, on behalf of which as much as can be said has been said by the highly intelligent Leibnitz. In this way I develop Monadism.” Monadism is an abstract Spiritism.

But there can be persons who do not rise to the level of the Monads; they cannot concede that existence is made up of beings with the most varied conceptual powers, but at the same time they are not content to allow reality only to external phenomena; they hold that “forces” are dominant everywhere. If, for example, a stone falls to the ground, they say, “That is gravitation!” When a magnet attracts bits of iron, they say: “That is magnetic force!” They are not content with saying simply, “There is the magnet,” but they say, “The magnet presupposes that supersensibly, invisibly, a magnetic force is present, extending in all directions.” A world-outlook of this kind—which looks everywhere for forces behind phenomena—can be called Dynamism.

Then one may say: “No, to believe in ‘forces’ is superstition”—an example of this is Fritz Mauthner's Critique of Language, where you find a detailed argument to this effect. It amounts to taking your stand on the reality of the things around us. Thus by the path of Spiritism we come through Monadism and Dynamism to Realism again.

But now one can do something else still. One can say: “Certainly I believe in the world that is spread out around me, but I do not maintain any right to claim that this world is the real one. I can say of it only that it ‘appears’ to me. I have no right to say more about it.” There you have again a difference. One can say of the world that is spread out around us. “This is the real world,” but one can also say, “I am clear that there is a world which appears to me; I cannot speak of anything more. I am not saying that this world of colours and sounds, which arises only because certain processes in my eyes present themselves to me as colours, while processes in my ears present themselves to me as sounds—I am not saying that this world is the true world. It is a world of phenomena.” This is the outlook called Phenomenalism.

We can go further, and can say: “The world of phenomena we certainly have around us, but all that we believe we have in these phenomena is what we have ourselves added to them, what we have thought into them. Our own sense-impressions are all we can rightly accept. Anyone who says this—mark it well!—is not an adherent of Phenomenalism. He peels off from the phenomena everything which he thinks comes only from the understanding and the reason, and he allows validity only to sense-impressions, regarding them as some kind of message from reality.” This outlook may be called Sensationalism.

A critic of this outlook can then say: “You may reflect as much as you like on what the senses tell us and bring forward ever so ingenious reasons for your view—and ingenious reasons can be given—I take my stand on the point that nothing real exists except that which manifests itself through sense-impressions; this I accept as something material.”

This is rather like an atomist saying: “I hold that only atoms exist, and that however small they are, they have the attributes which we recognize in the physical world”—anyone who says this is a materialist. Thus, by another path, we arrive back at Materialism.

All these conceptions of the world that I have described and written down for you really exist, and they can be maintained. And it is possible to bring forward the most ingenious reasons for each of them; it is possible to adopt any one of them and with ingenious reasons to refute the others. In between these conceptions of the world one can think out yet others, but they differ only in degree from the leading types I have described, and can be traced back to them. If one wishes to learn about the web and woof of the world, then one must know that the way to it is through these twelve points of entry. There is not merely one conception of the world that can be defended, or justified, but there are twelve. And one must admit that just as many good reasons can be adduced for each and all of them as for any particular one. The world cannot be rightly considered from the one-sided standpoint of one single conception, one single mode of thought; the world discloses itself only to someone who knows that one must look at it from all sides. Just as the sun—if we go by the Copernican conception of the universe—passes through the signs of the Zodiac in order to illuminate the earth from twelve different points, so we must not adopt one standpoint, the standpoint of Idealism, or Sensationalism, or Phenomenalism, or any other conception of the world with a name of this kind; we must be in a position to go all round the world and accustom ourselves to the twelve different standpoints from which it can be contemplated. In terms of thought, all twelve standpoints are fully justifiable. For a thinker who can penetrate into the nature of thought, there is not one single conception of the world, but twelve that can be equally justified—so far justified as to permit of equally good reasons being thought out for each of them. There are twelve such justified conceptions of the world.

Tomorrow we will start from the points of view we have gained in this way, so that from the consideration of man in terms of thought we may rise to a consideration of the cosmic.

• 2. “Unsere Welt ist das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht.” The rendering given is that of Professor Robert Adamson, in the series of Blackwood's Philosophical Classics for English readers. Alternative words for versinnlichte might be “sense-perceptible” or “tangible”. The quotation is from Fichte's work, Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (1798).

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In our studies we have often called attention to the aphorism written on the Greek Temple of Apollo, ‘Know thyself,’ which comes down to us along the ages. A tremendous challenge to strive after human wisdom as well as cosmic wisdom lies in this sentence. It receives a pregnant renewal, a deepening through the impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha. If time admits we shall speak further of these matters in the course of this winter. We must seek the path to the goal to which it points.

To-day we shall start from an apparently external consideration of man, from an external form, as it were, of human self-knowledge, yet only apparently external, being a specially powerful force when man makes use of it in order to penetrate the inner nature of the human being. We shall start—apparently only—from the external human form.

We find a consideration of that outer human form in what is approved to-day as science, but in a sense somewhat unsatisfactory to the higher spiritual consideration. We might say: Anyone who wishes to know man as man, finds but little incitement to such knowledge in science, especially as practised at the present time. What science brings forward, what calls for discussion, can be seen from indications given in my book Riddles of the Soul. This book gives an essential and important foundation for a far-seeing knowledge of the human being; but such a foundation is not sought at the present time. Anatomy, physiology, etc., to-day contribute very little to enquirers who wish to penetrate seriously into the nature of man from a knowledge of his outer form. At the present time an artistic study really gives far more. It might be said that science leaves much unsatisfied. If a man will only decide to seek actual substantial truth in art, especially in an artistic consideration of the universe, he may find more truth in that way than by recognised science. In future times there will be a philosophy of life which will derive from Spiritual Science much that man cannot fathom to-day, a philosophy which will unite a scientific and an artistic perception of the world into a higher synthesis and harmony, based on a certain need of human knowledge. There will be much more clairvoyance in that than in the clairvoyance of which most people dream to-day but only dream.

On approaching the human form we at once perceive something of the utmost importance to it when we direct our attention—as we have doubtless all done more or less—to its centre of support, the skeleton. We have all seen a skeleton, and observed the difference between the head and the rest. We have observed that the head, the chief part, is in a sense an enclosed and isolated whole, which is, as it were, mounted on a column above the limb system and the rest of the human organism. We can very easily contrast the head resting on the skeleton, with the rest of the human form. If we thus turn our attention to the most superficial difference, it may strike us that the formation of the head is more or less spherical, it is not a perfect sphere, but spherically constructed. Now the investigator into Spiritual Science must warn students not to expect external superficial analogies to underlie a search for knowledge; but the concept of the human head as approaching a spherical form is no superficial observation, for man is really a kind of duality, and the spherical formation of his head is in no wise accidental. We must bear in mind what we actually have before us in the human head. The first indications of what is intended here is given in The Spiritual Guidance of Man, where I showed how the human head presents an image of the whole universe which surrounds us externally as a spatial globe, a hollow sphere.

In reviewing these things we must observe something which for the man of to-day lies far from the most essential kind of observation, something which he always employs, but not where it is of the utmost importance. It would not occur to anyone who takes a compass, a magnetic needle in hand, to seek in the needle itself the cause of its pointing with one end to the North and with the other to the South; the physicist feels himself compelled to regard the magnetic force proceeding from the needle, and the directing magnetic force coming from the North Pole of the earth, as a whole. The cause of what takes place in the small space of the needle is sought in the great universe. Yet this is not done in other cases where it should be done, and where it is of importance. If anyone—especially a scientist—observes that one living being is formed within another living being, as, for instance, the egg is formed in the body of the hen, he sees there how something forms in the smallest space; but what does not usually strike him is to apply what he knows of the magnetic needle and say, that the reason why the germ of the egg develops in the body of the hen lies in the entire cosmos, not in the hen. Exactly as the great universe has a part in the magnetic needle, so too the whole cosmos has a share in the hen's body,—no matter what other processes also take part in it—the whole cosmos in its spherical form co-operate. The processes that can be traced back through the line of heredity to the fore-fathers, only co-operate when the germ of the egg is formed in the maternal organism. That of course is heresy in the eyes of official science, but it is a truth. The forces of the cosmos co-operate in the most varied ways. Just as it is true that in the case of man (empirical embryology proves this) the head, in its germinal rudiments is formed from the whole universe,—the human head forms first in the maternal organism—so too is it true that, on the other hand, the original causative forces for this formation work from the whole cosmos, and man's head is an image of it. That to which the head is attached (the skeleton), if carefully observed, is seen in its configuration, its form, to be more connected with the line of heredity, with the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, than with the cosmos outside. Thus even in relation to his origin, his development, man is primarily a dual being. On the one side his form is fashioned from the cosmos, which comes to light in the spherical form of his head, on the other, he is formed from the whole line of heredity, which can be seen in the rest of the organism attached to the head. The whole of man's outer formation shows him to be of a hybrid nature, it shows that he has a twofold origin.

A consideration of this kind has more than one significance, if by means of it we learn two quite different facts. Anyone studying men under the direction of ordinary official science, studying the development of the germ through the microscope—seeing only what is within its range (as though one wished to see by the magnetic needle itself why it is capable of pointing North and South)—lives in a mass of thought which make him immovable and unserviceable for outer life, especially if he proceeds accordingly in outer science. If man applies such thoughts to social science, they do not suffice; or they lead him to world schoolmastering, which in other words may be called Wilsonism. This is a question of what sort of thinking is called up in us, what thought-forms arise when we devote ourselves to certain thoughts. To ‘know’ about things is of less significance; the important point is the particular kind of knowledge, and of what service it is. If one has an open mind to see man's connection with the whole universe, thoughts will arise which lead to the ethical, juridical consideration of the world, which ought really to be the highest, but which to-day is considered somewhat strange. Thus we see, there are certain impulses required to seek such knowledge as is here meant, other than the satisfaction of—I will not say inquisitiveness—but of mere desire for knowledge.

Thus man stands before us as a compound being, a hybrid. This has a much deeper significance still. To-day I only wished to strike the keynote which is to call forth in us a feeling of the reality of what we are studying.

Let us adhere to the fact that in the further course of our life the head—which we have just encountered as an image of the whole cosmos—is really the intermediary for knowledge (I will not say the instrument, for that would not be quite correct). The head however is not the only intermediary. Let us keep to knowledge or perception of the world. The head acts as intermediary for this, but so does the rest of the man. As regards its origin, the rest of the man differs very much from the head, it is something quite different; thus man, in so far as he is a being of perception, consists of a head-man and a heart-man; because in the heart everything else is concentrated. We are, in fact, two men; a head-man, who stands with discernment in his relation to the world, and a heart man. The difference is, that as surely as he inveighs against that world, he uses his head solely in order to know. What is really at the root of this! To draw a parallel between head-knowledge and heart-knowledge would not lead to much. One able to understand with the heart what the head knows, would be ‘warmer’ in his knowledge than another. There would be a difference between the two men, but the difference would not be very great. If, however, facts were approached with the practical knowledge of Spiritual Science, they would appear in a very different light. We acquire knowledge, perception; it gradually comes to us. Then the following happens. Our relation to the world through our head, our perception and knowledge, takes place in a certain respect quickly; and the way in which we confront the world with the rest of our organism takes place slowly. Our head hurries on with its knowledge, the rest of the organism does not. This has a profoundly deep significance. In scholastic education we see only the training of the head; nowadays people only receive education for the head. This can be done by scholastic training, for, if the head has taken part slowly in the development of knowledge, only in exceptional cases does it close as late as the 20th year of life—in the case of most people it does not keep open so long. The head is then ready with its knowledge, its assimilation of the world. The rest of the organism needs the whole time up to death for this assimilation. We might say that in this respect the rate of the head is approximately three times as quick as that of the rest of the organism; the latter has more time and moves three times as slow; the rate is quite different. Hence one who through knowledge has the gift of clearly observing such things, is aware that having grasped something through the head it must wait until he has united it with the whole man. In order to receive something really full of life, after this absorption through the head has lasted about a day, a man must wait three or four days until he has completely absorbed it. The scientific spiritual investigator will never recount what he has received with the head alone, but what he has grasped with the whole man. That has an uncommonly comprehensive and profound significance. According to existing arrangements, we can only give our children a kind of head-knowledge; we do not give them a knowledge compatible with the rest of the organism. It stops at head-knowledge; a knowledge so prepared that it must be quickly accepted by the head and remembered later. Where it is a matter of education, however, one does not always remember later. One is thankful if the knowledge holds out even till the final examination. A knowledge in which the whole of the rest of the organism can be used would, under all circumstance, develop love, joy and appreciation for it when one remembered it later. How to mould education so that a man may look back upon his school time with warmth and joy, and may wish himself back, is connected with one of the deepest secrets of the mysteries of humanity.

In this domain there is a tremendous amount to be done. Anyone acquainted with such things, knows that everything now presented to children in particular, is previously so prepared that the rest of the organism does not receive it, and thus no future pleasure is prepared. This is connected with the fact that man's soul ages comparatively early in our time. One of the Mysteries of man is that when the head is 28 years old, the rest of his organism which follows in its development is only a third or fourth of this age. It maintains a rate three or four times as slow (other connections we have yet to learn). If we were to approach these mysteries as educators, a child might receive something so fruitful, so flourishing, that it would last until its death. Thus if he had received such things up to 25 years, and the time needed for this elaboration by the remaining organism was three times that period, it might take 75 years. Knowledge acquired by the head alone has not unlimited significance for man's whole being; it requires the inner deliberate experience gained by man in his whole being. Public life, however, is averse to this to-day, it will only accept head-wisdom. One can easily reckon the whole significance of what is intended by saying that up to 15 years of age a man might absorb through his head a certain number of ideas which, if directed to the administration of public affairs, would render him fit at 45 years of age to be chosen for state service of parliament, for he ought not to offer himself until he has become a whole man. Thus we may say that if at 15 years of age he can produce ideas of sufficient force to be elaborated by his whole nature, at 45 he would be mature enough to be chosen for the town council or parliament. The mode of view of the ancients, who possessed a living wisdom from the Mysteries, was based on such things. To-day, on the contrary, the endeavour is to set the age limit as low as possible, for everyone is regarded as being as mature at 20 as man used to be at 80. Insistent demands, however, cannot decide these things, but only true knowledge.

These things have a pregnant application to life. The whole of our modern public life takes into account only what people are as regards their heads; yet, while they have social relations only with the head (let us reflect that all social relations are only head-relations) such social relations are wholly unsuited to form a social life. For whence comes the head? The human head is not of this earth, but is brought forth from the cosmos. One cannot attend to earthly affairs with the head. One cannot be a nationalist with the head, or belong to any one part of the earth. With the head we can only determine what belongs to the whole universe. To be able to decide what belongs to the earth, we must grow together throughout life with what belongs to the earth, and what makes us citizens of the earth and not of the heavens. These things must be so. What may underlie public decisions must be drawn forth from deeper knowledge, beyond that of man himself. Further, we must bear in mind what Goethe expressed as ‘The thought of metamorphosis;’ this has a deep significance and far wider application than Goethe himself could make in his time.

Our head is formed from the cosmos. Consider the matter from Spiritual Science: we must say that throughout the time between death and rebirth in the cosmos itself we work in advance on the head. In a sense the head is the grave of the soul, respecting what the soul was before birth or conception. The activity we exercised in the spiritual life between death and rebirth there comes to rest; and to this, which is in a sense formed out of the spiritual world, there is then added that which belongs to the line of heredity. What then is this? It is still something connected with the head. As before remarked, all in man except the head is the germ of the head in the next incarnation. The whole of the remaining organism is something that can pass over to the head at the next incarnation. When we pass through the gate of death, the forces developed throughout life wrest themselves free from the rest of the organism but remain in the same forms borne by the rest of the organism during life; man carries these during the time between death and rebirth, and transforms them into his future head. Thus in our head we have always something which is a heritage from the former incarnation; and in the rest of our organism something which works determinately for the formation of our head in the coming incarnation. In this respect also we are of a twofold nature.

If we consider man as regards his cosmic relations, we find that in reality he does not only arise and develop in the divisions of time and space which we have before us in outer physical view, but stands in a tremendously great relationship. It is especially fascinating not only to look, as Goethe did, at a bone of the vertebral column and then at the bones of the head, saying that the bones of the head are only transformed vertebrae; but to see that all pertaining to the head is also part of the rest of the organism. It needs, however, an exceptionally unbiased observation to recognise not only the nose, for instance, and all belonging to the head as having been thus remodelled, but that also all belonging to the rest of the organism, though at a younger stage of metamorphosis, has in an earlier metamorphosis all been changed to what now meets us in the head.

In matters of educational science the consequences of such a view are extremely important; and some day man's thinking will turn to the knowledge of Spiritual Science, when momentous demands for a practical educational science arise.

One thing especially is significant. In life we grow old, but in reality we can only say that our physical body grows old; for, strange as it may seem, the etheric body, the nearest spiritual part of our being, grows younger. The older we grow the younger becomes our etheric body; and as we become wrinkled and bald as regards the physical body, we become—at least the etheric body does—chubby and blooming. As external nature provides that our physical body shall grow old, we must certainly take care that our etheric body is provided with youthful forces. We can only do this if through the head we introduce such sustenance of spiritual ideas that they suffice for working into the whole life. The investigator of Spiritual Science can have some idea of how children ought to be taught in earliest childhood that man is an image of the whole universe, an image of the divinely wise cosmic ordering; and this should be grasped directly and simply, not by reciting Bible words imperfectly understood. All this must be drawn from the spirit or sources of Spiritual Science, then there will be a richer head-wisdom than that of to-day. During man's lifetime that will be a source of rejuvenation, whereas our present system of education is quite the contrary. If to-day in spite of early education, we are in the fortunate position not to be terribly bad-tempered, it is because the present method of providing for the head (which was prepared approximately 400 hundred years ago and has now reached its zenith) has not yet been able to ruin so much of what still remain, as hereditary culture from older times. If, however, we continue to instruct the head only, we are going the right way to become really bad-tempered. In the last years before the war there was a great leaning towards ‘sanatoria,’ great measures were taken to do away with ‘nervous conditions.’ This is all connected with the fact that the head is not given what the whole man needs. I have mentioned how seldom one finds the right thing done for these things, for I remember an occasion a few years ago when I went to visit someone at a sanatorium. We arrived at mid-day. All the patients walked past us. Some of these were remarkable persons; their nervous condition was partly written on their faces and partly on their fidgeting hands and feet. I then made the acquaintance of the most fidgety and nervous of them all—the medical superintendent. It must be said that a medical director cannot find a cure for his patients if he is himself the one who needs it most. In other respects he was an extremely loveable man; but he was an example of those who, in their youth at any rate, have not absorbed what can keep them young throughout their lives. Such things cannot be changed by any kind of isolated reform, nor can the relationships be changed that way; they can only be improved when the whole social organism is improved. Therefore attention must be directed to that. The great cosmic laws have provided that man as a solitary individual cannot gratify his egoism in such spheres, but can, as it were, only find his welfare when he seeks it together with others.

Thus it appears to me, as it must to everyone who does not live absorbed in material things (as is customary to-day) but is able to look beyond to the super-sensible from which must come the reformation of the world in the near future—it appears to me that in this sphere, as well as in others, Spiritual Science can be introduced into life in such a way that it will come to pass that men can, in an upright, honourable way, work out something in the concrete to which Spiritual Science can give the impulse. As I have often said, there is no need to press towards visionary clairvoyance, but we must learn to understand man as a likeness of the cosmic spiritual nature, then spirituality will come of itself. It is impossible to understand man in his entirety without investigating the spiritual underlying his nature and keeping that in view. One thing is necessary;—I have often emphasised this—the renunciation of intellectual laziness, a fault so terribly persistent in relation to all questions of the philosophy of life. Our whole study of Spiritual Science shows us that man must go forward step by step, that he must be disposed to go into details and thence build up a whole, so that starting, as it were, from the nearest sensible, he can rise to the super-sensible. This he can easily do, for anyone who regards the human head in the right way sees in it something modelled from the whole universe, and in the rest of the organism something also organised into the universe in order to come back in the next incarnation. By rightly observing what is obvious to the senses, one can rightly arrive at the super-sensible. One must, however, be willing to admit that if one wishes to understand the construction of man, the same trouble must be taken as would he necessary—e.g., if one wished to understand the mechanical action of a watch; one would have to bear in mind the connection of the wheels, etc. Yet it is supposed that one can talk of man's highest being without the requisite trouble being taken to gain knowledge of man's nature. It is very frequently pleaded that ‘Truth must be very simple’—and the accusation is made against Spiritual Science that it is very complicated. Man longs to acquire in five minutes—or in less time—what is necessary for the knowledge of his highest being; whereas he is by nature a complicated being, his greatness in the universe is due to that very fact, and we must overcome the tendency to indolence in respect of knowledge if we really wish to penetrate to the human entity. In our time there is no understanding of what is needful for one who wishes to put himself in a position to penetrate even dimly the whole complexity of human nature; for because we only cultivate head-wisdom, because we do not wish the whole man to elaborate what the head learns, nothing is given to the head which can be worked upon by the rest of the man, and we thereby place man in the social order in such a position that his earthly life cannot become a reflection of a super-sensible spiritual life. We are subject to a remarkable cleavage, one not like the others already mentioned, but an injurious cleavage which must be overcome.

Human life has changed in course of evolution. To observe this we need only go back four centuries, indeed not so far. Anyone acquainted with the spiritual history of life—not the ordinary historical literature—knows how tremendously the life and thought of the 18th century differed from that of the 19th. We need only go a little way back to see how the whole of human life has changed in four centuries. Human thinking has wholly changed, ideas formed before the 20th century have gradually become more and more abstract, they have become ideas of the head. When we compare the rich ideas of the 13th and 14th centuries with the natural science of this 19th century, we find an impressive difference in the abstract ideas, the dry conformity to law of the present day. There is a very interesting book by Valentine of Bâle, containing very interesting matter. A short while ago a Swedish scholar wrote a book on ‘Matter,’ quoting various things from Valentine, and his judgment is ‘Let him who can, understand it; no one can.’ We very readily believe that he could not, for, read with the ideas derived from modern physics and chemistry, Valentine is quite incomprehensible. This is connected with such facts as the good old practical wisdom of life: ‘The morning has both God and gold in its hand,’ which has been changed in course of time to ‘The early bird catches the worm.’ The good European saying has been Americanised.

With regard to the description and comprehension of Nature, those older times were permeated with what comes from the whole man. To-day it is head-knowledge. Therefore on the one side it is abstract, dry, and does not fill a man's whole life to the end, yet on the other side it is very spiritual. This dual nature is really present, so that we actually do engender what is most spiritual; for these abstract ideas are the most spiritual that can be, yet they are incapable of grasping the Spirit. It is astonishingly easy to perceive the cleavage in which man is involved through the spiritual ideas he has developed. It is precisely in them that he has become so remarkably materialistic. When these ideas come in the right way, however, materialism never arises from them. The simple existence of abstract ideas is the first refutation of materialism. In this duality we live. We have been tremendously intellectualised for four centuries, and in this spiritual, which we only possess in the abstract, we must find again the living spiritual. We have risen to objective concepts; we must get back to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We have cast aside what has been handed down to us of old primeval wisdom in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We must now recover it, after having so wholly discarded the richness of the knowledge of man's whole being. This is a truth which will fill us with a sense of the seriousness of Spiritual Science.

The object of these two somewhat introductory lectures is to show how, from the most external observation of man, an impulse may arise to apply one's intelligence to that which spiritually underlies the world. In the pursuit of these impulses and ideas something will come to humanity which to-day is so terribly lacking: viz., INNER SINCERITY. Man cannot really strive fruitfully after the Spirit if he does not do so in inner sincerity, and he will never go astray if he acquires knowledge through life's experience; true harmony is only possible between head-wisdom and heart-wisdom when man adopts the right relationship towards life. The man of to-day does not wish to lead head-wisdom over to heart-wisdom, because the latter not only takes longer, but even reacts against the former, and thrusts it back when it is untrue. In this way the rest of the man then makes itself felt as a kind of conscience. The humanity of the present, with a bias towards the head-wisdom only, shrinks from this.

In conclusion, a few directly practical remarks—since when we are thus gathered together we must contemplate the efforts of spiritual science in the whole world.

Spiritual Science can only flourish if people take it in sincerity, with earnestness; for it is just this which at the present time can satisfy man's deepest needs. It must meet those qualms of conscience which easily arise when the heart says ‘no’ to the head—as it always does when the spiritual is not sought, or when knowledge is only sought from pure egoism, greed, ambition, etc. For this reason it is necessary to allow no compromise in any quarter. Spiritual Science must be followed positively for its own sake; no compromise can be made with half and half incomplete things; it is too serious a matter. I may perhaps here introduce a few personal remarks, though not intended personally. A great proportion of the opposition to Spiritual Science can only be understood when man has in view its origin and development. Here or there someone appears, for instance, who turns furiously against Spiritual Science. There are other cases, but in many instances opposition arises as in the following concrete case.

Once, when I was in Frankfort-on-Main, to give lectures, someone telephoned that a gentleman wished to speak to me. I had no objection, and said that I could see him then and there. He came, and said, ‘I have been travelling about after you for a long time, hoping to speak with you.’ I had nothing either for or against that, and he then talked of all sorts of other things. Spiritual Science, however, can only be taken seriously, and much that ‘shows off’ and wishes to appear clever, must be rejected. No compromise can be made. I was not discourteous to this man, but I sent him away letting him see that I would take no further notice of him. I was convinced that he talked much nonsense, for which he hoped to find support in me. (What I am now relating is for the purpose of describing certain occurrences.) I had to send the man away. He said much that was extremely flattering, but the only question was whether his aspirations for Spiritual Science were at all genuine. Soon after advertisements appeared in Switzerland announcing that this man was to speak of the ‘demoniacal,’ ‘devilish’ character of Steiner's Spiritual Science. I might relate the subsequent history of this matter, but I shall not do so. This is one of the ways that opposition shows itself. Often people come forward who really seek some kind of connection with Spiritual Science and whose quest must be disregarded.

In connection with this I may mention that our friend Dr. Rittelmeyer wrote a short time ago in a periodical, an article on the attitude of Spiritual Science to religion, endeavouring to reply to many other prejudices against spiritual science, in a way worthy of appreciation and thanks. Now Dr. Johannes Müller, who is well known, has felt it his duty to write a series of three articles in the same paper against Dr. Rittelmeyer. It is really not my task to go into what Dr. Johannes Müller has written, for it has been my endeavour throughout many years not to talk of him, with the motive of keeping Spiritual Science free from superficial pursuits and any entanglement in compromise. This is best attained by not worrying or at least not troubling to speak about what ostensibly must work by its own merit, if it is to work at all. I have never mentioned Dr. Johannes Müller in any particular connection. In our time there is not much feeling for truth or untruth in these domains. Looking over Johannes Müller's articles, it will be seen that they contain much that is called forth either by carelessness or what might be called objective untruth. They are full of it. These things must be kept well in mind. In the book, Riddles of the Soul, I have described one such case: the false statements of Dessoir. I am now very curious, for something must inevitably follow from what a professor of the Berlin University is proved to have written. Let people but read the second article in Riddles of the Soul upon Professor Dessoir's method of working. Of course anyone who now writes on Dessoir without taking into account the article before us is accessory to these things; but to-day people will not take these things seriously; they excuse themselves by saying ‘I have not read it,’ as if someone who made a statement had not properly given his attention to the matter. Now it can easily be proved that Johannes Müller's accusations are untrue: namely, that my lectures pander to man's love of sensation. In any town where Spiritual Science has as yet no footing, very few people as a rule attend my lectures; where many come, it is because in such places Spiritual Science has been made known and worked for. I will not go further into the matter than to allude to the last part of Johannes Müller's article, which launches forth, saying that I speak of a ‘Divine Drama’ through which man is to be saved, and the like, and where he fills a column and a-half by quoting a few sentences from Christianity as Mystical Fact, which he tears out of their context as they strike him, until through his omissions, what he quotes becomes absolute nonsense. In my book on Christianity I said the very opposite of what he quotes of the ‘Divine Drama’ and its magic. Johannes Müller excuses himself by saying that he was not able to understand my writings. Of that I am confident! Without understanding this book in the very least, he has undertaken to criticise it! I have often called attention to the fact that this book places the Mystery of Golgotha in contradistinction to all other Mysteries, as the central point of Evolution. Of this Johannes Müller has no perception. I should never expect him to understand my book, I do not think he could; yet he criticises it. It is remarkable that this book was published in 1902; so that in 1906 it had been under discussion for four years. It was known that in the first edition I had set forth my relation to Natural Science on the one side and to Philosophy on the other. Christianity as Mystical Fact has since become known. Now if it was not known to Johannes Müller, that is his affair; but I mention that it was known in 1906, and was just as much connected with my general philosophy of life as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for instance. Anyone who formed an opinion of me in 1906 ought to do so from the whole aspect of my conception of the universe, and should not really select fragments. In the year 1906, it is a fact that Christianity as Mystical Fact was four years old. In that year, however, Johannes Müller's book on The Sermon of the Mount was sent to me. The dedication of that book is: ‘To Dr. Steiner, in grateful remembrance of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Mainberg, 17. viii. 1906.’ This is one of those circumstances which I am compelled to ignore, for it was not possible to compromise in the direction of which I have spoken, and I considered it within my duty when approached in this way, to be silent, instead of saying: ‘I see your meaning on this or that point.’ Sometimes, however, silence annoys people more than anything else. I said that one should look for the opposition to Spiritual Science in its real relations. I could tell of even more annoying things, but anyone who now reads Dr. Johannes Müller's articles against our friend Dr. Rittelmeyer, will perhaps do well not to look for the opposition in these things alone, but in other things too, such as the few just cited. One must seek everywhere for much more sincere reasons than those lying on the surface. It is vexing when one man approaches another with ‘in grateful remembrance of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’ and the other turns away and gives no answer.

I did not wish to keep from you this slight contribution to the psychology of Johannes Müller, so that you might see matters more clearly than through his articles alone.

The contents of the last lecture are most important for our next consideration as well as for a comprehension of karmic connection in general. For this reason, because of its extreme importance, allow me to recapitulate the chief points.

We began by saying that views concerning cures and medicines have in the course of a relatively short time, during the last century, undergone a radical change. We pointed to the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that view was developed which was based entirely upon the theory that for every illness which was given a name, and which it was believed could be strictly defined, some remedy must exist upon earth. And it was firmly believed that by the use of the remedy in question the course of the illness must be influenced. We then pointed out that view prevailed more or less until the nineteenth century, and side by side with this we showed the complete reversal of this opinion which found expression chiefly in the nihilism of the Viennese school, founded by the famous medical man Dietel, and carried on by Skoda and his disciples. We characterised the nihilistic current of thought by saying that it not merely harboured doubts as to the existence of any absolute connection between one remedy or another, one manipulation or another in respect to the treatment of illness and the illness itself, but would no longer concern itself with any such connection. The idea of the so-called ‘self-healing’ penetrated the minds of the young doctors influenced by this school. Skoda himself made the following significant statement to this school: ‘We may be able to diagnose an illness, to explain, and perhaps also to describe it, but remedy for it we have none.’ This point of view originated from the proofs furnished by Dietel to the effect that, given the necessary conditions, an illness such as pneumonia will with temporising treatment take such course as to develop self-healing forces at the end of certain period. By means of statistics he was able to prove that a temporising treatment showed neither fewer cures nor more deaths than the remedies ordinarily in use. At that time the term ‘therapeutic nihilism’ was not without justification, for it is quite true that the doctors of this school were powerless against the patient's conviction that there simply must exist a remedy, a prescription. The patient would not yield, nor would his friends. A remedy had to be prescribed, and the disciples of this school got out of the difficulty by prescribing a thin solution of gum arabic, which according to their opinion would have the same effect as the remedies previously in use. From this we have learnt how the modern scientific world is moving in the direction of what we may call the karmic connections of life. For they had now to find an answer to the question: how is that which we may call ‘self-healing’ brought about? Or better, why does it take place? And why in some cases can there be no self-healing or cure of any kind?

If a whole school led by medical authorities resorts to the introduction of the idea of self-healing, we must arrive at the conclusion that something is invoked in the course of an illness which leads to the conquest of the illness. And this would have induced us to pursue the more secret reasons for the course of the illness. We have attempted to point out how such a karmic connection with the course of an illness may be sought for in the development of humanity. We showed that indeed what we accomplish in our ordinary lives in regard to good or evil deeds, or wise or foolish deeds, what we experience in regard to right or wrong emotions, that all this does not go deeply into the foundation of the human organism. And we have shown the reason why what is subject to the moral, intellectual, or emotional judgement in ordinary life remains at the surface, and is not subject to the law which we could trace in another instance—a law which influences the deeper lying forces of the human organism. We demonstrated that in this way there exists a sort of hindrance preventing immorality from entering into the deeper forces of our organism. And this barrier against the penetration by our acts and thoughts into the deeper forces of our organism, consists in the fact that our deeds and our emotions accomplished between birth and death are accompanied by our conscious concepts. In so far as we accompany an act or any other experience by a conscious concept, so far do we provide a defence against the result of our deeds sinking down into our organism.

We have also pointed out the significance of those experiences that have been irrevocably forgotten. It is no longer possible to bring them back to the life of our conscious perceptions, but those experiences, because the defence of the conception is lacking, penetrate in a definite way into our inner organism and there co-operate with the formative forces of our organism. And we are able to point to those forms of disease which lie nearer the surface, such as neurosis, neurasthenia, and so forth. A light is thrown even upon hysterical conditions. As we said, the cause of such conditions must be sought for in the concepts that have been forgotten, which have fallen out of the complex of consciousness and have sunk down into the inner soul-life where, as a sort of wedge, they assert themselves in the form of disease. We further pointed out the tremendous significance of the period which lies between birth and the time when we first begin to remember our experiences; and our attention was drawn to the fact that what at an earlier stage has been forgotten continues to be active within our living organism, forming, as it were, an alliance with the deeper forces of our organism, and thereby influencing our organism itself. As we see, a complex of conceptions, a number of experiences must sink down into the deeper foundations of our being before they can intervene in our organism. We then pointed out that this sinking down is most thorough when we have passed through the gate of death and are experiencing the further existence between death and re-birth. The quality of all experiences is then transformed into forces which now develop an organising activity, and the feelings which we have experienced during the period between death and re-birth will become part of the plastic forces, the formative forces that take part in the rebuilding of the body when we return into a new life. In these formative forces man now carries within him the result of what at an earlier stage he held within his soul-life, perhaps even in his conscious conceptions. And further we could point to the fact that man with his conscious conceptions permeated by the Ego oscillates between two influences present in the world—between the luciferic and the ahrimanic influences. When owing to the characteristics of our astral body we have done wrong through evil passions, temper, and so forth, we are driven thereto by luciferic forces. Such deeds then take the course we have described, if they are transformed into formative forces, they will be dwelling as causes of luciferic disease within the formative forces, and will lay the foundations of our new body. We have further seen that we are subject also to the ahrimanic forces which affect us more from outside. And again we had to admit, concerning the ahrimanic forces, that they are transformed into formative forces, into forces shaping the newly built organism when man enters existence through birth, and in so far as the ahrimanic influences mingle with the formative forces, so far we may speak of ahrimanic predisposition to disease. We then pointed out in detail how the forces act, that are thus developed. I quoted some radical examples of this activity, because in radical examples the picture is more distinct, more clearly defined. I gave the person who in his previous life had at all times acted in such a way as to produce a weak Ego-consciousness and weak self-reliance, and whose Ego attached little value to itself, becoming absorbed only in generalities and so forth. Such a person will after death develop the tendency to absorb forces that will render him capable of strengthening and perfecting his ego in his further incarnation. As a result of this he will seek conditions that will give him an opportunity of fighting against certain resistances, so that his weak Ego-consciousness may be strengthened through resistance. Such a tendency will lead him to seek an opportunity of contracting cholera, because in this he will face something that offers an opportunity of conquering those resistances, in the conquest of which he will be led in his next incarnation, or even should a cure be effected in this same incarnation, to a stronger Ego-consciousness or to forces which will by way of self-education lead him gradually to a stronger Ego-consciousness. We have further stated that an illness such as malaria affords an opportunity of compensating for the overbearing Ego-consciousness which has been engendered by the soul in an earlier life through its deeds and emotions.

Those of us who took part in our earlier anthroposophical studies will understand such a course. It has always been said that man's Ego finds its physical expression in its blood. Now both of these illnesses which have just been mentioned are connected with blood and the laws of blood. They are so connected that in the case of cholera there is a thickening of the blood which can be regarded as the ‘resistance’ which a weak self-reliance must experience, and by means of which it is trying to develop. We shall also be able to understand that in a case of malaria we are faced with an impoverishment of the blood, and that an over-developed Ego-consciousness needs the opportunity of being led to an impossible extreme. This impoverishment of the blood of an over-developed Ego will find all its efforts ending in annihilation. Naturally these things stand in an intimate relationship to our organism, but if we examine them, we shall find them comprehensible.

The result of all this is that when we are dealing with an organism formed by a soul that has brought with it the tendency to overcome some imperfection in one or another direction, man will tend to become impregnated with a predisposition to a certain illness, but, at the same time he will have the capacity for fighting this illness which is produced for no other reason than to provide the means of a cure. And a cure will be effected when the person, in accordance with his whole karma acquires through the conquest of the illness, such forces as will enable him through the rest of his life to make true progress by means of his work upon the physical plane. In other words, if the stimulating forces are so strong that man is able to acquire upon the physical plane itself those qualities, on account of which the illness broke out, then he will be able to work with that reinforced power which he lacked before, and which he gained from the healing process. But if it is in our karma that we have the desire to mould our organism so that through the conquest of the illness in question it should acquire forces which lead nearer to perfection, and yet because of the complexity of the causes we are forced to leave our organism weak in another direction, then it may be that although the forces we develop and make use of in the healing process strengthen us, they do not do so sufficiently to make us equal to our work upon the physical plane. Then because what we have already gained cannot be used upon the physical plane, it will be made use of when we pass through the gate of death, and we shall try to add to our forces what we could not achieve upon the physical plane. So these forces will mature in the formation of the next body when we return to earth in a new incarnation.

Bearing this in mind one more indication should be given which deals with those forms of illness leading neither to a real cure nor to death but to chronic conditions, to a kind of languishing state. Here we have something of which the knowledge is of the greatest importance for most people. When one has recovered from an illness, the effect sought for has been obtained and in a certain sense the illness has been conquered. But in another sense this may not be the fact. For instance, the trouble which was produced between the etheric body and the physical body has disappeared, but the disharmony between the etheric body and the astral body still exists, and we oscillate between attempts at cure and our inability to effect a cure. In such a case it is of special importance that we should make use of all that we have attained in the way of a real cure. And this is what is very rarely done for it is precisely in the case of those illnesses that become chronic that we find ourselves in a vicious circle. We should find a way out of the difficulty if in such a case we could isolate that part of our organism that has achieved a certain cure, if we could let it live by itself and withdraw from the healthy part the rest which is still in disturbance and disorder on account of what is in the soul. But many things oppose this, and chiefly the fact that when we have had an illness resulting in a chronic condition, we are living all the time under the influence of that condition, and, if I may thus crudely express myself, we can never really completely forget our condition, never really arrive at a withdrawing of that which is not yet healthy, so as to treat it by itself. On the contrary, through thinking continually about the sickly part of our organism, we bring as it were our healthy part into some kind of relationship with the sickness and thus irritate it anew. This is a special process, and in order to make it clearer I should like to explain one of the facts proved by Spiritual Science, that can be seen by clairvoyant consciousness when a person has gone through an illness, and has retained something which may be termed chronic. The same occurs also when there exists no apparent acute illness, but when a chronic disease is developed without any acute state having been specially noticed. In most of these cases it is possible to see that there is an unstable state of balance between the etheric and the physical body, an abnormal oscillation to and fro of the forces, but in spite of which the body still remains alive. This oscillation of forces which appertain to the etheric body and the physical body bring about in the person a continual state of irritation which leads to continuous excitability. Clairvoyant consciousness sees this agitation transmitted to the astral body, and these states of excitability continually force their way into that part of the organism which is partly ill and partly well, thereby creating not a stable but an unstable balance. Through this penetration by astral excitability, the health which would otherwise be much better is in fact greatly impaired. I must beg of you to remember that in this case the astral does not coincide with consciousness, but rather with an excitability of the inner soul, which the patient does not wish to admit even to himself. Because in such cases the barrier of consciousness is lacking, those conditions and passions, emotional crises, continual states of weariness of mind and inner discontent do not always act as do conscious forces, but rather like the organising forces. Seated within our deeper being they continually irritate that part which is half ill and half well. If the patient by means of a strong discipline of the soul could forget his condition for some time at least, he would gain such satisfaction from this, that even from this satisfaction itself he could derive the necessary force to carry on further. If he could forget his state completely and develop the strong will which will help him to say: ‘I will not bother with my condition,’ certain soul forces would thereby become liberated, and if he applied them to something spiritual that would elevate him and satisfy his inner soul, if he liberated the forces that are continuously occupied with the sensation of aches and pains, oppression and so on he would thereby gain great satisfaction. For if we do not live through these feelings, the forces are free and they are at our disposal. Naturally it will not be of much use merely to say we don't want to take notice of these aches and pains, for if we do not put these liberated forces to spiritual use, the former conditions will soon return. If, however, we employ these liberated forces for a spiritual purpose which will absorb the soul, we shall soon discover that we are attaining in a complicated way that which our organism would otherwise have attained without our assistance through the conquest of the illness. Naturally the person in question would have to be aware of filling his soul with something directly connected with his illness or with that which constitutes his illness. For instance, if someone suffering from a weakness of the eyes were to read a great deal so as to avoid thinking of this, he would naturally not arrive at his goal. But it is quite unnecessary to resort to further illustrations. We have all noticed how useful it is when we are slightly indisposed, to be able to forget that indisposition, especially if we gain this forgetfulness by occupying ourselves with something different. Such is a positive and wholesome forgetfulness. This already suggests to us that we are not entirely impotent in face of the karmic effects of those transgressions of our earlier lives which are expressed in the form of illness. We recognise that what is subject to moral, emotional and intellectual judgement during life between birth and death cannot penetrate so deeply during one single life as to become the cause of an organic disease, but that in the period between death and re-birth it may penetrate so deeply into the human essence as to cause disease; then there must also exist a possibility of re-transforming these processes into conscious processes.

The question might be put thus: If illnesses are the karmic results of spiritual or other events called forth or experienced by the soul, if they are the metamorphosis of such causes, might we not then also suppose that the result of the metamorphosis, namely, the illness, might be avoided—or do we learn nothing of this from spiritual facts? Might it not be avoided if we could replace, for the good of our education, the healing processes which are drawn from the organism to combat the disease. Could we not replace these by their spiritual counterpart, their spiritual equivalent? Should we not thus, if we were sufficiently wise, transform illness into a spiritual process and accomplish through our soul forces the self-education that would otherwise be accomplished through illness?

The feasibility of this may be demonstrated by an example. Here again we must insist that only those examples are given which have been investigated by Spiritual Science. They are not hypothetical assertions but actual ‘cases.’ A certain person contracts measles in later life, and we seek for the karmic connection in this case. We find that this case of measles appeared as the karmic effect of occurrences in a preceding life—occurrences that may be thus described: In a preceding life the individuality in question disliked concerning himself with the external world but occupied himself a great deal with himself, though not in the ordinary egotistical sense. He investigated much, meditated much, though not with regard to the facts of the external world, but confined himself to the inner soul life. We meet many people to-day who believe that through self-concentration and through brooding within themselves, they will arrive at the solution of world riddles. The person in question thought he could order his life through inner meditation how to act in one instance or another without accepting any teaching from others. The weakness of the soul resulting from this led to the formation of forces during existence between death and re-birth which exposed the organism comparatively late in life to an attack of measles.

We might now ask: if on the one hand we have the attack of measles which is the physical karmic effect of an earlier life, how is it then with the soul? For the earlier life will also result through karmic action in a certain condition of the soul.

This soul condition will prove itself to be such that the personality in question, during the life in which the attack of measles took place, was again and again subject to self-deception. Thus in the self-deception we must see the psychic karmic result of this earlier life, and in the attack of measles the physical karmic result.

Let us now assume that this personality before developing measles had succeeded in gaining such soul forces that he was no longer exposed to all kinds of self-deception, having completely corrected this failing. In this case the acquired soul force would render the attack of measles quite unnecessary, since the tendencies brought forth in this organism during its formation had been effaced through the stronger soul forces acquired by self-education. If we contemplate life as a whole and examine in detail our experiences, considering them always from this standpoint, we should invariably find that external knowledge will bear out in every detail what has here been stated. And what I have said about a case of measles can lead to an explanation why measles is one of the illnesses of child-hood. For the failings I have mentioned are present in a great many lives and especially in certain periods did they prevail in many lives. When such a personality enters existence he will be anxious to make the corresponding correction as soon as possible. In the period between birth and the general appearance of children's complaints which effect an organic self-education, there can as a rule be no question of any education of the soul.

From this we see that in a certain respect we can really speak of a disease being transformed back into a spiritual process. And it is most significant that when this process has entered the soul as a life principle, it will evoke a viewpoint that has a healing effect upon the soul. We need not be surprised that in our time we are able to influence the soul so little. Anyone regarding our present period from the standpoint of Spiritual Science will understand why so many medical men, so many doctors become materialists. For most people never occupy themselves with anything which has vital force. All the stuff produced today is devoid of vital force for the soul. That is why anyone wishing to work for Spiritual Science feels in this anthroposophical activity something extremely wholesome, for Spiritual Science can again bring to men something which enters the soul so that it is drawn away from what is acting in the physical organism. But we must not confuse what appears at the beginning of such a movement as Anthroposophy with what this movement can be in reality. Things may be brought into the Anthroposophical Movement which prevail in the physical world, for people on becoming Anthroposophists often bring to Anthroposophy exactly the same interests and also all the bad habits which they had outside. There is thus brought in much of the degeneracy of our age, and when some such degeneracy appears in the persons in question, the world says that this is the result of Anthroposophy. That is of course a cheap statement.

If we now see the karmic thread passing from one incarnation to another, we grasp only the one aspect of truth. For anyone beginning to understand this, many questions will arise which will be touched upon in the course of these lectures. First of all we must deal with the question: What difference is there between an illness due to external causes and an illness where the cause lies exclusively in the human organism itself. We are tempted to dispose of the latter illnesses by saying that they come of their own accord without any external provocation. But this is not so. In a certain sense we are justified in saying that illnesses come to us if we have a special disposition for the illness within us. A great many forms of illness, however, we shall be able to trace to external causes; not indeed everything that happens to us, but much that befalls us from outside. If we break a leg for instance, we are obliged to account for it by external causes. We must also include within external causes the effects of the weather, and numerous cases of disease which come to people living in slum dwellings. Here again we envisage a wide field. An experienced person looking on the world will find it easy to explain why the modern trend of the medical faculty is to seek the causes of illness in external influences, and especially in microbes. Of these a witty gentleman (Tröhls-Lund) said not without justice: ‘Today it is said that illnesses are provoked by microbes, just as it was formerly said that they came from God, the devil, and so forth.’ In the thirteenth century it was said that illnesses came from God; in the fifteenth it was said that they came from the devil; later it was said that illnesses came from the humours, today we say that illnesses come from microbes! Such are the views that in the course of time give place to one another.

Thus we speak of external causes of human illness and health. And the man of the present day may easily be tempted to use a word that is fundamentally adapted to bring disorder into the whole of our world-conception. If someone who was previously healthy comes into a district where there is an epidemic of influenza or diphtheria, and then falls ill, the man of today will be inclined to say that the person has become ill because he entered this particular district. It is thus easy to make use of the word ‘chance.’ Today people really speak of ‘chance.’ This word is really disastrous for any world-conception, and as long as we make no attempt to become clear about what is so readily termed ‘chance,’ we shall not be able to deal in any way satisfactorily with the initial stages of the subject: ‘Natural and accidental illnesses of man.’ For this it is essential that we should attempt by way of introduction to throw some light on the word ‘chance.’

Is not chance itself inclined to make us suspicious of the way it is frequently defined to-day? I have already on a previous occasion drawn your attention to the fact that a clever man in the eighteenth century was not entirely wrong when, concerning the reason for the erection of monuments, he made the following statement: ‘If we regard objectively the course of history, we should have to erect by far the greater number of monuments to Chance.’ And if we examine history, we shall make strange discoveries concerning what is concealed behind chance. As I have mentioned before, we owe the telescope to the fact that children once were playing with optical lenses in an optical laboratory. In their play they formed a combination by means of which someone then produced a telescope.

You might also recall the famous lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, which before the time of Galileo was seen by thousands and thousands, oscillating with the same regularity. But it remained for Galileo to find out by experiment how these oscillations coincided with the course of his blood circulation, whereby he discovered the famous laws of the pendulum. Had we not known these, the whole course of our physics, the whole of our culture would have developed on entirely different lines. Let us try to find a meaning in human evolution, and then see whether we should still wish to maintain that only chance was at work when Galileo made this important discovery. Let us consider yet another case.

We are aware what Luther's translation of the Bible means to the civilised countries of Europe. It profoundly influenced religious sentiment and thought and also the development of what we call the German literary language. I simply mention the fact without comment. I insist only on the profound influence which this translation exercised. We must endeavour to see the significance of that education which, during the course of several centuries, came to mankind as a result of Luther's translation of the Bible. Let us endeavour to perceive a meaning in this, and then let us consider the following fact.

Up to a certain period of his life Luther was deeply imbued with the feeling and desire so to order his life as to become a veritable ‘child of God.’ This desire had been brought about by a constant reading of the Bible. The custom prevailed amongst the Augustinian monks of reading preferably the works of the Fathers of the Church, but Luther passed to the spiritual enjoyment of the Bible itself. Thus he was led to this intense feeling of being a ‘child of God,’ and under this influence he fulfilled his duties as teacher of Theology in the first Wittenberg period. The fact that I should now like to emphasise is that Luther had a certain repugnance to acquiring the title of Doctor of Theology, but that, when sitting with an old friend of the Erfurt Augustinian monastery, he was persuaded in the course of a ‘chance’ conversation to try and gain the hat of a Doctor of Theology. For this purpose it was necessary once more to study the Bible. Thus it was the ‘chance’ conversation with his friend which led to a renewed study of the Bible, and to all that resulted from it.

Try to conceive from the point of view of the last centuries the significance of the ‘chance’ that Luther once conversed with that friend and was persuaded to try for the Doctorate of Theology. You will be obliged to see that it would be grotesque to connect this human evolution with a ‘chance’ event.

From what has been said we shall first of all conclude that perhaps after all there is something more in chance than is usually supposed. As a rule we believe chance to be something which cannot be satisfactorily explained either by the laws of nature, or by the laws of life, and that it constitutes a kind of surplus over and above what can be explained. Let us now add to this statement a fact which has helped us to understand so many aspects of life: Man, since he began his earth existence, has been subject to the two forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic principles. These forces and principles continually penetrate into man. While the luciferic forces act more within by influencing the astral body, the ahrimanic forces act rather through the external impressions which he receives. In what we receive from the external world there are contained the ahrimanic forces, and in what arises and acts within the soul in the shape of joy and dejection, desires, and so forth, there are contained the luciferic forces. The luciferic as well as the ahrimanic principles induce us to give way to error. The luciferic principle induces us to deceive ourselves as to our own inner life, to judge our inner life wrongly, to see Maya, illusion within ourselves. If we contemplate life rationally, we shall not find it difficult to discover Maya in our own soul life. Let us consider how very often we persuade ourselves that we have done one thing or another for this or that reason. Generally the reason is quite a different one, and far more profound. It may be found in temper, desire, or passion, but in our superficial consciousness we give quite a different explanation. Especially do we endeavour to deny the presence within our soul of that which the world does not greatly appreciate, and when we are driven to some act from purely egotistical motives, we frequently find ourselves clothing these crude egotistical impulses with a cloak of unselfishness, and explaining why it was necessary for us thus to act. As a rule we are not aware ourselves that we err. When we become aware of it, there generally begins an improvement accompanied by a certain feeling of shame. The worst of it is that for the most we are ignorant that we are driven to something from the depths of our soul, and then we invent a motive for the deed in question. This has also been discovered by modern psychologists. As there exists but little psychological culture today, however, these grotesque indications are brought forward, and interpretations are arrived at which are altogether peculiar. Any true investigator on observing such facts will naturally fathom their true significance and so realise that there are indeed two influences acting together, namely, our consciousness, and that which dwells in the deeper layers beneath the threshold of consciousness. But when the same facts are observed by a materialistic psychologist, he will set to work differently. He will immediately fabricate a theory about the difference between the pretext for our deeds and the real motive. If, for instance, a psychologist discusses the suicides of students which occur so frequently today, he will say that what is quoted as pretext is not the real motive; that the real motive lies far deeper, being found mostly in a misdirected sexual life, and that the real motive is so transformed that it deludes the consciousness for some reason or other.

Often this may be so, but anyone who has the least knowledge of truly profound psychological thought will never from this evolve a general theory. Such a theory could easily be refuted, for if the case really is such that pretext is nothing, and motive everything, this would also apply to the psychologist himself, and we should be forced to say that with him too, what he is telling us and developing as a theory is but a pretext. If we were to search for deeper reasons, perhaps the reasons alleged by him would be found to be of exactly the same nature. If this psychologist had, truly learnt why a reason is impossible that has been based upon the conclusion: ‘All Cretans are liars,’ and that such a judgement is biased if made by the Cretan himself, if he had learnt the reason why this is so, he would also have learnt what an extraordinarily vicious circle is created when in certain domains assertions can be driven back upon oneself. In almost the whole compass of our literature we find very little of truly deep culture. That is why as a rule people hardly notice what they themselves do, and for this reason it will be indispensable for Spiritual Science in every respect to avoid such confusions in logic. Modern philosophers when dealing with Spiritual Science come more than any others to such confusions in logic. Our example is typical of this. We here see the tricks played upon us by the luciferic influences transforming the soul-life into Maya, so that we can pretend to have quite different motives from those really dwelling within us.

We should try to acquire a stricter self-discipline in this respect. Today words are as a rule handled with great facility. A word, however, can lead to great error and confusion. The word has but to have a pleasing sound, and it creates the impression of a charitable deed. Even the pleasant sound of a sentence will betray us into believing that the motive in question is within our soul, while in truth the egotistical principle may be concealed behind it without our being aware of its presence, because we have not the will to arrive at true self-knowledge. Thus we see Lucifer active on the one side. How does Ahriman act on the other?

Ahriman is that principle which intermingles with our perceptions and enters us from outside. Ahriman's activity is strongest when we feel that in this case thought is not sufficient, and that we face a critical moment in our thought life. Thinking is trapped as in a thought maze. Then the ahrimanic principle seizes the occasion to penetrate us as through a rift in the external world. If we pursue the course of world events and the more obvious occurrences, if for instance, we pursue modern physics back to the moment when Galileo was sitting in front of the oscillating church lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa, we can spin a thought-net embracing all these events whereby the matter will be easily explained. Everything will be quite clear, but the moment we arrive at the oscillating church lamp, our thoughts become confused. Here is the window through which the ahrimanic forces penetrate us with the greatest strength, and here our thought refuses to understand the phenomena which might bring reason and understanding into the matter. Here also is what we call ‘chance.’ It is here where Ahriman becomes most dangerous to us. Those phenomena which we call ‘chance’ are the phenomena by which we are most easily deluded by Ahriman.

Thus we shall learn to understand that it is not the nature of facts themselves that induces us to speak of ‘chance,’ but that it depends on ourselves and our own development. Little by little we shall have to educate ourselves to penetrate Maya and illusion, that is to say, we must gain insight into matters where Ahriman's influence is at its strongest. So that just where we have to speak of important causes of illness, and of a light that is to be shed over the course of many an illness, we shall find it necessary to approach phenomena from the following aspect. First of all we shall have to try and understand how far it is by chance that someone should be travelling on the very train on which he may lose his life, or that someone at a definite period should be exposed to disease-germs affecting him from outside, or to some other cause of illness, and if we pursue matters with sharpened understanding, we shall be able to arrive at a truer cognition of the whole meaning for human life of illness and health.

Today we had to show in detail how Lucifer leads to illusions within man, and how Ahriman becomes intertwined with external perceptions and there leads to Maya; that it is a result of Lucifer if we delude ourselves with a false motive, and how the false supposition concerning the world of phenomena—the deception through Ahriman—leads to the belief in chance. These foundations had to be laid to show that karmic events, the results of earlier lives, are active also in those cases where external causes, which seem to be chance, give rise to illnesses.