The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The theosophical world view differs from all remaining world views, which we can meet in the present, because it also satisfies knowledge. We have so often heard in the present: we cannot recognise certain matters; our cognitive faculties have limits and cannot rise up above a certain height. If we let the philosophical investigations of the present approach us, then one often speaks of such limits of knowledge in particular those philosophical schools which go back to Kantianism. The view of the theosophist and the practical mystic differs from all such discussions because it never puts limits to the human cognitive faculties, but considers them in such a way that they can be extended. Is it not a big immodesty, if anybody considers his particular cognitive faculties, his point of cognition as something decisive and says that we cannot go with our cognitive faculties beyond a certain limit?

The theosophist says: I stand on a certain point of view of human cognition today. From this point of view I can recognise this or that, and I cannot recognise this or that. But it is possible to develop the human cognitive faculties to increase them. What one calls initiatory schools is intended basically to increase these human cognitive faculties to a higher level, so that it is indeed correct if one says from a lower level of knowledge that there are limits of cognition, that one cannot recognise this or that. But one can also rise up above such a level of knowledge, one can get to higher levels, and then one can recognise what one could not recognise on subordinate levels. This is the nature of initiation, and this deepening or rise of knowledge is the task of the initiatory schools. It is a matter of raising the human being to the levels of knowledge on which he cannot stand from nature which he has to attain only with long-standing patient exercises.

At all times, there have been such initiatory schools. With all peoples recognising men of higher kind came from such initiatory schools. The nature of such initiatory schools and of the great initiates who have outgrown the lower levels of the human cognitive faculties and got to the highest knowledge, which is accessible to us on earth, expresses itself in the fact that these initiates gave the different religions and world views to the different peoples.

We want to outline the nature of these great initiates today. As one must get to know the methods of every science, of every spiritual procedure with which one penetrates to knowledge, it is also in the initiatory schools. Also there it is the point that we are led to higher stages of cognition using certain methods of which we have just spoken. Now I shortly invoke the concerning stages. Certain levels of knowledge are to be attained only in the intimate initiatory schools, where teachers are who themselves have experienced that school, who have carried out those exercises, who can really consider any single stage, any single step. One has to confide in such teachers of these initiatory schools only.

Indeed, there is nothing of authority in these initiatory schools, nothing of the principle of dogmatism, but only the principle of advising holds sway. Who has gone through certain stages of study and has thereby acquired the experiences of the higher super-sensible life knows the intimate ways leading to this higher cognition. Only such a man/woman is competent to say what one has to do. What is necessary in this field between pupil and teacher is confidence only. Who does not have this confidence is not able to learn anything. Who has this confidence sees very soon that by any esoteric or mystic teacher nothing else is recommended than what this teacher himself has worked through. The point is that only the externally visible part of the whole entity of the human being is completed, as well as the human being faces us today. Everybody who strives for esoteric instructions has to get clear in his mind that the human being is not a completed being today, as he faces us, but that he is developing that he gets to much higher stages in future.

What has already attained the image of God today, what of the human being has come to the highest level is the human sensuous body what we see of him with eyes, what we can generally perceive with our senses. However, this is not the only what the human being has. The human being has even higher members of his nature. At first, he has a member which we call the etheric body. Someone who has developed the soul organs can see this etheric body. Because of this etheric body the human being is not only a creation in which chemical and physical forces work but a living creation that lives and is provided with growth, life and the capacity of reproduction. One can see this etheric body which is a kind of archetype of the human being, if one suggests the usual physical body away with the methods of clairvoyance that are still characterised afterwards. You know that one can achieve by the usual methods of hypnosis and suggestion that if you say to anybody that here is no lamp he really sees no lamp. Thus you are able to thoroughly suggest the room away although you look into the room. That is possible if you develop enough strong willpower in yourselves, that willpower which diverts the attention from the physical body. Then you see the room not empty, but filled with a kind of archetype. This archetype has approximately the same figure as the physical body. However, it is not through and through of the same kind, but is organised thoroughly. It is not only interspersed with fine little veins and currents, but it also has organs. This formation, this etheric body causes the real life of the human being. Its colour can be compared only with the colour of the young peach-blossom. It is no colour which is included in the solar spectrum; it is approximately between violet and red. This is the second body.

The third body is the aura which I have already described occasionally, that cloud-like formation of which I have spoken last time, when I described the origin of the human being, in which the human being is like in an ovoid cloud. Everything expresses itself in it that lives in the human being as desire, passion and feeling. Happy, devoted feelings express themselves in bright colour currents in this aura. Hatred, sensual emotions express themselves in darker hues. Keen, logical thoughts express themselves in well-defined figures. Illogical, confused thoughts find expression in figures with unclear contours. Thus we have an image of the human soul-life in this aura.

As well as I have now described the human being he was placed so to speak, by the hand of nature on earth at that time which lies nearly in the outset of the Atlantean age. I have described last time what one has to understand by the Atlantean age. At the time when the fertilisation with the eternal spirit had already taken place the human being faces us with three members: body, soul and mind. Today these three members of the human being are basically somewhat changed because the human being has worked on himself since that time, since nature has dismissed him, since he has become a self-conscious being.

This work on himself means improving his aura, irradiating light from the self-consciousness to this aura. The human being who stands on a very deep level who has not worked on himself, we say a savage, has an aura as nature has given him. All those, however, who are within our civilised world, have auras in which they themselves have co-operated. For as far as the human being is a self-conscious being, he works on himself, and this work finds expression in him at first that his aura changes. Everything that the human being has learnt from nature what he has taken up, since he can speak and think self-consciously, is a new impact in his aura, caused by himself.

If you transport yourselves back to the Lemurian age when the human being was warm-blooded since long time when his fertilisation by the spirit had taken place in the middle of this Lemurian age, the human being was not yet a being capable of clear thoughts. All that just started developing. The spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time, the aura was completely a result of the natural forces. There one could notice and one can notice it still today with people of very low level , a smaller aura of bluish colour originating at a certain place within the head. This smaller aura is the external auric expression of the self-consciousness. The more the human being has developed this self-consciousness by his thinking and working, the more this smaller aura spreads out about the other aura, so that both become often completely different in short time. The human being who lives in the external civilisation who is an educated civilised person works on his aura in such a way as civilisation just drives him. We take up our usual knowledge, as our school offers it, our experiences, which life brings us, and they perpetually change our aura. But this change must be continued if the human being wants to join the practical mysticism. There he has to work particularly on himself. There he has to incorporate into his aura not only what civilisation offers him, but there he has to exert an influence in certain, regular way on his aura. This happens by means of the so-called meditation. This meditation or the inner contemplation is the first stage which the student of an initiate has to go through.

What is the sense and purpose of this meditation? Attempt once to hold the thoughts before yourselves, which you hold in the mind from the morning up to the evening, and to ponder how these thoughts are influenced by the space and time in which you live. Attempt once whether you are able to prevent your thoughts and ask yourselves whether you had them if you did not live by chance in Berlin and in the beginning of the 20-th century. At the end of the 18-th and at the beginning of the 19-th century, the human beings have not thought in the same way as the human beings of today. If you imagine how the world has been changed in the course of the last century and which changes time has caused, then you see that what permeates your soul from morning to night depends on space and time. It is different if we dedicate ourselves to thoughts which have an eternal value. Actually, these are only certain abstract, academic thoughts, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry to which the human being dedicates himself and have eternal value. Twice two is four: this must hold good at all times and places. The same applies to the geometrical truths which we take up. But if we refrain from the certain foundation of such truths, we can say that the average person thinks very little that is independent of space and time. What is dependent on them connects us with the world and exerts a small influence only on that being which itself is something permanent.

Meditation is nothing else than dedicating oneself to thoughts of eternal value, to educate oneself consciously to that which is beyond space and time. The great religious writings contain such thoughts: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter up to the end, also the Imitation of Christ (1441) by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471, canon regular). Who becomes engrossed with patience and perseverance in such a way that he lives in such writings, who becomes engrossed every day anew and maybe works on one single sentence for weeks, and thinks and feels it through, gets an infinite use. As well as one gets to know and love a child with all its peculiarities more and more every day, one lets such a sentence of eternity penetrate the soul every day which arises from the great initiates or inspired human beings. This fulfils us with new life. The sayings in Light on the Path (1885), written down by Mabel Collins (1851-1927) according to higher instructions, are also very important. Already the first four sentences are suitable if they are exercised patiently to intervene in the human aura in such a way that this aura is completely illuminated with a new light. One can see this light lighting up in the human aura. Bluish colour nuances replace the reddish or reddish-brownish ones, light reddish nuances replace the yellow ones et etcetera All the colours of the aura change under the influence of such thoughts of eternity. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he starts gradually feeling the deep influence that goes out from this changed aura.

If the human being exercises certain virtues, certain performances of the soul most carefully beside these meditations, then his soul senses develop within this aura. We must have these if we want to behold into the soul-world, just as we must have physical senses to be able to look into the physical world. As the external senses are implanted by nature into the body, the human being has to implant higher soul senses lawfully into his aura. The meditation causes that the human being becomes mature to work on these senses which exist as rudiments.

But we have to turn our attention to particular soul performances if we want to develop these senses. Consider that the human being has a number of such senses as rudiments. We call these senses lotus-flowers, because the astral structure which the human being starts developing in his aura takes on the figure of lotus-flowers comparatively. Of course, this is only comparative, just as one speaks of lungs which resemble to wings. The two-petalled lotus-flower is in the middle of the head about the nasal root between the eyes. Then near the larynx is the 16-petalled lotus-flower, near the heart is the twelve-petalled one, near the pit of the stomach the 10-petalled one. More far below there are the 6-petalled and the 4-petalled lotus-flowers. I would like to speak only of the 16-petalled and the 12-petalled lotus-flowers today.

In Buddha's teaching the so-called eightfold path is given. Now ask yourselves once: why does Buddha give just this eightfold path as especially important for the attainment of the higher stages of the human being? This eightfold path is: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Such a great initiate like Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, he speaks out of the knowledge of the human nature, and he knows which influence the soul performances have on those bodies which must develop only in future. If we consider the 16-petalled lotus-flower of a modern average person, we see, actually, very little. It is about to light up again, so to speak. In times of very distant past this lotus-flower existed already once. It declined in its development. Today it appears again due to the cultural work of the human being. However, in future this 16-petalled lotus-flower comes again to full development. It begins to gleam in its sixteen spokes or petals brightly, any petal appears in another hue, and, finally, it moves from the left to the right, clockwise.

Someone develops in the initiatory school consciously what every human being experiences and possesses once in future, so that he can become a guide of humanity. Eight of the sixteen petals were already developed in the very distant past. Eight are still to be developed today if the esoteric student wants to get to the use of these senses.
These are formed,
-If the human being goes consciously and carefully the eightfold path
-If he exercises the eight soul activities given by Buddha
-If he arranges his whole soul-life in such a way that he exercises these eight virtues as intensely as possible,
So that he controls himself, supports his meditation work and not only matures the 16-petalled lotus-flower, but sets them also in motion to be able to really perceive.

Now I still want to speak of the 12-petalled lotus-flower near the heart. Six petals were already developed in the far-off past; six have to be developed in future with all human beings, with initiates and their pupils already today. In all theosophical manuals you can find certain virtues cited which someone who wants to ascend to the stage of a chela or student should acquire in the forecourt. These six virtues, which you find cited in every theosophical manual where of the development of the human being is spoken, are: control of thoughts, control of actions, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality and balance or what Angelus Silesius calls calmness. These six virtues, which one has to practice consciously and carefully and to add to the meditation, develop the other six petals of the 12-petalled lotus-flower. This is not blindly or accidentally picked up in the theosophical textbooks or written down out of own internal feeling, but is spoken from the deepest knowledge of the great initiates. The initiates know that somebody who really wants to develop to higher super-sensible stages has to develop the 12-petalled lotus-flower. For this purpose he has to develop the six petals, which were not developed in the past, with these six virtues. Thus you see how from a deeper knowledge of the human being the great initiates gave their instructions for life. I could still extend this consideration to other organs of cognition and observation, but I want only to give you an outline of the initiatory process with these remarks which should be sufficient.

If the student has advanced so far that he starts developing these astral senses if he has advanced so far that he is thereby able to see not only the sensuous impressions in his surroundings but also what is mental, what the aura is in the human being, in the animal and in the plant, a quite new level of instruction begins. Nobody can see anything mental in his surroundings, before his lotus-flowers rotate, just as somebody who has no eyes can see no colours and no light. If now the wall is broken through if he has progressed on the preliminary stage of knowledge so far that he has an insight into this astral world, then only the real apprenticeship begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. What happens now at this moment when the human being has become a chela, after he has gone through the preliminary stages? We have seen that everything that we have now described refers to the astral body. This is organised thoroughly by the human body. The human being who has experienced such a development has another aura. If he then examines his astral body with self-consciousness, if he himself has become the clear organisation of his astral body, we say that this student has examined his astral body with manas. Nothing else is manas than an astral body which is controlled from self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but on different developmental stages.

One has to realise this if one wants to practically use for the practical mysticism what is given in the theosophical manuals as seven principles. Everybody who knows the mystic way of development, everybody who knows something of initiation says that they have a theoretical value for the study, but for the practical mystic only if one knows the relationships which exist between the lower and upper principles. No practical mystic knows more than four members: the physical body, in which the chemical and physical laws are working, the etheric body, the astral body and, finally, the self-consciousness which we call kama-manas in the present development, the self-consciously thinking principle. Manas is nothing else than what the self-consciousness works into the body. The etheric body, as it is now, is taken away from any influence of the self-consciousness. We can influence growth and nourishment indirectly, but not in such a way as we let our wishes, our thoughts and ideas come from the self-consciousness. Thus we ourselves cannot influence our relationships of nourishment, digestion and growth. These are without any connection with the human self-consciousness. This etheric body has to come under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body must penetrate and treat the etheric body in the same way as the human being his aura, his astral body. If the human being has advanced so far by meditation, by contemplation and by the exercise of the soul activities that the astral body is organised of its own accord, then the work proceeds to the etheric body, then the etheric body receives the inner word, then the human being hears not only what lives in the environment, then the inner sense of the things sounds to him in his etheric body.

Many a time I have said here that the actually spiritual in the things is something sounding. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the practical mystic if he speaks of a sounding in the spiritual world that he speaks of a luminescence in the astral world, the world of desires. Not without reason Goethe says when he leads his Faust to the heaven:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with threat of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

And not without reason Ariel says, as Faust is led by the spirits to the spiritual world: “In these sounds we spirits hear the new day already born.”

This inner sounding which is, of course, no sounding perceptible to external sensuous ears, this inner word of the things by which they express their own nature is the experience which the human being has if he is able to influence his astral body from his etheric body. Then he has become the chela, the real disciple of a great initiate. Then he can continue this path. One calls such a human being who has ascended this level a homeless human being, because he has found the connection with a new world because the spiritual world sounds to him and because he has no longer his home, so to speak, in this sensuous world. One must not misunderstand this. The chela who has attained this level is a good citizen and father of a family, a good friend as he would be, if he had not become a chela. He needs to be torn out from nothing. What he experiences there is a course of soul development. There he attains a new home in a world which lies behind these sensuous one.

What has happened there? The spiritual world sounds in the human being, and while the spiritual world sounds into the human being, he overcomes an illusion, the illusion generally, in which basically all human beings are prejudiced before this level of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. The human being believes that he is a personality, separated from the rest of the world. Already a mere reflection could teach him that he himself is no independent being in the physical. Take into account if in this room the temperature were 200 degrees higher than now, we would not be able to exist here as we exist now. As soon as the circumstances change outside, the conditions are no longer appropriate to our physical existence. We are only the continuation of the outside world and absolutely inconceivable as a special being. This is even more the case in the psychic and in the spiritual worlds. We see that the human being, understood as a self, is only an illusion that he is a member of the general divine spirituality. Here the human being overcomes the personal self. It appears what Goethe pronounced it in the chorus mysticus (Faust) with the words: “All that is transitory is only a symbol.” What we see, is only an image of an eternal being. We ourselves are only an image of an eternal being. If we give up our special being, we have the external life and we live a separate life with the whelp of the etheric body , then we have overcome the external, separate life, we have become a part of the All-life.

In the human being something now appears that we have called buddhi. Buddhi is virtually now achieved as a developmental stage of the etheric body, of that etheric body which does no longer cause a special existence, but enters the All-life. The human being, who arrives at this, has arrived at the second level of chelahood. Then all scruples and doubts drop from his soul, and then he can no longer be a superstitious person, just as little as he can be a disbelieving person. Then he does no longer need to get truth comparing his ideas with the external environment, then he lives in the sound, in the word of the things, then it sounds and sounds out of the being what it is. Neither superstition nor doubt is there. One calls this the delivery of the key of knowledge to the chela. If he has attained this stage, a word of the spiritual world sounds into this. Then his word does no longer echo what the world is but what comes from another world which works into our external world which cannot be seen with our external senses. Messengers of the divinity are these words.

If this stage is stepped over, a new one comes. It happens that the human being wins influence on what his physical body is immediately doing. He had only influence on the etheric body before, now, however, on the physical body. His actions have to set the physical body in motion. What the human being does is integrated into what we call his karma. But the human being does not work consciously on it; he does not know that he pulls an effect behind himself because of his action. Only now the human being starts performing the actions consciously in the physical world in such a way that he consciously works on his karma. There he wins influence on the karma with the physical action. There it sounds not only from the things of the environment, but there he is so far that he is able to pronounce the names of all things. As the human being lives in our cultural stage, he is able only to pronounce one single name. And this is the name he gives himself: I. This is the only name the human being himself can give. Who becomes deeper engrossed in it, can come to profound knowledge nothing of which the academic psychology dreams.

It is only one thing to which only you yourselves can give the concerning name. No one else can say to you I, only you yourselves. To anyone you must say you and every other must say you to you. It is something in everybody that everybody can call I. Therefore, the Jewish secret doctrine also speaks of the inexpressible name of God. This is something that is immediately an announcement of the God in him. It was forbidden to pronounce this name unworthily and unholy. Hence, the holy shyness, the importance and fundamentality if the Jewish esoteric teacher pronounced this name. “I” is the only word which says something to you what can never come to you from the outside world. As the average person gives his self only the name, the chela of the third degree gives names which he has from intuition to all things of the world. That is he is merged up in the world-self. He speaks out of this world-self. He is allowed to say the deepest name of a thing to this thing, whereas the average present-day human being is only able to say “I” to himself. If the chela has attained this level, one calls him a swan. The chela who can rise to the names of all things is called swan because he is the herald of all things.

What is beyond the third degree cannot be expressed with everyday words. This requires the knowledge of a special script which is taught only in the esoteric schools. The following degree is the degree of the disguised. Beyond it are the degrees which the great initiates have, those initiates who gave our culture the big impulses at all times. They were chelas first. First they attained the key of knowledge. Then they were led to the regions where to them the universal and the names of the things were disclosed. Then they ascended to the stage of the All and could have the deep experiences by which they were enabled to found the great religions of the world.

Not only the great religions, but generally every big impulse, everything that is important in the world originated from the great initiates. Only two examples are cited which kind of influence on the world the great initiates have who experienced the training.

We transport ourselves back to that time where under the guidance of Hermes the students of the initiatory schools were instructed. These instructions were usual, so-called esoteric, scientific lessons.

Only with a few lines I am able to draw what such lessons contained. It was shown there how the world spirit descends to the body world, embodies itself, and how it revives in the matter, how it gets to its highest stage in the human being and celebrates its resurrection. Paracelsus expressed this pleasantly saying: what we meet outside, these single beings are the letters, and the word which is joined together from them is the human being. We have off-loaded all human virtues or weaknesses on the creatures outside. However, the human being is the confluence of all that. How in the human being a confluence of the remaining macrocosm revives as a microcosm, this was taught in details and with immense spiritual wealth as esoteric lessons in the Egyptian initiatory schools.

After these lessons the hermetic lessons followed. One can understand with the senses and with the reason what I have said. One can only understand what in the hermetic lessons was offered if one has achieved the first degree of chelahood. Then one gets to know that special script which is not an accidental and arbitrary one but echoes the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not like ours an external image which is fixed arbitrarily in single letters and members, but it is born out of the spiritual law of nature because the human being who is expert of this script is in the possession of these laws of nature. Thus all his ideation is following a set pattern in the psychic and astral space. What he imagines he imagines in the sense of these big characters. He is able to do that if he gives up his self. He submits to the eternal laws. Now he is over his hermetic lessons. He is admitted to the first stage of a more profound initiation. He has to experience something in the astral world, in the real soul-world that has a significance extending over the world cycles. After he has attained the capacity that the astral senses fully work, so that they work down to the etheric body, he is introduced in a deep secret of the astral world for three days. He experiences in the astral world what I have described to you as the origin of the earth and the human being last time. He experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of sun, moon and earth and the origin of the human being, he has this whole sequence of phenomena before himself. At the same time, he has them before himself in such a way that they become a picture. And then he comes out of the temple. After he has gone through this great experience in the initiatory school, he steps among the people and tells what he has experienced in this psychic and astral world. This story runs approximately in such a way:

Once a divine couple, Osiris and Isis, was combined with the earth. This divine couple was the regent of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was persecuted and dismembered by Typhon, and Isis had to search for his corpse. She did not bring it home, but at different places of the earth Osiris's graves were laid out. There he descended completely and was buried in the earth. There a ray of the spiritual world radiated on Isis, fertilising her to the new Horus by an immaculate conception.

This image was nothing else than a big representation of what we have just got to know as the emergence of the sun and moon, as the separation of the sun and moon and as the origin of the human being. Isis is the symbol of the moon; Horus signifies the earthly humanity, the earth itself. When humanity was not yet provided with warm blood, when it was not yet covered with the physical body, it felt in big images what occurred in the soul-world. It was prepared to receive the big truths in such images from the great initiates in the beginning of the Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan developments. Hence, these truths were not simply arranged, but were given in the picture of Osiris and Isis. All great religions which we find in antiquity were experienced by the great initiates in the psychic space. These great initiates came out and spoke to the people in the way how it could understand, namely in images of that which they themselves had experienced in the initiatory schools. This was in antiquity that way. Only because one was in such initiatory school one could ascend to the higher astral experience.

With the emergence of Christianity this changed. It represents a significant incision in the development. Since the appearance of Christ, it was possible that one could be initiated as a nature initiate as one also speaks of a nature poet. There are Christian mystics who had received the initiation by mercy. The first who was called to bring out Christianity all over the world under the effect of the saying “happy are they who find faith without beholding me” (John 20:29) was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside of the mysteries. I cannot deal with further details.

To all great movements and cultural foundations the great initiates gave the impulses. A nice myth has survived to us from the Middle Ages which should show this in a time when one did not yet ask for materialistic reasons. The epic originated in Bavaria and, hence, has taken on the dress of Catholicism. We want to realise what happened at that time in the following way. At that time the so-called urban culture, the modern bourgeoisie originated in Europe. The mystic understood the further development of humanity, the advance of every soul to the next stage as the advance of the soul, of the female in the human being. The mystic sees something female in the soul that is fertilised by the lower sensory impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a fertilisation process. The big impulses for the progress of humanity are given by the great initiates. Somebody can notice this who looks deeper into the evolution of humanity who beholds the spiritual forces behind the physical phenomena. Thus the medieval world view also attributed that rise of the soul to higher stages during the new cultural stage which was caused by the cities. This urban development was achieved because the soul took a leap forward in history. It was an initiate who caused this leap. One attributed all big impulses to the great lodge of the initiates who surrounded the Holy Grail. From there the great initiates came who are not visible to the external human being. And one called that person Lohengrin who provided the urban culture in those days with an impulse in mediaeval times. This is the emissary of the Holy Grail, the great lodge. And the urban soul, the female principle that should be fertilised by the great initiates is suggested by Elsa of Brabant. That who should mediate is the swan. Lohengrin is brought by the swan to this physical world. The initiate must not be asked for his name. He belongs to a higher world. The chela, the swan, provided this influence.

I could only suggest that the big impact was symbolised again for the people in a myth. The great initiates worked that way and put into their teachings what they had to announce. Also those worked this way who founded the elementary culture of humanity: Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, and Moses in the Jewish people. Then again Orpheus, Pythagoras and, finally, Jesus worked who is the initiate of the initiates who carried Christ in himself.

With it only the great initiates are called. I have tried to characterise their connection with the world in these explanations. What has been described with it is still abstruse to many people. But those who themselves felt something of the higher worlds in their souls looked always up not only to the spiritual worlds but also to the leaders of humanity. Only with this point of view they were able to speak so enthusiastically like Goethe. But you also find something of a holy spark with others, which leads us to this point which spiritual science should give us again. You will find it with a German, with a young sensible German poet and thinker whose life looks like a blissful recollection of a former life of a great initiate. Who reads Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801, German poet and philosopher) feels something of the breath which leads to this higher world. It is not so pronounced as usually, but it is something in him that also the magic words have. That is why he wrote the nice word of the relationship of our planet to humanity, which applies to the lower, undeveloped human being as well as to the initiate:

Humanity is the sense of our earth planet, humanity is the nerve that connects this earth planet with the upper worlds, and humanity is the eye with which this earth planet faces the heavenly kingdoms of the universe.

Answer-to-Question

Question: Why did Christ not leave writings behind?

This is just the basic difference between him and the former founders of a religion. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The other founders of a religion were way and truth. They announced what should be done and believed, as Moses did, for example. If we study the ancient religious confessions, we find no difference of the contents, no difference between Christianity as doctrine and the other great religions. Who knows the Egyptian religious system in its deepness finds everything that is included in Christianity also there. That applies to all religions. Christianity is still something absolutely new, not as a doctrine but as a fact. Hence, I have called my book: Christianity as Mystic Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity (CW 8). The appearance of Christ signifies something that is termed “blessed” (selig), filled with the soul (Seele). Now everybody should become blessed who was connected in faith with the founder. Christ descends to the valley and becomes a human being among human beings. He teaches nothing new, but he lives in the immediate existence, in the innermost personality in that which the others taught. What the others taught was the Logos, the divine truth. If you study Buddha, if you penetrate the lofty teachings of Hermes or of the Vedas, you have external sayings of the divine creator's word. The Logos became doctrine there.

[ 1 ] When I see how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another ball, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this event which I observe. The direction and velocity of the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I do no more than observe, I cannot say anything about the motion of the second ball until it actually moves. The situation alters if I begin to reflect on the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the event. I bring the concept of an elastic ball into connection with certain other concepts of mechanics, and take into consideration the special circumstances prevailing in this particular instance. In other words, to the action taking place without my doing, I try to add a second action which unfolds in the conceptual sphere. The latter is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I could rest content with the observation and forgo all search for concepts if I had no need of them. If, however, this need is present, then I am not satisfied until I have brought the concepts ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., into a certain connection, to which the observed process is related in a definite way. As certain as it is that the event takes place independently of me, so certain is it also that the conceptual process cannot take place without my doing it.

[ 2 ] We shall consider later whether this activity of mine is really a product of my own independent being or whether the modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections present in our consciousness determine.¹⁷ For the time being we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel compelled to seek for concepts and connections of concepts standing in a certain relation to objects and events given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we accomplish it according to an unalterable necessity, we shall leave aside for the moment. That at first sight it appears to be our activity is beyond doubt. We know with absolute certainty that we are not given the concepts together with the objects. That I myself am the doer may be illusion, but to immediate observation this certainly appears to be the case. The question here is: What do we gain by finding a conceptual counterpart to an event?

[ 3 ] There is a profound difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of an event are related to one another before and after the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can follow the parts of a given event as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I see the first billiard ball move toward the second in a certain direction and with a definite velocity. I must wait for what will happen after the impact, and again I can follow what happens only with my eyes. Let us assume that at the moment the impact occurs someone obstructs my view of the field where the event takes place: then—as mere onlooker—I have no knowledge of what happens afterward. The situation is different if before my view was obstructed I had discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can estimate what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. An object or event which has only been observed does not of itself reveal anything about its connection with other objects or events. This connection comes to light only when observation combines with thinking.

[ 4 ] Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all spiritual striving of man insofar as he is conscious of such striving. What is accomplished by ordinary human reason as well as by the most complicated scientific investigations rests on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit. Philosophers have started from various primary antitheses: idea and reality, subject and object, appearance and thing-in-itself, ego and non-ego, idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, the conscious and the unconscious. It is easy to show, however, that all these antitheses must be preceded by that of observation and thinking, as the one the most important for man.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we wish to advance, we must prove that somewhere we have observed it, or express it in the form of a clear thought which can be re-thought by others. Every philosopher who begins to speak about his fundamental principles must make use of the conceptual form, and thereby makes use of thinking. He therefore indirectly admits that for his activity he presupposes thinking. Whether thinking or something else is the main element in the evolution of the world, we shall not decide as yet. But that without thinking the philosopher can gain no knowledge of the evolution of the world, is immediately clear. Thinking may play a minor part in the coming into being of world phenomena, but thinking certainly plays a major part in the coming into being of a view about them.

[ 6 ] As regards observation, it is due to our organization that we need it. For us, our thinking about a horse and the object horse are two separate things. But we have access to the object only through observation. As little as we can form a concept of a horse by merely staring at it, just as little are we able to produce a corresponding object by mere thinking.

[ 7 ] In sequence of time, observation even precedes thinking. For even thinking we learn to know first by means of observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the opening of this chapter, we gave an account of how thinking is kindled by an event and of how it goes beyond what is given without its activity. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences we first become aware of through observation. The contents of sensation, of perception, of contemplation, of feelings, of acts of will, of the pictures of dreams and fantasy, of representations, of concepts and ideas, of all illusions and hallucinations are given us through observation.

[ 8 ] However, as object of observation, thinking differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table or a tree occurs in me as soon as these objects appear within the range of my experience. But my thinking that goes on about these things, I do not observe at the same time. I observe the table; the thinking about the table I carry out, but I do not observe it at the same moment. I would first have to transport myself to a place outside my own activity if, besides observing the table, I wanted also to observe my thinking about the table. Whereas observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are but ordinary occurrences filling daily life, the observation of thinking itself is a sort of exceptional situation. This fact must be taken into account sufficiently when we come to determine the relation of thinking to all other contents of observation. It is essential to be clear about the fact that when thinking is observed the same procedure is applied to it as the one we normally apply to the rest of the world-content, only in ordinary life we do not apply it to thinking.

[ 9 ] Someone might object that what I have said here about thinking also holds good for feeling and for all other soul activities. When, for example, we feel pleasure, the feeling is also kindled by an object, and it is this object I observe, and not the feeling of pleasure. This objection, however, is based upon an error. Pleasure does not have at all the same relationship to its object has has the concept which thinking builds up. I am absolutely conscious of the fact that the concept of a thing is built up by my activity, whereas pleasure is produced in me by an object in the same way as, for instance, a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls upon it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as that is given which causes it. The same is not true of concepts. I can ask: Why does a particular event arouse in me a feeling of pleasure? But it is never possible to ask: Why does an event produce in me a certain number of concepts? That simply has no sense. When I reflect about an event there is no question of an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself by knowing the concepts which correspond to the change observed in a pane of glass when a stone is thrown against it. But I very definitely do learn something about my personality when I know the feeling which a certain event arouses in me. When I say of an observed object: This is a rose, I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing: It gives me a feeling of pleasure, I characterize not only the rose but also myself in my relation to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of comparing thinking and feeling as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown concerning other activities of the human soul. Unlike thinking, they belong in the same sphere as other observed objects and events. It is characteristic of the nature of thinking that it is an activity directed solely upon the observed object and not upon the thinking personality. This can already be seen from the way we express our thoughts, as distinct from the way we express our feelings or acts of will in relation to objects. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, generally I would not say: I am thinking of a table, but: This is a table. But I would say: I am pleased with the table. In the first instance I am not at all interested in pointing out that I have entered into any relationship with the table, whereas in the second it is just this relationship that matters. In saying: I am thinking of a table, I already enter the exceptional situation characterized above, where something is made an object of observation which is always contained within our soul's activity, only normally it is not made an object of observation.

[ 11 ] It is characteristic of thinking that the thinker forgets thinking while doing it. What occupies him is not thinking, but the object of thinking which he observes.

[ 12 ] The first thing then, that we observe about thinking is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary life of thought.

[ 13 ] The reason we do not observe thinking in our daily life of thought is because it depends upon our own activity. What I myself do not bring about, enters my field of observation as something objective. I find myself confronted by it as by something that has come about independently of me; it comes to meet me; I must take it as the presupposition of my thinking process. While I reflect on the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is turned to it. This activity is, in fact, thinking contemplation. My attention is directed not to my activity but to the object of this activity. In other words: while I think, I do not look at my thinking which I produce, but at the object of thinking which I do not produce.

[ 14 ] I am even in the same position when I let the exceptional situation come about and think about my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking, but only afterward can I make into an object of thinking the experience I have had of my thinking-process. If I wanted to observe my present thinking, I would have to split myself into two persons: one to do the thinking, the other to observe this thinking. This I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The thinking to be observed is never the one actually being produced, but another one. Whether for this purpose I observe my own earlier thinking, or follow the thinking process of another person, or else, as in the above example of the movements of the billiard balls, presuppose an imaginary thinking process, makes no difference.

[ 15 ] Two things that do not go together are actively producing something and confronting this in contemplation. This is already shown in the First Book of Moses. The latter represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only when the world is there is the possibility of contemplating it also present: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” So it is also with our thinking. It must first be present before we can observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason it is impossible for us to observe thinking when it is actually taking place, is also the reason it is possible for us to know it more directly and more intimately than any other process in the world. It is just because we ourselves bring it forth that we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in the other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly: the relevant context and the connection between the individual objects—in the case of thinking is known to us in an absolutely direct way. Off-hand, I do not know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning, but from the content of the two concepts I know immediately why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. Naturally here it does not matter whether I have correct concepts of thunder and lightning. The connection between those concepts I have is clear to me, and indeed this is the case through the concepts themselves.

[ 17 ] This transparent clarity of the process of thinking is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. I speak here of thinking insofar as it presents itself to observation of our spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I carry out a line of thought, does not come into consideration at all. What I see when I observe thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept of lightning with the concept of thunder, but I see what motivates me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation of thinking shows me that there is nothing that directs me in my connecting one thought with another, except the content of my thoughts; I am not directed by the material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than ours this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today however, when there are people who believe: When we know what matter is, we shall also know how matter thinks,—it has to be said that it is possible to speak about thinking without entering the domain of brain physiology at the same time. Today many people find it difficult to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Anyone who wants to contrast the representation of thinking I have here developed, with Cabanis ¹⁸ statement, “The brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.,” simply does not know what I am talking about. He tries to find thinking by means of a mere process of observation such as we apply to other objects that make up the content of the world. He cannot find it in this manner because as I have shown, it eludes normal observation. Whoever cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to bring about in himself the exceptional situation described above, which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious in all other spiritual activities. If a person does not have the good will to place himself in this situation, then one can no more speak to him about thinking than one can speak about color to a person who is blind. However, he must not believe that we consider physiological processes to be thinking. He cannot explain thinking because he simply does not see it.

[ 18 ] However, one possessing the ability to observe thinking,—and with goodwill every normally organized person has this ability,—this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself brings to existence; he finds himself confronted not by a foreign object, to begin with, but by his own activity. He knows how what he observes comes to be. He sees through the connections and relations. A firm point is attained from which, with well-founded hope, one can seek for the explanation of the rest of the world's phenomena.

[ 19 ] The feeling of possessing such a firm point caused the founder of modern philosophy, Renatus Cartesius,¹⁹ to base the whole of human knowledge on the principle, I think, therefore I am. All other things, all other events are present independent of me. Whether they are there as truth or illusion or dream I know not. Only one thing do I know with absolute certainty, for I myself bring it to its sure existence: my thinking. Perhaps it also has some other origin as well, perhaps it comes from God or from elsewhere, but that it is present in the sense that I myself bring it forth, of that I am certain. Cartesius had, to begin with, no justification for giving his statement any other meaning. He could maintain only that within the whole world content it is in my thinking that I grasp myself within that activity which is most essentially my own. What is meant by the attached therefore I am, has been much debated. It can have a meaning in one sense only. The simplest assertion I can make about something is that it is, that it exists. How this existence can be further defined I cannot say straight away about anything that comes to meet me. Each thing must first be studied in its relation to others before it can be determined in what sense it can be said to exist. An event that comes to meet me may be a set of perceptions, but it could also be a dream, a hallucination, and so forth. In short, I am unable to say in what sense it exists. I cannot gather this from the event in itself, but I shall learn it when I consider the event in its relation to other things. From this, however, I can, again, learn no more than how it is related to these other things. My search only reaches solid ground if I find an object which exists in a sense which I can derive from the object itself. As thinker I am such an object, for I give my existence the definite, self-dependent content of the activity of thinking. Having reached this, I can go on from here and ask: Do the other objects exist in the same or in some other sense?

[ 20 ] When thinking is made the object of observation, to the rest of the elements to be observed is added something which usually escapes attention; but the manner in which the other things are approached by man is not altered. One increases the number of observed objects, but not the number of methods of observation. While we are observing the other things, there mingles in the universal process—in which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. Something different from all other processes is present, but is not noticed. But when I observe my thinking, no such unnoticed element is present. For what now hovers in the background is, again, nothing but thinking. The observed object is qualitatively the same as the activity directed upon it. And that is another characteristic feature of thinking. When we observe it, we do not find ourselves compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the same element.

[ 21 ] When I weave an object, given independently of me, into my thinking, then I go beyond my observation, and the question is: Have I any right to do so? Why do I not simply let the object act upon me? In what way is it possible that my thinking could be related to the object? These are questions which everyone who reflects on his own thought processes must put to himself. They cease to exist when one thinks about thinking. We do not add anything foreign to thinking, and consequently do not have to justify such an addition.

[ 22 ] Schelling ²⁰ says: “To gain knowledge of nature means to create nature.” If these words of the bold nature-philosopher are taken literally, we should have to renounce forever all knowledge of nature. For after all, nature is there already, and in order to create it a second time, one must know the principles according to which it originated. From the nature already in existence one would have to learn the conditions of its existence in order to apply them to the nature one wanted to create. But this learning, which would have to precede the creating, would, however, be knowing nature, and would remain this even if, after the learning, no creation took place. Only a nature not yet in existence could be created without knowing it beforehand.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with regard to nature: creating before knowing, we achieve in the case of thinking. If we wanted to wait and not think until we had first learned to know thinking, then we would never think at all. We have to plunge straight into thinking in order to be able, afterward, to know thinking by observing what we ourselves have done. We ourselves first create an object when we observe thinking. All other objects have been created without our help.

[ 24 ] Against my sentence, We must think before we can contemplate thinking, someone might easily set another sentence as being equally valid: We cannot wait with digesting, either, until we have observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to the one made by Pascal ²¹ against Cartesius, when he maintained that one could also say: I go for a walk, therefore I am. Certainly I must resolutely get on with digesting before I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But this could only be compared with the contemplation of thinking if, after having digested, I were not to contemplate it with thinking, but were to eat and digest it. It is, after all, not without significance that whereas digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thinking can very well become the object of thinking.

[ 25 ] This, then, is beyond doubt: In thinking we are grasping a corner of the universal process, where our presence is required if anything is to come about. And, after all, this is just the point. The reason things are so enigmatical to me is that I do not participate in their creation. I simply find them there, whereas in the case of thinking I know how it is made. This is why a more basic starting point than thinking, from which to consider all else in the world, does not exist.

[ 26 ] Here I should mention another widely current error which prevails with regard to thinking. It consists in this, that it is said: Thinking, as it is in itself, we never encounter. That thinking which connects the observations we make of our experiences and weaves them into a network of concepts, is not at all the same as that thinking which later we extract from the objects we have observed and then make the object of our consideration. What we first unconsciously weave into things is something quite different from what we consciously extract from them afterward.

[ 27 ] To draw such conclusions is not to see that in this way it is impossible to escape from thinking. It is absolutely impossible to come out of thinking if one wants to consider it. When one distinguishes an unconscious thinking from a later conscious thinking, then one must not forget that this distinction is quite external and has nothing to do with thinking as such. I do not in the least alter a thing by considering it with my thinking. I can well imagine that a being with quite differently organized sense organs and with a differently functioning intelligence would have a quite different representation of a horse from mine, but I cannot imagine that my own thinking becomes something different because I observe it. What I observe is what I myself bring about. What my thinking looks like to an intelligence different from mine is not what we are speaking about now; we are speaking about what it looks like to me. In any case, the picture of my thinking in another intelligence cannot be truer than my own picture of it. Only if I were not myself the thinking being, but thinking confronted me as the activity of a being foreign to me, could I say that my picture of thinking appeared in quite a definite way, and that I could not know what in itself the thinking of the being was like.

[ 28 ] So far there is not the slightest reason to view my own thinking from a standpoint different from the one applied to other things. After all, I consider the rest of the world by means of thinking. How should I make of my thinking an exception?

[ 29 ] With this I consider that I have sufficiently justified making thinking my starting point in my approach to an understanding of the world. When Archimedes ²² had discovered the lever, he thought that with its help he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges if only he could find a point upon which he could support his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself, that was not carried by anything else. In thinking we have a principle which exists by means of itself. From this principle let us attempt to understand the world. Thinking we can understand through itself. So the question is only whether we can also understand other things through it.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thinking without considering its vehicle, man's consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object: Before there can be thinking, there must be consciousness. Therefore, one should begin, not from thinking, but from consciousness. No thinking can exist without consciousness. To them I must reply: If I want to have an explanation of what relation exists between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. In doing so I presuppose thinking. To this could be said: When the philosopher wants to understand consciousness he makes use of thinking, and to that extent presupposes it, but in the ordinary course of life thinking does arise within consciousness and, therefore, presupposes this. If this answer were given to the World Creator who wished to create thinking, it would no doubt be justified. One naturally cannot let thinking arise without first having brought about consciousness. However, the philosopher is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Therefore he has to find the starting point, not for the creation, but for the understanding of the world. I consider it most extraordinary that a philosopher should be reproached for being concerned first and foremost about the correctness of his principles, rather than turning straight to the objects he wants to understand. The World Creator had to know, above all, how to find a vehicle for thinking; the philosopher has to find a secure foundation for his understanding of what already exists. How can it help us to start from consciousness and apply thinking to it, if first we do not know whether it is possible to reach any explanation of things by means of thinking?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For in subject and object we already have concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying: Before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood. To deny this is to fail to realize that man is not a first link in creation, but the last. Therefore, for an explanation of the world by means of concepts, one cannot start from the first elements of existence, but must begin with what is nearest to us and is most intimately ours. We cannot at one bound transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our investigations there; we must start from the present moment and see whether we cannot ascend from the later to the earlier. As long as geology spoke in terms of assumed revolutions in order to explain the present condition of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it made its beginnings from the investigations of those processes at present at work on the earth, and from these drew conclusions about the past, that it gained a secure foundation. As long as philosophy assumes all sorts of principles such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will get nowhere. Only when the philosopher recognizes as his absolute first that which came as the absolute last, can he reach his goal. But this absolute last in world evolution is Thinking.

[ 32 ] There are people who say: Whether or not our thinking is right in itself cannot be established with certainty, after all. And to this extent the point of departure is still a doubtful one. It would be just as sensible to raise doubts as to whether in itself a tree is right or wrong. Thinking is a fact, and to speak of the rightness or wrongness of a fact has no sense. At most, I can have doubts as to whether thinking is being rightly applied, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies a wood suitable for making tools for a particular purpose. To show to what extent the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong, is just the task of this book. I can understand anyone doubting whether we can ascertain anything about the world by means of thinking, but it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can doubt the rightness of thinking in itself.

Addition to the Revised Edition (1918):

[ 33 ] In the preceding discussion, the significant difference between thinking and all other activities of the soul has been referred to as a fact which reveals itself to a really unprejudiced observation. Unless this unprejudiced observation is achieved, against this discussion one is tempted to raise objections such as these: When I think about a rose, then, after all, this also is only an expression of a relation of my “I” to the rose, just as when I feel the beauty of the rose. In the case of thinking, a relation between “I” and object exists in the same way as in the case of feeling or perceiving. To make this objection is to fail to realize that it is only in the activity of thinking that the “I” knows itself to be completely at one with that which is active-going into all the ramifications of the activity. In the case of no other soul activity is this completely so. When, for example, a pleasure is felt, a more sensitive observation can quite easily detect to what extent the “I” knows itself to be one with something active, and to what extent there is something passive in it so that the pleasure merely happens to the “I.” And this is the case with the other soul activities. But one should not confuse “having thought-images” with the working through of thought by means of thinking. Thought-images can arise in the soul in the same way as dreams or vague intimations. This is not thinking.—To this could be said: If this is what is meant by thinking, then the element of will is within thinking, and so we have to do not merely with thinking, but also with the will within thinking. However, this would only justify one in saying: Real thinking must always be willed. But this has nothing to do with the characterization of thinking as given in this discussion. The nature of thinking may be such that it must necessarily always be willed; the point is that everything that is willed is—while being willed—surveyed by the “I” as an activity entirely its own. Indeed it must be said that just because this is the nature of thinking, it appears to the observer as willed through and through. Anyone who really takes the trouble to understand all that has to be considered in order to reach a judgment about thinking, cannot fail to recognize that this soul activity does have the unique character we have described here.

[ 34 ] A personality highly appreciated as a thinker by the author of this book, has objected that it is impossible to speak about thinking as is done here, because what one believes one is observing as active thinking only appears to be so. In reality one is observing only the results of an unconscious activity, which is the foundation of thinking. Only because this unconscious activity is not observed does the illusion arise that the observed thinking exists through itself, just as when in an illumination made by a rapid succession of electric sparks one believes one is seeing a continuous movement. This objection, too, rests on an inaccurate examination of the facts. To make it means that one has not taken into consideration that it is the “I” itself, standing within thinking, that observes its own activity. The “I” would have to stand outside thinking to be deluded as in the case of an illumination with a rapid succession of electric sparks. Indeed one could say: To make such a comparison is to deceive oneself forcibly, like someone who, seeing a moving light, insisted that it was being freshly lit by an unknown hand at every point where it appeared.—No, whoever wants to see in thinking anything other than a surveyable activity brought about within the “I,” must first make himself blind to the plain facts that are there for the seeing, in order to be able to set up a hypothetical activity as the basis of thinking. He who does not so blind himself cannot fail to recognize that everything he “thinks into” thinking in this manner takes him away from the essence of thinking. Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing belongs to thinking's own nature that is not found in thinking itself. If one leaves the realm of thinking, one cannot come to what causes it.

• 17. See Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, Jena, 1893, p. 171 of the Ger. ed.
• 18. Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1757–1808), French physiologist. A precocious child, Cabanis was enrolled at the age of 10 in the College of Brives. Later studied in Paris, afterward traveled widely in Poland and Germany. In 1789 he was appointed administrator of hospitals for Paris, and in 1795 became professor of hygiene and history of medicine in the medical school of that city. In 1799 he was made professor of legal medicine and history of medicine. He was an intimate friend of Mirabeau, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He had a deep interest in medical and psychological problems. Active in the cause of the French Revolution, Cabanis was a member of the Council of Five Hundred. Though Napoleon Bonaparte repeatedly offered him governmental positions, Cabanis declined them, since he was a foe of the former's policies. Cabanis died at Meulan on May 5, 1808, principally honored for his contributions to medical science, and especially for his main work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, a series of papers read to the Institute in 1796–97. The sentence quoted is probably from Cabanis' book, written in 1802, translated into German, 2 vols., 1808, under the title, Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper, Relationship of the Soul to the Body. The thought has also been paraphrased: “Just as the stomach and intestines receive food and digest it, so the brain receives impressions, digests them, and has as its organic secretion, thought.”
• 19. Renatus Cartesius, Rene Descartes (1596–1650). The father of modern rationalism, soldier of fortune, scholar, pilgrim, traveler, and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic faith. His philosophical work, which has often been summed up in his words, J pense, donc je suis (Cogito ergo sum), “I think, therefore I am,” was given significant impulse by a dream he had on November 10, 1619. This revealed to him the method of philosophical speculation he was to follow, and his subsequent work is said to have stemmed from this experience. An extensive literature on Descartes and his teachings exists in English translation. See any standard encyclopedia for further details.
• 20. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Often referred to as the Proteus among philosophers, Schelling was noted for his ever-changing alertness and brightness of mind and expression. Goethe (see note 16, above) had a very high regard for him, and spoke of him as “the most congenial philosopher I know.” Schelling had a profound influence among the thinkers of his time, including philosophers of France and England. His last years were dedicated to what he termed “positive philosophy,” radically different from the philosophy of identity, the transcendental idealism, and the pantheistic tendencies of his earlier time. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Schelling in his writings and lectures, on various occasions praising that philosopher's “important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.” Steiner further spoke of Schelling, “who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared in public—the short, thick-set man, with the extremely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge.” (From a lecture given at Dornach, Switzerland, Sept. 16, 1924) Perhaps Steiner's greatest study of Schelling is to be found in his Die Rätsel der Philosophie, The Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I, Ch. 7. For English translations of Schelling and further details on his life, see any standard encyclopedia.
• 21. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Known as one of the greatest of mathematicians and physicists, Pascal's tame long ago spread far beyond the confines of his native France. His contributions to the establishment of the mathematical theory of probability, to the science of hydrodynamics, to the study of gravity and the vacuum, and his elaboration of the theory of conic sections have given Pascal a lasting place among the great men of science. As a Christian thinker, his devotion to truth and piety, and his acceptance of mystical experience have made his name revered. His philosophical speculations and deep psychological insight, as well as his remarkable gifts as a writer of French prose have secured him a leading position among philosophers and literary historians. Pascal's Pensées, Thoughts, is one of the great books of the world. For details on Pascal's very eventful and highly interesting life, as well as an account of his fundamental ideas, see any standard encyclopedia.
• 22. Archimedes (c 287–212 B.C.) Greek mathematician and inventor. He was born at Syracuse in Sicily, and studied at the famous university in Alexandria. Archimedes spent the remainder of his life at Syracuse, where he engaged in constant mathematical research. He is noted for his many mechanical inventions, but his first love was mathematics. His work as a pioneer in mechanics is illustrated by his famous remark, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth!” During the sack of Syracuse by the army of the Roman general, Marcellus, Archimedes was discovered drawing a mathematical figure in the sand beside his garden bench. Deep in meditation upon the problem before him, Archimedes was instantly killed when he was run through the body by a sword in the hand of a Roman infantryman. For details on the life of Archimedes, see Plutarch's Life of Marcellus. A complete, standard edition of the Works of Archimedes with valuable notes by T. L. Heath was issued by Cambridge University Press, 1897.

It is often difficult for a person to find his bearings within the course of world events, especially when they are considered from a higher point of view. People are so very loath to view the truth without prejudice, which often resolves certain conflicts of life only after long periods of time. They would like only too well to be guided by the reins of the cosmic powers, even though they do not admit this to themselves. It becomes especially difficult for a person to find his bearings in an unprejudiced way when he is compelled in any single incarnation to live in such a catastrophic time as the present. He likes then to ask why the gods permit such things. He does not like to ask about the necessities of life. He always has in the background a longing to have everything as comfortable as possible.

In such a time as ours, man must behold all sorts of things that are in course of preparation from chaos. Chaos is necessary for the total course of events, and he must often take up his position in the midst of the chaotic, as well as in what has been harmonized. Especially is our fifth post-Atlantean epoch such a time as causes man to pass through much that is chaotic. But this is connected with the entire characteristic, the whole nature, of this epoch. We are living at a time in which man must pass through those impelling forces in the course of evolution that set him upon his own feet and permeate him with individual consciousness. We are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul.

Now, after all that we have considered, in connection with which we have brought together a great variety of things that may be suited to make our age understandable to us, we must ask ourselves what is the most profound characteristic of the evolution of the consciousness soul in our epoch. The profoundest characteristic of this epoch is that man must become acquainted in the most profound and the most intense way with all those forces that oppose the harmonizing of humanity as a whole. For this reason a conscious knowledge of those ahrimanic and luciferic powers working against man must gradually spread. If he should not pass through these evolutionary impulses in which the luciferic and ahrimanic forces are participating, he would not arrive at the complete use of his consciousness, and thus at the development of his consciousness soul.

This integration of the consciousness soul into human nature has to be recognized as a strongly antisocial impulse. Thus we have in our epoch the peculiar fact that the manifestation of social ideals appears as a reaction against what is striving to emerge out of the innermost nature of man, a reaction against the evolution of individual consciousness. What I mean to say is that the reason we have such an outcry about the need of socializing is that the innermost nature of man, precisely in our age, is most violently opposed to this socializing. For this reason it is necessary that we should obtain a view of everything in the cosmos, in the universe, that sustains a certain relationship to man, in order that we may become aware of the relationship existing between the antisocial impulses streaming today out of the depths of human souls and the clamor for social harmonizing, working like a reaction to what streams forth from the inner nature of the human soul. It is simply necessary that we should come to see clearly that man represents in his life a state of balance between conflicting powers. Every conception characterized by the idea of mere duality—a good and an evil principle—will always fail to illuminate life. Life can be illuminated only when we represent it from the point of view of a trinity, in which one element represents a state of balance and the two others represent the opposite poles, between which the state of balance tends to move continually like a pendulum. This is the reason for the Trinity we undertake to represent in our Group¹ ; the Representative of Man balancing Ahriman and Lucifer, which is to constitute the middle point of this building.

This consciousness of a state of balance for which one strives, but that is always in danger of swinging toward the one or the other side, must become the essential element in the world conception of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. As man passes through the stage of the consciousness soul, he develops toward the spirit self. This epoch of the evolution of the consciousness soul will continue for a long time. But within reality things do not proceed in such a way that one always follows the other in a beautiful scheme. On the contrary, one is telescoped in a way into the other. While we are developing in ever stronger measure the consciousness soul, there is always waiting in the background the spirit self that will then develop during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch just as strongly as the consciousness soul during this fifth epoch. Just as strongly as the consciousness soul works antisocially in its development, will the spirit self work socially. Thus we may say that, during this epoch, man develops from the innermost impelling forces of his soul what is antisocial, but behind this something spiritually social exerts its influence. This spiritually social element that is exerting its influence in the background will appear in its essential nature when the light of the spirit self shall dawn in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. It is not surprising therefore, that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch what can enter livingly and in a well-ordered way into humanity only during the sixth epoch appears in all sorts of abstruse, extreme forms.

Man is exposed during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to the preliminary disturbing movements of what is to come during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. Everything will depend upon the acquisition of an understanding of what we must pass through during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The antisocial instincts will play a tremendous role, and they can be restrained and integrated into a true social life only in the way that I recently explained. To assist him, man shall employ the social science that is to be derived from a general spiritual science.

Behind all the many struggles, therefore, of the present time, and also of the immediate future, the social question will remain in the background because its time has not yet come. But we must repeat from all possible points of view the fact that this social formation that is demanded cannot attain to real life unless it enters into a union with two other things. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, this union will appear more or less spontaneously. During this fifth epoch, social life must be regulated through the fostering of spiritual science. Every effort to regulate social life outside the sphere of spiritual science will lead only to chaos and radicalism, bringing about unhappiness for humanity. As regards a social shaping of life, this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is dependent in preeminent degree upon the science of the spirit. Just consider what I referred to yesterday and also recently in a public lecture in Basel. Just consider that man has mastered a nature that is distributed over the whole animal kingdom. He is the conqueror of the animal nature; he bears the animal nature within him.

Naive Darwinism maintains that human morality is only the development of the social impulse among animals. The social impulses are inborn in the animal, and they become, just to the extent that they are social impulses in the animal, antisocial impulses in man. He can awaken again to a social life only when he grows above what has developed as an antisocial impulse in him out of the animal nature. This is the truth. Thus, if we wish to represent the human being schematically from this point of view, we may say that man overcomes and develops beyond animality. What is social in the animal becomes antisocial in man. But he grows into spirituality and within the spiritual he may again achieve the social for himself. At a higher stage than the one that man has reached in the epoch of the consciousness soul, where he has grown out of animality, he will gain the social element. This shines amid the chaos of this middle stage where he now is.

This must be supplemented by two other facts. When the socializing process becomes manifest as an elemental impulse as a demand within humanity, this socializing alone must always bring a curse. The socializing process can become a blessing only if it is linked with two other things that must develop during the entire course of our postAtlantean age, up to the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. This may occur only when it is linked with what may be called the free life of thought and an insight into the spiritual nature of the world lying behind the sensible nature. Socializing without a science of the spirit and without freedom of thought is an impossibility. This is simply an objective truth. But man must awaken to freedom of thought; he must make himself ripe for freedom of thought precisely during our epoch of the consciousness soul.

Why must he awake to freedom of thought?

During the course of human evolution, man has come in a certain respect to a decisive point in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Up to this fifth epoch he possessed the possibility of having the prenatal time continue its influence into the postnatal life. Let us grasp this quite clearly. Up to our epoch man has borne forces within him that are not acquired by him during the course of life but were possessed by him when, as the expression goes, he first beheld the light of the world, when he was born. These were imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. These forces that were impressed upon man during the embryonic time and that then continue to work throughout life, were possessed by man up to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Only now do we face a great crisis in the evolution of humanity through the fact that these forces can no longer be determinative; they can no longer work in such an elemental manner as hitherto. In other words, during this fifth postAtlantean epoch man will be in much greater measure exposed to the impressions of life, because forces opposing the impressions of life, which were acquired in the embryonic period before birth, are losing their sustaining power. This fact is something of enormous importance.

Only in one respect was life even prior to this time such that man could acquire something between birth and death, something that was not imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. But this was possible only because of the following facts. We explained yesterday the peculiar phenomena of sleep in relation to social life. When man is asleep, his ego and astral body are outside the physical and the etheric body. There is a different relationship between the ego and the astral body, on the one hand, and the physical and etheric bodies on the other hand during sleep from that existing in the waking state. While man is asleep, he stands in a different relationship to his physical and etheric bodies. Now, there is a certain resemblance between our sleep and our embryonic period—a resemblance, not an identity. In a certain sense, our life during the period from sleeping to waking is similar to the life that we live from conception—or actually three weeks thereafter—until birth—again similar, not identical. While we rest as an infant in the body of our mother, our life is similar to what we experience later during sleep, except that during sleep we breathe the outer air. For this reason I have to say only “similar” but not “identical.” We do not breathe the outer air when we rest in the body of the mother. We are stimulated to breathe the outer air when we are born.

Thus, in this way life during sleep is different from the embryonic life. Now hold firmly to the fact that, while the human being is sleeping, his life is in many respects similar to that of the embryonic state except that something is at work that can occur only between birth and death and not in the embryonic life. Breathing works here. The fact that man breathes the outer air causes his organism to be influenced in a certain way. But everything that influences our organism affects the totality of our life-expressions, even our psychic expression. Because we breathe, we understand the world otherwise than if we did not breathe.

Now, there was a cultural element in the evolution of humanity. We touch upon a significant mystery of human evolution when we undertake to explain this. This was the Old Testament cultural element, which was permeated in an especially profound way for its initiates by the fact that man is different, by reason of the breathing between birth and death, from the embryonic life, which is otherwise like the life of sleep. It was upon this inner knowledge of the nature of breathing that the relationship between the old Jewish initiates, the Hebrew initiates of the Old Testament, and their Jehovah God was based. The Jehovah God manifested himself, as we need only learn from the Bible, to his people. Which was the people of Jehovah? It was the people who had a peculiar relationship to this truth of breathing that I have just explained. This is the reason why precisely this people received the revelation that man became man when the breath of life was given to him.

We acquire a special understanding when this is developed on the basis of the nature of human breathing. We acquire an understanding of the life of abstract thinking, which was called in the Old Testament the life of law, an understanding of the reception of abstract thoughts. Strange as this may seem at present to materialistic thought, it is nevertheless true that the human power of creating abstractions is determined essentially by the breathing process. The fact that man can abstract, that he can conceive abstract thoughts, just as laws are abstract thoughts, is connected with his breathing process and even physiologically with his breathing process. The instrument of abstract thinking is, of course, the brain. This brain is involved in a continual rhythm synchronized with the breathing rhythm. I have already spoken here repeatedly in regard to this relationship of the brain rhythm with the breathing rhythm. I have explained to you how the brain is floating in the cerebral fluid, and how this fluid, when the air is breathed out, flows down through the spinal column and empties below into the abdominal cavity; how the fluid is pressed upward again when the air is breathed in so that a continual vibration occurs: with exhalation, a sinking of the cerebral fluid; with inhalation, an ascent of the cerebral fluid and the immersion of the brain in the cerebral fluid. The capacity of the human being to form abstractions is connected even physiologically with this rhythm of the breathing process.

A people who based things in special measure upon the breathing process was likewise the people of the abstraction process. For this reason the initiates could impart a special revelation to their people, as they perceived things in their Jehovah manner, because this revelation was completely adapted to the process of abstract thinking. This is the secret of the Old Testament revelation. Man received a wisdom that was adapted to the abstracting capacity, the capacity of abstract thinking. Jehovah wisdom is adapted to abstract thinking.

As regards this Jehovah wisdom, man is asleep in the ordinary state of consciousness. The Jehovah initiates simply received in connection with their initiation what man experiences through his breath from falling asleep until waking. Because of this fact, persons who love half-truths have often designated Jehovah as the divinity who regulates sleep. This is true also. He imparted to man that element of wisdom that he would experience if he should become as clairvoyant as the initiates became, and should experience consciously the life between falling asleep and waking. Now, this was not experienced by the ordinary consciousness in the Old Testament times, but was given to man as a revelation, so that he thus received as revelation in this Jehovah wisdom that through which they had to sleep. It was necessary to sleep through this, since otherwise the life process could not continue.

This is the essential element of the Old Testament culture. The night wisdom was revealed as Jehovah wisdom. To a certain extent—but I beg you to note that I say to a certain extent—this possibility for man was exhausted during the period when the Mystery of Golgotha drew near because this wisdom, which is in a sense the wisdom of sleep and breathing, is one-seventh of all the wisdom that man must develop in the course of his evolution. It is the wisdom of a single one of the Elohim, that is, Jehovah. The other six-sevenths could and can come to humanity only as the Christ impulse flows into mankind. We may thus say that, as Jehovah revealed himself, he revealed the wisdom of night and breathing in anticipation. The six other Elohim, constituting in their totality together with the seventh Elohim the Christ impulse, reveal all other wisdom, which comes to man between birth and death otherwise than through breathing.

Within the life of Old Testament culture man would have been entirely antisocial if Jehovah had not revealed the social element to his people in that abstract law that regulated and harmonized their life.

Now, Jehovah was able to gain complete control for himself by thrusting back the other Elohim, as I have explained to you, and dethroning them in a certain way. This caused other, lower spiritual entities to come in contact with human nature and to take possession of it. Man was exposed to these other entities, so that we have two conditions in the course of Old Testament evolution: first, the harmonizing Jehovah wisdom in what was given to the Jews as their Law, which included at the same time their social life; second, what opposed this social union, the lower entities coming close to human nature because the other Elohim were not yet given access in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. These lower entities directed their powerful attacks in an antisocial sense against the Jehovah element.

It is a peculiar fact that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the fifth decade, Jehovah ceased in a certain sense to master the opposing spirits with his influence, so that they acquired special power. Not until the course of the nineteenth century was it really necessary for the first time that the Christ impulse, which had previously been only in a preliminary stage as I have often pointed out, should really be understood. Human culture could not progress further without this impulse and it was the social element particularly that stood face to face with this important crisis. It was necessary that the Christ impulse should be understood for the future. Without an understanding of this Christ impulse, no social demand takes the direction leading to any sort of wholesome objective.

The almost twenty centuries during which Christianity has previously been disseminated were only preparatory stages for the real understanding of the Christ impulse because the Christ impulse can be understood only in the spirit. Everything happens gradually. In our critical times, when we face a crisis in regard to just those things I have called to your attention, the situation is as follows. The instinct leading toward a mere Jehovah wisdom still extends into our age as a remnant, tending toward the wisdom that depended upon what was acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only by the unconscious breathing process. The Jehovah wisdom requires a revelation in order to enter our consciousness. This sufficed up to the time when the consciousness soul had not yet evolved to a certain degree. Now, since the consciousness soul has evolved to this degree, humanity cannot get along further with Jehovah wisdom that is adapted to the breathing, but it is invariably true that an effort is made to continue to get along with something that has become insufficient according to inner necessities. Since, for the life between birth and death, what is 'connected with the breathing remains unconscious, the Jewish culture was a folk culture, not an individualized culture of humanity. It was a folk culture in which everything is related to the descent from a common tribal father. Jewish revelation is, in its essential nature, a revelation adapted to the Jewish people, because it takes account of what is acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only through an unconscious element, the breathing process.

What is the result of this fact in our critical times? The result is that those who will not become adherents of the Christ wisdom that brings into the human being the other element, acquired during the life between birth and death apart from the breathing process, wish to continue in their relationship to the Jehovah wisdom and to have humanity established only on the basis of folk cultures. The present clamor in favor of an organization consisting of individuals from mere peoples is a retarded ahrimanic demand for the establishment of such a culture, in which all the peoples represent only folk cultures, that is, Old Testament cultures. The peoples in all parts of the world are to become like the Jewish Old Testament people. This is the demand of Woodrow Wilson.

We are here touching upon a most profound mystery, which will be unveiled in the greatest variety of forms. A social element that is antisocial as regards the whole of humanity and undertakes to base the social life upon individual peoples alone is striving to come to manifestation as an ahrimanic element. The cultural impulse of the Old Testament is to be maintained in an ahrimanic form.

Thus you see things are not so simple as people suppose in thinking that it is necessary only to think out one thing or another in order to propose ideals to men. We must be able to look into reality. We must be able to say what really governs and develops its powers amid these realities. Man is faced, in fact, with the prospect of not being able any longer to base his life upon the merely unconscious or of finding it necessary to base his life upon the conscious element within life between birth and death. The unconscious depends upon the breathing process and thus inevitably upon what is connected with the breathing process, upon the blood circulation, that is, upon the line of descent, upon connections by blood, upon heredity. The culture that must come into existence cannot base the social order upon mere blood connections because these blood connections yield only one-seventh of what must be established in the culture of humanity. The other six-sevenths must be added through the Christ impulse: In the fifth epoch, one; in the sixth epoch, the second; in the seventh epoch, the third. The rest stretch out into the following periods of time. For this reason there must gradually develop in humanity what is connected with the true Christ impulse, and what is related to the mere Jehovah impulse must be superseded.

Typically, far-reaching endeavors of the Jehovah impulse will take place, for the last time, in what the proletariat understands as international socialism. In essence, this is the last stirring of the Jehovah impulse. We face the strange situation that every people will become a Jehovah people, and every people will at the same time demand the right to spread its own Jehovah cult, its own socialism, throughout the world.

These will be the two contending forces between which a balance must be found. In all that comes to manifestation as objective necessity in the course of humanity's evolution there mingles the feeling, the sentiment, of human beings who take one relation or another to the various national groups, and who work disturbingly within the objectively inevitable course of evolution. Through the Jehovah wisdom one of the seven doors to the union of humanity has been opened. A second door will be opened when it shall come to be known that what man bears with him as the physical and the etheric nature becomes ill in the course of life. Naturally, I do not refer to an acute illness, but in our fifth epoch life is identical with a gradual process of becoming ill. This has been true since the fourth epoch; it is especially true in the fifth epoch. The life process is the same thing, only gradual in its stages, as an acute illness, except that this takes a more rapid course. If, therefore, an acute illness must be cured by a specific healing process, something must enter also into human life that brings healing.

In short, the natural life of human beings, from the fifth post-Atlantean epoch on will be a sort of continual, gradual becoming ill. All influences of education and of culture must be directed to the objective of making well. In a certain way, this is the first true activation of the Christ impulse: healing. This is the special mission of Christ in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—to be the Healer, the One who heals. The other forms of the Christ impulse must remain in the background. For the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, the Christ impulse must work in the direction of seership. There the spirit self comes to development within which man cannot live without seership. In the seventh postAtlantean epoch a sort of prophetic nature will develop as the third element, since it must, indeed, pass prophetically over into an entirely new period. The other three members of the sixfold Christ Being will do their work in the following periods. Thus must the Christ impulse find its way into humanity, as the element that permeates mankind with social warmth in the course of the present and the two following cultural epochs, that is, as the healing process, the seer process and the prophetic process. This is the real living entrance of the Christ impulse. This will interpenetrate other things necessary for evolution that we have already mentioned. One door has been opened through the Jehovah wisdom, but this door became unusable in the middle of the nineteenth century. If mankind should pass through this door alone, the only result that can follow would be that all peoples would in a way develop Hebraic cultures, each in its own form. Other doors must be opened. Initiation wisdom, which will become known through a second, third, and fourth door, must be added to the wisdom that has become known through the Jehovah door. Only in this way can man grow into other connections than those that are regulated by the bonds of blood and breath.

This constitutes, in turn, the critical element of our age. It is a fact that human beings wish to preserve a regulation of the world order according to the bonds of blood, coming in an ahrimanic way out of ancient times, but that an inner necessity strives outward beyond these bonds of blood. In the future what controls the social life cannot proceed from anything having to do with kinship. On the contrary, only what the soul itself in its own free decision can experience as regulating the social order will be valid. An inner necessity will so guide men that everything that penetrates into the social order out of mere bonds of blood will be eliminated. All such things enter into manifestation at first tumultuously. In our age there must evolve spirit knowledge and freedom of thought, especially freedom of thought in the religious realm. The science of the spirit must develop for the reason that man must enter into relationship with man. But man is spirit. Man can enter into relationship with man only when the approach is from the spirit. The relationship into which men entered at earlier stages had its origin in the unconscious spirit vibrating in the blood, in accordance with Jehovah wisdom, which leads only to abstraction. That to which the men must next be led must be something grasped within the soul. The heathen peoples had their myths in pictorial form, created through atavism in ancient cultural forms. The Jewish people had its abstractions, not myths, but abstractions: the Law. This has continued its existence. This was the first elevation of the human being to the conceptual force and into the force of thought. But from humanity's present view of the matter, which is only the revival of the command, “Thou shalt make unto thyself no image,” man must revert to the capacity of the soul that can once more, and this time consciously, form images. It is only in images, in imaginations, that the social life also can be rightly established in the future. The social life could be regulated only as regards a single people in abstractions, and the regulation for a people in social relationships was that of the Old Testament. The next form of regulation of the social life will depend upon the capacity to exercise in a conscious way the same force that once existed atavistically, in unconscious or half-conscious form, in man's myth building capacity. Men would be completely filled with antisocial instincts if they should endeavor to continue disseminating mere abstract laws. They must come again by way of their world conception, to the pictorial. Out of this conscious myth creation there will arise also the possibility for the development of the social element in the intercourse of man with man.

You may look at such a sculptural form as that of our Group: the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. There you confront for the first time what is working in the whole human being, because man is the state of balance between the luciferic and the ahrimanic. If you permeate yourself in actual life with the impulse to confront every person in such a way that you correctly see this trinity in him, then do you begin to understand him. This is an essential capacity, bearing within itself the impulse to evolve in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Thus we shall no longer pass by one another as one specter passes another, so that we form no picture of each other but merely define the other person with our abstract concepts. The truth is that we do nothing more at the present time We pass by each other as if we were specters. One specter forms the conception, “That is a nice fellow,” and the other, “That is not such a nice fellow” ... “That is a bad man” . . . “That is a good man,”—all sorts of such abstract concepts. In the intercourse of man with man we have nothing but a bundle of abstract concepts. This is the essential thing that has entered into humanity out of the Old Testament form of life: “Make unto thyself no image.” It must inevitably lead to an antisocial life if we should continue it further. What is flowing out from the innermost nature of man, striving toward realization, is that, when one individual confronts another, a picture shall stream forth in a certain way from the other person, a picture of that special form of balance manifested individually by everyone. But this requires, of course, the heightened interest that I have often described to you as the foundation of social life, which each person should take in the other person. At present we have not yet any intense interest in another person. It is for this reason that we criticize him, that we pass judgment upon him, that we form our judgments according to sympathies and antipathies and not according to the objective picture that leaps to meet us from the other.

This capacity to be mystically stimulated in a certain way as we confront another person will come to realization. It will enter as a special social impulse into human life. On the one hand, the consciousness soul is striving to come in an antisocial way to complete domination in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand, something else is striving outward from the nature of man, that is, a capacity to form pictures of the human beings with whom we live. It is here that the social impulses arise, the social instincts. The simple fact is that these things lie at a far greater depth than is ordinarily supposed when people talk about the social and the antisocial.

Now the question may arise in your minds as to how we shall gradually attain to the capacity of causing the picture of the other person to leap to meet us. It is in life that we must gain this capacity. Jehovah capacities are given to us at birth; we evolve them in the embryonic life. The culture of the future will not make things so comfortable for people. The capacities a person must manifest will have to be developed during the course of his life. Far more concrete and definite principles must enter into education than those that are now being brought into dominance in such an utterly confused manner in today's pedagogy. It is most important of all that the instinct shall be implanted in people to look back more frequently during this life, but in the right way. What people develop at present as memories of earlier experience is marked as yet for the most part by a selfish character. If a person looks back in a more unselfish way to what he has experienced in childhood, youth, etc.—according to the age he has reached—there emerges as if out of the gray depths of the spirit various persons who have had something to do with his life in all sorts of relationships.

Look back into your life and pay less attention to what interests you in your own respectable person and much more to those figures that have come into contact with you, educating you, befriending you, assisting you, perhaps also injuring you—often injuring you in a helpful way. One thing will then become evident to you and that is how little reason a person really has to ascribe to himself what he has become. Often something important in us is due to the fact that one person or another came into contact with us at a certain age, and—perhaps, without knowing it himself, or perhaps, being fully aware of the fact—drew our attention to something or other. In a comprehensive sense, a really unselfishly conducted survey of our lives is made up of all sorts of things that do not give us occasion to immerse ourselves selfishly in our own being, to brood over ourselves egotistically, but lead us to broaden our views to include those figures who came into contact with us. Let us immerse ourselves with real love in what has come into our life. We shall often discover that what evoked an antipathy in us at a certain period is no longer so disagreeable to us when a sufficient length of time has passed because we begin to see an inner connection. The fact that we had to be affected in an unpleasant way at a certain time by one person or another might have been useful to us. We often gain more from the harm that a person does to us than from the furtherance afforded us by another. It would be advantageous to a person if he more frequently exercised such a survey of his life, and should permeate his life with the convictions flowing from his self observation. “How little occasion I really have to occupy myself with myself! How immeasurably richer my life becomes when I look back to all those who have entered my life!” In this way we free ourselves from ourselves when we carry out such an unselfish survey. We then escape from that terrible evil of our times, to which so many fall victims, of brooding over ourselves. It is so extremely necessary that we should free ourselves from this brooding over ourselves. Anyone who has once felt the power of such self-observation as I have just described will find himself far too uninteresting to spend much time brooding over his own life. Unlimited illumination is cast over this life of ours when we see it irradiated with what enters into it from the gray depths of the spirit.

But this has such a germinating power over us that we really acquire the imaginative forces necessary to confront the contemporary human being in such a way that in him the thing is manifest that appears to us only after many years in our backward survey of those figures with whom we have lived together. We thus acquire such a capacity that pictures actually come to meet us from the individuals we confront.
The cultivation of the social life, which in earlier times had its source only in the bonds of blood, does not depend so much upon any sort of socialistic programs, but upon man's becoming a spiritual-social being. He will become such a being by awakening within himself, in the manner I have described, the deeper forces that can bring to birth within him the capacity for conceiving pictorially the other human being. Otherwise, we shall always remain antisocial beings, capable of approaching others only according to our sympathies and antipathies, incapable of approaching them according to the picture that may stream forth from each person if we only develop the picture-forming forces in our intercourse with them. Precisely in the social life of humanity must the principle come into existence, “Thou shalt make for thyself an image of thy fellow man.” Then, when we form a picture of our fellow man, we enrich our own soul life; then do we bestow a treasure upon our own inner soul life with each human acquaintanceship. Then we no longer so live that A lives there, B there, C there, but A, B and C live in D; A, B and D live in C; C, D and E live in A; etc. We gain the capacity to have other human beings live in us.

But this must be acquired; it is not born in us. If we should continue simply to cultivate those characteristics that are born in us, we should continue within the limits of a mere blood culture, not the culture to which could be ascribed in the true sense of the word human brotherhood. Only when we carry the other human being within us can we really speak of human brotherhood, which has appeared thus far only in an abstract word. When we form a picture of the other person, which is implanted as a treasure in our souls, then we carry within the realm of our soul life something from him just as in the case of a bodily brother we carry around something through the common blood. This elective affinity as the basis of social life must take the place in this concrete way of the mere blood affinity. This is something that really must evolve. It must depend upon the human will to determine how brotherhood shall be awakened among men.

Human beings have hitherto been separated. They ought to become socialized in brotherhood. In order that the manifoldness shall not be lost, the innermost element in man, thought, must be able to take form individually in every single person. With Jehovah the whole folk stood in a relationship. With Christ each individual person must stand in relationship. But the fact that brotherhood will thus awaken requires that there shall be a compensation in an entirely different field, that is, through freedom of thought.

• 1. Three figures in heroic size carved in wood by Rudolf Steiner.

Bearing in mind what we sought to study yesterday, let us consider how matters actually stand in regard to what we call man's Saturn evolution.

If we remember the course of yesterday's lecture,¹ we know that there is concealed within us, within our human being, something that was first implanted in us during the Saturn period, namely, the first rudiments of our physical bodily nature. What we have acquired from the ancient Saturn evolution can be met with nowhere today in the external world. In primeval ages the Saturn evolution arose and again passed away; it possessed characteristics, forces, which seek in vain if we look around us today. For even if we look out to the stars in cosmic space we do not at first find what prevailed within the old Saturn evolution.

After this ancient Saturn evolution had died away, there came as you know, the Sun evolution and then the Moon evolution and today we are living in the Earth evolution. Three evolutionary periods have gone by. And all that formed their peculiar characteristics has passed away with them and is no more to be found in our field of vision. We can only find the characteristics of the Saturn evolution among the hidden occult activities which pulsate through the world. We can still, as it were, uncover the forces which at that time worked upon our physical body.

If you recollect what was shown in my book Outline of Occult Science you are aware that there was an active co-operation at that time between the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Personality. This co-operation still exists today though it cannot be discerned externally. We find it if we look into what we call our personal karma. Please note, my dear friends, that our personal karma is woven in such a way that what befalls us in successive earth lives is connected as cause and effect. The forces active in our personal stream of destiny cannot be investigated by the official Natural Scientist. He will find nothing among the forces disclosed in the field of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Physiology etc., which calls forth the connection of cause and effect that comes to expression in our personal karma. The laws prevailing there are withdrawn from physical observation as well as from the historical observation pursued today by the so-called cultural-scientist of a materialistic colouring. The modern investigation of historical evolution, the history which is written nowadays of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, up to our own time, contains laws which have nothing to do with the forces active in our karma. Thus the historian, the modern materialistic scientist studying civilization does not discover the laws dependent on man's personal karma.

History is looked upon as a continuous stream and no one considers to what extent historical evolution depends on the fact that human souls, for instance, who were personalities in ancient Roman times are present again today. The fact that they participate in current events and that the way in which they do so flows out of their personal karma finds no place in modern materialistically coloured history.

If we seek therefore for forces having something of the nature-forces of old Saturn we have to go to the law of our personal karma. Only when we learn to read what is in the surrounding cosmos and not merely to observe it, do we gain an insight into how the laws of ancient Saturn are still in a certain way active.

If we turn our attention to the ordering and out-streaming of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac as a cosmic script, and consider what radiating forces pour into human life from Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., we are then thinking in the sense of forces which were Saturn forces. And if we try to bring personal karma into connection with the constellations which relate to the zodiacal signs, we are then living approximately in the sphere of that world-conception which must be employed for the laws of the ancient Saturn epoch.

Thus nothing visible has remained, nothing that may be perceived, and yet there is still remaining an invisible element which may be interpreted out of the signs of the cosmos. Anyone who thought that Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., made his destiny would be living under the same delusion as a man who had been sentenced by a certain legal passage and then conceived a special hatred of this paragraph in the law and believed that it had sent him to gaol. Just as little as a legal paragraph printed on the white page can sentence a man, can Aries, Taurus, or Gemini, bring about destiny. Yet one can read from the star-script the connection between the cosmos and human destiny. And thus we can say that what follows from the star script is a remainder of the ancient Saturn evolution, is indeed the ancient Saturn evolution become entirely spiritual, but leaving its signs behind in the star-script of the cosmos.

When we proceed from the Old Saturn evolution to the Moon evolution we must be clear that at first there is nothing so directly (I said; at first, so directly) in our surrounding field of vision; external nature contains in the first place in the main no forces which resemble those of the Old Moon evolution. These forces of the Old Moon have also drawn back into concealment, but they have not yet become spiritual to the same degree as the Old Saturn laws. The Saturn laws have become so spiritual that we can only investigate them in the laws of our personal destiny, that is to say, quite outside space and time. When we observe human life as a whole we still find today these ancient Saturn laws, still find what cannot be seen when we confront a man in the physical world.

We have said that in meeting man in the physical world, we have the physical body as coming from the Old Saturn evolution, the etheric from the Old Sun evolution; the astral body from the Old Moon, and the Ego. And when we look at man externally and observe his form it is solely this embodiment of the ego which is not a relic from other periods of evolution. It is the laws of Earth which prevail and are active when the ego fashions man for itself and embodies itself. The laws of the Moon evolution, the laws of the astral body have already withdrawn and are no longer outwardly active. Now if we encounter a man we shall say: “You, O Man, as you confront me as material man are an embodiment of the Ego. But deep in the background of your being lies your invisible personal destiny.” How this invisible human destiny is determined comes under the rule of ancient Saturn laws. There we are already appealing to something entirely spiritual when, from the earthly laws of the embodiment of the Ego, we look towards the ancient Saturn laws. If, however, we look from what stands before us in the human being towards what still prevails in him from the Old Moon laws we find something not so spiritual. But this too has withdrawn from the external activity of the world, this too is not directly under the active forces of Earth-existence.

Where then must we seek for what has remained behind from the ancient Moon activity? We must we seek it protected and embedded, veiled from Earthly existence. For it is active in the period before man enters Earth existence through his physical birth, it is active before the external physical ray of light can penetrate his eye, it is active before he can first draw breath. It is active from the conception to birth, active in the embryonic life. I beg you expressly to notice, however, it is not active in that which develops from the ovum to the external physical human being; in what grows from the ovum, becoming greater and greater through continuous division, the forces of the Earth are working. But it is active in what exists only in the mother and dies away during the embryonic development, in what is lost with the birth and perishes. In all that envelops the earthly human being and cares for its nourishment before it is born, in all that ensheaths the growing human being and then falls away from it—in that rule the ancient Moon laws. And with this we have something that goes beyond the single human life, that forms a connection between the individual man and his ancestors and is included in the concept of heredity.

Thus we see something that existed during the Old Moon evolution still playing an active part, though not in the external world. In the outer world it acts only, so to say, as a dying away in human development, as something that is overcome as soon as the human being draws the first active breath for earthly life.

If one would study the laws of the Old Moon existence—or at any rate a part of them—purely physiologically and not clairvoyantly, the only way to do so today would be to study the laws at work in the sheaths surrounding the human embryo before it draws the first breath, enfolding it and nourishing it. What is there enclosed in the mother's body, what can only thrive during earthly evolution within the protecting sheath of the maternal body was the whole nature during the Old Moon evolution; it filled the whole field of vision.

Thus there die not only beings in so far as they have a sheath-nature, but whole types of natural laws, and exist in succeeding ages solely as last remains. Now you will have to ask the question: How does it stand with what is derived from the Sun?

Let us look at yesterday's diagram. We have seen that through all complications that appear here, we have to do with the complete human being, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego,—etheric body, astral body, ego,—astral body, ego, and with the ego itself.

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All that is above the dividing line is really the hidden part of human nature. If we wish to study the laws underlying the foundation of the physical body we must look to super-sensible laws determining man's destiny. If we look towards that which rules in the astral body and finds its embodiment in the physical body, we have something that is not so spiritual, so super-sensible, but something that melts from the sense-perceptible into the super-sensible. For the part that falls away from the human embryo becomes so to say more and more atomistic. The nearer the human being approaches birth the more it dissolves materially and becomes increasingly spiritual. For that which is attached to the human being as astral body and etheric body has originated through the spiritualising of those parts of the embryonic sheaths which fall away.

The question could now arise: how does it stand with regard to the Sun part? Can we find the Sun portion somewhere in the world? This too withdraws from sense perception. Whereas what we call karma, personal destiny, or, one might say, the Saturn part of man, lies in lofty spiritual regions, we have seen that we need not ascend so high in the case of the Moon part, for we found it still ensheathed in the sensible. Nor in the case of the Sun part need we ascend so high as for the Saturn part. One can still apprehend it but it is not easily recognised.

I should like to give you an example of something where you can still recognise the Sun-part that is active, although attention can only be directed to it in a veiled way. Those of you who have acquainted yourselves with the new edition of my book, Riddles of Philosophy in Outline will have found that four periods in the development of Philosophy are distinguished. I have called the first period “The World-conceptions of the Greek Thinkers”. This lasted from 800 B.C.—in round numbers—or 600 B.C. to the birth of Christ, i.e. into the age of the origin of Christianity. A second period lasted from the rise of Christianity to about 800 – 900 A.D. up to the time of John Scotus Erigena. Then came a third period which I have called “the World-conception of the Middle Ages”, and which lasted from 800, 900 A.D. to 1600 A.D. And then there is the forth period up to our own time; we are just in this period. Eight-hundred year periods have been assigned to the history of philosophy, presented in such a way as was possible in a book meant for a public still quite unacquainted with Spiritual Science.

The intention was to give everything that could stimulate the mind and let the spiritual structure of these periods work upon one. The characteristic of the first period consists in the fact that a transition is found from a very remarkable ancient thinking to what one can call the life of thought in ancient Greece. Our age has not made much progress in the understanding of such differences, the difference, for instance, between the thought life of our own time and that of ancient Greece. Our clumsy thinking believes that thought lived in an ancient Greek head just as it lives today in the head of modern man. Thought lived in Socrates, Plato, even in Aristotle quite differently from how it lives in present-day mankind; this present thought-life first awoke in the 7th, 6th century B.C. Before that there was no actual life of thought. As my book sets out, one can speak of a beginning, of a birth of thought-life in this age of ancient Greece.

People have conceived that most curious ideas about the great philosophical figures of Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, etc. It has been pointed out, for instance, that Thales believed that the world originated out of water, Anaxagoras out of air, Heraclitus from fire. I have shown how these ancient philosophers formed their philosophies from the human temperament. They were not based on speculation, but Thales established water as the original ground of things because he was of a watery temperament; Heraclitus founded the fire-philosophy because he was of a fiery temperament and so on. You find that shown in detail in my book.

Then comes the actual thought-life. And in the epoch described here the thought-life is still essentially different from that of modern times. The Greek thinker does not draw up thoughts from the depths of his soul, but thought is revealed to him just as external sound or colour is revealed to modern man. The Greek perceives the thought; he perceives it from outside and when we speak of Greek philosophy we must not speak of such a mode of thinking as is normal today, but of thought-perception. Thus in the first period we are concerned with thought-perception. Plato and Aristotle did not think in the way the modern philosopher thinks, they thought as today we see, perceive. They looked out into the world, as it were, and perceived the thoughts which they expound to us in their philosophies just as much as one perceives a symphony. They are thought-perceivers. The world reveals to them a thought-work; that is the essential character of the Greek thinker. And this perception of the thought-work of the world was brought to the highest pitch of perfection by the Greek thinker.

If the philosophers of today believe that they understand what Plato and Aristotle perceived as a universal symphony of thoughts, that is only due to a childish stage of the modern philosopher. The modern philosophers have a long way to go before they can fully grasp what Aristotle represents as Entelechy, what he gives as the members of the human soul nature—Aesthetikon, Orektikon, Kinetikon etc. The inner activity of thinking, where one draws the thoughts out of oneself, where one must make subjective efforts in order to think, did not as yet exist in Greece. It is completely foolish to believe that Plato thought he perceived thoughts. To believe that Aristotle already thought in the modern sense, is nonsense ... he perceived thoughts.

Modern man can hardly imagine what that is, for he makes no concepts of actual evolution. He gets slight goose-flesh if one tells him that Plato and Aristotle did not think at all in the modern sense, and yet it is a fact. In order that thinking in the modern sense might take root in the modern human soul, an impulse had to come that seized its inmost part, an impulse that has nothing to do with the thought-symphony in the surrounding world but which grips man's inmost being. This impulse came from Christ and hence this period of philosophy lasts up to the time of Christ.

In the second period we are concerned with a thinking that is still not man's own individual thought, but is stimulated by the impulse coming from the external world. If you go through all the systems of thought of the philosophers of the second period up to the time of Scotus Erigena you will find everywhere how the Christ-Impulse rules in them. It is what has flowed out of Christ himself, one might say, that gives man the first stimulus to create thoughts from within outwards. This gave the stamp, the physiognomy of the patristic philosophy of the Church Fathers, the philosophy of Augustine and others up to Scotus Erigena. We can therefore say that we no longer have thought-perception, but thought-inspiration stimulated by the spirit.

It was different again in the third period when the inner impulse proceeding from Christianity began to be seized by men themselves. In this third period man begins to be conscious that it is he who thinks. Plato and Aristotle did not think, but they could as little doubt that thought has a fully objective validity as a man seeing green on a tree can doubt that it has a fully objective validity.

In the second period it was the intense belief in the Christ Impulse that gave certainty to the awakening thought. But then began the period when the human soul began to say: “Yes, it is actually you yourself who thinks, the thoughts rise up out of you.” The Christ-Impulse gradually faded and man became aware that the thoughts arose out of himself. It began to occur to him that perhaps he framed thoughts that had nothing at all to do with what is outside. Was it possible that the objective external world had nothing to do with his thoughts?

Think of the great difference between this and the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle: Plato and Aristotle perceived thoughts and therefore they could not doubt that the thoughts were outside. Now, in the third period men became aware: ‘One creates thoughts oneself ... well, then, what have thoughts to do with objective existence outside?’ And so the need arose to give certainty to thinking,—to prove thinking as was said. Only in this period could it occur to Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, to create validity for the idea of God;—for one did not see thoughts as perception. In the former Greek thinking that would have been a complete nonsense, because at that time thoughts were perceived. How can one doubt that God exists when thoughts of the Godhead are as clearly to be seen outside as the greenness of the tree? Doubt first began in the third period when men became aware that they themselves produced the thoughts. The need arose to establish the connection of that which one thinks with that which is outside. In essentials this is the epoch of scholasticism—the becoming aware of the subjectivity of thinking.

When you consider the whole thought-structure of Thomas Aquinas it stands entirely under the aegis of this epoch. The consciousness is present throughout; concepts are created within, concepts are linked together in the same way as the laws of subjectivity. Thus a support must be found for the idea that what is created inwardly also exists outside. There is still at first an appeal to traditional dogmatism, but there is no longer the same attachment to the Christ-Impulse as in the second period of philosophical development.

Then comes the fourth evolutionary period; the independent rule of thought from the external thought-perception, the independent creation of thought from within: free creation of thought, that free creation that comes to light so magnificently in the thought-structures of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Decartes, and their successors, Leibniz etc. If we follow up these edifices of thought we observe that they are produced entirely out of the inner being. And everywhere we find that these thinkers had an intense desire to prove that what they created in themselves had also real validity externally. Spinoza creates a wonderful ideal-edifice. But the question arises: Now is that all merely created within, in the human spirit, or has it a significance in the world outside? Giordano Bruno, and Leibniz create the monad which is supposed to be a reality. How does something thought out by man as monad exist at the same time as a reality in the outer world? All the questions which have arisen since the 16th, 17th century are concerned with the endeavour to bring free thought-creation into harmony with external world existence. Man feels isolated, abandoned by the world in his free thought creation. We are still standing in the midst of this.

But now what is this whole diagram?

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If we go back to the perception of thoughts which prevailed in the time of the old Greek philosophers then we must say: Philosophic thought in ancient Greece—in spite of the fact that it was the age of the intellectual or mind-soul in ancient Greece—was still a perceptive thinking, was still deeply influenced by the sentient soul, in fact by the sentient, the astral, body. It still clung to the external. The thinking of Thales, of the first philosopher was still influenced by the etheric body. They created their Water—Air—Fire—Philosophies out of their temperament, and the temperament lives in the etheric body. One can therefore say that the philosophy of the sentient body goes into the philosophy of the etheric body. Then we come into the Christian period. The Christ- Impulse penetrates into the sentient soul. Philosophy is experienced inwardly but in connection with what one can feel and believe; the influences of the sentient soul are present. In the third period, that of scholasticism, the intellectual or mind-soul is the essential element of philosophical development. Now the development of philosophy follows a different course from that of human evolution in general. And for the first time since the 16th century we now have philosophy coinciding with the general evolution of mankind, for we have the free thoughts ruling in the consciousness soul.—Consciousness soul! The magnificent example of how free thought prevails from the abstraction of existence up to the highest spirituality, how a thought-organism, leaving aside the world entirely, rules purely in itself, that is the philosophy of Hegel—the thought that lives solely in the consciousness.

If you follow this scheme it is actually the part that I could not show in my book for the public, though it lies in it. And if you read the descriptions given of the separate epochs you will, if you are proper Anthroposophists, very clearly connect them with what I have written here (see diagram). There is thus a development corresponding to that of man himself: from the etheric body to the sentient body, to the sentient soul, to the intellectual soul, to the consciousness soul. We follow a path like the path of man's evolution, but differently regulated. It is not the path of human evolution, it is different. Beings are evolving and they make use of human forces in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul etc. Through man and his works pass other beings with other laws than those of human development.

You see—these are activities of the Sun-laws!

Here we need not ascend to such super-sensible regions as when we investigate human destiny. It is in the philosophical development of mankind that we have an example of what remains from the Sun-laws.

We had yesterday to write here Angeloi as corresponding to the etheric body (see diagram).

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Such Angeloi evolve. And while men believe that they themselves philosophise, Sun-laws work in them—inasmuch as men bear within them what the Sun-evolution laid down in their physical and etheric bodies. And the laws of the Sun-existence, working from epoch to epoch, cause philosophy to become precisely what it is. Because they are Sun-laws, the Christ, the Being of the Sun, could also enter them during the second period. Preparation is made in the first period and then the Christ, the Sun-Being, becomes active in the second period.

You see how everything is linked together. But inasmuch as the Christ, the Sun-Being, enters in, he comes into connection with an evolution which is not the human evolution, not man's earthly evolution, but actually Sun-evolution within Earth existence.

Sun-evolution within Earth existence! Just think what we have actually reached in these reflections. We are considering the course of philosophical development, philosophical thought since the time of ancient Greece, and when we consider how this has evolved from philosopher to philosopher we say to ourselves: there are active within not earthly laws, but Sun laws! The laws which at that time held sway between the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels come to light again on earth in the philosophical search for wisdom. Read in the book Occult Science how the Spirits of Wisdom enter during the Sun-evolution. Now during earthly evolution they enter again not into what is new but into what has remained from the Sun-evolution. And man develops his philosophy not knowing that in this development the Spirits of Wisdom are pulsing through his soul. The Old Sun existence lives in the evolution of philosophy; it really and truly lives within something that has stayed behind, something that is connected with the Old Sun-evolution.

Human beings, passing from generation to generation, evolve as external personalities in earthly evolution. But an evolution of philosophy goes through it from Thales up to our present time; the Sun-evolution lies within it. This gives opportunity for beings who have stayed behind to make use of the forces of philosophical evolution in order to carry on their ancient Sun existence; beings who remained behind during the Sun-evolution, who neglected at that time to go through the development that one can pass through in one's etheric body, sentient body, and sentient soul—in cooperation with Spirits of Wisdom and Archangeloi. These Spirits that missed their evolution during the Sun time can use man's philosophical evolution in order to be parasites within human evolution. They are Ahrimanic spirits!

Ahrimanic spirits yield to the enticement of creeping parasitically into what men strive for in philosophy and so of furthering their own existence. Men can thus evolve philosophically but at the same time they are exposed to Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean spirits.

You know that Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful spirits as long as one is not aware of them, as long as they work in secret. As long as they do not emerge and let men face them eye to eye spiritually Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful in one or another way. Let us suppose that a philosopher appears who develops thought of such a nature that one can grasp it in merely earth existence. He develops thoughts that can live through the instrument of earthly reasoning. That is Hegelian thought! It is pure thought, but only such as can be grasped with the instrument of the physical body and this as we know ends at death.

Hegel has achieved thought that is the deepest which can be thought in earthly life—but which must lose its configuration with death. Hegel's tragedy lies in the fact that he did not realise he grasped the spirit in logic, in nature, in soul-life, but only the spirit that exists in the form of thought and does not accompany us when we go through death. To have put this clearly before his mind he would have had to say: If I could believe that what goes through thought, that is to say what I think about abstract being by means of logic, thoughts of nature, thoughts of the soul and up to philosophy—if I could believe that this leads me behind the scenes of existence than I should be deceived by Mephistopheles!

This was realised by another: Goethe realised it and represented it in his Faust as the conflict of the thinker with Mephistopheles, with Ahriman. And in this fourth period of the evolution of philosophy we see how Ahriman presses into the Sun-evolution and how one has to face him consciously, really recognising and comprehending his nature.

Hence today we are also standing at a turning point of the philosophical thought of the outer world. In order to avoid falling prey to the allurements of Ahriman and becoming mephistophelean wisdom, philosophy must get behind this wisdom, must understand what it is, must flow into the stream of Spiritual Science.

Read the two chapters preceding the last one in the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy. You will see that I tried to present the world concepts prevailing in the world, the philosophical concepts of the world, in order then in a concluding chapter to add A brief view of an Anthroposophy. There you will see how philosophy today in the free emancipated life of thought represents something which, to be sure, rises into the consciousness soul, but how this life, through the consciousness soul, must lay hold of what comes from Spirit itself, philosophically at first, otherwise philosophy must fall into decadence and die.

Thus you see at least one example of the working of the Sun-evolution in human earthly life. I said that one could encounter these sun-laws if one studied the course of philosophical evolution, though one does not always recognise that it is sun-law which is active in it. This must be recognised by Spiritual Science. Just reflect that in reality a Being is evolving which little by little acquires the same members as man himself.

If one were to go still farther back into ancient times one would find that not alone the etheric, but the physical body too gave rise to the forming of world concepts. It is difficult to give clear characteristics of the age that goes back beyond the 12th – 14th centuries B.C.; it lies before Homer, before historical times. But then something was evolving which is not man as man lives upon the earth.

Something lives in history which passes through the etheric body, the sentient body etc., a real, actual Being. I said in my book that in the Grecian era thought was born. But in modern times it comes to actual self-consciousness in the consciousness soul: thought is an independent active Being. This could not of course be said in an exoteric book intended for the public. The anthroposophist will find it however if he reads the book and notes what was the prevailing trend of its presentation. It is not brought into it, but results of itself out of the very subject matter.

You see from this that very many impulses of transformation as regards the spiritual life are coming forward in our time. For here we see something evolving that is like a human being except that it has a longer duration of life than an individual man. The individual man lives on the physical plane: for seven years he develops the physical body, for seven years the etheric body, for seven years the sentient body etc. The Being which evolves as philosophy (we call it by the abstract name ‘philosophy’) lives for 700 years in the etheric body, 700 – 800 years in the sentient body (the time is only approximate), 700 – 800 years in the sentient soul, 700 – 800 years in the intellectual or mind-soul and again 700 – 800 years in the consciousness soul. A Being evolves upwards of whom we can say: if we look at the very first beginnings of Grecian philosophy this Being has then just reached the stage of development which corresponds in mankind to puberty; as Being it is like man when he has reached the 14th – 16th year. Then it lives upwards to the time when a human being experiences the events between the 14th and 21st year; that is the age of Greek philosophy, Greek thought. Then comes the next 7 years, what man experiences from the age of 21 to 28; the Christ Impulse enters the development of philosophy. Then comes the period from Scotus Erigena up to the new age. This Being develops in the following 700 – 800 years what man develops between the ages of 28 and 35 years. And now we are living in the development of what man experiences in his consciousness soul: we are experiencing the consciousness soul of philosophy, of philosophical thought.

Philosophy has actually come to the forties, only it is a Being that has much longer duration of life. One year in a man's life corresponds to a hundred years in the life of the Being of philosophy. So we see a Being passing through history for whom a century is a year; evolving in accordance with Sun-laws though one is not aware of it.

And then only there lies further back another Being still more super-sensible than the Being that evolves as humanity except that a year is as long as a century. This Being that stands behind evolves in such a way that its external expression is our personal destiny, how we bear this through still longer periods, from incarnation to incarnation. Here stand the Spirits regulating our outer destiny and their life is of still longer duration than the life of those for whom we must say that a century corresponds to a year.

So you see, it is as if we look there into differing ranges of Beings, and how, if we wished, we might even write the biography of a Being who stands spiritually as much higher than man as a 100 years is longer than a year.

An attempt has been made to write the biography of a such a Being as had its puberty at the time of Thales and Anaxagoras, and has now reached the stage of its self-consciousness and since the 16th century has entered, so to say, into its ‘forties’. The biography of this Being has furnished a ‘History of Philosophy’.³

From this you see, however, how Spiritual Science gives vitality to what is otherwise abstract, and really animates it. What dry wood for instance, is the usual ‘History of Philosophy’! And what it can become when one knows that it is the biography of a Being which is interwoven in our existence, but evolves by Sun-laws instead of Earth-laws!

It was my wish to add these thoughts to what we have been considering lately about the life-forces which arise in us when we look at Spiritual Science not as a theory but seek it in the guidance to living. And it is just through Spiritual Science that we find the living. What is so unalive, so dry, and withered as the history of philosophy comes to meet us out of the mist as though we looked up to it as a Goddess who descends from divine cloud-heights, whom we see young in ancient times, whom we see grow even if with the slowness where a century corresponds to a year of human life. Yet all this becomes living—the sun rises for us like the Sun within Earth existence itself. For just as the sun rises on the physical plane, so do we see the ancient Sun still radiate into the earthly world in a Being that has a longer lifetime than man. As we follow man's development on the physical plane from birth to death so we follow the development of philosophy by seeing a Being within it. When in this way we look at what Anthroposophy can be to us we reach the point of seeing in it not only a guide to knowledge but a guide to living Beings who surround us even though we are unaware of them.

Yes, my dear friends, something of this was only felt by Christian Morgenstern. And by feeling this, feeling it in the deepest part of his soul, our friend Christian Morgenstern could put into writing a beautiful sentiment, a true anthroposophical sentiment which shows how a soul can express itself which in its inmost being knows itself to be one with our Anthroposophy—not merely as with something giving us various facts of knowledge—but as something that gives us life. In the wonderful poem Lucifer by Christian Morgenstern we have a wonderful example of this. The feeling of this poem lives entirely in the inspiration of which ones feels a breath when, as we have tried to show today, one finds the transition from the presentation of the idea in Anthroposophy to the grasping of living beings.

Lucifer

“I'll keep my light from light of your excluded,
I want you not, your light shall be precluded,
Until my light's my own and separated.

So do I bring the Evil to expression
As Spirit of negation, self-possession,
Yet is new world by ranks of mine created.

By off'ing to un-erring Beings resistance,
A race of err-ant gods has found existence
Who act on their—and not your—discretion.

Who have not walked in Truth from the beginning
Who only reach the Truth through suffering, sinning,
Who only read the truth through sin's transgression.”

Luzifer

“Ich will mein Licht vor eurem Licht verschliessen,
ich will euch nicht, ihr sollt mich nicht geniessen,
bevor ich nicht ein Eigenlicht geworden.

So bring ich wohl das Bose zur Erscheinung
Als Geist der Sonderheit und der Verneinung,
Doch neue Welt erschafft mein Geisterorden.

Aus Widerspruch zum unbeirrten Wesen,
Aus Irr-tum soll ein Gotterstamm genesen,
Der sich aus sich—und nicht aus euch—entscheidet

Der nicht vom Anbeginn in Warheit wandelt,
Der sich die Wahrheit leidend erst erhandelt,
Der sich dies Wahrheit handelnd erst erleidet.”

Christian Morgenstern

If the feeling in this poem leads you to reflect how alive something can becomes that is understood theoretically in Anthroposophy, so that, as it were, one can grasp the Beings who approach us out of the dark abyss of existence, if you take this poem, stimulated by feelings I wished to arouse through today's lecture, then you will see that this figure of Lucifer is really perceived, fashioned in a wonderful way. It is a model example of how what is brought to us by Anthroposophy can become alive and grip our whole soul.

• 1. “The Ego perceived externally as Speech and Song, as creative fantasy, as inner experience.” Dornach, 9th Jan. 1915 (Z69)
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy

We had before us yesterday a succession of children to whom we gave our attention. It is in this way for the most part that the study of the treatment of abnormal children has necessarily to be pursued—namely, in relation to particular examples. Abnormality manifests in all possible directions, and each single case is a case by itself. The only way you can begin to learn how to deal with such children is to devote yourself to an individual case, and thereby, as time goes on, gradually acquire the skill that will be needed for dealing with other cases.

You will remember the boy of twelve years old who was brought before us yesterday and whom I had to describe as a kleptomaniac. I explained to you how spiritual vision can discern, in the case of such a kleptomaniac, that on account of hindrances in the astral body, he has no means of access to the capacity for judgement that ordinarily belongs to human beings in the world. In this connection, you must realise that everything which has to do with morality, everything of which it can be said that our conception of it must needs include moral impulses, comes to expression within Earth existence alone. We really could say—it would of course be misunderstood by the superficial thinking of the present day—that where the Earth comes to an end, where one goes out beyond into the super-sensible realm, moral judgements such as we are familiar with on Earth cease to exist; for the reason that out there, in the realm of the super-sensible, morality is, so to say, a complete matter of course. Moral judgements begin only where there is a possibility of choice between good and evil. For the spiritual world, good and evil are simply characteristic qualities. There are good beings and there are bad beings. As little as you can say of a lion that he ought, or ought not, to be lion-like, just so little can you say, when you have come away from the Earth, that good and evil ought or ought not to be as they are. To speak in this way pre-supposes the possibility of choice, of saying Yes or No, a possibility which comes in question solely within the organisation of man and where human beings are living socially together. Now, in the case of an illness such as kleptomania, owing to the hindrances of which we spoke, the person in question has not evolved his astral body far enough to enable him to develop a sensitivity to moral judgements. Consequently, the moment a boy of this kind feels a particular interest in some object, he sees no reason at all why he should not take it. He does not understand that it may “belong” to someone, the idea of “mine and thine” has no meaning for him. His astral body does not get far enough into the physical world for him to be able to appreciate the concept of possession.

We have here exactly the same kind of phenomenon as when someone is colour-blind. It's no use talking about colours to one who is colour-blind; and it would have just as little sense to speak in the higher world about possession and non-possession. The child does not find his way far enough into the physical world for him to be able to attach any meaning at all to what he hears people say about “possessing” things. What is particularly strong in him is the idea of discovery—the idea that he has lighted upon some object or other which astonishes him, which fills him with delight and interest. But there his capacity for forming ideas comes to a full stop. The truth is that up to now his astral body has not penetrated to the region of the will, but has remained more or less in the intellectual sphere. We have evidence of this in the fact that the organs of the will are deformed at the side. Consequently, whatever he finds good intellectually he at once turns into will. Let the same defect show itself in the intellect, and you will find the children are dull and stupid; but when, as here, it shows itself in the will, they are kleptomaniacs.

An abnormality of this kind is very difficult to contend with. For at the age of life when it would be important to make a strong stand against the failing, it generally escapes notice altogether. At this early age, the child is naturally imitative, doing what he sees done around him, and so one may easily fail to discern in his behaviour the tendency to kleptomania. Only after the change of teeth, will the tendency begin to be apparent. When the change of teeth has taken place, the child is however even then not far enough out yet on the physical plane to develop a sense for any moral judgement other than: What I like is good, what I don't like is bad. His judgements, that is to say, are entirely aesthetic. It will therefore be for the teacher to awaken in the child the feeling for the good—the meaning of “good”—by bringing it about that the child looks up to him and takes him for his pattern and example. That is why in our Waldorf School education we take particular care that authority shall make itself felt in this age of life. Quite as a matter of course it should come about that the child regards his teacher with devotion. The teacher will then speak of things that are “good” always in such a manner as to arouse the child's interest and enjoyment, and of things that are “bad” in such a manner as to arouse his antipathy. For this to achieve the desired result, it is of course essential that there be first the natural acceptance of the teacher's authority. If this is necessary in the case of a so-called normal child, it is in the very highest degree necessary in the case of such a child as we are considering. In all education nothing contributes so much to true progress as that the child has trust and confidence in the one who is his teacher; and in dealing with abnormal children it is absolutely essential that this right relationship between child and teacher can be relied on from the outset.

In a course of study such as we are now engaged in, we must not omit to point out how important it is, when dealing with quite little children, to make careful observation of the whole way in which their development takes place. If we notice that a little child grows very happy and animated on account of something he has learned—learned, I mean, before the change of teeth—if we notice, for instance, that a child who is learning to speak takes inordinate pleasure in some new sound he has learned to utter, then we must be prepared for the possibility that things may go wrong with that child! Children who later on become kleptomaniacs, develop this kind of egotism in the tender age of early childhood; they will perhaps click their tongue with satisfaction, when they have acquired a new word. This is rare with very young children, but it certainly can occur.

One has to learn to be able to look ahead and see what may be the outcome of such a trait in future years. Far more important for the doctor as well as for the educator, than the principles upon which he has to work—although a knowledge of these is, of course, to be taken for granted—far more important for him is that he should acquire a sensitive perception for what is going on in the world around him. You must not, you see, be like Wulffen;¹ you must be ready to appreciate what a vast deal depends on the environment of a growing child. Take, for instance, such a case, where a very little child has the habit I spoke of just now: he clicks his tongue with satisfaction over some new thing he has learned. This delight at acquiring something in the intellectual sphere will change, about the time of the second dentition, into a conspicuous vanity; the child will grow vain and conceited in relation to other things as well. It should indeed be a matter for grave concern, for instance, if at about the time of the change of teeth a child develops—as it were, from an inborn tendency—a hankering after fine clothes. Symptoms of this nature should be carefully noted. But let us now consider two kinds of environment into which such a child may grow up.

The child may be born in a region—we will imagine for the purpose some quite small territory—where people are accustomed to live in an easy-going way and let things take their course, and where they look upon the militia as something that is necessary for the defence of their territory, but that arouses in them no enthusiasm or at best an enthusiasm that has to be artificially stimulated. There will then develop in every child as a matter of course, during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, a feeling for what is expected of him as a member of the community. The boy grows up; and if particular care has not been taken that he is able to look up with love and respect to his teacher (for parents, as you know, do not always concern themselves about such a matter in this period of the child's life), then the tendency which we have seen at work in the intellectual sphere slips down now into the will, and it is quite possible that kleptomania may ensue.

And now let us see, on the other hand, what happens when a child of this kind grows up, not in a country where the militia is regarded as a somewhat troublesome burden, but in a region where the child finds himself surrounded by a kind of Prussianism. (As you will see, I am giving just characteristic features of a particular case.) Militarism is here looked upon by no means merely as a necessity, but as something that gives one tremendous pleasure, something that thrills one with wonder and admiration and to which one is loyal through thick and thin. The child does not remain at home in the family, he is sent to school and then later to the University. And now the trait that was not at all advantageous to the other boy turns out to be of great advantage to him. The disposition of which we have spoken and which was already present in him as a child finds its fulfilment and expression when he becomes a researcher in natural science. He is engaged in preparing microscopic slides; he will look round in all directions for objects to bring under the microscope, and in this regular—and at the same time irregular—way, satisfy his longing to acquire things for himself. The impulse will experience its full satisfaction. For the boy has found his way into a milieu within which the habit of stealing has no place; if things are “taken”, then it is things with which one does not associate the concept of stealing. The kleptomania will in this case go on developing beneath the surface. The boy becomes later a lecturer in physiology, he becomes the most famous physiologist of his time. Something of the kleptomaniac propensity remains with him for life, but it is associated in him with a kind of enthusiasm for war. This enthusiasm now changes however the sphere of its activity, finding its way especially into the imagery he uses in his lecturing; these are all about fighting and going to war. And then, strangely enough, this tendency may in certain circumstances degenerate into a kind of vanity. A feeling may get hold of him that his rhetorical figures are his own possession and that no one else has a right to use them. Suppose some daring and rather mischievous student of his, who is a bit of a genius, ventures in his examination to use the very same figures of speech. That student will certainly be failed. And if he should go so far as to click his tongue at the same time, then things will go very badly with him.

Once we have the insight to see and understand things of this kind when we meet them in life, the insight itself will guide us to the right method of dealing with them. We must resolve to make ourselves acquainted with life in all its manifold shades and varieties. Then we shall be ready to notice quickly when traits begin to show themselves that point in this or that direction.

I have already spoken to you of a good curative measure that can be employed in the psychological sphere. You have to cultivate your power of invention and tell the boy a story, in which this characteristic of his plays a part. You tell him of people who do the same kind of thing, and then you make it clear that all the time they are only digging a pit for themselves into which they afterwards fall. If the dramatic character of the story be developed with real enthusiasm, you can attain your end in this way, provided you sustain the effort without any slackening. In addition, you will at the same time need to treat such a child therapeutically; he must receive injections with hypophysis cerebri and honey, because, as you saw, the temporal lobes are stunted and we must do all we can to encourage forces of growth that shall counteract this deformation.

Very good results can also be obtained from the use of Curative Eurythmy; but it must be carried out with tremendous energy. All the movements that belong to the vowels, the boy must be got to make with his legs. For what we have to do is to expel from the will the intellectual element, and at the same time impel into the will the striving, the taking pains, that lives in the vowel sounds.

Finally, it is most important that by virtue of the authority we have with the child, we should find it possible to speak with him quite plainly and unreservedly on the matter, showing him how objectionable such a habit is. But this must not be done too early. It has to be brought home to the child's intellect, and by attempting it too early we can easily spoil everything. We must go to work with our stories in the first place, and then gradually lead over to this appeal to the intellect.

It is most difficult to point to any success in these measures, for the good results are simply not noticed. The truth is, however, that many a kleptomaniac would never have been one at all, if early on, so soon as symptoms began to show themselves, those in charge of the child had at once begun telling the right kind of stories. Such stories always work; but we must have patience. One can be quite sure that in such a case as this boy, good results can be achieved—although, if the habit is deeply ingrained, perhaps only after a very long time.

And now for the other difficult child of whom I was speaking yesterday, who is not yet quite a year old, the case of hydrocephalus. Treatment has indeed in this instance been very difficult so far. For what do we observe in this child? What strikes us about him? First and foremost, excessive excitability and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system. This it is that has made possible such a prodigious enlargement of the head. Marked irritability of nerves and senses will always be found to express itself in an enlargement of the head. We must however be careful here to look at relative and not absolute measurements. If a person who is predisposed to be small altogether, has a head of the same size as that of a big, tall person, then he has what is for him a large head. This must not be forgotten when we are considering cases that are not abnormal. The child we saw yesterday is abnormal. The inordinate sensitiveness and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system, which are so evident in him, have been induced by the conditions under which he was living in the embryo time; I described these conditions to you yesterday, explaining them as due to the uneven way in which the influences of mother and father co-operated in the embryo.

What must we do in order to bring the child nearer to normality? Everything that could excite or irritate the nerves-and senses system must be shut out for as many hours of the day as possible. Accordingly we have had the child in a dark room, a room that is completely darkened, so that as he lies there, he is all the time in the quiet and the dark, receiving no impressions. As a matter of fact, I overestimated at first the results that could be attained by these means, for the child is actually not yet responsive to light. His sensitivity to light is exceedingly weak; on this account the exclusion of light is of less importance than might have been presumed. Nevertheless, this is the right principle to go on—to let the child live in the quiet and in the dark, having around him as few impressions as ever possible; then the impulse for quick and restless movement—an impulse of the will—will be aroused from within, and will work counter to the nerves-and-senses system. This then will be the first rule we set out to follow. Another thing we must do is to try to influence the nerves-and-senses system through the appropriate agencies. We have been using gneiss as an internal remedy. Quartz itself, used directly, would induce shock, and that we must at all costs avoid; with gneiss, the effects of the influence of quartz are more distributed. In quartz, the forces are strongly “radiant” in their working, sharp and spear-like; whereas when the same forces are distributed as in gneiss, they are mild in their working and spread out in the organism, reaching the periphery with a lighter touch. Gneiss in a high potency can here lead to the desired result. And then we must try to calm down the excited state of the nerves in the region also of the will. For in a very little child the whole human being, you must remember, is nerves-and senses system. This can be achieved by giving poppy baths. Baths are prepared, using the common field poppy.

When you see before you a state of affairs such as shows itself in this child, two things must go hand in hand the whole time—observation of the case, and whatever therapy is possible. You are dealing, you see, with an individual case. You will be in a better position to appreciate the importance of what I am saying if I tell you now what further symptoms have presented themselves to our observation. To begin with, we noticed that during the time of the treatment by injection the temperature dropped. Shortly afterwards the head was found to have increased in size. The child was sleeping by day and crying in the night. That changed when we began to give poppy baths in the evening. The fæces are hard, and a difference can be noticed according as the baths are given in the daytime or at night. The connection of astral with physical body is quite different morning and evening.

What we have to do is to bring order into the processes whereby what comes from the digestive system works into the brain. You will easily realise that mother's milk is not able under all circumstances to benefit a child of this kind in the same way that it does another child. (Normally, you know, mother's milk has an inherent tendency, a natural readiness to transfer itself from the digestive system to the nerves-and senses system.) We therefore discontinued mother's milk at the beginning of March, and the child was from then on nourished by other means. Nectar was given—the content of the nectaries found in the flowers of certain plants. Nectar has the effect of strengthening the ego in the region of the will. By administering a nourishment that develops—with something even of the dynamic of a parasite—in the region of the blossom, we make appeal to the inner individuality of the child, we try to call forth this inner individuality and bring it to activity. We have had some measure of success in this direction. But I must warn you how necessary it is, when one has a plan of this kind on hand, to decide on a suitable time for carrying it out, and then prepare oneself thoroughly for the occasion. Set-backs can always occur, and these are misjudged by anyone who looks at the matter from a layman's point of view. We have it here on record that for some days the child was having nectar and the fæces became softer. Afterwards diarrhoea ensued. The nectar was then discontinued. The diarrhoea stopped, and a condition set in during the night of 11th-12th June, that brought a kind of crisis. The child was crying, and blinking, and passing a great deal of water; the body sank in with every expiration; there were attacks of cramp in the left leg, while the left arm grew tense and rigid; the fontanels were also quite taut, and the reflex actions more pronounced. Hot compresses were applied, and compresses of poppy juice, after which the child fell asleep, and his condition on the following day was good. Appetite and evacuation of the bowels were in order.

You must understand that it is impossible to steer clear of such crises—unless one is prepared to steer clear of all hope of a cure! For the very work we have to set ourselves to do in the organism is bound at some time or other to express itself in such a crisis. When this happens, it is of course necessary immediately to intervene—as Frau Dr. Wegman did. After the application of hot compresses and poppy juice compresses the crisis will subside in a proper way. The only advice that can be given for a crisis of this nature is on no account to allow yourself to be alarmed or thrown off your guard. There are moments in such a case when everything depends on prompt and immediate action.

I would like to tell you of an interesting little experience that I had on this occasion. News reached me from another quarter that the child was in a very bad way. Frau Dr. Wegman herself said nothing about it; I was accordingly reassured, and was confident that the condition was taking its inevitable course. For one must, you know, retain the whole time a mood of readiness for the natural development of the illness; that is essential. And then one can listen quite quietly to someone or other who, without any real understanding of the case, is frightened and disturbed at the turn the illness is taking. In cases like this, where anything may happen, we must first be perfectly clear in ourselves that we are doing what requires to be done; if this is so, then we can also rest assured that everything is as it should be. It is of course most important to be watchful for crises and, when they come, to give them every care and attention; but we must know that they will certainly occur in a case of this kind. Feelings of pity and the like, which tend to make one agitated and upset, cannot help. It is never of the least use to be overcome with a feeling of pity, that way we merely get bewildered and distraught; the one and only thing that can help is to face the situation quite objectively and do what has to be done.

And now let us go a little further into the subject of treatment. As we have seen, it is not possible to do anything much yet in the way of psychological-pedagogical treatment; we have only one possibility in this direction, namely, to help psychologically by giving rest and, as far as possible, darkness. It is important however to find a way of bringing into the organism the principle of disintegration. We must replace the strong tendency that is at work there towards the watery element, towards fluidity by the principle of disintegration. Water does not fall asunder or disintegrate; it flows and spreads. We want to call upon forces that can promote disintegration, that can aid and encourage it. Such are the forces of lead. In lead we have a most effective means of inducing decomposition, disintegration. Whenever you see that upbuilding forces are rampant in the very place where breaking-down forces should be at work—and is not a preponderance of upbuilding over breaking-down forces the fundamental phenomenon to be observed in a giant-embryo such as this little child?—whenever you see this, you may always start on a course of medical treatment with lead. Lead, especially when injected, can have extraordinarily good results.

Let me describe to you how lead takes effect in the organism. Lead has, of course, long been known as a remedy; for thousands of years those who have had any understanding of such things have pointed to the medicinal influence of lead. The knowledge of its beneficial working has however been tending gradually to disappear—although now in our own time it is coming into notice again in a most remarkable way, from quite a new quarter. But now consider for a moment—where, in the whole earth, are the most powerful forces of disintegration to be found? We find them where radium occurs. And from radium we get, along with helium, an intermediary product which, undergoing further transformation, produces lead. Here, then, you have the inner connection. In the great world outside, in the cosmos, the most powerfully working forces of cleavage produce in lead the substance in which these forces of cleavage are ultimately concentrated. If therefore you bring lead into the human body, you are bringing into it cosmic destruction, cosmic disintegration. Think what this means. You introduce the lead, by means of injection, into the blood-circulation. In the circulation of the blood we have an immediate reflection of the structure of the universe. The 25,000 years that the sun takes to go round the universe—these 25,000 years we have in the circulation, in the pulsation of the blood.² And now you bring disintegrating forces straight into the organism. The cosmos, as we know, gives itself time to work; nevertheless, if we have a real insight into the matter, it will be evident to us that the introduction of such a substance as lead can be of real help.

Treatment for this child will therefore be as I have described. We have also used hypophysis, applying it to the legs as an ointment; the formative, shaping forces that are active in the secretion of hypophysis counteract deformation. We shall in this way “form” while we heal. We have of course at the same time to see that the right stimulation is provided in order for the remedies to be able to work.

One can, you know, be very thankful that we have now surmounted a first crisis; one can be glad of the crisis that occurred between the 11th and 12th July, when the child manifested the symptoms we described. He will in all probability have to go through many such crises, and we must be very watchful to see that we cure the child, in the positive sense. For it is, you know, quite possible for a cure to take place in a negative sense. It comes to this—we have to cure, not for death, but for life. It is indeed a most delicate matter ever to deal with an organ therapeutically.

I would like also at this point to draw your attention to the fact that nothing could be achieved by puncturing and letting water flow out; the trouble then only starts again and grows even more serious than before. Obviously, however, so long as we have not yet ourselves attained any success in diminishing the size of the head, it is not for us to begin criticising other methods of treatment.

This is going to be a particularly interesting case, and for me personally it has as a matter of fact quite a special interest. For, whenever I think of this little fellow, whenever I look at him, it is not merely this child that I see before me. Imagine to yourselves this child grown to be thirty years old. He would then be an adult human being. It might well happen. He would be about six times as big as he is now. The head would be perhaps three-and-a-half times its present size, and the rest of the body six times. Imagining this, I see before me a man whom I actually did have before me when I was a boy of six years old. We used to meet constantly, for he was always there at the station when the trains arrived. He was obliged to use crutches, because his body could not carry his head. The whole muscular system that is involved in walking had not developed properly. He had an immense head. The man had in fact remained an embryo, he was a thirty-year-old embryo.

The reason why this man made such a remarkable impression on me as a little boy was that he was unbelievably clever. I did so enjoy talking to him! A deformity is of course a bit of a shock to a boy of seven or eight years old; but then, on the other hand, the man was, as I have said, astonishingly clever. One could learn a great deal from him; and all his judgements were pervaded with a great gentleness. This gentleness and mildness seemed to overflow from him—like his head! When he spoke—his sentences were not unduly drawn out, they took the normal length of time to utter, but as he spoke them, it was almost as though he had some sugary moisture on his lips, as though he were rubbing his lips together and tasting the sweetness all the time. There was indeed something quite original about the man. He was moreover genuinely inventive. Inventions of many kinds were attributed to him—which he was said to have made first on a small scale. Altogether, a most interesting personality. In course of time he had become less sensitive about his abnormality, he had grown accustomed to it. After all, he lived, you see, in a village, where a person of this kind is regarded with a certain measure of understanding. I have in fact never yet come across a village where some afflicted child had not grown up in this manner, becoming the child of the whole village, and receiving constant care and help from those around.

If we should have a child of this kind to look after, who is rather older than the little fellow we are considering, we would have to adopt other measures, such as I described to you in part when I told you how I had to treat the hydrocephalic boy of eleven years old who was given into my care, and who was in time completely healed.

Now let us go on to the next—the little girl who was rather unruly and troublesome. This child weighed 41 lb. at birth, was a nine months child and was breast-fed for seven months. She learned to walk in her first year, and learned also to speak at the proper time. When a year and a half old, she ceased to wet the bed at night, but wet herself by day. At the age of three-and-a-half she had an attack of influenza with headache and high fever, and three weeks later developed measles. The mother had influenza at the same time and was nervous and worried. The child's appetite is bad. She sometimes has disturbing dreams.

We have here a condition that is frequently to be met with among these children; we might even describe the little girl as a “normally” abnormal child. Our chief concern must be to see that the astral body receives the right form and configuration that will enable it to fit itself into the ether and physical bodies in a harmonious manner. To achieve this end, we always give arsenic baths—that is, we use arsenic externally; and occasionally we administer arsenic internally as well. The treatment has the effect of harmonising the relationships of astral body, ether body and physical body. Then, to ensure that the externally administered arsenic shall really strike home, we reinforce it by applying mustard compresses to the feet before and after the bath, using also grated horse-radish for this purpose. I should add that in the latter case, you must make sure that the horse-radish is not grated until immediately before use. It is most important that it should be freshly grated; if allowed to stand for some hours, it loses its efficacy.

Coming to the psychological aspect of the case, we must try to cure the child of the habit of being so excited. For she is still always restless and excited; I don't think the environment here has so far had any marked influence on her. We must break her of this habit. Altogether, the breaking of some habit or trait of character in a child can often lead to most salutary results—a fact that should not be overlooked. In the case we are considering, a great deal can be achieved by bringing the child to be quiet and still at the very moment when something is being told her of a kind that generally makes her excited and restless—even if, in order to keep her still, we have to resort to mechanical means. First of all, therefore, we observe, when we are relating some story, what things in the story particularly excite the child. Then, we compel her to restrain herself and not get excited, to become inwardly a little stiff and hold herself in. If we can bring this about we shall find, as time goes on, that the characteristic trait in the child is somehow being broken down. Instead of evincing excitement, she will begin even to show signs of weariness when the story is told. We let this weariness work—say, for a week or two; and then for a while we simply let the child go her way, treating her as though she were quite normal. After a time there will be some return of the excitability; then we shall have to set to work all over again, and repeat our course of treatment. The pauses are necessary; otherwise, if we go straight on without interruption, a reaction will come. The weariness, the slight signs of depression, will, if we push too far with our treatment, lead on to conditions of bodily depression, and we shall harm the child rather than heal.

We have now come to the point where I can indicate for you the principle that underlies the psychological treatment of all such children. We have to be ready and attentive, watching what is there in the child, realising that the abnormalities of soul are symptoms of what is going on within him, symptoms of the behaviour of ether body, astral body, ego organisation, etc. I say “etc.”; what do I mean? For when we divide the human being into

1. Physical body
2. Ether body
3. Astral body
4. Ego organisation
5. Spirit-Self

we generally go on to say, do we not, that the spirit-self has not yet been evolved by man and does not therefore immediately concern him. We read about it of course in the books, but in the present epoch, man reaches only as far as the ego organisation, and so we have no call to trouble about the spirit-self. But, my dear friends, that is not a true and full picture of the situation. Human beings, we say, reach as yet only as far as the ego organisation; but not all the beings with whom we humans have to do, come only as far as the ego and no further! When we are dealing with growing children, we are necessarily brought into contact with beings who attain to the spirit-self, beings who are further on in evolution than man. If we set out to develop Waldorf School pedagogy and really mean our work to have life, then we must appeal not only to the human beings who are congregated there in our school, but also to spiritual beings who are more highly developed than man, spiritual beings who show quite clearly that they have evolved to the spirit self. In dealing with a growing child, we shall particularly have to do with one specific class of such beings, namely, the beings to whom we give the name of “Genius of Language”. Were it left to the human beings themselves to hand on language to the next generation, man would pine away and perish. Being lives in language, as truly as ever being lives in man himself. Along with speech and language something enters into man, wherein beings live whose whole life bears unmistakably the stamp of the spirit-self, even as man in his life bears the stamp of the ego organisation. These beings inspire us; they live in us through the fact that we speak.

Think how in Eurythmy we have to develop an artistic speaking in order for a visible speech and language to arise. We are really very far from comprehending what speech is in its fullness! A little part of the working of the Genius of Language we elaborate in Eurythmy, so as to enable a visible speech to come to birth. And then again in Curative Eurythmy—think how we appeal there to what these beings can achieve with the spirit-self, in the intuitive stimulation of man's will!

It is really so: the moment we begin to speak of education, we have immediately to make our appeal to spirits who have evolved the spirit-self. And whenever we try to elucidate what lies hidden in speech, we are actually describing the spirit-self. I would therefore recommend anyone who is setting out to educate abnormal children, to meditate upon what he can read in our books, about the spirit-self. He will find this a good material for meditation. It is a prayer to those spiritual beings who are of the same kind as the Genius of Language.

Such spiritual beings are verily present among us. Say, we come into the schoolroom. If our behaviour and gestures as we enter give adequate expression to what we are feeling and experiencing in our soul, then they have an immense influence upon the child. And they are moreover a proof that we are connected with the spiritual beings who bear within them the spirit-self.

There is a habit that is all too common among people today—I am far from suggesting you should start inveighing openly against it; in matters of this kind, one must adopt a completely objective attitude, the same objective attitude as is required in dealing with the crises that occur in the little child. It is nevertheless a fact that when whole communities of people have a habit of keeping their hands in their trouser pockets and so avoiding any use of gesture, it means nothing else than that they want to be God-forsaken, they want to be left alone by the Gods—the Gods who are next above the spirit-man. It means, they would rather not have any knowledge of the beings who have developed the spirit-self—even as man has developed the I organisation. And one of the first things that happens to such persons is that their speech begins to be slovenly. This, is, in fact, the great danger that faces the civilisation of the West—the danger that speech and language, instead of being developed to become what they should become, deteriorate and grow slovenly.

In dealing with the growing child it is of the very first importance to see that he speaks clearly and distinctly, and this is more than ever necessary in the case of the abnormal child. We must on no account overlook the smallest sign of slovenliness of speech. In all your dealings with abnormal children, make it a rule to be watchful of how they speak, mindful always that their speech shall be clear and distinct and well-formed. Your watchfulness will react favourably on the condition of the child.

And then for the very young child who does not yet speak himself, it is good if he hears well-formed speech spoken around him—unless of course special instructions have had to be given that he is to be left still and quiet! And for children between the ages of seven and fourteen whom we have received into our care as abnormal, we need not have the slightest hesitation in bringing to them just as much as ever we can in the way of good speaking and recitation. To listen again and again to good speaking, well-ordered and articulate, is for abnormal children an absolute need, a need that springs from the inherent nature of the abnormality itself.

• 1. See Lecture 2
• 2. The exact number is 25,920.

Let us now consider the implication of certain concepts we have obtained in our recent studies. Today, in the lecture to follow, I shall speak mainly about the nature of truth and the nature of the good. These issues we have been concerned with recently. But let us first look at something that belongs to those interconnections we spoke about last time and which to modern history must seem very strange. We saw in the previous lecture that it is possible to gain definite concepts as to how a present life on earth is connected with the preceding life on earth as well as with the one that will follow. I described that the I insofar as we are aware of it in the will acts across from our previous life on earth, and that insofar as we form a thought picture of the I this thought, with all it contains, is so delicately woven that it acts across to the next earth life. I compared it with the way in which the seed in this year's plant becomes the life in the plant of next year. We must regard as seed for our next life on earth every web of thought at the center of which is the I. So you see, when we enter our life on earth we do so with conditions determined by our previous life; but also, of course, with what comes as a result of the last life having been worked on between death and new birth. This can be said to be one group of concepts we have gained.

Let us now make a great leap to another group of concepts we also obtained recently, concerned with the course of man's lives on earth. Those considerations culminated in the insight we gained into the secret of mankind's present age. I described how man, after the Atlantean catastrophe, entered upon the ancient Indian epoch, at the beginning of which mankind's age was 56. What this signifies was also described. It means that at that time the individual human being continued to be capable of natural development right up to the age of 56 in a way possible now only in childhood. Up to that age man's soul and spirit went through a development parallel to that of his physical body. This now happens only in childhood when the development of soul and spirit is bound up with the growth and development of the body. This interdependence ceases when we reach the age that was indicated. The soul and spirit then become more independent and man's inner development no longer continues of itself.

The most important aspect of this is that we do not go through the middle of life, when the body begins to decline at the age of 35, still dependent on the body. Consequently we are not conscious of the Rubicon which we cross at that time. We do not experience what was experienced in the first post-Atlantean epoch, namely, the body's decline, its becoming sclerotic and calcified and the spirit becoming free of the body. At that time this took place in the course of natural development, without effort on man's part. As we know, during that epoch the age of mankind receded from 56 to 55, 54 and so on, so that at the end of the epoch his natural development continued only up to the age of 49. In the following, the ancient Persian epoch, mankind's age receded from 49 to 42. During the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, it receded from the age of 42 to that of 35, in the Graeco-Latin epoch from the .age of 35 to 28. This means that the Greeks and Romans remained capable of natural development up to that period in life which is bounded by the ages 28 and 35. I then placed before you the stupendous mystery that, as mankind's age had receded to 33, Christ Jesus, aged 33, united Himself with mankind. That moment the Mystery of Golgotha took place. This revelation is so wondrous that one is at a loss to find words to express the awe felt by the soul able fully to experience this fact so steeped in mystery.

The age of mankind continues to recede. As you know, since the fifteenth century we have been living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. When it began, the age of mankind was 28 and by now has dropped to 27. This means that up to that age our soul and spirit are still in some way dependent upon our bodily-physical nature. After that age our natural development ceases; we can make no further progress merely through what our environment provides. If we are to progress, we must have an inner incentive to do so, and today that can only come from spiritual knowledge, as I have often explained. The impulse must arise from our feeling for what is spiritual in the world, from our knowledge of the spiritual aspect of things. In the last resort that can only arise through the Christ impulse. It is simply a fact that modern man, concerned only with what nature and society can provide him with, i.e., what the world can make of him, will remain a 27-year-old even if he lives to be a hundred. If he is to progress in his inner life, he must himself engender the impulse to do so; nothing more arises through the body's participation in his development. Thus through natural development modern man becomes 27 years old, and that is what is so characteristic of today's culture. Our culture, our civilization cannot be understood, especially in relation to earlier ones, unless this fact, verified by spiritual science, is kept firmly in mind.

This is something that is closely connected with the first group of spiritual facts of which we reminded ourselves today. As you will realize from the last lecture, we go through a certain evolution during the time between death and new birth; what is particularly at work then are the will impulses from the previous incarnation. What is accomplished between death and new birth we bring with us; it becomes experience in this life. However, the strange fact is that in the human being of today the reciprocal action between the astral body and the I that is soul and spirit on the one hand and the ether body on the other comes to a halt at the age of 27. We are so conditioned during life between death and new birth that we prepare and organize our new ether body in such a way that when it comes to live in the physical body, the I and astral body can still be active in it. At the beginning of the Graeco-Latin epoch, about 747 B.C., this vivifying effect of astral body on the ether body came to a halt when the person reached the age of 35, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the age of 33. It now stops at the age of 27. This means that today, according to the evolution he has gone through before birth or conception, a person can through what nature itself provides and what he gains from society keep his ether body mobile up to the age of 27, so mobile that the astral body, with which the ether body is in reciprocal activity, can imbue it with fresh concepts and ideas, vivifying it enough to engender new feelings and perceptions. Our mental pictures of the world, our ideals can be enriched up to the age of 27 simply through the experiences that come to us. After that age it does no longer happen of itself; progress will only come about through our own inner impulses.

Many soul conditions, many inner dissatisfactions in life suffered by modern man are due to the comparatively early cessation of the reciprocal effect between astral and ether body, and consequently also the physical body. There is, especially in early life, a lively reciprocal activity in the lower region between the soul, i.e., the astral body, and the ether body. Then it ceases, and unless we quicken our conceptual life in the way described in the previous lecture, we can absorb only shadowy concepts. These concepts must not attain their full reality or they would constantly lame us. They would be like a plant seed that insisted upon growing into a complete plant straight away. Our concepts and mental pictures must remain seeds until the next incarnation. If upbringing and self-discipline did not modify this tendency, we would in fact always want more than life of itself could give us. Many people do suffer from this “wanting more than life can give.” Life can provide us only with concepts that will mature in our next incarnation. They must consequently remain shadowy in this one unless through inner impulses of the kind described in the last lecture, we enrich and stimulate our mental pictures, in fact our whole inner life. If we could recognize that we are nurturing the seed for our next incarnation, i.e., see life in a much wider perspective, we would attain much greater inner contentment. This is directly connected with what Pascal and later Lessing expressed and what has often since been emphasized, the fact that in seeking truth, we are in a certain sense satisfied.¹ A passage which Pascal before him discussed at great length, Lessing expressed in a simpler, paradigmatic form, saying: “If God held truth in one hand and the striving after truth in the other, I would choose striving after truth.”² These words contain a great deal. They imply that while incarnated in a human body we will always have the feeling that we do not attain complete truth. Truth lives in concepts, in mental pictures and these are interwoven with the I; while in a human body, we can have only the truth which is seed for a next incarnation. It must not be fixed but live and move in our striving. Before incarnation our ether body is so constituted that it contains the truth. However, incarnating causes truth as a whole to be reduced to a copy, a picture of truth, and it is this picture which is seed for the following incarnation.

Inner contentment we attain only when we can feel ourselves as a member of humanity as a whole. In practice it is not attained unless we develop the kind of living concepts of which we spoke last time. These concepts are not derived from the surface of life's events; they must be sought in the connections between them. No human being today will achieve inner contentment unless he takes a vivid interest in the world around him, but an interest directed towards the spirit and the spiritual connections in the environment. Those who merely want to brood within themselves will find in life only what makes us into the kind of 27-year-olds that correspond to the evolution we went through between the previous death and the birth of the incarnation we are in.

Man has to discover out of his own initiative his bonds with the environment. This is why in our age man encounters obstacles to freedom. He must kindle in himself interest for those spiritual aspects of life that cannot be discovered merely through sense observations; they must be sought in wider, more hidden connections, in ways I explained in the previous lecture. Much in what has just been said can help explain, not only our stand towards truth in our time, but also towards the good—the ethically and morally good. In the next lecture we shall go into more detail. Today we shall concern ourselves more with something that follows from these facts and can explain much that will help us understand our present time.

The spiritual scientist must deal with the facts he discovers differently from the way the natural scientist deals with his. From our considerations over the years you will realize that the spiritual scientist arrives at his discoveries through the faculties of imagination, inspiration and intuition. This means he is engaged in cognition that goes beyond the confines of the immediate sensory world into that realm of the spiritual world which reaches beyond what is perceived through physical senses. This realm is at the same time the spiritual background from which everything sense perceptible is governed. The science of the spirit gains its observations such as the fact that humanity becomes younger and younger from the spiritual realm accessible to the human faculty of knowledge. The age of the human being is receding the way I explained from that of 56 to the age of 27 in our present time, and 27 is the age where we remain unless we take our own progress in hand. These facts can be discovered only through spiritual science. They cannot be found through ordinary ethnology or anthropology, nor of course, through ordinary historical research into the course of events since the Atlantean catastrophe with the methods of natural science. All these things can be derived only from the spiritual world. You will understand that the spiritual investigator with his spiritual knowledge will have a somewhat different attitude to events than the natural scientist, and not only to external events and processes but to history and social procedures. How does the natural scientist set about his research? He has before him the objects and phenomena to be investigated, and he formulates his concepts and mental pictures accordingly. The concept, the mental picture, is the second; the law that governs what is investigated is what he discovers. Thus he goes from facts to the laws by which they are governed; the sense perception comes between the two. The facts are the first, then the mental pictures are added, then the law discovered and so on.

In regard to the spiritual world itself the spiritual researcher sets about his investigation in a similar way; here the investigation is not really different. It is in regard to the physical aspect that differences arise. The spiritual facts are directly understood as one takes hold of them. If one wants to discover what significance they have for the physical world, then the corresponding physical facts must be sought out afterwards. The spiritual aspect is given first; afterwards one seeks out the physical facts or conditions which it explains. By means of the spirit one explains what in life must be spiritually explained. Many find it extremely difficult to understand that in spiritual research the law comes first, and the law; i.e., the spiritual aspect, then points to the physical phenomenon to which it applies. The physical phenomenon supplies confirmation, as it were, of the law. Spiritual investigators used to express this difference somewhat formally, saying that natural-scientific investigation has to proceed inductively—from fact to concept, whereas spiritual-scientific investigation must proceed deductively—from concept to fact. In this light, let us look at an example which is of significance today.

Spiritual research reveals that man in general develops in our time, through what nature and society provide, up to the age of 27. Therefore, the typical modern person who keeps aloof from spiritual knowledge will progress in his development up to his 27th year. If he is a person of significance, someone with many interests and is full of energy, then his faculties will be well developed by the time he reaches the age of 27. This means he will have brought to maturity everything one can develop simply through the fact of having physically become 27 years old. His powers of thinking will have developed and so too, the impulse to be active in one or another sphere. His will power will have grown in strength simply because his muscles have grown stronger, and similar things apply to the nervous system, and so on. If he is responsive to what he can absorb from the human environment, he will, by the time he is 27 years old, have developed a sum of ideas and ideals; he will be concerned about social reform and so on. All this will live and develop in him up to his 27th year, so that by that time he will, one might say, be crammed full. Then it stops; it ceases to develop further, and from then on what he brings to bear on life is the insight and outlook he has attained by the age of 27. He may live to be a hundred years old, and if he is a significant person he will bring about significant things, but whatever he does will be based on the ideas and impulses of a 27-year-old. Thus he is a true representative of the time in which we live; one could say he is a product of our time. But if he has no interest in the spiritual aspect of life, and does not develop impulses of the kind that enable, not only the body but the soul to mature beyond the 27th year, then he refuses to participate in mankind's further evolution. As he does not kindle spiritual impulses in himself, he cannot bring them to bear on his environment. He is incapable of bringing into our time anything that contains seeds for mankind's further progress. All that he does bring is characteristic of the time. If he is a man of stature—and one can, of course, be such and still remain 27 years old—then he will provide our time with what is in complete agreement with a certain aspect of it, but it will provide no seed for the future.

How are we to picture to ourselves such a typical person of our time? What exactly would he be like? What we must now do is to bring our mental picture of such a person down into physical reality. We must look for a physical counterpart. We must, as it were, visualize where such a person could be encountered in social life. It would have to be in the midst of modern life. So in what circumstances would one find him? First of all, the 27th year of his life would be conspicuous, but conspicuous in the sense that from his 27th year onwards his position in society would enable him to carry out precisely the ideas and impulses of a 27-year-old. At the same time what he lacked, i.e., his inability to progress inwardly beyond that age would not be too noticeable. In other words, he must have the opportunity to remain the age of 27 in a fruitful manner. Had he reached the age of 27 and found no possibility to do anything significant with his impulses and ideas, then he would have grown older with something dead within him. If then at the age of say 31 he found himself in some public position, he would meanwhile have carried what had become lifeless and dissolute within him into that later age; he would be no true representative of our time. However, it is possible in present-day circumstances to visualize that in a democratic country, under so-called normal conditions, such a person would, at the age of 27 be voted into parliament. There he would have the perfect opportunity to influence social affairs; it would also be a certain peak in his career. For if someone of some significance enters parliament at the age of 27 that would mean an occupation for life. He is, as it were, stuck; he cannot change course. However, he is in a position to put into action, from his 27th year onwards, all he has developed within himself. Should he later be called from parliament to become a minister of state, then that would be a change of less significance than the one that brought him into parliament. As minister of state he can put into practice what, as a 27-year-old he brought into parliament. So we can say that a typical person of our age with political and social interests would be someone who at the age of 27 is voted into parliament, giving him the possibility to carry out in practice the ideas and impulses corresponding to his age.

Yet there are still other demands such a person must fulfill to be a true representative of our time. There are things in modern society that work against a human being's natural development. What develops naturally soon goes awry when the person is subjected to modern educational methods; the more so if he goes through some branch of university training that pushes him in a one-sided direction. What we are looking for is someone who represents the age, someone in whom what nature has bestowed develops as far as possible, up to the age of 27, unimpaired by modern training of the young. In other words, he must fulfill the requirement I laid down on the basis of spiritual science—you could say deduced from spiritual science—someone who at the age of 27 stands in the modern world with all that nature provides, fully developed, unimpaired by modern training, and who refuses to absorb any knowledge that provides seeds for the future. If such a person could be found in the modern world, his life would clarify many things. We would see in him demonstrated in practice what it means that mankind is in general 27 years old, that people anywhere who come to a standstill in their development at the age of 27, in a crude way weaken the seed of the future.

Does a human being exist somewhere who had all the required qualities at the right age to make him a typical representative of our age? He does indeed; all the qualifications I deduced from spiritual considerations fit Lloyd George completely.³ Look at the life of Lloyd George, not just from the external aspect but, as it were, from above, from the spiritual aspect, and you will find that everything fits. He was born in 1863, was orphaned early in life—you will be acquainted with these details—he was brought up by his uncle who was a cobbler and also a preacher in Wales. He was of Celtic stock and, especially when young, of a lively and alert disposition. His uncle, the preacher, was always there as an example, and he aspired to become a preacher himself. That was not possible because the sect to which his uncle belonged was not permitted to have salaried priests; everyone had to pursue a trade and preach without remuneration. Therefore, not even these conventions had any inhibiting effect. Already in youth he was an ardent lover of independence. The poverty was such that often there was no money for shoes, so he ran about barefoot, in fact experienced all degrees of destitution. He grew up without attending school regularly, so received no proper education, but simply accepted what life brought him. In the same irregular fashion he embarked on a career as a lawyer, not through official training but by getting employment at sixteen in a lawyer's office, and through keen observation and sound judgment he became a solicitor at the age of 27. Thus his attainments were achieved not through academic training but through what he could gain from life in the present. Life had also kindled in him a strong opposition to the many privileges birth and position bestow. It was with a certain fury that he had removed his cap in greeting to the local squire with whom he was obliged to meet several times a day.

Then what happens? In the year 1890 when Lloyd George, born 1863, is 27 years old, he becomes, through the death of a member of parliament, the candidate opposing the man to whom he hated raising his cap in daily greeting. He had been put forward as a candidate because of the attention caused by a series of urgent speeches he had made, inflaming the hearts and minds of his listeners, exhorting the liberation of Wales from English dominion. Celtic nationality, he said, was to be infused with new life, and in particular the Church should be freed of the organizing influence of the State. He drew so much attention that as a result he won a seat in parliament by a slight majority. This was in 1890. Lloyd George was just 27 years old and a member of parliament! Immediate life experiences had taught him what was needed in his time, and these experiences he brought with him into parliament. For two months this 27-year-old member carefully watched everything that was happening and said not a word. For two months, sitting with a hand behind his ear, with eyes that tended to converge but now and then could flash, he saw and heard everything that went on, whereupon he began the career of a much feared speaker in parliament. People like Churchill and Chamberlain who formerly had looked upon their opponent with a certain indifference, with a certain English impassiveness, became enraged when opposed by Lloyd George.⁴ After all, he was untutored, unacademic, but he also displayed penetrating logic and biting sarcasm when refuting an opponent, no matter how highly revered. He was close to Gladstone, but even he had to endure much from the sarcasm, the cutting remarks, and logical arguments Lloyd George was always ready to conduct.⁵ Here we see the extraordinary versatility of someone taught by life itself. People not taught in this way tend to be one-sided, limited in things they can manage. Lloyd George was well informed about every subject and spoke in a way that enraged even the most distinguished members, rousing them from their habitual impassiveness.

It is indeed interesting to observe this great man as a representative of our time, to observe how he unites the characteristics of the 27-year-old with the strength of Celtic traits and makes the most of this combination. His caustic speeches against the Boer war, this wholly disgraceful affair, as he called it, are among his most outstanding. He constantly harangued parliament in even more vivid terms about what he called this vile, mean action of the war in South Africa. With Celtic fearlessness he continued to speak in public though he was once hit on the head with a cudgel so hard that he fell senseless to the ground. Another time he had to borrow a policeman's uniform and be smuggled through a side door because one dreaded the speech he was going to make. There had been no one like him in British political life, and he remained a severe critic well into the 20th century; naturally under a reactionary government a critic only. However, when the Campbell-Bannerman liberal government came to power early in the 20th century, everyone said how good it was to have a liberal government, but what was to be done about Lloyd George?⁶ Well, in a democratic country what does one do in such a case? One hauls the person in question into the cabinet and gives him a portfolio he is sure to know nothing about. That was exactly what Campbell-Bannerman did with Lloyd George. He, who never had any opportunity to concern himself with trade, was given the Department of Trade, which he took over in 1905. He was a self-made man, molded by life, not by academic training. And what was the outcome? He became the most outstanding Minister of Trade Britain had ever had.

After a comparatively short time, spent studying his new task and which involved travels to Hamburg, Antwerp and Spain in order to study trade relations, he set about introducing a law concerning patents which was a blessing for the country. The bills he introduced and passed for reorganizing the Port of London were met with general approval, an issue over which many former Ministers of Trade had come to grief. The way he managed to settle a particularly critical railway dispute was universally applauded. In short, he proved to be a quite exceptionally efficient minister of trade. When the change of government came from Campbell-Bannerman to that of Asquith and Grey, Lloyd George naturally had to be kept in the cabinet.⁷ By then it was the general opinion that Lloyd George could do anything. He was so truly a representative of his time that he was given the most important office, that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. With all his characteristics of a 27-year-old, with all his emotions stemming from his Celtic origin, Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had of course retained all the emotions that used to well up in him when as a barefoot boy he had to greet the local squire. He did, however, score over that same squire in his bid for a seat in parliament. He also retained his strong feelings against everything to do with special privileges and the like. He remained as he had been at the age of 27.

Before Lloyd George's time as Chancellor there had been in England a magic cure for financial problems; it was called tariffs. Inland revenue is really a form of tariff, worked out so that the privileged pay as little possible, ensuring that poverty is widespread. As Lloyd George presented his first budget, the abuse hurled at him and his impossible budget must have created a precedent. The British press was, in fact, hurling at him the kind of abuse they at present are reserving for the Germans. Everything in his budget to do with raising taxes in areas that affected the more privileged came in for heavy criticism.

In parliament he faced vehement opposition, but he sat, as always, completely calm and unperturbed, hand behind the ear, eyes that sparkled and lips ready to curl in sarcasm. This was a man in complete accord with the age. Chancellors before him had produced budgets which had been given this or that name, but the budget he presented was so unique to him that in Britain it was known simply as the Lloyd George budget. With no education other than that of life itself, he represented to perfection the time of which he was himself a product. Everything that could be learned about taxation and how it worked in America, France, and Germany he had investigated and endeavored to evaluate. Here again he did not gain his knowledge from books but from practical life, from the way the issue was dealt with at that particular time.

What he achieved is really most interesting and quite remarkable. His complete confidence is again demonstrated when one year, as he came to present his annual balance sheet, it was found that there was a deficit. Deficits had previously always been dealt with by simply absorbing them; i.e., making an entry for the amount. However, Lloyd George said: “Well, there is a deficit, but we shall leave it and not enter it because through the measures I have taken various branches of trade and industry will be so profitable that the extra revenue will cover the deficit in time”—which shows his confidence in life, a confidence that stemmed from his accord with life. Most importantly, unlike others he dod not lose that confidence when things went wrong. And in regard to this matter things did go very wrong. The deficit remained, but the prosperity he had so confidently promised did not materialize. Yet he remained calm, being so completely adjusted to life. And what happened? Three of his greatest adversaries died, all exceedingly wealthy men. They had strongly opposed him because of his tax laws which had earned him the title “robber of the upper classes,” one of the many insults hurled at him. Well, three of his most powerful enemies died—and you may call it a coincidence, but the death duty he had already introduced was so high that the revenue from their estates made up the deficit.

In a remarkable way the tide gradually turned, and Lloyd George began to be praised. He lived according to his inner conscience and the way he was prompted by the environment, and nothing could be in more complete accord than the man who had remained aged 27 and mankind aged 27. However, the time came for his 1909 budget. By then he was of course considerably older, yet had remained aged 27 in the real sense. As he introduced new measures in every sphere in which he had influence, all aiming at fighting poverty and other social ills of the worst kind existing in Britain, it was not surprising that he met with much enmity. But, if one is in such accord with what lives in mankind and has the strength to experience it, the strength will also be found to cope. He sometimes had to listen for ten hours or more to speeches and continually had to intervene and often was opposed by the strongest members of parliament, some glaring at him through monocles while reviling him. Lloyd George remained calm, answering objections for ten hours if he had to, always with wit and ironic remarks that found their target. Thus he managed to introduce laws of immense benefit, such as care of the elderly, laws aiming at improving the population's health, such as effectively combatting drunkenness and the like. One could say that as representative of the time he fought everyone who did not represent his time.

In order to understand fully this whole issue, we must add to it another basic aspect of mankind's evolution. We must bear in mind that in the first, the ancient Indian epoch, man developed the ether body, in the ancient Persian epoch the sentient body. Then in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch he developed the sentient soul, in the Graeco-Latin epoch the intellectual soul, and in our epoch the consciousness soul. However, in the present epoch no other people anywhere are in the position of the British, for they are especially constituted for the consciousness soul. We know that the Italian and Spanish peoples develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, the English people the consciousness soul, the Central Europeans the I, while the Russian people are preparing for the Spirit Self. The English people are therefore representative of the materialism of the epoch, because materialism is bound up with the development of the consciousness soul. Thus Lloyd George is also intimately connected with the consciousness soul; he is, as it were, predestined to be in every way the representative of our time. It is of immense significance that he, the typical 27-year-old, should emerge with the 27-year-old English people. That is why in everything he said he represented the English folk. But he also spoke as a representative of man-kind's present evolutionary stage, as one who has no inclination to further that evolution, but rather with bull-like tenacity wants to press on with what this evolution presently has to offer. Thus the English folk soul is coming to expression in a human being representing the age.

Lloyd George has been active in the British social system ever since 1890, when he was 27 years old, and has left his mark on every aspect of it. And it comes as no surprise that in the years leading up to the war he was heard saying that the British people were not to let themselves be confused by warmongers who continually tried to convince them that the Germans meant to invade England. There was to be no war and not a penny would be spent on arms. So again, this eminent representative of the British people expressed exactly what the British people felt. It also expresses the idealism of a 27-year-old. Whatever else was taking place at the time was more reminiscent of the other ideas as they had been in different ages. But Lloyd George expressed the un-warlike sentiment of the present age, particularly characteristic of the British people. He said there were three stages—which must be avoided at all cost—to sure ruin: to budget for war, to arm for war, and the war itself. This man, the eminent representative of our time, during the period of liberalism in Britain had imprinted it on all spheres of life. All that could be done in Britain in this respect he had done. He also dreamed of a world court of arbitration, which is a typical abstract ideal of a 27-year-old.

Everything I have explained so far about Lloyd George is connected with the fact that he possesses in an unspoiled way the qualities of the 27-year-old. This makes him the ideal representative of the English folk, and in fact, of everything from which the British people benefit and through which they in turn can benefit the world. But what Lloyd George cannot do is progress beyond the age of 27; he remains that age throughout his life in the sense I have explained. Consequently when something occurs under the influence of a different human age group with which he has no affinity, he is immediately thrown off balance. Someone who accepts only what nature and life of itself provide can have no understanding of something which issues from quite a different aspect of mankind's evolution. When one is able to look behind the scenes of world history it is an indisputable fact, though one that is little recognized, that what is represented by Lloyd George is what on the surface the British people want. And what they want is no war. This comes to expression perfectly in the sentiment which says that the three stages to certain ruin are to budget for war, arm for war and war itself. Though the war was not prevented, and thus permitted to occur by Britain, the real truth is that it was brought about by occult powers who manipulate those who govern as if they were marionettes.

One could point to the exact moment when these occult powers intervened, the moment they caught in their net those who were rulers or rather appeared to be. The occult powers who caused the war from Britain were behind well-known statesmen, and their impulses are most certainly not those of 27-year-olds. Rather they stem from ancient traditions and from a thorough knowledge of the forces inherent in the peoples of Europe. They have knowledge of where and when various peoples, or individuals, various leaders may be weak or strong. Their knowledge is exact and far-reaching, and has for centuries not only flowed through hidden channels but has been kept so secret that those in possession of it could drag others unawares into their net. Individuals like Asquith and also Grey were in reality mere puppets who themselves believed, right up to early August 1914, that at least for Britain there would be no war. They were sure they would do everything to prevent war, when suddenly they found themselves manipulated by occult powers, powers which originated from personalities quite other than those named. Over against these powers Lloyd George, having remained 27 years old, also became a mere puppet. This was because their influence originated from quite a different human life period than his; they could be so effective because of their ability to place ancient traditions in the service of British egoism. The influence of these powers swept like a wave over Britain engulfing also Lloyd George who, though a great man, is through and through a product of our time. Behind the impulses which from Britain laid the foundations for war existed an exact knowledge of the peoples of Europe and their political intentions. Those who know what took place in Britain also know that the content of what today is expressed in war slogans existed as an idea, as a plan, already in the 1880s and 90s, a plan that had to become reality.

Those with occult insight into Britain's political future and the future of the peoples of Europe were saying that the dominance of the Russian empire will be destroyed to enable the Russian people to exist. The Russian revolution in March 1917 was planned already at the end of the 1880s, and so were the channels through which events were guided and manipulated. This was something known only to that small circle whose secret activities sprang from impulses that were of considerably older origin than those of Lloyd George. The events that took place on the Balkans were all planned by human beings of whom it could be said that they were the “dark figures behind the scenes.” That these things happen, is destiny. When from Britain something intervened in the world situation which could not have arisen from the essentially British character represented by Lloyd George, the powers behind the scenes saw to it that he became Minister of Munitions! As long as he had been himself, Lloyd George's deepest convictions had been that the way to certain ruin was to budget for war, arm for war and war itself. Now that he is a puppet he becomes Minister of Munitions! All he retained of his own was his efficiency. He became a very able Minister of Munitions. The man who from deepest inner conviction had spoken against arms brought about that Britain became as well armed as all the other nations.

Here we see coming together the one who, having remained at age 27, so eminently represents mankind, and the dark powers behind the scenes, powers capable of overturning even the deepest convictions because all that lives in the physical world is governed by the spiritual realm; therefore it can be guided by a spirit which acts in accordance with the egoism of a certain group of people. Seldom perhaps have convictions been so completely reversed by the powers behind the scenes as those of Lloyd George have been. The reason lies in the fact that his convictions were so completely rooted in what had been prepared for this particular time as the essential “age 27 quality.” As long as the “age 27 quality” of this single human individuality was effective within mankind also aged 27, there was complete accord. However, just because that harmony was rooted solely in the present, the discord became all the greater when that other influence, based on ancient knowledge, asserted itself.

This extremely interesting interaction does certainly explain a great deal about present-day events; it can also help us to base our judgments on the facts of human evolution, rather than on sympathy or antipathy. The seriousness of certain things can be understood only when they are seen against the background of mankind's evolution as a whole. This also leads to a recognition of how essential it is to be aware of what goes on behind the surface of world history. As long as mankind's age had not receded below that of 28, up to the fifteenth century, evolution could go on without the individual acquainting himself with the guiding spiritual impulses behind historical events. Today it is necessary that we learn to know the influences at work beneath the surface. Such insight is essential especially in Central Europe. If one is to guard against the adversary, one must know the full extent of his might. The only way we can attain insight into mankind's evolution today is to acquaint ourselves, through spiritual knowledge, with the laws that govern that evolution. We understand our time even in regard to the individual human being only when we do so out of the spirit.

How does such an enigmatic figure as Lloyd George come to be just in the key position at this time? The answer to this question is important if one is to understand what is taking place. However, even when the individual is a representative of mankind, he can only be understood through the science of the spirit. Everything concerning Lloyd George's future will be of interest, just as everything concerning his past is of interest. Every step taken by him since 1890 has been significant. So, too, is the way he was there in the background at the outbreak of war, reflected, as it were, in the surface of events. Interesting is also the way he has become the pivot around which so many things in the world revolve, including what emerges from Woodrow Wilson, another one aged 27.⁸ Not least of interest is the fact that Lloyd George's inner convictions, despite their strength, were obliterated in the face of spiritual influences and powers of a dubious nature. How will Lloyd George be superseded? What is his future?⁹ These questions are also of interest. We must wait and see.

• 1 . Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662. Penseés, in many English editions. From the German edition of Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg, 1954, pp. 240-241: “We not only know God and ourselves through Jesus Christ; but life and death we know only through him as well. Without Jesus Christ we would not understand our life, our death, God, or ourselves.”
• 2 . Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781. The verbatim quote is: “If God held in his right hand all truth; and, in his left, the ever active drive for truth, even with the condition that I would eternally and always err, and said: ‘Choose!,’ I would fall humbly on his left and say, ‘Father, give! The pure truth is for you alone!,’ ” Eine Duplik (1778), in G.E. Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, Leipzig, 1897.
• 3 . David Lloyd George, 1863–1945, British statesman. Prime minister, 1916–1922.
• 4 . Sir Winston Churchill, 1874–1965, British statesman, prime minister 1940–1945, 1951–1955. Arthur Neville Chamberlain, 1869–1940, British statesman, prime minister 1937–1940.
• 5 . William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1898, British statesman, prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894.
• 6 . Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 1836–1908, British statesman, prime minister, 1905–1908.
• 7 . Sir Edward Grey, 1862–1933, British statesman. British foreign Minister, 1905–1914. Herbert Henry Asquith, 1852–1928, British statesman.
• 8 . Woodrow Wilson, 1856–1924, note 3 to Lecture I.
• 9 . David Lloyd George, see note 3, fell from power as Prime Minister in 1922 in connection with the Irish Question. He was a minister in various cabinets from 1909–1916, and Prime Minister from December 1916–1922. The liberal party which he led lost its influence thereafter. Lloyd George's role as a prominent politician was also at an end.

The more deeply we penetrate into the occult records of the various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly occult records, the more we are struck by one feature of them which meets us again and again. I have already indicated it in discussing the Gospel of St. John, and again on a later occasion in speaking of the Gospel of St. Mark. I refer to the fact that on looking deeply into any such occult record it becomes ever clearer that it is really most wonderfully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could show, for instance, how St. John's Gospel, when we penetrate into its depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition. With remarkable dramatic power the story is carried up stage by stage to a great climax, and then continues from this point onward with a kind of renewal of dramatic power to the end. You can study this in the lectures I gave at Cassel on St. John's Gospel in relation to the three other Gospels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the gradual enhancement of the whole composition while the super-sensible is placed before us in the so-called miracles and signs; each working up in ever-increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the initiation of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find artistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I could show the same for the structure of St. Mark's Gospel. When we regard such records in their beauty of form and their dramatic power, we can indeed conclude that just because they are true such records cannot be other than artistically, beautifully composed, in the deepest sense of the word. For the moment we will only indicate this fact, as we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable that the same thing meets us again in the Bhagavad Gita. There is a wonderful intensification of the narrative, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty in the song, so that if nothing else were to touch the soul of one studying this sublime Gita, he still could not help being impressed by its marvelous composition. Let us begin by indicating a few of the outstanding points—and we will confine ourselves today to the first four discourses—because these points are important both for the artistic structure and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna meets us. Facing the bloodshed in which he is to take part, he grows weak. He sees all that is to take place as a battle of brothers against brothers, his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not fight against them. While fear and terror come over him and he is horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the instrument through which Krishna, God, is to speak to him. Here in this first episode we already have a moment of great intensity and also an indication of deep occult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by whatever path, into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have gone only a few steps—or even had only a dim presentiment of the way to be experienced—such a person will be aware of the deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a deep upheaval in our souls. We have to experience something which disturbs and shakes all our forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are generally spread out over many moments, over long periods of living, whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore weaker—such feelings are concentrated in a single moment and storm through us with tremendous force when we enter the occult worlds. Then we experience a kind of inner shattering, which can indeed be compared to fear, terror and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from something almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the initial stages of occult development, to entering the spiritual worlds. It is just for this reason that such great care must be taken to give the right advice to those who would enter the spiritual worlds through occult training. Such a person must be prepared so that he may experience this upheaval as a necessary event in his soul life without its encroaching on his bodily life and health, because his body must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing. We must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with outward equanimity and calm.

This is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul forces we need for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual powers, even those of imagination, of feeling and will—these too must not be allowed to become unbalanced. The upheaval that may be the starting-point for occult life must take place in far deeper layers of the soul, so that we go through our external life as before, without anything being noticed in us outwardly, while within we may be living through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That is what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be able to experience such inward convulsions without losing one's outer balance and calm. To this end a person who is striving to become ripe for occult development must widen the circle of his interests beyond his everyday life. He must get away from that to which he is ordinarily attached from morning to night, and reach out to interests that move on the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to undergo the experience of doubting all truth and all knowledge. We must have the power to do this with the same intensity of feeling people generally have only where their everyday interests are concerned. We must be able to feel with the destiny of all mankind, with as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny, or perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, nation, or race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely ready for occult development.

For this reason modern anthroposophy, if pursued earnestly and worthily, is the right preparation in our age for a true occult development. Let those who are absorbed in the petty material interests of the immediate present, who cannot find sufficient interest to follow the anthroposophist in looking out over world and planetary destinies, over the historical epochs and races of mankind—let them scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an occult development must lift up his eyes to the heights where the interests of mankind, of the earth, of the whole planetary system become his own. When a person's interests are gradually sharpened and widened through the study of anthroposophy, which leads even without occult training to an understanding of occult truths, then he is being rightly prepared for an occult path.

In our time there are many who have such interests for the whole of mankind. More often they are not to be found among the intellectuals but are people who appear to lead quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have a humble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthroposophy is in such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must learn of the mighty upheaval of the soul that has to come at the beginning of occult experience. With wonderful truth the Bhagavad Gita sets such a moment of upheaval at the starting-point of Arjuna's experience, only he does not go through an occult training but is placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into the battle without being able to recognize its necessity, its purpose, or its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are about to fight against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna can be shaken by that to its innermost core, for he has to say to himself, “Brother fights against brother. Surely then all the tribal customs will be shaken and then the tribe itself will wither away and be destroyed, and all its morality fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that in accordance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then will everything be imperiled—man himself, the law, the whole world. The whole significance of mankind will be in the balance.” Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground were about to sink from under his feet, as though an abyss were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who had received into his feeling something that the man of today no longer knows, but that in those ancient times was a primeval teaching of tradition. He knew that what is handed on from generation to generation in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out from his blood connections and his family line are bound up with the man nature. What a man inherits as common, generic qualities is handed on to the descendants by the woman, whereas what forms him into a unique, individual being, tearing him out of the generic succession, is the part he receives from his father. “Must it not then have an evil effect on the laws that rule woman's nature,” says Arjuna to himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on which for him the whole well-being of human evolution depends. He feels that the forefathers of the tribe, the ancestors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their souls watch over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead of altars with sacrificial fires burning on them for the ancestors, he sees those who should join in kindling such fires assailing one another in battle. If we would understand a human soul we must penetrate into its thoughts. Above all we must enter deeply into its feelings because it is in feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with its very life. Now think of the great contrast between all that Arjuna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother against brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny is hammering at Arjuna's soul, shaking it to its very depths. It is as though he had to gaze down into a terrible abyss. Such an upheaval awakens the forces of the soul and brings it to a vision of occult realities that at other times are hidden as behind a veil. That is what gives such dramatic intensity to the Bhagavad Gita. The ensuing discourse is thus placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of necessity out of Arjuna's destiny, instead of being given us merely as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in occultism.

Now that Arjuna has been rightly prepared for the birth of the deeper forces of his soul, now that he can see these forces in inward vision, there happens what everyone who has the power to behold it will understand: His charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks to him. In the first four discourses we observe three successive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing something new. Here in these very first discourses we find an accent that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from the fact that it corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first stage is a teaching that might appear even trivial to many Westerners in its given form. Let us admit that at once. (Here I should like to remark, especially for the benefit of my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by “Western” all that lies to the west of the Ural Mountains, the Volga, the Caspian Sea and Asia Minor—in fact the whole of Europe. What is to be called Eastern land belongs essentially in Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we find a teaching that might easily appear trivial, especially to a philosophical mind. For what is the first thing that Krishna says to Arjuna as a word of exhortation for the battle? “Look there,” he says, “at those who are to be killed by you; those in your own ranks who are to be killed and those who are to remain behind, and consider well this one thing. What dies and what remains alive in your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer physical body. The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay those in the ranks over there they are but slaying the outer body, they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. The spirit goes from change to change, from incarnation to incarnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man is not affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your duty. You need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in killing your enemies you are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna, and at first hearing his words are in a sense trivial, though in a special way. In many respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his thinking and consciousness. He never stops to consider that everything is evolving. If he says that Krishna's exhortation, as I have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say, “Why do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when every schoolboy and girl knows his theorem?” It would be stupid to conclude that Pythagoras was not a great man in having discovered his theorem just because every schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is, but we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any Western philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of Krishna—that the spirit is eternal, immortal—was a sublime wisdom at the time Krishna revealed it. Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that blood-relations ought not to fight. They still felt the common blood that flowed in a group of people. To hear it said that “the spirit is eternal” (spirit in the sense of what is generally conceived, abstractly, as the center of man's being)—the spirit is eternal and undergoes transformations, passing from incarnation to incarnation—this stated in abstract and intellectual terms was something absolutely new and epoch-making in its newness when it resounded in Arjuna's soul through Krishna's words. All the people in Arjuna's environment believed definitely in reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a general and abstract idea, it was new, especially in regard to Arjuna's situation. This is one reason why we had to say that such a truth can only be called “trivial” in a special sense. That holds true in another respect as well. Our abstract thought, which we use even in the pursuit of popular science, which we regard today as quite natural—this thinking activity was by no means always so natural and simple.

In order to illustrate what I say, let me give you a radical example. You will think it strange that while for all of you it is quite natural to speak of a “fish,” it was by no means natural for primitive peoples to do so. Primitive peoples are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod and herring, but “fish” they do not know. They have no such word as “fish,” because their thought does not extend to such abstract generalization. They know individual trees, but “tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general concepts is by no means natural to primitive races even in the present time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered humanity in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who considers why it was that logic first began in the time of ancient Greece, could scarcely be surprised when the statement is made on occult grounds that logical thinking has only existed since the period that followed the original composition of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna impels Arjuna to logical thought, to thinking in abstractions, as if to a new thing that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of thought that man has developed and takes quite for granted today, people have the most distorted and unnatural notions about. Western philosophers in particular have most distorted ideas about thought, for they generally take it to be merely a photographic reproduction of external sense reality. They imagine that concepts and ideas and the whole inner thinking of man simply arises in him out of the external physical world. While libraries of philosophical words have been written in the West to prove that thought is merely something having its origin in the stimulus of the external physical world, it is only in our time that thought will be valued for what it really is.

Here I reach a point that is most important for those who would undergo an occult development in their own souls. I want to make every effort to get this point clear. The medieval alchemists used to say—I cannot now discuss what they really meant by it—that gold could be made from all metals, gold in any desired amount, but that one must first have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could not make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain clairvoyance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are, are not clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become clairvoyant at all, because just as the alchemist thought that one must have a little gold to conjure forth large quantities, so must one already be a little clairvoyant in order to be able to develop and extend it more and more. Now you may see two alternatives here and ask, “Do you think then that we all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or, do you think that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so?” This is just the point. It is most important to understand that there is really no one among you who does not have this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be conscious of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in it. What is this that all possess? It is something not generally regarded or valued as clairvoyance. Let me make a rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses. In the 18th century what was considered a great word was uttered by a pioneer of thinking, “O, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!” Today a great word must resound in men's souls, “O, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the beginning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed I said many years ago, publicly in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I showed that human ideas come from super-sensible, spiritual knowledge. It was not understood at the time, and no wonder, for those who should have understood it were—well, like the chickens! We must realize that at the moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first time in the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the knowledge of higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the very surface of the changes that take place within the external world of sense. Bodies die; the spirit, the abstract, the essential being, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen playing on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoyance for men.

One thing is necessary for men of today if they would attain to an inwardly-experienced truth. They must have once passed through the feeling of the fleeting nature of all outer transformations. They must have experienced the mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same time the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath of the ephemeral that streams out from all things. They must have been able to fix their interest on this coming forth and passing away again, the transitoriness of the world of sense. Then, when they have been able to feel the deepest pain and the fullest delight in the external world, they must once have been absolutely alone—alone with their concepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In these concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of the outer edge of cosmic being,”—the very expression I once used in my The Philosophy of Freedom! This must be experienced, not merely understood intellectually, and if you would experience it, it must be in deepest loneliness. Then you have another feeling. On the one hand you experience the majesty of the world of ideas that is spread out over the All. On the other hand you experience with the deepest bitterness that you have to separate yourself from space and time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas. Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore, it comes to you that the world of ideas has now drawn together as in a single point of this loneliness. Now you say, I am alone with my world of ideas. You become utterly bewildered in your world of ideas, an experience that stirs you to the depths of your soul. At length you say to yourself, “Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps the only truth about these laws is that they exist in the point of my own loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced, utter doubt in all existence.

When you have this experience in your world of ideas, when the full cup of doubt in all existence has been poured out with pain and bitterness over your soul, then only are you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not the infinite spaces and periods of time of the physical world from which your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of doubt, you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and know that your doubt was justified, and in what sense it was justified. For it had to be, since you imagined that the ideas had come into your soul from the times and spaces of the physical world. How do you now feel your world of ideas having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds? Now for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you were feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark abyss. Now you begin to feel that you are standing on a rock that rises up out of the abyss. You know with certainty, “Now I am connected with the spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on me my world of ideas.”

This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage where man begins to be deeply in earnest with what has today come to be a trivial, commonplace truth. To bear this feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive in a true way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of the eternal spirit living through outer transformations. To abstract understanding we speak in concepts and ideas. Krishna speaks to Arjuna's heart. What may be trivial and commonplace for the understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the heart of man.

We see how the first stage shows itself at once as a necessary consequence of the deeply moving experience that is presented to us at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Now the next stage.

It is easy to speak of what is often called dogma in occultism—something that is accepted in blind faith and given out as gospel truth. Let me suggest to you that it would be quite simple for someone to come forward and say, “This fellow has published a book on Occult Science, speaking in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and there is no way of controlling these statements. They can only be accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being said, because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our age; and there is no getting away from it, our age is superficial. Indeed, under certain conditions this objection would not be without foundation. It would be justified, for example, if you were to tear out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution. If anyone were to begin reading the book at this chapter it would be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author prefaces it with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist because he shows what paths the soul has to go through in order to reach such conceptions. That is the point, that it has been shown in the book how every individual man, if he reaches into the depths of his soul, is bound to come to such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism ceases.

Thus we can feel it natural that Krishna, having brought Arjuna into the world of ideas and wishing to lead him on into the occult world, now goes on to show him the next stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it finds the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by rejecting every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically. Here we come up against a hard saying by Krishna. He absolutely rejects what for centuries had been most holy to the highest men of that age—the contents of the Vedas. He says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor to the word of the Vedas. Hold fast to Yoga!” That is to say, “Hold fast to what is within thine own soul!”

Let us grasp what Krishna means by this exhortation. He does not mean that the contents of the Vedas are untrue. He does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Vedas dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda teaching do. He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very first original point whence the human soul evolves. For this purpose all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imagine Krishna saying to himself that even though Arjuna will in the end reach the very same wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, still he must be drawn away from them, for he must go his own way, beginning with the sources in his own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their content is true or untrue. Arjuna's path must start from himself, through his own inwardness he must come to recognize Krishna. Arjuna must be assumed to have in himself what a man can and must have if he is really to enter into the concrete truths of the super-sensible worlds. Krishna has called Arjuna's attention to something that from then onward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to this point he must lead him further and bring him to recognize what he is to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must first undergo Yoga. Here the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we see how the Bhagavad Gita goes on through the first four discourses with ever-increasing dramatic impulse, coming at length to what is most individual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to Arjuna. We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He describes the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to what can only be attained through Yoga. Concepts only require to be placed in the right light; but Arjuna has to be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows once more an enhancement of dramatic power, and again comes the expression of a deep occult truth. Let us assume that someone really takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together with the whole earth, then he grows into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the earth as well—of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up—not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long succession of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our atonement with what goes from one incarnation to another in the earth's evolution. That is the third stage.

This is the reason for the great beauty in the artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. In its climaxes, its inner artistic form, it reflects deep occult truths. Beginning with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our thinking it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the third stage to a description of the marvelous expansion of man's horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens in Arjuna the idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived often before, only you know nothing of it. But I have this consciousness in myself when I look back on all the transformations through which I have lived, and I will lead you up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I feel myself.” A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it is deeply and occultly true!

Thus we come to see the evolution of mankind from out of its everyday consciousness, from the pearl in the roadway that only needs to be recognized, from the particular world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of everyday life in any one age, up to the point from where we can look out over all that we really have in us, which lives on from incarnation to incarnation on the earth.

Yesterday I described to you the Rosicrucian Initiation up to the third stage the Knowledge of Occult Writing. We therefore learned to know what is designated in the Rosicrucian meaning as Study, then the Acquisition of Imaginative Knowledge, and then what is termed as the Penetration into the Occult Writing into that writing which is taken out of the laws of Nature themselves.¹ Now it behooves us to proceed to the fourth stage of Rosicrucian Initiation, to the one which is called The Preparation of the Stone and the Wise. We should realise that only in the present time has it become possible to say something about that which the Rosicrucians really meant by the Preparation of the Stone of the Wise.

By that name were known certain rules for the entrance into the higher worlds, and these rules have existed ever since the founder of Rosicrucianism inaugurated this movement in 1459. You must bear in mind that this spiritual current has always been handled with the greatest precaution and has always been kept secret.

Towards the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, certain secrets of Rosicrucianism leaked out in an unjustified manner, owing, to a kind of treason; at that time several things connected with these secrets were printed, but from these publications one could gather that the, people in question had an inkling of these secrets, but did not understand them; never the less they at least heard the right words or picked them up so to speak, also in regard to the “Stone of the Wise”. At that time a series of communications appeared even in the “Reichsanzeiger” on a society whose task it was to prepare the Stone of the Wise; among these communications there is also one which can only be understood by those who know what it is about. It states: “Yes, the Stone of the Wise exists; it is known to almost everyone; indeed, most people have even held it in their hand; it is not at all difficult to find it,—but most people do not know this!”

The idea of the Stone of Wise was connected with the meaning that little by little it enabled one to know man's immortal part, which cannot decay after death, for it leads one up into the higher worlds. If a human being realizes that this immortal part cannot fall a prey tOo death, he acquires an immortal life through the possession of the Stone of the Wise, and thus he overcomes death. This had been interpreted as meaning that one would never die. But it means instead that thereby one learns to know the world where man lives after death. Moreover one saw in the Stone of the Wise an elixir of life. All this rendered the Stone of the Wise extremely desirable. Those who knew the true meaning of these things must have found these words strangely correct; for they are true—but those who do not know the secret cannot do much with them.

Let me now show you quite briefly what these words really mean. If you wish to understand them, please follow me in the contemplation of a plain, natural-scientific fact:—You must be clear as to the relation existing between the human being and the vegetable kingdom. It is a fact that all those who breathe as man breathes, could never exist if there were no plants. Now try to become acquainted with the process which takes place between you and the plants.

You breath in the air and use the oxygen of the air. You could not live, if there were no oxygen. When you take in the air and work upon the oxygen in your organism, you breathe out carbonic acid, a combination of carbon and oxygen. You must therefore say: Man continually takes in oxygen which maintains his body, and he breathes out carbonic acid; consequently he continually creates a poison which could kill him. You continually fill your environment with a poison.—What does the plant do? In a certain way it does exactly the contrary! It takes in carbonic acid, keeps the carbon, and sends out the oxygen which it does not need. Thus you give the plant what it needs and the plant gives you oxygen in return. What does the plant do with the carbon which it retains? To a certain extent it uses the carbon to build up its own body. You therefore give the plant, so to speak, the opportunity to build up its body out of carbon.—And after thousands of years, when you dig the plant out of the earth in the form of coal,you have it in the same substance.

The plant gives you oxygen, You breathe it in. You give the plant carbonic acid, it retains the carbon, uses it to build up its body and returns you oxygen. This is a wonderful alternating process, which thus takes place. This is what happens to-day. But man is developing, and in the future, the human body itself will have the organ which transforms carbonic acid into oxygen, retaining the carbon.

Here I am indicating a future state of development of man, a different condition from that which I pointed out to you yesterday, when speaking bf the Rosicrucian path of training. In the future man will have a passionless body of a higher order, a body which you may find to-day upon a lower stage in the plant; man will be able to build up a body which will be plant-Like upon a higher stage. In the organ which now constitutes his heart he will have an apparatus which will be able to do that which the plant does to-day. Now. the human being and the plant belong together; one could not live without the other. If there were no plants, all the beings who breathe in oxygen would have to die in a very short time, because it is the plant which supplies us with oxygen. We cannot imagine life without plants. But what the plant now does outside, will in the future be done by that organ into which our heart will develop when the heart shall have become a muscle which we ourselves control. We spread out our consciousness over the plants; we grow together with the vegetable world, so that in the future that which the plant now does outside our being will take place within our being. Then we shall also retain the carbon which we now discard, and build up our body with it. We shall be like the plants upon a higher stage of consciousness.

From primeval ages, occultism weaves all this into a wonderful legend. It is the Golden Legend. And what I have explained to you to-day was imparted to the pupil of occultism in the form of an image. The legend was more or less as follows:—

When Seth, the son whom God gave Adam and Eve in place of the murdered Abel, once entered Paradise„ he found the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life inter-grown; their branches intertwined. From this tree Seth took three seeds, following the command of the Angel who guided him. He kept the three seeds and when Adam died, he placed them into Adam's mouth. And a tree grew out of Adam's grave; to those who knew how to look upon it in the right way, this tree revealed a writing in flaming letters—the words: “Ejeh Asher Ejeh. I am He that was. He that is, He that shall be.” Now Seth took some wood from this tree and many things were made out of it: among them the rod which became the magic rod of Moses. And this tree multiplied; from its wood the portal of Solomon's temple was made, and later on, when it had passed through many other destinies, it became the Cross upon which the Savior hung.

The legend thus connects the wood of the Cross of Golgotha with the tree which grew out of Adam' s grave from the seeds of the Tree of Paradise.²

This legend conceals the same mystery which I indicated to you to-day. It meant to say: In primeval ages the human race had not yet sunk down to the flesh with passion; it was pure and chaste like the plant which stretches out its calyx to the sun. The human beings then descended through the “fall into sin”; their flesh was filled with passion. But everything which the human being once possessed in the state of innocence will be regained if he succeeds in forming through knowledge a body devoid of passion, the body which he once had before acquiring knowledge. Bear in mind the origin of the Ego. That the human being no longer possesses that innocent body, is connected with the fact that he began to breathe through the lungs and was able to form his red blood. Man's present form, and the fact that this form is the bearer of knowledge in the present meaning, is therefore connected with his breathing and the circulation of the blood.

Now transfer yourselves into the human body of to-day. You can imagine the oxygen streaming into it and stimulating the red blood, you can look upon the blood as a tree with many branches reaching into every part of the body, and you can see the blue blood streaming back filled with carbonic acid.

You have two trees within you: the tree of the red blood, and the tree of the blue blood. Man, as the bearer of an Ego, could not exist without these two trees. He had to take in the blood in order to have an Ego, and that is how our modern knowledge arises; this forms its foundation. But death was connected with this development, for you constantly transform the red blood into blue blood filled with carbonic acid! The occult teacher of the Old Testament therefore said: “Look upon your own being: you have within you the red tree of blood; without this tree you would never have become a cognitive human being. You have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge; but this gave you at the same time the possibility to give life.”

That which was once a Tree of Life became a death-bringing tree; the blue blood-tree within-us is therefore the Tree of Death. This is the present state of things. But the initiate sees a future state, when the human being shall have the plant-nature within him, when the heart-organ shall transform the blue blood into red blood in a direct way, within the human being. Then the Tree of Death shall have become the Tree of Life and man shall have become an immortal being. What man once was upon a lower stage, he shall once more become upon a higher stage, and he will have within him the apparatus which now exists in the plant.

Paradise thus shows us a final state of humanity. Seth' s mission, so the occult teachers explained, was that he saw that which comes at the end of the times: the balancing of the two principles within the human being. Thus the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge intertwine in Paradise; but in man they can only exist if he seeks aid from the plant. But how can he acquire the faculty through which the two trees intertwine within his being? By developing within him the three higher members of human nature.

We have learned that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego, and we have seen that when the Ego works upon the astral body it produces the first higher member; when it works upon the etheric body, the second higher member; and when it works upon the physical body, the third one. The future human being will therefore consist of seven parts, for he will also have the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit, and the Spirit-Man.

When the human being thus transforms his lower nature, he will have the Tree of Life within him. At the beginning of his development man has therefore been predisposed through his Ego for the unfolding of his three higher members.

Seth took three seeds and the first Ego-man, Adam, let these seeds grow into a tree. This tree contains that which passes through every incarnation. During your first incarnation your Ego was upon a very low stage, but from incarnation to incarnation it reaches ever higher stages. What grows out of it is the symbol for the eternal part in man. which will reach its greatest perfection at the end of the Earth. But we shall only attain to this if we connect ourselves with everything that is highest along the path of the Spirit. Everything which leads humanity upwards along this path—the rod of Moses, Solomon' s Temple, and finally the Cross upon Golgotha—helps us to unfold fully the higher trinity within us. The Cross of Golgotha indicates the path leading to the highest fulfillment of man. At the beginning the seed from which that Tree grew was laid in Adam's mouth (this cannot be expressed more beautifully than in this Legend!), it was the seed which Seth had gained in the manner described. Here you have the path of humanity throughout the ages, the path of humanity through Time. And in future, man will have to attain that which the plant can do to-day: the transformation of his being, the capacity to produce carbon within himself, through his own power. Man will in the future master the alchemy of the plant.

The alchemistic preparation of what I have just now described to you was reached by giving the Rosicrucian pupil certain indications on the way in which he had to regulate his breathing process. This can only be grasped if we bear in mind the proverb: The steadily falling drop hollows out the stone. But the Rosicrucian pupil works towards this future goal. Even as the drop, small as it is, after a long time achieves hollow in the stone, so the progress of the human bodies is brought about by this regulation of the breathing process. The indications given to the Rosicrucian pupil enable him to prepare, even to-day, a condition in which the Ego acquires the faculty to contemplate the future state of being in the higher worlds. The Rosicrucian pupil therefore does two things: In the first place he helps to prepare the future of humanity, and secondly he himself acquires the power of looking into the spiritual worlds; he sees that which will later on come down into physical reality.

Now you will be able to understand the indications which were published by that strange man, though he did not understand them. The Stone of the Wise is the ordinary black coal; but you must learn the process enabling you to elaborate the carbon through your inner forces: this constitutes the future of mankind. The present coal is a prototype of that which will one day constitute the most important substance of the human being. Bear in mind the clear diamond: also the diamond is nothing but carbon! This was called, the “Preparation of the Stone of the Wise” in the Rosicrucian world-conception. It conceals a process of transformation in the human being and the call to work upon future conditions of humanity,. All who work in this way help to prepare the human bodies of the future, the bodies which will in future be needed by the human souls.

There is a saying which expresses very beautifully this work upon future states of being, and we shall be able to understand it after having made a clean distinction between the development of souls and of races.

In the past, all of you were Atlanteans, but these Atlantean bodies presented an entirely different aspect,—as I have already explained to you. Within your present body lives the same soul which once lived somewhere in an Atlantean body. But not every body has been prepared, as yours are being prepared, today, by a few colonists, who at that time migrated from the West to the East. Those who remained behind, those who connected themselves, aS one says, with the race, decayed, whereas those who had progressed, founded new cultures. The last stragglers along the path leading eastwards, the Mongolians, have preserved something of the Atlantean culture. They have not progressed; they remained within the race. In the same way, when a new age dawns, the bodies of those who do not progress, will become the Chinese of the future. Also in the future there will be decadent races. In Chinese bodies live souls who had to incarnate again within the Chinese race, because during the Atlantean time they were attracted too strongly by their race. The souls that dwell within you to-day will in the future incarnate in bodies proceeding from those who are now working in the manner described, producing the bodies of the future, in the same way in which the first colonists of the Atlanteans prepared the bodies of coming ages. And those who cling to everyday things, who do not wish to connect themselves with that which the future holds in store, will melt together within the race.

There are people who wish to remain within traditional things, who do not wish to know anything of progress and who do not listen to those who can lead them beyond the race to ever new forms of humanity. The myth has preserved this tendency in a wonderful way; for it can not be described more appropriately Than by pointing to one of the greatest, who spoke the words: “Those who do not forsake father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, cannot be my disciples”, and by setting forth the tragic aspect of a man who says: “I do not wish to have anything to de with such a guide!, and who rejects Him. How can this be expressed more clearly than by the image of him who rejects the guide and who cannot progress! This is the legend of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, who sat at the feet of Christ Jesus and rejected the greatest of all Guides, who did not wish to know anything of the course of evolution and must therefore remain with his race and always return within his race.³ These are myths which are given to humanity as a perpetual reminder, so that it may know the gist of things.

This fourth stage of Rosicrucian training must therefore be looked upon as something of immense depth, and humanity thus gradually develops the “Preparation of the Stone of the Wise.”

The fifth stage is the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm. The whole complicated human body, such as it exists now, has arisen in a special way. My lectures have led you through the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth conditions; Upon Saturn, only the first foundations of your sensory system existed; only this existed of everything which now constitutes your physical body, and it was embedded in the Saturn-substance, even as crystals are now embedded in the earth-substance. Your eye was like a crystal of quartz. Upon the Sun, the glands which were your highest organs were constituted in such a way that they covered the surface of the Sun. And upon the Moon the organs which form your nervous system were spread over the Moon's surface. The Moon had a nervous system in which the men-animals who lived upon the Moon had a share. Upon the Earth, man acquired his osseous system; this was not possible upon the Moon, for it had no mineral kingdom.

This shows you hew wonderful is the structure of the human body. The organ of sight, the eye such we have it now, was once spread over the whole of Saturn; and what was once spread out in the great cosmos outside, entered our being in regard to each organ, occult science can tell you how it is connected with the macrocosm, with the great world outside, for something in the external world corresponds to the liver, the spleen, the heart, etc. Spiritual science can also tell you what had to take place in the external world so that these organs might arise. The Rosicrucian schooling enables us to immerse ourselves in our sense-organs, to penetrate from within into our eyes and ears, and to gain a clairvoyant knowledge of the development of these organs.

I have led you back to an epoch in the Atlantean evolution when the etheric body still emerged so far above the physical body that it could not coincide with a point in our head which is just above the root of the nose. We have seen that the etheric body then gradually penetrated into the physical body and that tile physical body took on its present form. Now there is one method of immersion, connected with a certain formula which can only be communicated by word of mouth. When you thus concentrate yourself upon that point where the physical part of the head coincides with the above-mentioned point of the etheric head, then you learn to know what the earth was like at that time, when the etheric head began to enter the physical head. In a similar way you may enter every part of your body, of your microcosm, and thus gain knowledge of the forces which hold sway in the macrocosm. Man is the most complicated of all beings, and even as the message contained in a telegram enables you to identify the sender, so the immersion in this or in that organ of your body enables you to gain knowledge of the creative powers which gave rise to it.

This leads us on to the sixth stage, which is called the Immersion in the Cosmos. Those who have learned to know, in the manner described above, the relationship between microcosm and macroc0sm, have gained a knowledge which embraces the whole world. This fact is concealed behind the ancient motto: “Know thyself!” But a very harmful influence has been exercised by theosophists who say: Within you lies the whole godhead; the highest principle is contained within your being. Thus all you need to do is look into your being , to look within yourself, and this will enable you to know the whole world.

Yet this inner brooding is the most foolish thing we can do, for it only leads to the knowledge of our lower self, which we have in any case. Self-immersion never shows us more than we have already have. Real self-knowledge only arises in the complicated manner described above, and then it is at the same time world-knowledge.

A genuine theosophical teaching does not make things easy for us, but it must say: Calm, earnest meditation should lead you to the knowledge even of the most complicated Beings. You cannot recognise the Godhead otherwise than by learning to know it piece by piece in the world outside. Patience and perseverance are needed for this. Calm, slow progress leads you to a knowledge of the world. Theosophy cannot give you a universal formula supplying knowledge all at once; it can only indicate the path long which you can gain self-knowledge and world-knowledge. This will lead you to a knowledge of God.

On the sixth stage of Rosicrucian schooling we do not attain to a dry, intellectual form of knowledge, but to one which is intimately connected with the world, with the universe. Those who have this knowledge, are intimately connected with everything in the universe; it is a connection which a modern men can only understand by bearing in mind the mysterious love-relationship between man and woman, which is based upon a secret knowledge of the other's being. The contemplation of the macrocosm leads not only to an understanding of the world, but to an intimate connection with every being, resembling that of lovers. In that case you will have an intimate relationship, a kind of love relationship with the plant, with the stone, with every creature in the universe. You will develop a specialized love for every being; to each one you will say something which you would not have said had you not reached this deeper understanding.

Animals eat the substances which suit its constitution and do not touch those that might harm it. This is based on a sympathetic relation towards certain things and an antipathetic one towards others. Man had to lose this direct connection with things in order to reach his present form of knowledge, but he will regain this connection upon a higher stage. What enables a modern occultist to know that the plant's blossom has another influence upon the human body than the root? And how does he know that the influence of an ordinary root differs from that of a carrot? Because these things speak to him, as they do to animals upon a lower stage. Animals do not have a conscious understanding of such things, but man will regain this direct connection with the substances and beings of the universe, upon the highest stages of consciousness.

The seventh stage of Rosicrucian schooling naturally follows the sixth one. Everything which I have told you so far will have shown you that the knowledge involved is chiefly connected with soul-impressions and feelings. No knowledge which we attain along this path does not at the same time move the heart in the most living way, so that a clear distinction should be made between an idea logical, intellectual and a spiritual knowledge.

The occultist does not mean to touch your feelings, and to tell you all manner of beautiful things. He simply relates the facts of the spiritual world and he would consider it as shameless to appeal to your feelings in a direct way. But he knows that when he tells you the truths of the spiritual world, these truths themselves speak; these spiritual facts should stir your feelings. A Rosicrucian therefore never takes into consideration the person of a teacher, for the teaching is in no way connected with the person. The teacher is the instrument through which the truths themselves speak to men. Those who still believe or have “views of their own” are not fit to be occult teachers. For if we judge through feeling, instead of judging objectively, we might even say that twice two is five!

This shows you how the Rosicrucian gradually penetrates into the knowledge of the higher worlds by developing various things within him. He needs guidance in this, but all those who earnestly seek this guidance will find it at the right moment.

We cannot say, however, that the Rosicrucian successively passes through these seven stages of training under the personal guidance of a teacher. The occult teacher chooses what is more suited to the one or to the other. I have already given you a description of the preparatory stages. Let me now emphasize two things in in this preparation, in order to show you that other things must be developed before proceeding to the stricter exercises.

There is one thing which must be practiced from the very outset, and that is concentration, concentration of thought. Consider how your thoughts ramble about from morning to night! They came from this or from that direction and draw you along with them, A Rosicrucian pupil must choose a time in which he is master of his thoughts; he should take an object as uninteresting as possible and reflect over it. The length of time employed for this does not matter, essential are energy, patience, and perseverance.

The other thing is what we call “positivity”, which consists in going in search of things in life which are characterised best of all by a Persian legend relating to Christ Jesus.

One day, when Christ Jesus was walking along with his disciples, they found on the road's edge the carcass of a dog, in advance stage of decomposition. The disciples who were not so highly developed as Christ Jesus, turned away from this horrid sight, but Christ Jesus thoughtfully looked upon the animal and said: “What beautiful teeth it has!”

No matter how ugly a thing may be, there is always some beauty concealed in it; in every lie there is a grain of truth, in everything evil a grain of goodness. This does not mean, of course, that you should abstain from criticism! You misunderstand positivity if you think that you should no longer find anything bad, ugly, etc., but positivity means that you should see the grain of beauty in everything evil. This develops the higher forces of your soul. All this forms part of the preparation.

To begin with, I wished to give you some idea of the Christian-Gnostic path of training. In the Rosicrucian schooling you will find the deepest and most genuine Christianity. If you are a Rosicrucian, you can be a Christian in the deepest meaning of the word, in spite of the demands of modern life. In the past, one could be a good Christian by withdrawing from the world; this was possible so long as man was not influenced by those forms of thinking which now render it so difficult for him to be a Christian. For the thoughts which have developed out of the natural-scientific way of thinking render it difficult for us to take in Christianity in its original form. The noblest men are those who honestly say: “To-day I cannot connect anything real with Christianity”.

The spiritual world indeed lives round about us, but within us live the thoughts produced by our materialistic age. We are incessantly surrounded by these thought-forms of materialistic life. A conscientious person must therefore say: In the present time we need a remedy which can cope with the ideas that continually stream into us, a remedy which enables us to hold our own and to remain upright in the face of everything which streams into us from the world outside.

Spiritual science offers us this remedy. We are egoists if we reject it, if we refuse to take it. Spiritual science feels that it is the executor of that which also constituted the will of medieval theosophy. Everyone can understand spiritual science; even-those who are acquainted with the justified objections raised against it by natural science. The Rosicrucian direction of theosophy enables everyone to find that which leads to a knowledge of the universe, and to peace within the soul, to be sure, a steady attitude in life. The theosophy of Rosicrucianism is not a merely theoretical knowledge which can give rise to polemical discussions, but a living knowledge which must flow into our whole modern civilisation. Theosophists who have passed through the Rosicrucian schooling know every objection which can be raised against spiritual science and are well acquainted with every counter-argument.

A polemical treatment of theosophy would produce the same result as, for instance, the polemical treatment of Eduard von Hartmann's. “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Eduard von Hartmann published this book and made certain statements in it which appeared like a higher standpoint in the face of the materialistic views of natural-scientific research. All the scientists rose up in arms against hin and a flood of criticism was poured over the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Eduard von Hartmann was called “the greatest amateur”. Among the many writings which appeared against this book, there was an anonymous pamphlet which brilliantly opposed the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”, drawing in every possible argument available to a scientist who has a thorough knowledge of the natural sciences of his time. This writing was greatly admired and applauded. Oscar Schmidt, the famous zoologist, said for instance: “What a pity that we do not know the author of this excellent pamphlet, for he stands at the very summit of modern science.” And Ernst Haeckel wrote: “Let him come out of his anonymity, and we shall welcome him as one of us.” In fact, this pamphlet created quite a sensation! Then a second edition appeared, with the name of the author: Eduard von Hartmann! Now the scientists did not say a word and the matter was hushed up. This really took place.

You see those who adopt a higher standpoint, are themselves able to advance counter-arguments, for they only need to descend to another standpoint. We might also bring forward a few counter-arguments; if we had sufficient time at our disposal.⁴ But in the brief time available it was essential above all to communicate some of the facts which spiritual science can proclaim to-day concerning the higher worlds.

The chief point to bear in mind is that spiritual scientific truths should exercise a healing influence upon men. Occult science can show that these truths are able to permeate every sphere of human life and to fructify it. And when spiritual science will have exercised this healing, fructifying influence it will have justified its existence in the best possible way. This, is the proof which spiritual science seeks. Theosophists therefore do not grow alarmed when people come and say: “This is pure fantasy!” Everything which has become a blessing in human civilisation has at first been regarded as pure fantasy. In the history of the last forties of the 19th century; we could cite many examples in support of this statement.

If spiritual science is to become a reality in life, it must penetrate into that which constitutes our ordinary environment. When spiritual science has become a force which gives wings to our whole life, permeating our daily actions, it will have stood the test. This is the standpoint adopted by the Theosophy of Rosicrucianism, and from this standpoint you should view the lectures which I have delivered to you. Spiritual science will one day develop into something which will influence humanity and bring new impulses in art and science, in medicine and education. Its forces will stream into every sphere of life, animating it.

This is the standpoint of these lectures, which should be accepted in this light.

• 1. See: “The Path of Knowledge and its Stages. The Rosicrucian Path” “Imaginative Knowledge and Artistic Imagination”
• 2. See: The Xmas Thought and the Mystery of the Ego. The Tree of the Cross and the Golden Legend. Also: The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The Mysteries of Art (Paths of Spiritual Knowledge and the Renewal of an World-Conception).
• 3. See: Rudolf Steiner's Five Easters by Anasthasius Grün.
• 4. See: Wie widerlegt man Geistesforschung (How does one oppose Spiritual Research) and Wie begrandet man Goistesforschung (What is the Foundation of Spiritual Research), double volume no. 1/2 of the series Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung (Results of Spiritual Research), Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, publd. by Phil. Anthropl. Verlag in Dornach, Switzerland.

[ 1 ] From our last lecture you will at any rate have seen that the man of to-day, constituted as he is in his bodily nature and by education, cannot easily bring into his present incarnation such spiritual contents as are seeking to enter in from former incarnations. He cannot even do so when this present incarnation is so strange and unusual a one as that of which I spoke last Sunday. For, in effect, we are living in the age of evolution of the conscious, spiritual soul. This is an evolution of the soul which evolves most especially the intellect, i.e., that faculty of the soul which governs the whole of life to-day, no matter how often people may be crying out for heart and sentiment and feeling. It is the faculty of the soul which is most able to emancipate itself from the elementarily human qualities, from that which man bears within him as his deeper being of soul.

[ 2 ] A certain consciousness of this emancipation of the intellectual life does indeed find its way through when people speak of the cold intellect in which men express their egoism, their lack of sympathy and compassion with the rest of mankind, nay even with those who are nearest to them in their life. Speaking of the coldness of the intellect one has in mind the following of all those paths which lead, not to the ideals of the soul, but to the planning of one's life on utilitarian principles and the like.

[ 3 ] In all these things people give expression to a feeling of how the element of intellect and rationalism emancipates itself within the human being from what is truly human. And indeed if one can fully see the extent to which the souls of to-day are intellectualised, one will understand also in every single case how karma must carry into the souls of to-day the high spirituality which these souls have passed through in former epochs. [ 4 ] For I ask you to consider the following.—Let us take quite a general case. I showed you a special example last time, but let us now take the general case of a soul that lived in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha or even after the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way as to take the spiritual world absolutely as a matter of course. Let us think of a human being who in such a life could speak of the spiritual world out of his own experience as of a world that is no less real and present than the many-coloured warm and cold world of the senses.

[ 5 ] All these things are there within the soul. And in the interval between death and a new birth, or in repeated intervals of this kind, all these things have entered into relationship with the spiritual worlds of higher Hierarchies. Many and manifold things have been worked out in such a soul.

[ 6 ] But now, let us say through other karmic circumstances, such a soul has to incarnate in a body which is altogether attuned to intellectualism, a body which can receive from the civilisation of to-day only the current conceptions which relate, after all, only to external things. In such a case this alone will be possible, for the present incarnation: the spirituality that comes over from former times will withdraw into the subconscious. And such a personality will reveal in the intellect which he evolves perhaps a certain idealism, a tendency to all manner of good and beautiful and true ideals. But he will not come to the point of lifting up from the subconscious into the ordinary consciousness the things that are there latent in his soul. There are many such souls to-day. And for him who is truly able to observe with a trained eye for spiritual things, many a countenance to-day will contradict what openly comes forth in him who wears it. For the countenance says: in the foundations of the soul there is much spirituality, but as soon as the human being speaks, he speaks not of spirituality at all. In no age was it the case in such a high degree as it is to-day, that the countenances of men contradict what they themselves say and declare.

[ 7 ] We must understand that strength and energy, perseverance and a holy enthusiasm are necessary in order to transform into spirituality the intellectualism which after all belongs to the present age. These things are necessary that the thoughts and ideas of men to-day may rise into the spiritual world and that man may find the path of ideas upward to the Spirit no less than downward into Nature. And if we would understand this, then we must fully realise that intellectualism to begin with offers the greatest imaginable hindrance to the revelation of any spiritual content that is present within the soul. Only when we are really aware of this, only then shall we, as Anthroposophists, find the true inner enthusiasm. Then shall we receive on the one hand the ideas of Anthroposophy which must indeed reckon with the intellectualism of the age, which must remain, so to speak, the garment of contemporary intellectualism. Then shall we also become permeated with the consciousness that with the ideas of Anthroposophy, relating as they do, not to the mere outer world of sense, we are destined really to take hold of that to which they do relate, namely, the spiritual. To enter deeply and perseveringly into the ideas of Anthroposophy—it is this in the last resort which will most surely guide the man of to-day upward into spirituality, if only he is willing.

[ 8 ] But what I have said in this last sentence, my dear friends, can truly only be said since about the last two or three decades. Previously one could not have said it. For although the dominion of Michael began already with the end of the seventies, nevertheless it was formerly the case that the ideas which the age provided were so strongly and exclusively directed to the world of sense that even for the idealist to rise from intellectualism to spirituality was possible only in rare, exceptional cases in the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century.

[ 9 ] To-day I will give you an example to reveal the outcome of this fact. I will show you by an example how strong and inevitable a force is working in this age to drive back and dam up the spiritual contents which are surging forth from former times in human souls. Nay, at the end of last century such spiritual contents had to withdraw and give way to intellectualism if they were to be able to reveal themselves in any way at all.

[ 10 ] Please understand me rightly. Let us assume that some personality living in the second half of the 19th century bore within him a strong spirituality from former incarnations. Such a personality lives and finds his way into the culture and education of this present time (or of that time) which is intellectualistic, thoroughly intellectualistic. In the personality whom I now mean, the after-working of former spirituality is still so strong that it is really determined to come forth, but the intellectualism will not suffer it. The man is educated intellectually. In the social intercourse which he enters into, in his calling or profession, everywhere he experiences intellectualism. Into this intellectualism what he bears within his soul cannot enter. Such a human being would be one of whom we might say that Anthroposophy would truly have been his calling. But he cannot become an Anthroposophist, though the very thing which he bears within him from a former incarnation, if it could enter into the intellect, would have become Anthroposophy. It cannot become Anthroposophy; it stops short; it recoils as it were from intellectualism. What else can such a personality do? At most he will treat intellectualism again and again as a thing into which he does not really want to enter, so that in one incarnation or another what he bears within his soul may be able to come forth. Of course it will not come forth completely, for it is not according to the age. It will very likely be a kind of stammering; but it will be visible in such a man how he recoils and shrinks again and again from going too far, from being touched too closely by the intellectualism of the age.

[ 11 ] I want to give you an example of this very thing to-day. To begin with I will remind you of a personality of ancient time whom we have mentioned here again and again in all manner of connections, I mean Plato. In Plato the philosopher of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. there lives a soul who forestalls many of the things that mankind ponders on for centuries to come. You will remember when I drew your attention to the great spiritual contents of the School of Chartres, how I referred to the Platonic spirit which had been living for a long time in the development of Christianity. And in a certain sense it was in the great teachers of Chartres that this Platonic spirit found its true development according to the possibilities of that time.

[ 12 ] We must realise that the spirit of Plato is devoted in the first place to the world of Ideas. We must not, however, conceive that the “Ideas” in Plato's works are the abstract monster which ideas are for us to-day, if we are given up to the ordinary consciousness. For Plato, the “Ideas” were to some extent almost what the Persian Gods had been, the Amschaspands who as active genii assisted Ahura Mazdao. Active genii attainable only in imaginative vision—such in reality were the Ideas in Plato. They had a quality of being, only he no longer described them with the vividness with which such things had been described in former times. He described them as it were like the shades of beings. Indeed this is how abstract thoughts henceforth evolved: the Ideas were taken by human beings in an ever more and more shadow-like way. But Plato, as he lived on, nevertheless grew deeper in a certain way, so that one might say: well-nigh all the wisdom of that time poured itself out into his world of Ideas. We need only take his later Dialogues, and we shall find matters astronomical, astrological, cosmological, psychological, the last named expressed in a most wonderful way, and matters concerning the history of nations. All these things were found in Plato in a kind of spirituality which, if I may so describe it, refines and shadows down the spiritual to the form of the Idea.

[ 14 ] But in Plato everything is alive, and in Plato above all this perception is alive: that the Ideas are the foundations of all things present in the world of sense. Wherever we turn our gaze in the world of sense, whatever we behold, it is the outward expression and manifestation of Ideas.

Withal there enters into Plato's world of conception yet another element which has indeed become well known to all the world in a catchword much misunderstood and much misused—I mean the catchword of Platonic love. The love that is spiritual through and through, that has laid aside as much as possible of that egoism which is so often mingled with love—this spiritualised devotion to the world, to life, to man, to God, to the Idea, is a thing that permeates the Platonic conception of life through and through. It is a thing which afterwards recedes in certain ages only to light up again repeatedly. For Platonism is absorbed by human beings ever and again. Again and again at one place or another it becomes the staff by which men draw themselves upward. And Platonism, as we know, entered most significantly into all that was taught in the School of Chartres.

[ 14 ] Plato has often been regarded as a kind of precursor of Christianity. But to imagine Plato as a precursor of Christianity is to misunderstand the latter, for Christianity is not a doctrine, it is a stream of life which takes its start from the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only since the Mystery of Golgotha that we can speak of a real Christianity. We can however say that there were Christians before the Mystery of Golgotha in this sense, that they revered as the Sun Being and recognised in the Sun Being the sublime Figure who was subsequently recognised as the Christ within the earthly life of mankind. If, however, we speak of precursors of Christianity in this sense we must apply the term to many pupils of the ancient Mysteries, among whom we may indeed include Plato. Only we must then understand the thing aright.

[ 15 ] Now I already spoke at this place some time ago of a young artist who grew up while Plato was still living, not exactly in Plato's School of the Philosophers but under Plato's influence. Indeed I mentioned this matter already many years ago. Having passed through other incarnations in the meantime this individuality was reborn, not out of the Platonic philosophy but out of the Platonic spirit. He was reborn as Goethe, having karmically transformed in the Jupiter region what came to him from former incarnations, and notably from the one in which he partook of the Platonic stream, so that it became that kind of wisdom which does indeed permeate all the contents of Goethe's work. Thus we can indeed turn our gaze to a noble and pure relationship between Plato and this—I will not say “disciple”—but follower of Plato. For as I said, he was not a philosopher but an artist in that Grecian incarnation. Nevertheless Plato's eye did fall upon him and perceived the infinite promise that lay within this youth.

[ 16 ] Now it was truly hard for Plato to carry through the following epochs, through the super-sensible world, what he had borne within his soul in his Plato incarnation. It was very hard for him. For although Platonism lit up here and there, when Plato himself looked down upon the Platonism that evolved here on the earth, it was for him only too frequently a dreadful disturbance in his super-sensible life of soul and spirit.

[ 17 ] I do not mean that that which lived on as Platonism was therefore to be condemned or harshly criticised. Needless to say the soul of Plato carried over livingly into the following epochs piece by piece and ever more and more, what lay within him. But Plato above all, Plato who was still united with the Mysteries of antiquity, of whom I said that his Doctrine of Ideas contained a certain ancient Persian impulse—Plato found the greatest difficulty in entering a new incarnation. When he had absolved the time between death and a new birth—and in his case it was a fairly long time—he found real difficulty in entering the Christian epoch into which, after all, he had to enter. Thus although in the sense I just explained we may describe Plato as a forerunner of Christianity, nevertheless the whole orientation of his soul was such as to make it extraordinarily difficult for him, when ready to descend to earth again, to find a bodily organism into which he might carry his former impulses in a way that they might now come forth again with a Christian colouring.

Moreover Plato was a Greek. He was a Greek through and through, with all those oriental impulses which the Greeks still had, which the Romans had not at all. Plato was in a certain sense a soul who carried philosophy upwards into the higher poetic realm. The Dialogues of Plato are works of art. Everywhere is the living soul, everywhere the Platonic love which we need only understand in the true sense and which also bears witness to its oriental origin.

[ 18 ] Plato was a Greek, but the civilisation within which alone he could incarnate, now that he was ripe for incarnation, now that he had grown old for the super-sensible world—this civilisation was Roman and Christian.

Nevertheless, if I may put it so, he must take the plunge. And to repress the inner factors of opposition, he must gather together all his forces. For it lay in Plato's being to reject the prosaic, matter-of-fact and legalistic Roman element, nay indeed to reject all that was Roman.

[ 19 ] And there was also a certain difficulty for his nature to receive Christianity, for he himself represented in a certain sense the highest point of the pre-Christian conception of the world. Moreover even the external facts revealed that the real Plato-being could not easily dive down into the Christian element. For what was it that dived down into Christianity here in the world of sense? It was Neo-Platonism, but this was something altogether different from true Platonism. We remember how there evolved a kind of Platonising Gnosis and the like but there was no real possibility of taking over into Christianity the immediate essence of Plato. Thus it was difficult for Plato himself, out of all the activity which he bore within him as the Plato-being and the results of which he must now bring with him into the world—it was difficult for him to dive down in any way. He had as it were to reduce all this activity.

[ 20 ] And so it was that he reincarnated in the 10th century in the Middle Ages as the nun Hroswith—Hroswitha, that forgotten but great personality of the 10th century, who did indeed receive Christianity in a truly Platonic sense and who carried into the Mid-European nature very, very much of Plato.

She belonged to the Convent of Gandersheim in Brunswick and carried infinitely much of Platonism into the Mid-European nature. This in truth it was only possible at that time for a woman to do. Had not Plato's being appeared with a feminine character and colouring it could not have received Christianity into itself in that age. But the Roman element too was strong in all the culture of that time which had to be received. Perforce, if I may put it so, it had to be received. And so we see the nun Hroswitha evolving into the remarkable personality she was, writing Latin dramas in the style of the Roman poet Terence, dramas which are of extraordinary significance.

[ 21 ] You see, it is appallingly easy to misrepresent Plato wherever he approaches one. I often described how Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play—it never got beyond the plan—Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play in which he would give a humorous treatment of the following theme.—Plato reincarnated sits on the benches of a grammar school.—A mere poetic fancy, needless to say, but this was Hebbel's idea.—Plato is reincarnated as a schoolboy while the schoolmaster puts him through the Platonic Dialogues and Plato himself, reincarnated, receives the very worst criticism with respect to the interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues. These things Hebbel noted down as the subject for a play which he never elaborated. Nevertheless it shows, it is like a divination of how easy it is to misunderstand Plato. Now this is a feature which interested me most especially in tracing the stream of Plato. For this very misunderstanding is extraordinarily instructive in finding the right paths of the further life and progress of the Platonic individuality.

[ 22 ] It is indeed highly interesting. There was a German philosopher (I do not remember his name, it was some Schmidt, or Müller), who with all his scholarship “proved” up to the hilt that the nun Hroswitha wrote not a single play, that nothing was due to her, that it was all a forgery by some Counsellor of the Emperor Maximilian. All of which proof is of course nonsense, but there you have it. Plato cannot escape misunderstanding.

[ 23 ] And so we see arising in the individuality of the nun Hroswitha of the 10th century, a truly intensive Christian and Platonic spiritual substantiality united with the Mid-European-Germanic spirit. And in this woman there was living so to speak the whole culture of that time. She was indeed an astonishing personality. And she among others partook in those super-sensible developments of which I told you. I mean the passage of the teachers of Chartres into the spiritual world, the descent of those who were then the Aristotelians, and the discipleship of Michael. But she took part in all these things in a most peculiar way. One may say: here was the masculine spirit of Plato and the feminine spirit of the nun Hroswitha wrestling with one another, inasmuch as they both of them had their results for the spiritual individuality. If the one incarnation had been of no significance, as is generally the case, such an inward wrestling could not afterwards have taken place. But in this individuality it did take place and indeed it went on for the whole succeeding time.

[ 24 ] And at length we see the individuality ripe to return to earth once more in the 19th century. He became an individuality of the very kind I described above as a hypothetical case. For the whole spirituality of Plato is held back, recoils and shrinks back in the face of the intellectuality of the 19th century which it will not come near.

And to make this process the easier the feminine capacity of the nun Hroswitha has been instilled into the same soul. Thus as the soul appears on the scene, all that it had received from its incarnation as a woman, great and radiant as she was, makes it the more easy to repel the modern intellectualism wherever it is not liked.

[ 25 ] Thus the individuality stands upon earth anew in the 19th century. He grows up into the intellectuality of the 19th century but lets it come near him only to a certain extent, externally, while inwardly he is perpetually shrinking back from it. Platonism comes forward in his consciousness not in an intellectualistic way, for again and again, wherever he can, he speaks of how Ideas are living in all things.

The life in Ideas became an absolute matter of course to this personality. Yet his body was such that one continually had the following impression: the head simply cannot give expression to all the Platonism that is seeking to come forth in him. But on the other hand there could spring forth in him in a beautiful way, nay in a glorious way, that which is hidden behind the word “Platonic Love.”

[ 26 ] Nay more, in his youth this personality had something like a dream-intuition of how Mid-Europe cannot and may not after all be truly Roman. For indeed he himself had lived as the nun Hroswitha. Thus in his youth he represented Mid-Europe as a modern Greece. Here we see his Platonism striking through. And he represented the rougher region that had stood over against ancient Greece, namely Macedonia, as the present East of Europe. There were strange dreams living in this personality, dreams from which one could see, and this was very interesting, how he wanted to conceive the modern world in which he himself was living, like Greece and Macedonia. Again and again, especially in his youth, there arose the impulse to conceive the modern world—Europe on a large scale—as Greece and Macedonia magnified.

[ 27 ] The personality of whom I am speaking is none other than Karl Julius Schröer. With the help of all that I have now brought together you need only take Karl Julius Schröer's writings. From the very beginning he speaks in a thoroughly Platonic way. But this is so strange: with a kind of feminine coyness, I might say, he takes good care not to enter into intellectualism wherever he has no use for it.

[ 28 ] When he spoke of Novalis, Schröer was often fond of saying: Novalis—he is a spirit whom one cannot understand with this modern intellectualism which knows only that twice two is four.

[ 29 ] Karl Julius Schröer wrote a history of German poetry in the 19th century. In this history, wherever one can approach a thing with Platonic feeling, it is very good, but wherever one requires intellectualism it is suddenly as though the lines were to sink away into nothingness. He is not a bit like a professor. He writes many pages about some who are passed over in silence by the ordinary histories of literature, while about the famous ones he sometimes writes only a few lines.¹

When this history of literature was first published, how the literary pundits did wring their hands! One of the most eminent among them at that time was Emil Kuh, who declared: this history of literature is not written by a head at all; it simply flowed out of a wrist.

Karl Julius Schröer also published an edition of Faust. A professor—in Graz—for the rest a very good fellow—wrote such a dreadful review of it that I believe no less than ten duels were fought out among the students at Graz pro and contra Schröer.

There was indeed much grievous misunderstanding, failure of recognition. This poor estimate of Schröer went so far that on one occasion at a social gathering in Weimar where I was present, the following thing happened. In that circle Erik Schmidt was a highly respected personality and dominated everything when he was present. Conversation turned on the question, which of the princesses and princes at the Weimar Court were wise and which were stupid. This was being seriously discussed and Erik Schmidt declared: the Princess Reuss (she was one of the daughters of the Grand Duchess Reuss)—the Princess Reuss is not a clever woman for she considers Schröer a great man.—This was his reason!

[ 30 ] But you must go through all his works, down to that most beautiful little book Goethe und die Liebe, for there you will really find what one can say without intellectualism about Platonic Love in immediate and real life. Something extraordinary is given to us in the style and tone of this little book Goethe und die Liebe. It came to me beautifully on one occasion when I was discussing the book with Schröer's sister. She called the style “völlig süss vor Reife”, fully sweet unto ripeness—a pretty expression. And such indeed it is. It is all—I cannot say in this sense so concentrated—but it is all so fine, so delicate in its form. Refinement indeed was a peculiar quality of Schröer's.

[ 31 ] And yet this Platonic spirituality, repelling intellectualism, this Platonic spirituality that did not want to enter into this body made at the same time a quite peculiar and strong impression, for in seeing Schröer one had the distinct perception: this soul is not quite fully there within the body. And then when he grew older one could see how the soul, not being really willing to enter into the body of that time, withdrew little by little out of that body. To begin with the fingers grew swollen and thick. Then the soul withdrew ever more and more, and as we know, Schröer ended in the feeblemindedness of old age. [ 32 ] Certain features of Schröer, not the whole individuality, but certain features, were taken over into my character Capesius, Professor Capesius, in the Mystery Plays.

Here indeed we have a remarkable example of the fact that the spiritual currents of antiquity can only be carried over into the present time under certain conditions. And one may well say that in Schröer the recoiling from intellectuality showed itself characteristically. Had he attained intellectuality, had he been able to unite it with the spirituality of Plato, Anthroposophy itself would have been there.

[ 33 ] And so we see in his karma how his paternal love for his follower Goethe, if so I may describe it, becomes transformed. It had arisen in the way I told you, for in that ancient time Plato had indeed loved him in a paternal way. We see this love karmically transmuted; Schröer becomes a warm admirer of Goethe. Thus it emerges once again.

[ 34 ] There was something extraordinarily personal in Schröer's reverence for Goethe. In his old age he wanted to write a biography of Goethe. Before I left Vienna at the end of the eighties he told me about it and afterwards he wrote me about it. But of this biography of Goethe which he would have liked to write he never wrote in any different vein than this.—He said: Goethe is continually visiting my soul. It always had this personal character which was indeed karmically predestined as I have now indicated.

[ 35 ] The biography of Goethe was never written, for Schröer fell into the feeble-mindedness of old age. But we can indeed find a luminous interpretation of the whole character of his writings if we know the antecedent which I have now explained.

[ 36 ] Thus in the well-nigh forgotten character of Schröer, we see how Goetheanism came to a standstill before the threshold of intellectualism transformed into spirituality. And if I may put it so, one could really do no other, having once been stimulated by Schröer, than carry Goetheanism forward into Anthroposophy. There was no other course to take. And again and again this deeply moving picture (for so it was for me) stood before the eye of my soul: Schröer carrying the ancient spirituality of Goethe, pressing forward in it up to the point of intellectuality. And I understood how Goethe must be grasped again with modern intellectualism, lifted up into the spiritual domain. For only so shall we fully understand him. Nor did this picture by any means make things easy for me. For owing to the fact that that which Schröer was could not directly and fully be received, again and again there was mingled in the striving of my soul, a certain element of opposition against Schröer.

[ 37 ] Thus, for example, when at the Technical University in Vienna Schröer conducted practice classes in lecturing and essay writing, I once gave a pretty distorted interpretation of Mephisto merely to refute my instructor Schröer with whom at that time I was not yet on such intimate and friendly terms. There was indeed a certain opposition stirring within me.

But as I said, what else could one do than loose the congestion that had taken place and carry Goetheanism really onward into Anthroposophy!

[ 38 ] Thus you see how world-history really takes its course. For it takes its course in such a way that we may recognise: whatever we possess in the present day emerges with great hindrances and difficulties. Yet on the other hand it is well prepared.

Read the wonderful hymn-like descriptions of womanhood in Karl Julius Schröer's writings. Read the beautiful essay which he wrote as an appendix to his History of Literature, his History of German Poetry in the 19th Century. Read his essay on Goethe and his relation to women. If you take all these things together you will say to yourselves: truly here is living something of a feeling of the worth and character of womanhood which is an echo of what the nun Hroswitha had lived as her own being. These two preceding incarnations harmonise and vibrate together wonderfully in Schröer's life, so much so that the breaking of the thread became indeed a deeply moving tragedy. And yet in Schröer of all people there enters into the end of the 19th century a world of spiritual facts, immensely illuminating towards an answer to this question: How shall we bring spirituality into the life of the present time.

[ 39 ] Herewith I wished to round off this cycle of lectures.

• 1. There is a gap in the stenograph here. According to some who attended the lecture, Rudolf Steiner spoke of Christian Oeser, the father of Karl Julius Schröer, as being the reincarnation of Socrates.
  See the discussion which follows the corresponding German text and alternate English translation available by clicking the 'Show German' at the top of the page.

Let us try to think once about the fact how many people are still able to evoke a clear, somewhat more in-depth idea in their souls walking through the streets and looking at the preparations of Christmas everywhere. There are slightly clear ideas about this festival today and they correspond less to the intentions of those—we are allowed to speak as theosophists this way—who once used these great festivals as symbols of the infinite and imperishable in the world. You can convince yourselves of it adequately if you have a look at the so-called Christmas considerations of our newspapers. There probably cannot be anything bleaker and stranger at the same time to that which it concerns than what is disseminated by the printed paper into the world at this time. Let a kind of summary of that pass before our souls that these various autumn talks on the spiritual-scientific horizon have brought us. It should not be a pedantic, schoolmasterly summary, but a summary of the kind as it can arise in our hearts if we link on Christmas from the spiritual-scientific point of view. The spiritual-scientific view of life should not be a grey theory, not an external confession, not a philosophy, but it should pulsate in our life directly. The modern human being is estranged to the immediate nature, much more than he thinks, much more than still at the time of Goethe.

On the other hand, does anyone still feel the whole depth of that saying by Goethe, which the great poet spoke when he entered the circles of Weimar and began a life epoch extremely important for him at the same time? At that time, he addressed a hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with her mysterious forces:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to come out of her, and unable to go deeper into her. Uninvited and not warned she takes us up in the circulation of her dance and drifts away with us, until we are tired and drop out of her arm.

She creates forever new figures; what is there was never, what was does not come again—everything is new and, nevertheless, always the old.

We live in the middle of her and are strange to her. She speaks continually with us and does not betray her mystery to us. We continuously work on her and, nevertheless, do not exercise power over her.

She seems to be out for individuality of everything and makes nothing of the individuals. She is always building and always destroying, and her workshop is inaccessible.

She lives in nothing but children; where is the mother? She is the only artist: from the simplest material to the biggest contrasts; by all appearance without effort to the biggest completion—to the most precise assertiveness, always covered with something soft. Any of her works has own being, any of her phenomena the most isolated concept, and, nevertheless, everything constitutes one.

She plays a game: whether she sees it herself, we do not know, and, nevertheless, she plays it for us who stand in the corner.

It is an everlasting life, becoming and moving in her, and, nevertheless, it does not move further along. It changes forever and no moment of standstill is in her. She has no concept of remaining and curses the standstill. She is firm. Her step is measured, her exceptions are seldom, and her principles are unalterable...

We all are her children. If we believe to act according to her principles least of all, maybe, we act most of all according to this big principle that floods through Nature and streams into us. Who does feel the other significant saying by Goethe so deeply even today with which Goethe tried not less to express the empathy with the concealed forces common to Nature and the human being, where Goethe approaches Nature not as a lifeless being like the modern materialistic thinking where he speaks to her like a living spirit:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me. In fire
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
And when the storm-swept forest creaks and groans,
when, as it falls, the giant fir strips down
and crushes neighbouring boughs and trunks, and when
the hill echoes its fall as muffled thunder,
you guide me to the safety of a cave,
reveal my self to me, and then my heart's
profound and secret wonders are unveiled.

(Faust I, Forest and Cave, v. 3217-3234)

Goethe tried out of his feeling of nature to refresh something of that, which flowed out of emotion and knowledge at the same time by this mood. This is the mood of the times in which wisdom still was in league with nature, when those symbols of empathy with nature and the universe were created, which we recognise as the great festivals from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Such a festival has become something abstract, almost uninteresting to the soul and to the heart. Today often the word about which we can argue to which we can swear weighs much more than that which should apply to this word originally. This external word should be the representative, the announcement, the symbol of the big creative word that lives in the outside nature and in the whole universe. It revives again in us if we recognise ourselves correctly, and all human beings have to become aware of it with those opportunities that are in particular suited to it according to the course of nature. This was the intention when the great festivals were established. Let us attempt to apply our knowledge we have got in the course of the spiritual-scientific talks to understand something that the old sages expressed in the Christmas.

Christmas is not only a Christian festival. It existed where religious feeling expressed itself. If you look around in old Egypt, thousands and thousands years before our calendar, if you walk across to Asia, even if you go up into our areas, again many years before our calendar, everywhere you find this same festival during the days in which also the birth of Christ is celebrated by the Christians.

What a festival was celebrated everywhere on earth since ancient times during these days?—We want to refer to nothing but to those marvellous fire festivals, which were celebrated in the areas of Northern and Central Europe in old times. During these days, that festival was mainly celebrated in our areas, in Scandinavia, Scotland, England, within the circles of the old Celts by their priests, the so-called druids. What did one celebrate there?

One celebrated the ending wintertime and the springtime announcing itself again bit by bit. Of course, we still approach wintertime advancing to Christmas. But in nature a victory has already announced itself there which can just be the symbol of a festival of hope for the human being, or better said—if we use the word that exists for this festival almost in all languages—the symbol of a festival of confidence, of trust and faith.

The victory of the sun over the opposing powers of nature: this is the symbol. We have felt the shorter and shorter growing days. This decreasing in length of the days is an expression of a decease, better said of the natural forces falling asleep up to the day at which we celebrate Christmas and at which our ancestors celebrated the same festival. During this day, the days start becoming longer. The light of the sun celebrates its victory over darkness. Today, this appears to us, thinking materialistically, even more than we believe it, as an event about which we do no longer think in particular. It appeared to those who had a lively feeling and wisdom connected with this feeling as a living expression of a spiritual experience, of an experience of the divinity, which leads our life. As if in the single human life an important event takes place that decides something, one felt such a solstice in that time as something important in the life of a higher being. Yes, even more: one did not feel this decreasing and increasing of the days immediately as an expression of such an event in the life of a higher being, but still more like a reminiscent sign of something much bigger, something unique. Thus, we conceive of the great basic idea of Christmas as a universal festival, a festival of humanity of the highest rank.

In the times in which a real secret doctrine one saw something occurring in nature at Christmas that was considered as a commemoration of a great event which had taken place once on earth. The priests, who were the teachers of the peoples, gathered the faithful around themselves during these days at midnight and tried to reveal a great mystery to them and spoke about the following. I do not tell anything sophisticated to you here, anything found by the abstract science, but I say something that lived in the mysteries, in secret cult sites, because the priests gathered their faithful around themselves by that which they said to them to give them strength for their teachings.

Today, they said, we see the victory of the sun over the darkness announcing itself. Thus, it also was once on this earth. There the sun celebrated the great victory over the darkness. This happened in such a way: until then all physical, all bodily life on our earth had almost only reached the stage of animals. What lived on our earth as the highest realm was only on the level to be prepared to receive the immortal human soul. Then a moment came in this prehistoric time, a great moment of human development, when the immortal imperishable human soul descended from divine heights. The wave of life had developed up to that time in such a way that the human body had become able to take up the imperishable soul in itself. Indeed, this human ancestor ranked higher than the materialist naturalists believe. However, the spiritual part, the immortal part was not yet in him. It descended only from another, higher planet to our earth, which should now become the scene of its work, the place of residence of that which is now undetachable to us, of our soul.

We call these human ancestors the Lemurian race. The Atlantean race and then ours, which we call the Aryan race, followed it. Within this Lemurian race, the human bodies were fertilised by the higher human soul. Spiritual science calls this great moment of human development the descent of the divine sons of the spirit.

Since that time, this human soul forms and works in the human body for its higher development. Unlike the materialist natural sciences imagine, the human body was fertilised by the imperishable soul at this time. At that time contrary to the view of the materialist naturalists, something happened in the big universe that belongs to the most important events of our human development.

At that time, that constellation, that mutual position of earth, moon, and sun gradually appeared, which made the descent of the souls possible. The sun became significant for growth and thriving of the human being and of the plants and animals belonging to him. Only somebody who realises spiritually the whole becoming of humanity and earth correctly sees this connection of sun, moon, and earth with the human beings living on earth.

There was a time—one taught this at these old times—, when the earth was one with the sun and moon. They were one body. The beings still possessed figures and appearances different from those living on earth today, because they were adapted to that world body which consisted of sun, moon and earth together. Everything that lives on this earth received its being because first the sun and then the moon separated, and that these heavenly bodies interrelated now externally with our earth. The mystery of the togetherness of the human spirit with the entire universal spirit is based on this relationship. Spiritual science calls the universal spirit logos, which encloses sun, moon, and earth at the same time. We live, we work and we are in it.

As well as the earth was born out of the body which enclosed sun and moon at the same time, the human being was born out of a spirit, of a soul to which sun and earth and moon belong at the same time. If the human being looks at the sun, at the moon, he should see not only these external physical bodies, but he should regard them as external bodies of spiritual beings. Modern materialism has admittedly forgotten this. However, who can no longer regard sun and moon as the bodies of spirits can also not recognise the human body as the body of a spirit. As true as the human body is the bearer of a spirit, as true the heavenly bodies are the bearers of spiritual beings.

The human being also belongs to these spiritual beings. As well as his body is separated from the forces which prevail in the sun and moon, and, nevertheless, as his external physical accommodates forces which are active in the sun and moon, the same spirituality, which rules on the sun and the moon is also active in his soul. While the human being became this being on earth, he became dependent on that effect of the sun, which it causes as a special body shining on the earth.

Our ancestors felt as spiritual children of the whole universe that way, and they said to themselves, we have become human beings because the spirit of the sun caused our spiritual form. The victory of the sun over the darkness signifies to us a memory of the victory, which our soul gained in those days, in the times in which the sun appeared for the first time in such a way as it shines now onto the earth. It was a victory of the sun, when the immortal soul entered the physical body in the sign of the sun, when it descended into the darkness of desires and passions.

Let us imagine the life of the spirit. The darkness precedes the solar victory. It followed a former solar time only. Thus, it was also with the human soul. This human soul originates from the original divinity. However, it had to disappear for a while in unconsciousness to build up the lower human nature within this unconsciousness; since this human soul itself built up the lower human nature gradually to inhabit this house built by itself. If you imagine that a master builder builds a house, according to his best forces, and enters it later, you have a right simile of the entry of the immortal human soul into the human body. The human soul could work only unconsciously in that time on its house. This unaware work is expressed in the simile by the darkness. The emergence of consciousness, the lighting up of the conscious human soul is expressed in the simile by the solar victory.

Thus, this solar victory signified to those who still had a lively feeling of the connection of the human being with the universe the moment in which they had received the most important of their earthly existence. This great moment was maintained in that celebration.

At all times one imagined the way of the human being on earth in such a way that this human being becomes more and more similar to the regular rhythmical way of nature. If we look from the human soul at that which encloses its life now, at the way of the sun in the universe and at all with which this way of the sun is connected, something becomes clear to us that is infinitely important to feel. It is the big rhythmical, the big harmonious in contrast to the chaotic, to the unharmonious in the own human nature. Look at the sun, pursue it on its way, and you see how rhythmically, how regularly its phenomena return in the course of the day and of the year. You see how regularly and rhythmically everything is connected in nature under the influence of the sun.

On occasion, I have already emphasised that everything is rhythmical with the beings ranking below the human being. Imagine the sun deviating for a moment, for a fraction of a second only, and imagine the unbelievable, indescribable mess, which would be caused in our universe.

The rhythmical life processes of all beings that are dependent on the sun are connected with this harmony. Imagine the sun in the course of the year how it evokes the beings of nature in the spring, imagine how little you are able to think that the violet blossoms at a time different from that when you are used. Imagine that the seeds are sown at another time and the harvest may take place at another time than it takes place. Up to the animal life, everything appears to you depending on the rhythmical way of the sun. Even with the human being, everything is rhythmical, regular, and harmonious, as far as it is not subjected to the human passions, instincts or even to the human mind. Observe the pulse, the way of digestion, and admire the big rhythm and feel the great, infinite wisdom that floods through the whole nature, and then compare the irregular, the chaotic to it which prevails in the human passions and desires and in particular in the human mind and thinking. Try once to let the regular of your pulse and your breath pass yourselves by, and compare it to the irregularity of your thinking, feeling and willing. They wander around aimlessly.

On the other hand, imagine how wisely the life powers are arranged how the rhythmical has to overcome the chaos. Which crimes do not all human passions and hedonism commit against the rhythm of the human body! On occasion I have already mentioned here how marvellous it is for him who gets to know the heart by anatomy, this wonderfully arranged organ of the human body, and must say to himself what has it to bear because the human being enjoys tea, coffee and so on that has an effect on the rhythmical, harmonious heartbeat. Thus, it is with the entire rhythmical, divine nature that our ancestors admired and the soul of which is the sun with its regular way.

While the sages and their followers looked at the sun, they said to themselves, you are the picture of that which is not yet this soul, which is born with you, but which it should become.—The divine world order presented itself to these sages in its whole glory. The Christian worldview also says that the glory is in the divine heights (Latin gloria in excelsis deo). The word “glory” means revelation, not honour, or splendour.

One should not say, glory to God in highest heaven—but God is revealed in the heavens today.—This is the true meaning of the sentence. In this sentence, one can fully feel the glory flowing through the world. In former times, one felt in such a way that one established this world harmony as a great ideal for that who should be the leader of the remaining humanity. Therefore, one spoke at all times and everywhere where one was aware of these matters of the “sun hero.”

In the temple sites where the initiation was carried out one distinguished seven degrees. I use the Persian terms of these degrees. The first degree is that where the human being went beyond the everyday feeling, where he came to a higher mental feeling and to the knowledge of the spirit. One called such a human being “raven.” Hence, the ravens are those, which announce to the initiates in the temples what takes place outdoors in the world. When the medieval poetry of wisdom wanted to portray an initiate in the person of a medieval ruler, for example, Barbarossa who should wait inside of the earth with the treasures of wisdom of the earth for that big moment when Christianity should rejuvenate humanity, it let the ravens be again the messengers. Even the Old Testament speaks of the ravens of Elias (Elia, Elijah).

The initiates of the second degree are the “occult.” The third degree is that of the “fighters,” the fourth degree is that of the “lions.” The initiates of the fifth degree are called with the name of their own people: Persian or Indian and so on, because only the initiate of the fifth degree is the true representative of his people. One called the sixth degree “sun hero” or “sun runner.” The seventh degree had the name “Father.”

Why did one call the initiate of the sixth degree a sun hero? Who had climbed up so high on the ladder of spiritual knowledge had to have developed such an inner life at least that it ran after the pattern of the divine rhythm in the whole universe. He had to feel, to think in such a way that anything chaotic, anything arrhythmic, anything inharmonious no longer existed with him. This was the demand, which one made on him in the sixth degree of initiation. One considered them as holy human beings, as a pattern, as ideals, and said about them, as big as the misfortune would be to the universe if it were possible that the sun deviated from its way for a quarter of a minute. It would also be a big misfortune if it were possible for a sun hero to deviate from the way of the big morality, from the road of the soul rhythm.—One called somebody a sun hero who had found such a sure way in his mind like the sun outdoors in the universe. All nations had such sun heroes.

Our scholars know so little about these matters. Indeed, it strikes them that sun myths about the lives of all great religious founders formed. However, they do not know that one was in the habit of creating the leading heroes sun heroes with the ceremonies of initiation. It is not miraculous at all, if that which the ancient peoples had attempted to put into them is found out again by the materialist research. With Buddha and even with Christ, one looked for such sun myths and found them. Here you have the reason why one could find this with them. They were put into them first, so that they showed an immediate imprint of the solar rhythm. Then these sun heroes were the big pattern that one should try to equal.

What did one imagine what happened in the soul of such a hero who had found such an inner harmony?—One imagined that in such a way that now no longer only a single human soul lived in him, but that in him something of the universal soul had emerged which flows through the whole universe. In Greece, one called this universal soul, which flows through the whole universe, Chrestós, and the most elated sages of the East know it as buddhi. If the human being has stopped only feeling as the bearer of his individual soul and if he experiences anything of the universal, then he has created an image of that in himself, which combined at that time as a solar soul with the human body; then he has reached something tremendously important on the road of humanity.

If we look at this human being with such an ennobled soul, we are able to put the future of the human race and the whole relationship of this human future with the idea, the image of humanity generally, before ourselves. As humanity faces us today, one can imagine only that certain matters are decided by the fact that people bring about a decision in quarrel and discord by a kind of majority, by a majority decision. Because where one still looks at such majority decisions as something ideal, there one has not yet understood what truth is. Where does truth live in us? Truth lives in us where we pledge ourselves to think logically. On the other hand, would it not be nonsense to decide by majority decision whether two times two are four or three times four are twelve? If the human being has recognised once what is true, then millions may come and say, it is different, nevertheless, he has his assurance in himself.

So far, we are in relation to the scientific thinking, to that thinking, which is no longer affected by human passions, desires, and instincts. Where passions, desires and instincts play a part, the human beings are still in quarrel, in confused mess as the instincts form a wild chaos generally. However, if once the desires, instincts, and passions are purified, have become what one calls buddhi or the Chrestós, if they are developed up to that height on which today the logical thinking is without passion, then that the human ideal is attained which shines to us in the old religions of wisdom, in Christianity, in the anthroposophic spiritual science. If our thinking and feeling is so purified that that which one feels harmonises with that which our fellow men feel, if on this earth the same epoch has arrived for the feeling and the sensation, as it has come for the equalising intellect, if buddhi is on this earth, if the Chrestós is embodied in the human race, then the ideal of the old teachers of wisdom, of Christianity, of anthroposophy is fulfilled. Then one needs to vote just as little about that which one regards as good, noble and right as one needs to vote about what one has recognised as logically wrong or right. Everybody can put this ideal before his soul, and doing this, he has the ideal of the sun hero before him, the same that all esoteric teachers also have who are initiated in the sixth degree.

Even our German mystics of the Middle Ages felt this, while they pronounced a word of deep meaning, the word deification or apotheosis. This word existed in all religions of wisdom. What does it signify? It signifies the following: once also those at whom we look today as the spirits of the universe passed a chaotic stage which humanity experiences today. These leading spirits of the universe brought themselves up to their divine stage where their manifestations of life sound harmoniously through the universe. What appears to us today as the harmonious way of the sun in the course of the year, with the growth of the plants, in the life of the animals, was once chaotic and brought it to this great harmony. Where these spirits stood once, the human being stands today. He develops from his chaos to a future harmony that is modelled after the present sun, the present universal harmony.

The anthroposophic mood of Christmas results from this, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a living feeling lowered into our souls. If we feel it so sure that the splendour, the revelation of the divine harmony, appears in the heights of the heavens, and if we know that the revelation of this harmony sounds once from our own soul, then we feel the other that will happen within humanity due to this harmony. Then we feel the peace of those who are of good will (Latin: et pax hominibus bonae volutatis). Thus, two feelings are connected as Christmas feelings. If we look into the divine world order, into the revelation, at its splendour in the heights of the heavens, and look at the human future, we can already feel that harmony in advance which takes place on earth in the human beings in the future who have the feeling and the sensation of it. The more that lowers itself into us what we feel outdoors in the world as harmony, the more peace and harmony will be on this earth.

Thus, the great ideal of peace places itself as the highest feeling of nature before our souls if we feel the way of the sun in nature in the right way during Christmastide. If we understand the victory of the sunlight over the darkness during these days, we take the big confidence, the big trust from it that connects our own developing souls with this world harmony, and then we let that be known not for nothing, which lives in this world harmony in our souls. Then something lives in us that is harmonious, then the seed falls into the soul that brings peace on this earth, in the sense of the peace between the religions. Those human beings are of good will who feel such peace, such a peace, as it spreads over the earth if that higher stage of the unity of feeling is attained which is attained only in the equalising intellect today. Then love flowing through everything replaces quarrel and discord. Goethe said in the same hymn I have quoted that a few swallows from this cup of love compensate a life full of trouble.

That is why Christmas was a festival of confidence, of trust and hope in all religions of wisdom because we feel during these days that the light must be victorious. Out of this big universal feeling, the Christian church determined in the fourth century to reschedule the birthday celebration of the Saviour on the same day in which with all great religions of wisdom the victory of the light over the darkness was celebrated. Until the fourth century Christmas, Christ's birthday celebration was completely variable. Only in the fourth century, one decided to let the Saviour be born on that day when this victory of the light over the darkness has always been celebrated.

Today we cannot deal with the Christian teachings of wisdom, which will be an object of a talk next year. But one thing should and must be said already today that nothing was more justified than to reschedule the birthday celebration of that divine individuality in this time, which offers the guarantee, the confidence to the Christian that his soul, his divinity will carry off the victory over everything that is darkness in his only outward world. Thus, Christianity is in harmony with all great world religions. When the Christmas bells sound, the human being may probably remember that during these days this festival was celebrated all over the world. Everywhere it was celebrated where one had understood the true big progress of the human soul in this world, where one knew something of the significance of spirit and spiritual life, where one tried to practice self-knowledge in the practical sense.

We have today not spoken of an uncertain, an abstract feeling of nature, but we have spoken about a feeling of nature in any lively spirituality. If we go back to the word of Goethe: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by her” and so on, we may be clear in our mind that we interpret nature, not in the materialistic sense, but that we see the external expression and the physiognomy of the universal divine spirit in her. As the physical is born from the physical, the mental and spiritual from the divine-mental and divine-spiritual, and as the physical, the body combines with merely material forces, the soul combines with the spirit.

The great annual festivals are there as symbols for humanity to feel this in connection with the whole universe and to use our knowledge, our thinking to feel one with the whole universe not uncertain but most certain. If one feels anything about it again, these festivals will be different from today, then they will plant themselves again vividly in soul and heart, then they will be to us that which they should be really to us: nodal points of the year, which connect us with the universal spirit.

If we have fulfilled our duties, our tasks of everyday life all the year round, at these points of the year, we look at that which connects us with the everlasting. Even if we know that we had to grind out quite a few in the course of the year, during these days we get a feeling of the fact that there is peace and harmony beyond all fight and chaos. Therefore, these festivals are annual festivals of the great ideals; and Christmas is the birthday celebration of the greatest ideal of humanity, the ideal that humanity must gain if it wants to reach its destination generally. The birthday celebration of that which the human being can feel and want is Christmas if one understands it properly.

The anthroposophic spiritual science wants to go making understandable this festival again. We want to announce not a dogma, no mere doctrine, or philosophy to the world but life. This is our ideal that everything that we say and teach, and is included in our writings, in our science passes into life. It passes into life if the human being practices spiritual science also in the everyday life everywhere, so that we do no longer need to speak of spiritual science, if from all pulpits spiritual-scientific life sounds through the words, which are spoken to the believers, without saying the word theosophy or spiritual science. If at all courts the human actions are considered with spiritual-scientific feeling, if at the sickbed the doctor feels spiritual-scientifically and heals spiritual-scientifically, if at school the teacher develops spiritual science for the adolescent child, if in all streets one thinks, feels, and acts spiritual-scientifically, so that the spiritual-scientific doctrine becomes superfluous—then our ideal is attained, then spiritual science will be mundane. Then, however, spiritual science will also be in the great festive turning points of the year. The human being connects his everyday tasks with the spiritual using the spiritual-scientific thinking, feeling, and willing. On the other hand, he lets the everlasting and imperishable, the spiritual sun shine in his soul at the great annual festivals. They remind him that in him a true, higher self is, a divine, a sun-like, a light that will forever win over all darkness, over all chaos, that gives a soul peace, that will always compensate all fight, all war and strife in the world.